Twitter

There's some chest-thumping going on over at TweetMeme, a service that rounds up "retweets" of popular links--much like Digg buttons--and aggregates them into a central site. A rival site, ReTweet, just announced its impending launch, and TweetMeme thinks the two are too similar.

More specifically, according to a blog post by TweetMeme's Nick Halstead, ReTweet's "retweet button Javascript and the Wordpress plugin code seemed to have been directly copied from ours." He said that TweetMeme is "seeking further legal advice."

Halstead says he was spurred by a commenter on a TechCrunch … Read more

The stars are dancing away from Facebook. And it's a quickstep.

After Bill Gates recently admitted that he had given up on Facebook because he couldn't work out which of his friend requests came from friends and which from very sad people, another of the world's great famous people has declared her Facebook unfriendliness.

Yes, Martha Stewart, perhaps one of the most iconic cooks, has decided that she is firmly in the Twitter camp and that Facebook just has to face her rejection.

"I just love it (Twitter) so much more than Facebook," she told the Daily Beast.… Read more

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.--If you're in charge of what is thought to be one of the most powerful, influential and important megachurches in the United States, if not the world, how do you make sure that your message is reaching the largest possible audience?

To Brady Boyd, the lead pastor at the New Life Church here, the famous, 10,000-plus member nondenominational church that's directly across Interstate 25 from the Air Force Academy, the answer is technology.

It's not that the New Life Church is light years ahead of anyone else--in fact, it may well even be … Read more

One of the main themes at TEDGlobal this year was a lively debate between optimistic and pessimistic voices on the social potential (or doom) of the web. This outlook was somewhat more somber than I expected at a TED conference, perhaps – as some attendees suspected – due to the cultural differences between Long Beach and Oxford. There was definitely a palpable sense of enlightened skepticism at the conference, a distinctly European tone that serves as welcome counterweight to the Californian brand of optimism that TED is often associated with (just read this amusingly British commentary in the Times of London).

One … Read more

Teflon Don reveals that he is well, entirely coated in Teflon. But we still don't know if the iPhone 3GS is. So if you know, tell us. We also discuss how Twitter could improve its home page and why the AP just doesn't get it.

Palm Pre WebOS 1.1.0 available, fixes iTunes sync

Microsoft's code contribution due to GPL violation

Twitter to revamp home page for the masses

AP cracks down on unpaid use of articles on Web

ISP cuts off suspected pirates without warning

Bezos apologizes for Kindle 1984 redaction

LongBox aims to be iTunes for comic books

Microsoft changes "Laptop Hunters" ad after Apple complains

Wireless power system shown off

$2 million NASA power beaming challenge heating up

Cambrionix 49-port USB hub for professional nerds (thanks virgilio corrado)… Read more

PASADENA, Calif.--Ashton Kutcher said that the fact he beat CNN to a million Twitter followers is a significant deal.

Kutcher, known to his nearly 3 million followers as "aplusk," said that it shows that one individual can have the power to reach as many people in a new medium as a media conglomerate.

"Individuals are becoming consumers and (the) editors of the media," Kutcher said. "It has and will forever change media."

While he doubts his content has the broad relevance of, say, CNN, Kutcher said having such a large audience is both … Read more

Twitter's home page definitely gets some Zen cred by consisting of little more than a text field that asks, "What are you doing?" But that's apparently about to change.

According to Kara Swisher at AllThingsD, there will very soon be a major revamp to Twitter.com.

The reason is to give potential Twitter users--you know, the ones who are curious about what these "tweets" on CNN are--a better idea of exactly what the service is and what they can do with it.

This is slated to launch next week.

"You can try (Twitter) … Read more

PASADENA, Calif.--Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said that, for all its success, the company is still 1 percent of where it wants to be. Oh, yeah and it still doesn't have a head of sales.

"We have a lot of growing still to do," Stone said Thursday at the Brainstorm: Tech conference here. The company has managed to grow its staff to 55 workers. (That's up from 43 in May.) Stone said the company is trying to keep focused on the longer term.

"We don't want to be that child actor...that grew up … Read more

At the Oscon conference this week, Tim O'Reilly repeated something he has been arguing for years, but that resonated powerfully given some of the rancorous debates currently raging in the free and open-source software community. O'Reilly cut through the misguided logic of free-software advocacy with a simple statement:

I don't care about free software. I care about freedom...Architecture of systems matters more than licenses.

An open-source software license doesn't necessarily make you open. An open-source license doesn't guarantee freedom, either--at least not in the broad sense of the word.

For example, O'Reilly indicated … Read more