| Has Twitter Eclipsed 300 Million Users? Twitter's rapid growth shows no signs of slowing. As of today it looks like the messaging service has eclipsed 300 million accounts and is growing at a rate of close to three-quarters of a million accounts daily. TwopCharts has the numbers. As of this writing - 7:05 a.m. PST - there were 300,869, 462 Twitter accounts with the service signing up 8.5 accounts per second. Extrapolating those numbers, we find that approximately 30,240 accounts are registered by the hour that comes to 725,760. Yet, less than a month ago it looked like Twitter had just passed 200 million accounts. Even at the amazing growth rates Twitter has had, 100 million users in a month is highly unrealistic.
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2WAY Q&A: Layar's Maarten Lens-FitzGerald on Building a Digital Layer on Top of the World Maarten Lens-FitzGerald is part of our impressive lineup of speakers at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit. As part of our ongoing series of interviews with those speakers, we fired off a round of questions at Lens-FitzGerald to learn a little more about who he is, what he does, and what he'll be talking about at the summit. RWW: When was the first time you really thought you were going to go into augmented reality? Has that always been something for you? Lens-FitzGerald: I never thought of going into augmented reality, but cyberspace, any form of digital worlds, have always been one of the things I've been thinking about since I found out about science fiction. One of the first books I read of the cyber punk genre was Bruce Sterling's "Mirror Shades." Mirror shades, meaning, of course, AR goggles. And that book came out in 1988 and ever since, this was my world.
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How Paulo Coelho Uses Social Media Paulo Coelho is one of the most successful fiction writers today and he actively uses social media to engage with his readers. For the past 25 years the Brazilian author has written many inspirational books, which have garnered him a huge fan base all around the world. I recently discovered Coelho's writing and have been busy devouring his books ever since. I've also been checking out his online presence, which is based around 3 main platforms: blogging, Facebook and Twitter. Writers and publishers can learn a few tricks from how Paulo Coelho uses social media.
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Why Bing Could Beat Google in Social Search When you look at the numbers, there's no doubt that Google is the clear leader among search engines. But if recent moves by Google and Bing, in which both added social indicators to their search algorithms, are any indication, then social search could be the thing of the future. We have to wonder then, if social search is indeed the next big thing, if Bing could have found some solid ground to stand on in taking on the big G.
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Big Tech Fights Big Government Over Proposed California Privacy Bill Big Tech is fighting Big Government in California over a proposed privacy bill that would limit the amount of information that companies can share about their users. A coalition of tech companies including Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Skype, Match.com, Twitter and others sent a letter to the California Senate May 16 opposing the bill, saying it is unnecessary and would be detrimental to the tech industry and thus to California's economy. Proposed by Sen. Ellen Corbett, the bill would force social networks to institute default settings upon registration of what users share on the services. Users can opt to share more information than the default, which would only list the users' city of residence. Tech companies are fighting on the basis that the bill is Draconian and unintuitive and that, as an industry, technology can do better than the California legislature.
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Avoid Data Caps and Compress Your iPhone Data with Onavo If you have to keep an eye on your iPhone data usage - whether it's due to data caps or roaming fees - then you might like Onavo, a new app that will monitor and compress your data so you can use (and pay for) less data. Once you download the Onavo app and register your device, your data is routed through Ovaco's services, which compress your data and help you track your usage, identifying for example which apps are data-download-intensive.
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Twitter's Humble Origins: Jack Dorsey, His Pager and a Hack If you were a child of the 1990s (and even the early 2000s), then you might remember pagers, those silly little vibrating devices you would clip to your supa-fly JNCO jeans that either flagged you as a teenage victim of overprotective parents, drug dealer, bike messenger or working stiff. Such is the birthplace of Twitter, way back in 2001, according to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Oh, and in case you were wondering, Dorsey is cut of the bike messenger variety.
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Bonnaroo: Hippies to be Controlled by RFID Bonnaroo, one of the music festivals that have helped to move rock music from the club to the Garden of Earthly Delights, has announced it will be using RFID chips in the entrance wristbands to prevent counterfeiting. Like all RFID tech, it requires readers to scan. Those readers will be at all entrance points to the festival. If a band lacks a working RFID chip, the wearer will not be allowed in. The festival is also allowing festival-goers to use the bracelet for a lot more, however.
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TikTok iPod Nano Watchbands Go From Kickstarter Project to the Apple Store It's the perfect Kickstarter success story: designer Scott Wilson posts a project to the crowdfunding website: designs for two iPod Nano watchbands - TikTok and LunaTik. The idea takes off, breaking almost every record on Kickstarter, including most funds raised ($941,718) and most backers (13,512). And now Apple announces its plans to begin carrying the designs in North American stores. As Wilson points out in a recent interiew, his design for the watchbands really "gave the Nano a home." It also gave consumers a reason to wear a stylishly techy watch and a reason to buy an iPod Nano - an Apple device that seemed to be lost in the shuffle (no pun intended) of iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches. In fact, according to a survey of the Kickstarter project's backers, over three-quarters of those who pledged actually had to purchase a Nano in order to use the watchband.
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Forrester Develops A Roadmap to Navigate the "Post PC" World In a report released today, research firm Forrester attempts to define exactly what this "Post PC" era actually is. Foremost, it does not mean "absence of" PCs, but a whole new computing paradigm that will fold into existing technology and lead us to the computers of tomorrow. Forrester came up with several guidelines and principles that will help manufacturers, developers and consumers navigate the technological waters that are stretching to the horizon. The research firm defines Post PC as, "a social and technological phenomenon in which computing experiences become ubiquitous, casual, intimate, and physical."
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