Tis the season (or day) that most of us go out to celebrate the New Year with friends, family and in many cases a few drinks. Police, of course, have known this for ages and set up checkpoints to find those who decide to put their (and other people) lives in danger.

According to research these checkpoints help to cut down the number of drunk drivers on the roads and ultimately reduce the number of DUI related car accidents by 20%.

In Fresno, California, police now fear that Twitter users will use the power of this social network to avoid sobriety checkpoints by contacting there fellow tweeps.

According to the Seatle Times, Sgt. Dave Gibeault, head of the Fresno Police Department’s traffic unit said

“Trying to elude arrest for drunken driving, young people use technology to tell each other about the location of sobriety checkpoints”.

In Phoniex Arizona police agree with this train of thought and add

“We go out of our way to tell people when we’re doing enforcement efforts,”
“Behind the wheel under the influence of alcohol and a young person doing it — it’s a recipe for diaster,” said Sgt. Tommy Thompson of the Phoenix Police Department.

Add the fact that recent studies have surfaced about the dangers of texting and driving and you add even more fuel to the fire – sort of speak. Users that decide to text or use twitter while driving drunk pose an even greater danger to all parties involved.

I guess what I am getting to here is, if you are heading out this evening to have a some drinks, be safe, use common sense and have a sober person drive.

Have Fun and Happy New Year!!!

sources:

Tweets Warn Of DUI Traps

Police: Twitter used to avoid DUI checkpoints

image credit

The Ohio Department of Transportation decided to take another precaution this winter in hopes of dwindling down the 44,000 plus accidents it suffered last year – as a result of serve winter weather conditions.

The DOT will now offer winter advisory, Twitter updates for the highways in Cincinnati, Akron, Cleveland, Toledo, Columbus and Dayton.

The updates will be provided from the following twitter profiles:

“Safety is always our top priority… [And] social networking websites such as Twitter are increasingly becoming a very useful tool in sharing information, especially among our younger populations.”

It should also be noted that this is a test project and more areas will be added as the project progresses forward.

As always, I would advise that users check their twitter feeds before leaving the house and not while driving.

For more information please visit: www.BuckeyeTraffic.org/twitter

The U.S. Geological Survey have come up with a new way to track earthquakes via tweets. Normally Scientists have the tedious task of sorting through large quantities of data through recording stations, prior to finding out where exactly an earthquake has struck. Now Scientists can use filtering software to sort through tweets to help them get a rough idea, as to where the earth quake happened and how large it was.

Typically people begin to tweet there experience a few seconds after an earthquake to tell others what they experienced. Scientist realize this and have created a project based on this information.

Scientists have dubbed the effort TED for Twitter Earthquake Detection, which scans tweets in several different languages for the word earthquake. The software is said to filter out all variations of the word that may be misleading. Such examples word include words that refer to the Quake video game.

According to reports from the BBC News Dr. Paul Earle from the USGS explained that this is in no way hard scientific data but rather “It is a speed versus accuracy issue”.

“Because there is a lot of noise in this data and we don’t believe this system could ever be used to initiate a critical response such as shutting down a nuclear power plant, but what it may do is give us an initial heads-up in a region which doesn’t have a dense seismic network that further scientific evaluation is needed,” said Dr Earle.

(source: BBC)

Google announced yesterday that is has overhauled the news to cater to iPhone, Android, and Palm Pre users. With this new overhaul comes a user interface that displays more images, news and their sources. Google also promises “you can now reach your favorite sections, discover new ones, find articles and play videos in fewer clicks. If you are an existing Google News reader on desktop, you will find that all of your personalizations are honored in this mobile version too.”

This all comes in 29 different languages with over 70 different versions avaliable.

After testing the new functionality of the mobile version, I was quite impressed how everything was slimmed down and pretty easy to find.

The “Jump To” feature – located in the top right header of each section – appears to be using some internal page links that allows you to quickly find the topic of interest without endless scrolling.

Now all they need to do is integrate a retweet button and users will have the chance to spread the word, at a much more rapid rate.

100 Million to the Twitter Corp

According to various sources on the net – this past week – Twitter received 100 million in funding to bring the Corporation to a whooping 1 billion dollar value. Investors Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Morgan Stanley initially wished to remain private about the deal until Friday Sep 25, 2009.

Which begs the question, why? Why would anyone invest this type of capital into a business for only 10% stake in a corporation that has yet to implement a solid revenue generating plan? Is there an Initial Public Offer waiting around the corner? Does twitter have an ace up its sleeve? …

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According to co-founder Biz Stone, Twitter has no intentions of pushing ads on this site this year. Instead their main focus will be on creating business accounts that will offer a subset of additional features such as improved search capabilities…

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13 Percent of all medical students taking part in a recent survey by the Journal of the American Medical Association reported a breach in doctor patient confidentiality by posting confidential information publicly online.
The survey conducted consisted of 60% of all US medical schools – in which – 60% percent of all respondents reported posting “unprofessional content” online.
Since no official policies have been created – schools have not been able to take official action against students…

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In an effort to better optimize Facebook ads Nielson plans to implement a new advertising measuring tool, dubbed BrandLift. BrandLift will basically work by eliciting users with annoying survey questions on a purely volunteer basis. This comes after – what many have determined to be a failure on the part of Facebook to successfully manage client advertising campaigns…

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While ATT&T stands fast with the notion that they had no part in rejecting Google Voice App from the iPhone, they are complaining to the FCC about how Google Voice should operate.
ATT&T claims that Google Voice should operate exactly as ATT&T does, even though the Google Voice uses a the internet to run its service…

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Intel introduced its new Light Peak technology earlier this past week. What is light peak you ask? Light peak is a new form of blazing fast optical data transfer that is said to be 10x as fast as your current gigabit ethernet cable (the one for your internet connection ). The rate at which data can travel over this optical cable is somewhere around 10 Gbps.
It is have been unveiled by Engadget that Apple plans to replace all computer ports with this new technology and has been the driving force behind this new innovation since 2007.

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Actor Patrick Swayze 57, died Monday after his enduring 20 Month battle with Pancreatic Cancer.

Patrick Swayze passed away peacefully today with family at his side after facing the challenges of his illness for the last 20 months,” [...] by his publicist, Annett Wolf.

False rumors were spread several months ago through various social media platforms, stating that he had already lost the battle with cancer.

More Details of this story can be found [here]

Tweeter Changes Terms of Service – Twitter announces its terms of service changes – publicly on its blog. Making it clear that you own your own tweets, the advertising door is left open, SPAM will not be tolerated (as usual) and they are still working on guidelines for APIs.

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Twitter, being one of the larger real time communication platforms that can pass message at the speed of thought, laid victim to a terrible hoax today. Apparently a Tweeted message was sent alerting tweeps that a 3 year Girl was taken in Stockton, Ca. The message also stated that an Amber Alert was in effect to assist in her safe return. While fellow tweeps quickly spread the message in good faith, it was unfortunate that this was a ruse.

It should also be noted that this has become quite a common spam alert, that has been spread via the internet and cell phones since 2006. If this had been an actual Amber Alert all news media outlets are immediately notified of the incident. So if you are transversing the twittersverse and find something in similar reference, a quick check to one of your major media sources should confirm or negate the validity of the message.

Employees of Twitter apparently caught on to this message and have since removed it from the list of trending topics.

Several variations of the message can be found at snopes.com

A brief timeline of this type of message can be found here.

Popular today on the social media platform Reddit, was a brief story about a 61 year old man, smacking some lady’s 2 year old child in a Georgia Walmart.

Apparently Roger Stephens approached Sonya Mathews and told her to make her child stop crying. Stephens then went on to tell Mathews if she didn’t get her daughter to stop crying he would do it for her. The child continued to cry; Stephens then abruptly grabbed the 2 year old girl and proceeded to smack her several times across the face.

Adding insult to injury Stephens went on to tell Mathew’s “See, I told you I would shut her up.”

The child’s mother immediately screamed at Stephens and yelled franticly for security. Another shopper stopped the disgruntle man until security could take care of the situation.

The delusional vigilante Stephens, is now sitting in Gwinnett County jail; being held without bail and facing one count of first degree cruelty to children (a felony in GA).

Fortunately Mathew’s daughter suffered no physical injuries as a result of the altercation.

(source: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

Dave Goldstein, 36 also know as DJ AM, was found dead in his 2 million dollar SOHO residence in New York on Friday. Goldstein who had a legacy of drug use from his early teens, was found with a bag of crack cocaine stuck to his bare chest and various drug paraphernalia spread all around him.

Police were called to the scene after a friend tried to gain access to the DJ’s residence. According to the WSJ police kicked in the door and found Goldstein in his bed wearing only sweat pants at approximately 5:20 pm.

Goldstein one of two surviors of a Learjet crash in Columbia, South Carolina last year on September 19, was deemed critically injuried while four passengers lost their lives. Many of his close associates claimed this event changed his life – making him more appreciative of his existence.

Some sources claim that his last Twitter Message – a famous lyric from a Grandmaster Flash song -was somehow correlated to his demise. But this is pure speculation at this point.

Goldstein having a long history of being addicted ecstasy, crack cocaine and others was set to star in a new reality show on MTV this fall dubbed “Gone Too Far”. The premise behind the show was drug intervention where loved one’s setup intervention for addicts.

DJ AM was also famous for many of his past relationships including an engagement to actress Nicole Richie and his ties with singer/actress Mandy Moore.

Goldstein was well sought after and a friend to many celebrities and social starlets. Twitter sparked a storm of tweets following the announcement of his death.

Most notably

Demi Moore
@mrskutcher The shock of DJ AM has me at a loss for words…his joyous spirit was a gift to us all!

Katy Perry

@katyperry rest in peace friend.

Alyssa Milano

@Alyssa_Milano May you rest in peace, Adam. You touched many with your light and will be missed like crazy.

Paris Hilton

@parishilton R.I.P. AM, I love you and you are already missed so much. My heart and prayers go out to his family and close friends. God bless.

It should be noted that keyword “RIP DJ Am” still trends the twitterverse as fans and friends continue to morn his loss.

(image source: examiner.com)

Google posted today that it added a little flair to the popular Google Docs application – by allowing you to translate your text into 42 different languages.

The translation process is overwhelmingly easy, after you are finished typing up a document, highlight the area you need translated. Next go to the “Tools” menu select the “Translate document” submenu and select your the new language. Google docs will then open a new document with the translated text and give you the option to save a copy or overwrite the original file.

While this new feature will certainly help a lot of people with friends and family in different parts of the world, it should be noted that it is not a perfect translation. Google also stated that they will be “improving translation quality over time”.

Twitter Study – August 2009 – Pearanalytics

A study was conducted by Pearanalytics with the initial hypothesis that Twitter was primarily used for Self Promotion. Their later findings concluded that 40% of Twitter Tweets are “Pointless Babble”, making it the most widely prolific type of Tweet sent. While conversation ranked number two in the study…

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The saga continues where unsavory characters are exploiting Twitter to send unsuspected users to links that contain the Koobface worm. The end result being an attempt to gather sensitive data from your PC…

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Twitter: Project Retweet in Phase One Status

Twitter Announced Phase one of Project Retweet, where they plan to implement a Retweet button at some point; allowing developers to first work with the API…

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Facebook accidently rolled out invitations to several users of the service, asking them to try out a slender version of the Facebook application. The goal of this project is to gain more followers in areas that do not have high speed internet access…

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In the latest counts from comscore.com Facebook has beaten Twitter in terms of growth in the month of July. Facebook drew in 87.7 million unique visitors- up 14 percent compared to last month while Twitter has only seen a 6 percent growth with 21.2 million unique visitors…

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Must speculation has been made as to whether Facebook is challenging Google’s search engine, by including web search functionality into the popular application. It has also been stated that they are working on a payment system that may give paypal a run for their money…

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Google released a set of widgets for the iGoogle page that lets users add social widgets to their iGoogle page. With these widgets users would be able to play games together, share photos and more…

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Google released a new search engine algorithm that will allow the search engine giant to serve up search engine results faster, include more sites in their search engine results pages and more…

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Many people have often suggested that Twitter should put a reTweet Button or link on posts to enable users to pass along information in a more efficient manner. Effective today phase one of Project Rewteet has officially been announced on Twitters blog.

What does Phase one mean of project Retweet?

So far it includes an announcement of the project. Later the developers will get to beat around an improved API (Application Programming Interface) that includes the Retweet feature. Next they will release the feature to a subset of the Twitterverse, do some testing, make changes if needed and then (finally) we will all get to use it. Makes me kinda of wonder what happened to the Authenticate user project, has it been scraped?

Why give it to the Developers first?

Simply because this is the way Apple did it with their 3.0 release of the iPhone OS.
Kidding of course, The rational behind this decision appears to be due to the fact that they do not want to release a new feature of Twitter without giving developers a chance to prep their applications first. Just throwing a new feature out there without giving developers time to adjust their apps would not only raise some questions about Twitter’s ethics- it may cause them to loose some valuable users as well.

Twitter was also kind enough to post a high res version of the project using the latest in graphic art software… the notepad and pen.

Google announced yesterday that they now have a group of widgets for your iGoogle page that will allow you to interact better with your peers. Currently they feature 19 different widgets that include chess, scrabble, flixster, trivia, photo sharing and more.

iGoogle was implemented in 2005 to allow users to customize their own person page to include various widgets. These widgets feature a wide range of functionality from getting weather reports to finding information about movies playing in your local area. A similar concept was first introduced by Yahoo! referred to as My Yahoo!.

So How do these gadgets let you interact with your peers?

Google reports that you can share information on the different widgets if your friends have the same widget on their page or through a new feed service they have dubbed Updates. Google recently posted the following information about how to use the Update technology.

Updates can include your recently shared photo albums, your favorite comics strips, your travel plans for the weekend and more. To help you manage who you are sharing with, we’ve created a Friends group. You can add and edit friends in this group at any time. If you already have a Friends group within your Google Contacts, you’ll be able to easily share with those friends on iGoogle as well. If you don’t care to share, iGoogle’s social features are optional and can be disabled on a gadget-to-gadget basis with just a few clicks.

While Google’s attempts to go social in the past have not been meet with much success, maybe these social widgets will allow the search giant to gain some traction before releasing the new Google Wave service.

It has been reported that a new slender version of Facebook is now being tested by select users on Facebook. This information was supposedly leaked last night as users were sent accidental invites to use the new service.

Judging by the screen shot it would seem that users can post information in very similar fashion to Twitter or Facebook’s newly acquired FriendFeed.

Techcrunch reported that the lite version was created out of a need to target users that have lower internet connectivity speeds. If successful, this would allow Facebook to gain a larger demographic from areas where high-speed internet is not accessible – as MySpace once did. This influx of new users could ultimately lead into larger earnings for the social media giant by allowing them to cash in on even more ad revenue.

Techcrunch has also reported that Facebook’s official response to the lite app madness as is follows:

We are currently testing a simplified alternative to Facebook.com that loads a specific set of features quickly and efficiently. Similar to the Facebook experience you get on your mobile phones, Facebook “Lite” is a fast-loading, simplified version of Facebook that enables people to make comments, accept Friend requests, write on people’s Walls, and look at photos and Status updates. We are currently testing Facebook Lite in countries where we are seeing lots of new users coming to Facebook for the first time and are looking to start off with a more simple experience.

This evening, the test was temporarily exposed to a larger set of users by mistake. We have not opened up access to lite.facebook.com to all users at this time. People who are not part of the test and are trying to access “Lite” will be directed to Facebook.com as usual.

A quick search on Twitter reveals much speculation and curiosity about the new Facebook lite application. While searching using the keyword “facebook lite” I found that some users are excited to be able to use a lighter version of Facebook. Some user’s just want to find out what it is and some feel that Facebook lite may be just a repacked rip-off of the increasingly popular Twitter.

(Facebook Screen Shot Source Twitgoo)

Update: According to Fast Company, Facebook lite is now being tested in China, India and Russia.

Google released a beta version of a new search engine that engineers have been working on in secrecy over the past several months dubbed Caffeine. While most people will not notice any aesthetic differences, many developers have said the new google search engine is a lot faster.
Google claims that the new search engine architecture will go far beyond the current Google search and will push the “envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”

Google has stated that the new project has yet to be fully completed and is asking that web developers and “power searchers” test the new project out here http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and give Google your feedback.

It should be noted that Google does not want just any feedback and includes the following in their recent blog post.

Right now, we only want feedback on the differences between Google’s current search results and our new system. We’re also interested in higher-level feedback (”These types of sites seem to rank better or worse in the new system”) in addition to “This specific site should or shouldn’t rank for this query.” Engineers will be reading the feedback, but we won’t have the cycles to send replies.

Here’s how to give us feedback: Do a search at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and look on the search results page for a link at the bottom of the page that says “Dissatisfied? Help us improve.” Click on that link, type your feedback in the text box and then include the word caffeine somewhere in the text box. Thanks in advance for your feedback!

Initial testing of both search engines (Caffeine and normal Google) using the keyword iphone (all lower case), has shown slightly different results in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Most Notably is the number of indexed pages in both search engines. Normal Google (decaffeinated) displayed 357,000,000 results for the term. While Caffeine displayed 458,000,000, giving validity to the initial blog announcement – where the size envelope will be pushed.

What will this mean for search engine optimization experts and other search engine marketing gurus? At this point it is too early to tell since the project has been pushed out in a fashion to elicit user and developer feedback. While this is not a Google Lab product (notorious for pooping up and then just dying off), feedback from users could ultimately change the direction of the project.

Thursday sparked a world wide web storm as attackers focused their efforts on several prominent websites. Twitter apparently suffered the most, during the attack. ..

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As previously blogged about, Twitter is the focus point of an patent infringement suit, where the plaintiff insists Twitter has imposed on its IRIS system…

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One of the most highly used and most popular iPhone apps “Facebook”, plans to have a new version up and running soon. The app will feature support for video, news feeds ability for users to “like” content and more…

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The engineers at Google plan on doing routine maintenance on Saturday, August 8. So if you have an AdSense account- don’t be alarmed if you can not access your user interface. Google ensures us that all people running AdSense ads will still get credit for ad clicks and impressions will be recorded.

The planed maintenace schedule is as follows:

United States – 10am to 2pm PDT

London – 6pm Saturday

Athens – 8pm Saturday

Mumbai – 10:30pm Saturday

Kuala Lumpur – 1am Sunday

Melbourne – 3am Sunday

To find out more about scheduled maintenance go here…

Well it’s official the microblogging master of the internet Twitter, is facing patent infringement charges from a Sugar land, Texas Company that specializes in mass notifications systems.

The Texas Based Company, TechRadium , claims to have several patents protecting the concept of mass notification.
Most notably is the Patent for IRIS™ (Immediate Response Information System) that is described on their website as

IRIS™ was developed as an intuitive, ease-to-use system and comes equipped with a comprehensive feature set. The mass communication system is a highly advanced, state-of-the-art program which is consistently updated and upgraded to best accommodate our clients’ needs.

Some of the main features include a web based application, rapid message delivery, conference calling and the ability to send text messages.

The federal suit was filed on Tuesday in Houston, Texas and the Plantiff seeks

… the fullest extent permitted by law, Plaintiff seeks recovery of damages for lost profits, reasonable royalties, unjust enrichment, and benefits received by the Defendant as a result of use the misappropriated technology, and any other damages to which it may be entitled in law or in equity.

(source bizjournals)

The webs largest Online Payment Service, Paypal went down yesterday from the hours of 1:30 EDT to 6:30 EDT missing approximately $36,000,000 in transactions from around the globe. According to the Wall Street Journal, PayPal spokesman Anuj Nayar said the cause was from an “internal network hardware issue” but was not sure how to deal with merchants that currently rely on the system.

While the issue appears to be resolved, there was no mention if PayPal plans to update their contingency plan to reduce another lengthy outage in the future.

(source Wall Street Journal)