Twitter

Since it was founded three years ago, Twitter has quickly grown into a social phenomenon used by presidents and bloggers alike for breaking news, political protests, marketing and personal blogging, offering a unique real-time cross-section of today's society. In a recent announcement made by Google's VP of search products and user experience, Melissa Mayer, the search giant said it had reached an agreement with the microblogging service and would soon be able to integrate status updates with its standard search results.  Read More

Tapping the Internet – including personal Web searches, news reports, blogs, chat rooms and social networking sites – is fast becoming a way to get a complete, up-to-the-minute view of public health threats, say researchers from the Informatics Program at Children’s Hospital Boston (CHIP) in a Perspectives article published Online First by The New England Journal of Medicine on May 7, 2009. In an accompanying sidebar, they describe the use of HealthMap.org – a freely available Web site that aggregates, categorizes, filters and displays real-time information on emerging infectious diseases – in tracking the current H1N1 swine flu outbreak. 
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Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are designed to make keeping in touch with friends and family easy, but as the list of such sites continues to grow, the task of keeping up to date with all that data can quickly lead to information overload. "Lifestreaming" applications designed to simplify the process by aggregating data from multiple sources are now emerging. AOL's Socialthing is the latest lifestreaming app to join the ranks of FriendFeed, Tumblr.com and the recently announced Vine from Microsoft.  Read More

With the Facebook and Twitter social networking juggernaut rolling ever onwards, Microsoft is looking to jump on the bandwagon with its new social web app called Vine. While sites such as Facebook and Twitter use the global span of the internet to let users connect with people from all corners of the globe, Vine makes its focus local, concentrating on keeping users in touch with family, friends, activities and major events in their community, including disasters and emergencies.  Read More

If you're looking for a way to keep up to date with Gizmag, but our RSS feed and e-mail newsletter aren't doing the trick, we've recently added another option that might interest you - a Twitter feed at @gizmag.  Read More

Social networking site Facebook is rolling out its second set of major interface changes in the last 12 months - accompanied by the usual cries of protest from its user base. The most notable change is the new live feed page, which gives a long list of status updates - which will soon include not just mutual friends, but updates from one-way "fan" relationships you may have with bands, brands and celebrities. Sound familiar? Is Facebook the new Twitter?  Read More

For the uninitiated, Twitter is a "microblogging" service that invites you to share what you're doing with the world in 140 characters or less - and it's currently taking the world by storm, with everyone from Scoble to Shaq on board. Its charm is that its usefulness is entirely open to interpretation - while many just don't get it (including Google's CEO), some use it purely for self-promotion, others to connect with their peers, others to tap breaking news long before mainstream media covers it, and then there's the subset of users that like to build or hack devices to use its API. Read on to meet six devices (of varying usefulness) that use Twitter to communicate with their human overlords.  Read More