Twitter moves to beef up video sharing on social media

NEW YORK: Twitter said Thursday it has bought SnappyTV, a California firm that lets people edit and share clips from TV broadcasts.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

SnappyTV, launched in 2010, has been collaborating with Twitter to "inject the best video content into Twitter´s real-time conversation, straight from the TV to your mobile device," Twitter said on its official blog.

Twitter added: "While we continue to invest in SnappyTV´s product and integrate it more tightly with Twitter, we also plan to maintain our partners´ ability to post high-quality videos to other platforms."

"As Twitter has grown as the companion to live events and broadcast media, SnappyTV will help partners and brands bring the best videos into the conversation, when it matters most," Twitter added.

Since the beginning of the year Twitter has been on a shopping spree, in particular for TV audience rating firms or social media advertising companies. These include the US firm Gnip, Mesagraph of France and Britain´s SecondSync.

CIA opens twitter and Facebok account

WASHINGTON: The secretive US spy agency joined the world of social media Friday and quickly had the Twitterverse talking.

We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet the Central Intelligence Agency quipped on its newly minted official Twitter page.

Within two hours of the post it received around 90 000 retweets and the CIA counted 115 000 followers. The Twitter Government and Politics team welcomed the posting with a BestPractice hashtag for being creative with your first tweet.

CIA director John Brennan said in a statement that the new Twitter and Facebook accounts aimed to help the agency more directly engage with the public and provide information on CIA's mission history and other developments. We have important insights to share Brennan said.

The agency already had accounts with YouTube and Flickr. There is little chance the agency will post spy secrets. Instead it plans to post its rare press releases information about careers within the agency or about historic missions that have since been declassified.

The agency will also post images of objects on display at the CIA museum which it called the best museum most people never get to see because it's closed to the public.

On its Twitter profile the CIA describes itself as the nation's first line of defense. We accomplish what others cannot accomplish and go where others cannot go.

Twitter tweaks website to attract new users

NEW YORK: As Twitter looks to broaden its appeal beyond its 241 million users, the company is introducing a redesign of profile pages that includes bigger photos, more user controls and a distinct resemblance to Facebook.

"Moment by moment, your Twitter profile shows the world who you are," the company wrote in a blog post Tuesday. "Starting today, it will be even easier (and, we think, more fun) to express yourself through a new and improved Web profile."

As part of changes coming in the next few weeks, users who access Twitter via the Web will notice larger photos on their profile pages. Besides profile photos on the left corner of the page, the redesign includes a large banner photo that resembles the big rectangular cover photos on Facebook pages. Users will be able to "pin" one of their tweets to the top of the page to give others an idea of the topics they like to tweet about. In addition, tweets that receive the most interest from other users will appear slightly larger.

The more visual look is an attempt to attract people who may be intimidated by Twitter's onslaught of text filled with quirky acronyms, at-symbols and hashtags. The changes come at a time when Facebook is adding features to its site that are Twitter-like, highlighting the way the two companies are jockeying for people's time and advertisers' dollars.

Is Twitter saying a picture is worth 140 characters? Perhaps not. The new profiles don't apply to Twitter's mobile app, which is a more popular way to access the service than the website. Mobile is also where Twitter earns most of its money. EMarketer expects about 77 percent of Twitter's estimated $1.1 billion in advertising revenue to come from mobile this year.

Even so, Twitter has acknowledged that it needs to reach a bigger audience. CEO Dick Costolo described the effort in broad terms during the company's February earnings call with analysts.

"By bringing the content of Twitter forward and pushing the scaffolding of the language of Twitter to the background," Costolo said, "we can increase high quality interactions and make it more likely that new or casual users will find the service as indispensable as our existing core users do."

Costolo also promised more visually engaging content, of which the profile page redesign is just one example. Last fall, the company decided to make users' feeds more visual by including previews from Twitter photos and Vine videos.

Twitter's first-quarter tally of users signaled that growth is slowing on the service. The company added just 9 million new monthly users in the fourth quarter, only 1 million of which came from the U.S. It added an average of 16 million new accounts in each of the first three quarters of 2013.

Twitter said in February that it had 241 million users at the end of 2013. By comparison, Facebook boasts some 1.23 billion users, while WhatsApp, the messaging service Facebook is buying for $19 billion, said it had 400 million active monthly users last December.

Twitter has not yet reported its first-quarter financial results, so it's hard to tell if the slowdown is a sign of trouble or just a blip. EMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson said in a recent report that Twitter's user base "may be growing more slowly than expected, but the social service has steadily increased its ad revenue and shown that its ads can drive engagement and interaction."

Noah Elkin, executive editor at eMarketer, said advertisers "love the engagement they get on Twitter." That said, he added that the company is still under pressure to grow.

The redesigned profile page, Elkin said, will likely have a "relatively minimal impact" on Twitter's advertising revenue, "unless and until" the company brings the new look to its mobile app.

 

Turkey lifts controversial Twitter ban

ANKARA: Turkey lifted a much-criticised block on Twitter on Thursday, 24 hours after its highest court overturned the ban as a breach of the right to free speech.

Premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan on March 20 shuttered access to the social media site after it had been used to spread a torrent of anonymous leaks implicating his inner circle in corruption.

Turkey's NATO allies and international human rights groups strongly criticised the ban -- as well as an ongoing block of video-sharing website YouTube -- as a step backward for Turkey's democracy.

On Wednesday Turkey's Constitutional Court ruled the Twitter ban violated free speech and ordered the communications ministry and telecoms authority to reverse it "with immediate effect".

The government took 24 hours to react. First the telecoms authority TIB removed from its website a court order on the Twitter block and started contacting internet service providers to lift the ban.

Shortly after -- as many of Turkey's Twitter accounts came live again -- the transport and communications ministry confirmed the move in a brief statement.

"In line with the decision made by the Constitutional Court ... the measure blocking access to the Twitter.com Internet site has been removed," it said. "After the necessary technical arrangements, the site will be opened to use."

The ban had been widely circumvented by many of Turkey's almost 12 million Twitter users, who have instead sent tweets via text message or by adjusting their Internet settings.

- 'Sultan has agreed' -

Many Twitter users quickly commented on the move, with Nervana Mahmoud writing from Egypt, "Joy to the world, the Sultan has agreed", using a common nickname for Erdogan.

Turkish journalist Adem Yavuz Arslan urged caution, warning that users should maintain the VPNs or virtual private networks they have used to get around the ban.

"Twitter has been unblocked," he wrote. "But do not change your VPN settings yet. Because the government has the plug on the Internet. It can pull it whenever it wants."

When the micro-blogging service wasn't live in Turkey by Thursday morning, critics started pushing, fearing that the government may ignore the order.

Lawmaker Sezgin Tanrikulu of the secular main opposition Republican People's Party, warned that defying the ruling "would mean an abuse of power" while President Abdullah Gul, a regular Twitter user, said the bans on Twitter and YouTube now needed to be lifted.

After the service returned, San Francisco-based Twitter said: "We are encouraged by the news from Turkey today and welcome our Turkish users back to Twitter."

The United States, which offered rare criticism of ally Turkey over its crackdown on social media, also welcomed the move.

"Welcome back to Twitter #Turkey. Good decision by constitutional court. @YouTube still offline," tweeted Rick Stengel, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy.

- 'Anchor of stability' -

Erdogan had ordered the Internet curbs in the lead-up to key local elections last Sunday, in which his party chalked up sweeping wins despite the claims of sleaze and graft and a harsh police crackdown on protesters last June.

Polling has shown that the Twitter and YouTube bans -- despite earning rebukes from Brussels, Washington, rights group Amnesty International and a host of the world's literary greats -- had little effect on Erdogan's conservative Muslim loyalists.

Research centre Ipsos found that only 3.6 percent of AKP supporters said they had been influenced by the Internet blocks, and three quarters said the corruption claims had "no effect".

Millions of Turks approve of Erdogan, despite criticism of a growing authoritarianism, because of the strong economic growth seen during his 11-year rule, analysts say.

"The Turkish economy is betting on Erdogan as an anchor of stability, and so are the people," said Michael Meier of German think-tank the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation.

Report: Turkish court orders halt to Twitter ban

ANKARA: Turkey´s Dogan news agency and other media say a court has issued a temporary injunction ordering the telecommunications authority to restore access to Twitter, five days after the government blocked the social network.

The telecommunications authority had accused Twitter of disobeying court orders to remove content.

The ban came shortly after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to "rip out the roots" of the social network that has been a conduit for links to recordings suggesting government corruption.

Many in Turkey found immediate ways to circumvent the ban. Lawyers and the opposition party asked courts to overturn the Twitter ban, arguing it was illegal and unconstitutional.

It was not clear when or if the telecommunications authority would follow Wednesday´s court order.

DareToZlatan - The Most Amazing Q&A Session in Twitter History

Zlatan Ibrahimovic is fast becoming one of the most loved football personalities in the world, as well as one of the game's most outstanding talents.

The gift that keeps on giving took to Twitter today in true Zlatan style to do a Q&A session for his followers and anyone that was interested.

The hashtag #DareToZlatan was trending for most of the day and it's probably a result of the big Swede's hilarious Zlatan-esque responses, mostly given in the third person.

Here's a roundup of some of the truly amazing tweets