Social networking

Uh-oh. Tweets have just grown from 140 characters to seven stories. Digital-media students at Philadelphia's Drexel University have found a way to turn the microblogging messages into 36x62-foot animations projected onto the surface of a campus building. That's a whole lot of tweet.

Using the "Social Graffiti" system, anyone can digitally tag Twitter messages with @digmGraffiti to be projected onto Nesbitt Hall. Drexel seniors Matthew Morton and Chad Porche then combine the tweets with their own animations (shot in 1080p HD), and broadcast the images onto Nesbitt via a projector located on the fourth floor of … Read more

This e-mailing CEOs thing is getting a little out of hand.

Apple customers seem to be in a permanent e-mailing competition to see who can get a reply out of CEO Steve Jobs. Virtual bonus currency is, apparently, earned if you get more than three of Jobs' words.

Perhaps it was this fine trend that stimulated Giorgio Galante to e-mail AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. No, Galante was not steaming about dropped calls on his iPhone. Nor was he desperate to see the last of a strangely-dressed Luke Wilson in AT&T commercials.

No, according to Engadget, Galante … Read more

After a month and a half at sea, British ocean rower and environmental campaigner Roz Savage made landfall Friday in Papua New Guinea, completing her three-stage trip and becoming the first woman to row solo across the Pacific Ocean.

"It's still sinking in that I've actually done it," Savage, 42, said in an e-mail Friday.

She set off in her 23-foot boat from Tarawa in mid-April on the final leg of her Pacific voyage. In total, she spent about 250 days alone at sea, rowing more than 8,000 miles and taking an estimated 2.5 … Read more

U.S. consumers are venting frustration over the BP oil spill, demonstrating at gas stations and corporate offices, drumming up support on Facebook, and waging a mock public relations campaign on Twitter.

But their opposition to BP's handling of the crisis has yet to achieve critical mass, and any attempt to dissuade customers from fueling their cars with BP is likely to hurt the small business owners who run the stations with little or no effect on the British oil giant's revenues.

Most Americans--7 out of 10--say BP has done a poor or only fair job in handling … Read more

Police in Cumbria in the U.K. have been using Twitter to give updates to citizens on a gunman's shooting spree.

According to the Telegraph, which first reported on the news, Cumbria police tweeted a message at 1 p.m. local time on Wednesday alerting citizens that a gunman was on the loose in the town of Whitehaven. It also included a link to a statement written by law enforcement discussing the issue.

Cumbria police continued to use Twitter to update followers on what was happening. By the time the whole ordeal was over, police announced on their Twitter … Read more

People with Web-browsing phones are spending a lot more of their minutes accessing social networks these days, according to a new study from ComScore.

The study, released Wednesday, pegs social networking as the fastest growing activity among people with smartphones and other advanced phones that offer Web browsing, which are also known as feature phones.

Among the 69.6 million phone users who tapped mobile apps over the three-month period ending in April, 14.5 million of them accessed social networks--a 240 percent jump from the same period in 2009.

Among the nearly 73 million who used mobile browsers, 30 … Read more

Zynga, the online gaming powerhouse, has acquired Austin, Texas-based Challenge Games.

The social game start-up will be renamed Zynga Austin and will focus on product development.

Backed by Sequoia Capital and Globespan Capital Partners, Challenge focuses on virtual goods games, such as Warstorm.

Zynga did not reveal the terms of the deal.

The San Francisco-based Zynga has been on a bit of a deal tear of late, inking partnership agreements with both Yahoo and Facebook recently.

RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif.--Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended his company's approach to privacy, saying it makes sense for users to have a mix of information: some that's shared narrowly and some that should be made broadly available.

"There have been misperceptions that we are trying to make all the information public," Zuckerberg said, speaking at the D: All Things Digital conference here. That said, for social networks to link people to one another, some information must necessarily be public, he said. "There's some serendipity that can only happen if you are sharing," … Read more

It was a cold, dark night. Well, actually, it was a cold, dark morning.

This, it seems, will form a part of the claim that Lauren Rosenberg is offering against a the driver of a car that hit her while she walked along a highway and Google, whose walking directions she was following.

Should you not yet have cast your minds toward offering a verdict in this lovely case, Rosenberg is claiming that Google's walking directions should have been rather better than to send her along a highway that had no path--and that she is thus entitled to at … Read more