LeBron James has made at least one decision, just not the one the basketball world had been waiting for.
The most sought after NBA free agent of 2010 has joined the social networking site Twitter under the moniker ‘kingjames’, his publicist Keith Estabrook confirmed with Reuters on Tuesday.
More than 84,000 people have signed up to follow James as speculation mounts as to where he will play next season, even though he has not yet made a single posting.
Category: Social Media
The Man Behind @BPGlobalPR
If you are’t familiar with @BPGlobalPR on Twitter, you need to be. It was setup as a fake PR account for BP, a company that you may have seen on the news recently:
Here are some of my favorite tweets from the account:
- • OMG This isss ridciulsus. playing a drinking gamee where we drink a shot everytme we seeee an oily birdddd!!! LOL! so wasted!!11
- • We are very upset that Operation: Top Kill has failed. We are running out of cool names for these things.
- • What a gorgeous day! The ocean is filled with the most beautiful rainbows!
- • If Top Kill doesn’t work, we’re just gonna toss a giant “Get Well Soon” card into the gulf and hope for the best.
- • Sadly we can no longer certify our oil as Dolphin Safe.
- • Catastrophe is a strong word, let’s all agree to call it a whoopsie daisy
Hopefully it is easy to see why the account has become very popular, very quickly.
Iconfactory Outlines Twitterrific’s Future
When Twitter recently announced they were purchasing Atebits’ popular Twitter application, Tweetie, many critics wrote off all 3rd party apps, including Twitterrific. Well, we’re here to say that not only is Twitterrific alive and kicking, but it’s being actively developed with love by the Iconfactory. There are some exciting changes coming to the ‘Little Blue Bird that Could’ and we wanted to give you a wing up.
‘ReclaimPrivacy’ Project Reviews Facebook Privacy Settings
This little bookmark will scan your Facebook account for possible security issues. It’s a neat tool — Facebook should include something like this for all users.
On Newspapers, Social Media and Content
If we keep monkeying with the way we treat content (blurring lines between advertising and news, cutting newshole way down, burying important yet unsexy stories, etc.) because we think the content is responsible for the lack of money made in our industry, we are dooming ourselves. I am not saying that the way we do content is perfect or doesn’t need work. I am saying that it’s possible — nay, likely — that in a better economy (that didn’t also hit at the same time as a total paradigm shift in information transmission), we would not appear to be in the throes of death. Because people would be advertising as robustly as ever, people would have extra cash to spend on internet experimentation, our space wouldn’t be shrinking and therefore making it look like we don’t have things to put into the paper, etc. etc. etc.
Socialized
Robert Scoble, on what he wants to see in future editions of Windows:
I want everything I touch to be socialized. Why doesn’t Outlook know anything about Facebook? Why don’t my photos automatically get pushed to Flickr? Why don’t I have a news app on my desktop that brings in Tweets from Twitter? Why aren’t notifications built into the system at a deep level?
[…]
Why can’t my Xbox be a Windows 7 PC and vice versa? Does the world really need separate devices for all these features?
Lies? On Twitter? SAY IT AIN’T SO!
Wired highlights some of the widely-spread, widely-believed, totally untrue statements made on Twitter this year:
Bill O’Reilly is gay (Jan.) // Rick Sanchez is high on crack and might not be coming into work today (Jan.) // Britney Spears is dead (March) // Pork gives you swine flu (April) // Google is buying Twitter (April) // Apple is buying Twitter (May) // Prop 8 was overturned (May) // Steve Jobs is dead (June) // Sarah Palin is getting divorced (Aug.) // Kanye West is bisexual (Aug.) // Jeff Goldblum is dead (June) // Zach Braff is dead (Oct.) // Microsoft is buying Twitter (Oct.)
Apple Employees and Twitter
It seems that Apple is having employees — retail employees, at least — post some fine print on their Twitter accounts.
Here are a few examples I’ve come across over the last few days:
The comments and views shared on this or any other site are not shared by Apple or any affiliated parties…They belong to me and Apple can and should not be held responsible in any way for my postings on this site or any other.
Farewell, tr.im
With Twitter’s 140-charcter limit on updates, several URL shortening service cropped up in the last 18 months out of nowhere.
A few months ago, Twitter added bit.ly support to its homepage, effectively making it the most popular URL shortener out there.
It didn’t help rival tr.im:
tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately. Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward. However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009. Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.
Head of English Catholic Church Warns About Email and Texting
The head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales is concerned that excessive use of emails and mobile phone text messaging is creating shallow friendships and undermining community life, according to an interview published on Sunday.
Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, also said that popular social networking sites led young people to form “transient relationships” which put them at risk of suicide when they collapsed.
Jackson’s Death Almost Killed Internet
CNN, quoting AOL:
Today was a seminal moment in Internet history. We’ve never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth.
Twitter, AIM, Google News, TMZ, the LA Times and other sites all suffered outages as news broke about Michael Jackson late yesterday.
It Really is that Simple
All this shit, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, DoucheBlog, all of it, is just people talking to each other, in a fairly direct way. It’s analgous to a telephone. You don’t really think much about the phone system, it’s only there to allow you to talk to someone far away. Same thing for online shit. It can be a one to one, one to many, many to one, many to many, or all of the above, but it’s just people talking to each other.