Social media can be a tremendous force for good during an emergency. News agencies and local governments can disseminate urgent alerts in an instant, providing valuable information to a distraught public. Unfortunately, as services like Twitter are user-driven and unfiltered, plenty of errant info can spread like wildfire too. Someone’s pants are on fire here, as this totally untrue...
Twitter had made good on its promise to allow users to download an entire archive of their tweets before the year is up. Originally teased back in July, and then reiterated in Nov., Twitter has been letting its users know that before the year was out they would be able to download a complete archive of every Tweet they have sent all the way back to the first. It appears that the...
Every single one of your tweets — the one about your date with Sarah or the first time you tasted a Tacos Locos — can be downloaded in one beautiful package before the year is up. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said as much back in July, and reiterated his comments once again during a recent talk at the University of Michigan. By default, users can only see their last 3,200 tweets, but...
Election Day is almost upon us here in the U.S., as huge numbers will rock the vote on November 6. It has been a heated election season, and it seems that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are in a close race — in fact, both have been cited as poll leaders in various swing states (depending on where you get your news). Used to be that newspapers, radios and broadcast TV were the only ways...
While iOS hackers are often a thorn in Apple's side, sometimes the Cupertino company acknowledges that their expertise could actually be of value, and it offers them a job. That's what happened to 20-year-old Brown University student Nicholas Allegra, better known as legendary iPhone jailbreaker Comex, last August. After a year with Apple, however, Comex no longer works for the company...
Out with the old, in with the… familiar? Among the slew of new products unveiled by Twitter — including revamped iPad, iPhone/iPod Touch and Android apps — is a design change for the website profile that’s pretty reminiscent of Facebook’s Timeline layout. The new look being rolled out for user profile pages puts more emphasis on photos, with a widget on the left that displays even more...
Apple has seeded yet another OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.2 beta to registered developers. This release, which sports build number 12C50, is the fourth seed in under a month, and it indicates the software's public release is imminent. But unlike the other three, this one includes a number of new features. It has that much-anticipated Facebook integration built-in, like previous 10.8.2 betas...
Apple exposed a major flaw in its own iCloud security last week when it allowed a random person to call up and reset the password for Wired editor Matt Honan's iCloud account. This gave the hacker the ability to take control and remotely wipe all of Honan's Mac and iOS devices. To ensure the same thing doesn't happen again, Apple has now suspended iCloud password resets over the...
For every David Pogue who shows us what smart tweeting can do, there are loads of others who demonstrate their capacity for monumental Twitter gaffes. It’s kind of amazing how much damage 140 characters or less can do, so let’s take a tour, shall we?  Whether you’re looking for a learning lesson for the kiddies, want to entertain yourself with other people’s woes, or just simply curious...
Giving the Web a sense of scale, a guy named Ruslan Enikeev plotted 350,000 of the most popular websites and 2 million links from 196 countries on a colorful, bubble filled map, forming a giant cluster viewers can zoom in and out of on a whim. As you get closer to any particular bubble, the web address it represents comes into view, or you can punch in an address in the search field and...