| Tweeting More Than 140 Characters with Deck.ly: Brilliant or Blasphemy? Earlier this month, Twitter client TweetDeck introduced Deck.ly, a new feature that enables users to send long messages to Twitter, bypassing the 140-character limit that is the signature of the "micro-blogging" service. The response from users has been mixed, to say the least. Some users are glad to be able to tweet without restriction on length, but many are frowning upon the service's violation of that sacred 140 character limit.
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Rumors of an iPhone Nano Continue: Smaller, Cheaper, No Memory? There have been a number of published rumors in the last week, including those in Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal that Apple plans to launch a smaller, more affordable iPhone - an iPhone Nano, if you will. According to yesterday's story in the Wall Street Journal, the new iPhone - codename N97 - will be available some time this year for about half the cost of the current iPhone 4. That story also also contends that Apple will be revamping its cloud-based storage service MobileMe. Currently MobileMe allows users to store their data online and sync their calendars and contacts among their various computing devices. The WSJ suggests that Apple will do away with its $99 annual subscription fee, making MobileMe a free service "that would serve as a 'locker' for personal memorabilia such as photos, music and videos, eliminating the need for devices to carry a lot of memory, the people familiar with the situation said."
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HyperCities Maps and Archives the Tweets from Cairo #Jan25 Let the pundits continue to debate whether or not social media and Twitter enabled the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia. Digital humanities scholars are already on the case, pulling together the digital archives and the visualizations of the social media records from the events. One such project: Hypercities, a research project "for traveling back in time to explore the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment." Hypercities has recently turned its attention to Egypt, and its team of digital humanities scholars - Yoh Kawano, Todd Presner, and David Shepard - have created a live, interactive map of all the tweets in Cairo, viewable at http://egypt.hypercities.com/.
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Amazon Forces Kindle Lending Club to Rebrand - Now BookLending.com We covered the launch of the new startup the Kindle Lending Club last month. The startup takes advantage of the Amazon Kindle's new lending feature that was introduced in December - the ability to loan (some of) your e-books to another Kindle user for a 14-day period. But not surprisingly, Amazon has responded to the startup. Amazon isn't shutting down its service (that's good news), but it is demanding that the startup change its name. Amazon owns the trademark to "Kindle," so starting tomorrow the startup becomes BookLending.com.
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TweetDeck Acquired by Ubermedia: What Are the Implications for the Twitter Ecosystem? Popular Twitter client TweetDeck has been acquired by Ubermedia, continuing the company's buying spree of Twitter apps. First reported on Friday by Techcrunch, the deal is pegged at around $30 million, making it the largest deal that Ubermedia has done in the Twitter ecosystem. Indeed, TweetDeck is the most popular Twitter client outside of Twitter's own applications. TweetDeck will join the Twitter apps now under the Ubermedia umbrella, including UberTwitter, Twidroid, and EchoFon.
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Cuba's Internet Capacity To Increase 3,000x According to a press release from the International Telecommunications Union, a new undersea data cable connected to Cuba this week will increase the amount of the country's data and video transmission speed 3,000-fold when it becomes operation this summer. The ALBA-1 cable arrived in Siboney on February 9th, linking the eastern Cuban town to the cable's start-point in the Venezuelan port city of La Guaira. The second part of the project will lead from Cuba to Ochos Rios in Jamaica.
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Cartoon: Page-turner The last few years have seen a pretty serious shakedown in the book world. Bookstores closing their doors, publishers merging or shutting down, and overshadowing it all, Amazon and the Kindle. And now the iPad - with its spectacular adoption rate and the Apple-powered negotiating clout behind the iBook store - promises to turn it all upside down and shake hard. No wonder, then, that book lovers are wondering if the ink-and-paper era is ending. I haven't read so many anguished paens to the tactile feel of paper since I stumbled across a papyrus fetish newsgroup on Usenet.*
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Check Out the Companies That Make ReadWriteWeb Possible Our readers know ReadWriteWeb as the blog that's ahead of the technology curve. Our sponsors know us as that, too. Once a week we introduce our sponsors to our readers and let them know a little more about who they are and what they do. You can say thanks to the companies that make ReadWriteWeb happen by tweeting them (see the link below each sponsor) or following them using our Twitter list. Interested in being a ReadWriteWeb sponsor? Our readers are smart, tech-savvy decision makers; 40% have a graduate degree or PhD, and over 45% play a key role in information technology purchasing decisions. More than 1 million people on Twitter follow us to stay abreast of the latest Web technology trends from around the globe. To find out more about our sponsor packages, visit our advertising page or email our COO.
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RootsTech Challenges Developers to Mashup Family History The RootsTech conference has challenged developers to mashup social media and family history APIs in the hopes that developers will recognize genealogy as rich area for exploitation. Here's the challenge: use any open social media API, like from Flickr or Facebook, mash it up with any of the APIs from the five genealogy companies that offer them to create something which "demonstrates increased value to family historians."
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