January 12, 2010 marked the largest earthquake recorded in an impoverished Caribbean community near Port Au Prince. This 7.0 earthquake devastated the landscape, killing thousands and leaving several family members in shambles. While politicians around the world scrambled to figure out a viable plan to help the devastated community. mGive launched a mobile campaign with Red Cross- late Tuesday evening and has since raised over 2 million dollars in relief donations, according to the NYtimes.

Tracy Reines, the Director of the International Response Operations Center at the American Red Cross released this video on youTube yesterday to further describe the incident.

mGive has made it exceptionally easy to donate ten dollars to the cause. All users with a cell phone and major service provider have to do is text the word “HAITI” to “90999″ , wait for a reply, then type “YES” and ten dollars will be added to your next cell phone bill.

Users that prefer other methods to donate can call 1-800-REDCROSS or visit redcross.org to contribute directly from the website.

It should also be noted that the Haitian born musician Wyclef has created an effort where you can text “YELE” to “501501″ to make a five dollar donation.

Additional Sources:

• To find out about the latest news and information on White House Efforts
• To get the latest American Red Cross efforts
• To get the mGive FAQs about donations
• To learn more about Wyclef’s donation Campaign.
• To follow the latest twitter happenings “Help Haiti” OR #Haiti

GIVE TODAY!

Update | 10:48 a.m. Corrected mistake about Wyclef’s relation with the Black Eyed Pea’s

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

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.

It’s now official users of the popular Pandora Free Internet Music site can now easily post their songs and radio stations to Twitter and Facebook.

Facebook users will be able to listen to a quick thirty second preview of the post while tweeps will be able to send out shortened urls. These links will then take users to the feature page in question.

Users will have the choice to autoshare to their Facebook or Twitter accounts by adjusting their options under their account settings. But I would not recommend this if your friends are easily offended by autoposts.

To those who may be unfamiliar with Pandora its a nicely packaged web application that allows you to listen to free music online or while using an iPhone. Pandora currently allows you to create up to 100 radio stations based off of your personal listening preference. For each station you create, songs are generated based off of the …

Genome Project, the most sophisticated taxonomy of musical information ever collected. It represents over eight years of analysis by our trained team of musicologists, and spans everything from this past Tuesday’s new releases all the way back to the Renaissance and Classical music.

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]

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.

The official Facebook Android Application launched today and many of the features fall someone short to the Android Users. Facebook, having just released a major update to the iPhone Facebook App, did not manage user expectations that well – at all.

Having used the iPhone app for the past couple of weeks then seeing the Android app in action – is like getting a really great steak dinner one day and then getting a greasy burnt McDonald’s burger the next.

- Take a picture and upload it

- Shake the phone to refresh your news feed

- View your friends wall and user Info

- Comment on Status Updates

- Easily navigate through the interface

- View user requests

- View events

- Post notes

- Send emails

- View current notifications

Techcrunch Review:

While I am sure they will improve the application over time – the billion dollar company could work just a little harder on rolling out new applications to its valuable users.

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)

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.