With over 9 million posts and comments in two days, Google Buzz (Google Buzz) has stormed the web like a swarm of locusts. An array of strong features, integration with Gmail (Gmail), and lots of press have turned Buzz into an overnight phenomenon.
If you’re like a lot of us, you’ve suddenly found yourself using your Gmail even more than you already were. Spending so much time in Gmail and Buzz though inevitably takes away from your Facebook (Facebook) and Twitter (Twitter), and who wants to sacrifice their tweeting and …

Twitter CEO Evan Williams just announced on the company blog that they have acquired Mixer Labs, creators of GeoAPI. In a nutshell, GeoAPI provides developers with the ability to query the world through services which include a reverse geocoder; deep data about 16 million businesses and tens of thousands of points of interest; a writable layer for developers to annotate the world and do complex geo-queries; and location-enabled media layers (e.g., Twitter and Flickr). Just recently, they added an iPhone SDK to speed up mobile development as well.
GeoAPI will …

. . . . This would be a far cry from e-mails from folks in some faraway country telling me a long lost relative with the same last name has died and the money could be mine soon. All I have to do is send them some money. Clearly they don’t understand social networking, venture capital and the new marketing order at all. It’s not about the money, it’s about the network!
A few days later, I was forced to face reality. My friends and followers just weren’t doing the …

It was Jan. 16, 1978, and the world was in transition. The Sex Pistols were on the verge of disbanding. Future Macintosh architect Jef Raskin was settling into his new job at Apple Computer Inc. And it was snowing in Chicago. A lot.
But while Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, two members of the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists Exchange, were holed up during the not-so-great blizzard of 78, they werent wasting their time playing Uno or watching Logans Run. They were making history.
Just two weeks after that fateful snowstorm (though …

If you spend enough time on Twitter, chances are you’ll come across an occasional chat being held on the platform. Twitter chats are scheduled gatherings of people on Twitter to discuss pretty much anything that interests them, using a #hashtag to keep track of the conversation. There are chats for everything from blogging to art to agriculture — over 80 of them are listed in this great running list of Twitter chats.
Over 3 months ago, Lauren Fernandez and I started a weekly Twitter chat for young professionals called #u30pro. …

It doesn’t take much skill to tweet — you simply type what you want to say in under 140 characters. But while the barrier to entry is extremely low, tweeting well is something else entirely. I’m sure we all follow people who consistently offer enriching and insightful posts, and about whom we think, “Wow. They really know how to tweet.” We have also likely come across people on Twitter () about whom we have felt the exact opposite.
If we consider tweeting to be something of an art form, then …

Twitter is evolving from simple chatter to themed content distribution. The jump was made with the roll out of a new feature – Twitter lists. News media organizations have been fairly fast to utilize this feature. Most notably, the New York Times dedicates a screen on thier site to lists [hat tip Zee]:

The power of Twitter is in the people you follow. Let @nytimes lead you to the best of Twitter: follow our lists or build your own. Suggestions? twitterlists@nytimes.com

The Huffington Post seems pretty well on top …

Just about every big brand seemingly has a Twitter presence at this point, but which are generating the most buzz? TweetedBrands provides a simple answer to the question, by looking at the brands receiving the most mentions over the past 24 hours.
Not surprisingly, Twitter tops the list, and in fact, the first 9 brands listed are all Internet or tech related products. This makes sense – you’re a lot more likely to tweet about the various devices and services you’re using throughout the day than the brand of shoes …

Sir Timothy John “Tim” Berners-Lee, credited for inventing this little thing called the World Wide Web, has signed up for Twitter in a move that could potentially rip a hole in the time/space continuum.
The British computer scientist, engineer and MIT professor apparently got on Twitter yesterday just before he entered into a conversation with Tim O’Reilly on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit.
Read more at: Tech Crunch
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{Photography by Silvio Tanaka}

http://tidytweet.com

Just over a week ago, Twitter announced its fifth round of funding. While not officially disclosed, the recent cash infusion is estimated to be around $100 million. Twitter’s new estimated worth? – $1 billion.
With all of this valuation talk floating around, we became interested in just how fast Twitter’s worth has skyrocketed. It seems that VC Expert’s Private Equity Data Center (PEDC) was curious as well, so they decided to analyze all of Twitter’s financing rounds, from the first one in July of 2007 to last month’s $100 million …

Rutgers University Professors Mor Naaman and Jeffrey Boase set out to analyze the content and characteristics of social media activity. They dubbed communications systems like Facebook and Twitter, “social awareness streams,” and then took to examining user behavior.
After dissecting over 3,000 tweets from more than 350 Twitter users’ status updates the professors concluded that 80% of users are “meformers,” or “Me Now” status updaters.
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Read more at: Mashable
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{Photography by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³}

Get your Twitter Mosaic at http://sxoop.com/twitter
Follow me at http://twitter.com/lorenzogeraci

CHICAGO—September 24, 2009—37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1.
. . .
A $100 billion value for 37signals is “not outlandish,” says Aanandamayee Bhatnagar, a finance professor and valuation guru at Grenada State’s Schnook School of Business. Bhatnagar points to a leaked, confidential corporate strategy plan that projects 37signals will attract twelve billion users by the end of 2013.
How will the company overcome the fact that there are only 6.8 billion …

This week Twitter announced changes to its Terms of Service spelling out that you own your Tweets, and that Twitter () can place ads next to your content. What’s more, Twitter wants to crack down on spammers, bots and other bad behavior.
The refreshed Twitter Rules that are a part of the new Terms of Service spell out a number of different reasons why you may find your Twitter account terminated. Everything from inappropriate content and squatting to selling usernames could be cause for you to get the boot.
Read more …

Pimpy3wash just finished doing a round of laundry. Hacklab.toilet just flushed and mattsoffice tweeted that the temperature is 83.3° F.
It might seem like just another day in the Twitterverse, where prosaic, personal updates stream throughout the day. Except @Pimpy3wash, @hacklab.toilet and @mattsoffice are not real people: They are a washing machine, a toilet and an array of home light and temperature sensors. Each of them, with help from some microcontrollers, wires and Arduino boards, have been rigged to answer Twitter’s basic question: “What are you doing?”
“It started as a …

If you follow me on twitter you would probably know that in the last couple of weeks i’ve been having a debate with myself if I still like twitter and the way it works or not. And the saga hasn’t stopped yet. I follow some well know social media “guru’s” and internet marketing “experts” and over the last two months they have been having the same debate that I’m currently having.
@JohnReese and @MikeFilsaime have recently unfollowed about 80,000 people between them on their respective twitter accounts because they are …

If there was a popularity contest between social media platforms, I am sure Twitter would be the winner. Networking, trends, and search features all On its own, twitter is a great service, but without third party applications it wouldn’t be what it is today.
With this in mind, there are hundreds of third party applications to make twitter easier and better to use. But who has time to try them all? In an effort to streamline the list to only useful apps, I have created a list of 15 apps …

Every time I watch Rick Sanchez on CNN or every time I get a new follow update from someone I know in real life, who 12 months ago made fun of me for being on Twitter, I question its value over time: are Twitter and other social networks destined to niche status or are they so embedded in our lives that they are now an indispensable part of our society?
To answer, we can take a look at some other community-based cultural phenomena as a way to shine a light …

We’re big fans of TinyChat (in fact we use it to power the Mashable Lounge). Their live broadcasting web-based platform enables anyone with a webcam to create video chatrooms with social integration.
Today they’re announcing some pretty big updates to the service that will not only improve function, but also enhance their feature set. The freshly released updates will let users better control their own live show, benefit from better video quality, private message other chatters, and have access to the previously Mashable ()-only feature that can give your …