We’re not so sure that, when it comes time for your Discoblog editors to give birth, we’ll be punching the gory details into our Blackberries and sending them across the Internets. But hey, that doesn’t mean other women aren’t doing it! CNN reports on the “trend” of mothers-to-be-any-minute-now tweeting the ins and, er, outs of their labor. From the article:
[A]s Sara Williams showed on Tuesday when she posted Twitter updates about giving birth to her child, online social networking has pushed its way into the delivery room.
It’s now a trend for expectant moms to post to sites such as Twitter from the time they conceive to the moment they deliver a baby into the world.
Williams, wife of Twitter CEO Evan Williams, posted to her 14,000-plus Twitter followers when her water broke, when she arrived at the hospital, during contractions and when she decided to get an epidural. Her husband broke the news on his Twitter feed that their “perfect baby boy” was delivered on Tuesday afternoon.
And when the baby arrives, you can be sure to set your wee one up with his/her own post-utero feed—which some tech-loving parents have already done.
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Image: flickr / Mykl Roventine
For hundreds of years, people have flocked to Jerusalem’s Western Wall to stuff prayer-laden slips of paper into cracks in the ancient structure. But let’s face it–for most of us, it’s quite a trek to Israel. Luckily, it’s now possible to submit your prayers via Twitter, from the comfort of your own desk chair.
AP reports:
The service’s founder, Alon Nil, says petitioners can tweet their prayers, and they will be printed out and taken to the wall, where they will join the thousands of handwritten notes placed by visitors who believe their requests will find a shortcut to God by being deposited there.
The 25-year-old economist started the Twitter page three weeks ago and has already received hundreds of prayers.
Even before the Western Wall got Twitterific, religious folk could submit prayers via fax or e-mail. But maybe there’s something special about boiling down your heart’s deepest wishes into 140 characters or less.
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Image: flickr / Mockstar
Job hunters, maybe you should be building your Twitter network instead of your resume—at least if you’re interested in the position of Senior Manager-Emerging Media Marketing at Best Buy. The electronics giant reportedly listed “at least 250 Twitter followers” among the requirements for the position.
The Telegraph reports:
According to the advertisement, the chosen candidate would be “the primary lead for the Best Buy’s mobile, social, and video marketing & media efforts to drive in-store and online sales, create sustainable word of mouth evangelists, and brand loyalists.”
Basic requirements for the job included a Bachelors degree, two years of mobile or social media marketing experience, four years [of] people or resource leadership experience and one year of active blogging experience.
The job opening, which was at the company’s Minnesota headquarters, appears to have been filled. But because companies increasingly look for candidates with good social networking skills, it’s a good bet that job-seekers will see similar specifications in the future from other employers.
Just don’t tweet about how you hate your job, because your boss is probably on Twitter, too.
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Image: Courtesy of Twitter
When TMZ broke the news yesterday that Michael Jackson had been rushed to the hospital for cardiac arrest, rumors about the King of Pop’s fate flooded Twitter. Sure enough, the dreaded (and beloved) fail whale soon began to appear, when the 66,500 tweets about Michael crashed the micro-blogging site’s servers.
Millions of people also turned to Google, searching for “Michael Jackson” to find out the latest on the singer’s health. The BBC reported that Google initially thought it was under attack, because the Web slowed down so drastically when the news broke:
Millions of people who Googled the star’s name were greeted with an error page rather than a list of results.
It warned users “your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application”.
Other mainstream media sites including AOL, CBS, and CNN all needed additional time to load as well. As for us here at DISCOVER…well, we’re sworn to secrecy.
Image: flickr/ Jason Edmonds
Yes, according to new research out of Harvard Business Review. Study authors Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski found that of their sample of 300,542 Twitter-ers, collected in May 2009, “the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.”
So who’s writing all the tweets? A mere 10 percent of users, say the researchers—making it a far cry from average social networks, where the top 10 percent of users create only 30 percent of the content. There’s also the possibility the numbers are being swayed by “the large number of bored-user and spam accounts” on the site, suggests Silicon Alley Insider’s Nicholas Carlson.
To top it all off, there’s apparently a nice, juicy gender divide forming on the world’s most popular micro-blog:
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Twitter isn’t just the hippest new way to get gossip, headlines, and nosy details of your friends’ lives. It’s helping people whine, embarrass themselves, find taco trucks and counter the Taliban like never before.
Now, researcher Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire is using Twitter to investigate the not-so-scientific world of psychics. Specifically, he’s looking to learn more about the ability to psychically identify geographic locations, a so-called psychic power that actually has a name: remote viewing. Wiseman will think of a place, and research subjects will “tweet” where they perceive the location to be. He predicts that up to 10,000 people will participate, and all locations Wiseman chooses will be in the U.K. (which, uh, narrows the guesses down pretty considerably).
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Quick! Grab the latest scientific study that may have something remotely to do with Twitter! Run it with a “Twitter Will Destroy Humanity!” headline! With a graphic by Hieronymus Bosch!
Here’s how it all started: A University of Southern California study, which is slated for publication next week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition, has come to the reported conclusion that Twitter can/might/will turn humanity into a teeming mass of barbarians who engage in all matter of mass killings, wanton torturing, rape, and other atrocities. Or something.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a researcher and co-author on the study, has been quoted far and wide across the Internets with such gems as:
“If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states and that would have implications for your morality.”
Possibly—though “fully experiencing emotions” about others’ psychological states is not something that humans were ever particularly good at. Plus “implications for our morality” can be drawn from just about anywhere, on the Internet or no.
Not to mention the small matter, which some reports fail to mention, that the study’s methodology had absolutely nothing to do with Twitter.
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•Plants can twitter, but it seems celebrities can’t—not on their own, anyway.
• Toxic sofas, after being shipped from China with packets of a harmful mold-inhibitor, caused extreme skin rashes and burns on at least 1,600—and possibly tens of thousands not yet identified—people in England.
• Science education is under assault in Texas.
• In another move of, weirdly, putting animals on birth control, China is putting gerbils on the pill.
• Daddy long-legs are threatened by climate change, a gorilla suffered a seizure and was given an MRI, and a campaign helps endangered species by enlisting clothing brands to save their namesakes: Lacoste to the crocodiles’ rescue!
• Also, we’re doomed.
Ok, for anyone not on Twitter, it’s time to reevaluate: These days, even plants are doing it. And successfully, too—Pothos has 2,300 followers, and when it tweets, it almost always gets what it wants.
Granted, all it wants is water, but when plant owners are forgetful or just don’t have a green thumb, their green friends often go thirsty. The solution? Botanicalls, a device that sends wireless signals to Twitter. It’s made of soil moisture sensors that transmit information (too much moisture? too little?) through a circuit board to a microcontroller, just like a mini-computer.
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Love ‘em or hate ‘em, social networking tools are growing faster than anyone can keep track of, and are being used plenty of unexpected ways.
Some developments are questionably beneficial, like new education standards in England that may require students to learn to use online tools like Twitter and Wikipedia, while scrapping history. Who needs a textbook to teach the Second World War when you can learn about it from a user-generated encyclopedia?
Other ideas have ambition, like Nokia’s investment in a California startup that will allow cell phones to act, essentially, like credit cards. Now, the developed world may not need additional forms of credit, but in countries where people often lack bank accounts, the ability to use prepaid phone credit as cash—or to transfer funds for a loan to a friend, for example—will facilitate transactions and a lot of everyday life.
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