Less than a week after Twitter made the announcement about Verified Accounts, they have launched their beta version and have started verifying celebrities and well known businessmen and politicians.
The first person to get authorised seems to be internet celebrity officialTila. As I mentioned before, if you’re having problems with someone hijacking your personal name or product name, don’t get too excited as they only seem to be dealing with high profile people at the moment. 
I came across a cool website yesterday called SNODS, an internet game which uses Twitter. The game has a Mission Impossible theme to it and lets you go on missions, attack fellow Twitterers, kidnap your Twitter friends and much more.
To move up in the game you need to attack and kidnap other Twitterers and stop them from doing this to you. To achieve this you need to save up and upgrade certain things like your headquarters, vault and holding pen.
I don’t think you will waste a lot of time on the site but it’s worth checking out. Regardless, it has to be one of the best illustrations of how Twitter can be used for something Non-Twitter
Link : SNODS
read full article →I thought I would give you all an update on this saga.
I purchased the HummingBird script a month or so ago. My opinion since purchasing it hasn’t changed, I think it’s a great script. However, their support is absolutely awful.
The refused to help me get access to the forum and they refused to look into why it was crashing on my pc. They didn’t answer my emails about any of this.
At that point I felt I had no other choice but to ask for a refund via PayPal. My thinking was that they would either get the kick up the ass they needed to help me or I would get a refund. Unfortunately I got neither.
I got one reply from them via Paypal :
As far as the issues you are having with hummingbird, please describe them in detail so we may assist you in fixing them. Our support team was under the impression that you were only experiencing issues with the forum. Thanks.Sincerely,Merchant Services Support
This was frustrating for 2 reasons. First of all, I told them in several emails about the script crashing on my pc, they simply chose to ignore it and simply answer my question about forum access. Secondly, I have since emailed since this comment and asked for them to see what is wrong and they have not replied.
10 days after they left this comment, and after I left another two comments via PayPal as well, I escalated it to a dispute. Unfortunately they quickly ruled in their favour, which I’m not surprised about because PayPal rarely protects the buyer.
From what I have heard, many people have bought the script and have had good support. For whatever reason, I did not. I don’t want to discourage anyone out there from buying this script because it does do what it says it does but be warned, once you click buy your money is gone and if the script doesn’t work right – you’re screwed.
read full article →Without doubt, 2009 has been the year of Twitter, with their growth reaching astronomical levels in the first few months of the year. However, it doesn’t look like the 2nd half of the year will be as good for Twitter as the 1st.
First there was news from Nielson that 60% of Twitter users are not returning the next month. And today I read an article by David Weir which highlighted that Twitter only grew by 1.47% in May, which is incredibly low when you consider that Twitter has grew by 100% since March and a whopping 3700% in one year.
I don’t think that this illustrates that Twitter is a Fad but it wouldn’t surprise me if we see negative growth for the first time over the next 3 months.
Are you still using Twitter as much as you used to?
read full article →Over the weekend Biz Stone announced that Twitter will be testing out a new verified accounts system this summer.
The experiment will begin with public officials, public agencies, famous artists, athletes, and other well known individuals at risk of impersonation. We hope to verify more accounts in the future but due to the resources required, verification will begin only with a small set.
This development was no doubt in part because of the lawsuit that St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa delivered on Twitters doorstep because someone was impersonating him.
Impersonation violates Twitter’s Terms of Service and we take the issue seriously. We suspend, delete, or transfer control of accounts known to be impersonation. When alerted, we took action in this regard on behalf of St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa.
Reports this week that Twitter has settled a law suit and officially agreed to pay legal fees for an impersonation complaint that was taken care of by our support staff in accordance with our Terms are erroneous. Twitter has not settled, nor do we plan to settle or pay.
I was a little pissed off by start of this statement in which Biz stressed that they take the issue seriously and suspend, delete or or transfer control of accounts known to be impersonation. I have contacted Twitter a few times about people hijacking the Twitter usernames of domains/websites I own and they have never replied once.
I have seen a few other bloggers being pissed off about the fact that well known celebrities get their account back within a few days yet they won’t even bother looking into this kind of thing for your average joe. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that they must get a lot of complaints about hijacked accounts but they have to take some of the blame because hijacking is so damn easy to do on Twitter.
But, similar to Google, Twitter seem to respond incredibly quick when a big name or company complains about something. But the rest of us are not so lucky. Just recently Tyler Cruz had to choose @TylerCruzDotCom as his Twitter username because @TylerCruz was hijacked and Twitter did nothing about it.
I do think that Verified Accounts are a great addition to Twitter. However, for the majority of users, it won’t stop anyone hijacking your name. Twitter have said as much by stating that they are dealing with celebrities, athletes and public figures first.
Link : Not Playing Ball
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The trending topics sidebar is something that I have never really paid too much attention to on Twitter, least of all because many spammers try and use it to spam their agenda (it’s happened a few times). However, it has been the tool that broke newsbreaking news to me more than once over the last few months.
Yesterday I found out the sad news through trends that David Carradine had passed away. His passing was a big shock, as was the way he passed away, therefore news of his death was being twittered by everyone.
I still check the news everyday but I’ve noticed that I usually check Twitter first, therefore I’m sure it will continue to break news to me in the future.
What news did you find out through Trending Topics? Is it something you pay much attention to?
Kevin
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James
Hakim is a webmaster, blogger and self confessed gadget geek!
He owns numerous websites on the net including the popular
Twitter Scripts.