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According to the New York Times, Rep. Anthony Weiner is going to resign today.
The top Democratic official said Mr. Weiner called Representative Nancy Pelosi of California and Representative Steve Israel of New York last night while they were at the White House picnic to inform them he had decided to resign on Thursday. Mr. Weiner plans to resign in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, at 2 p.m. , at the spot where he announced his first campaign for City Council in 1992, according to two people told of his plans. The news comes as Democratic leaders prepared to hold a meeting on Thursday to discuss whether to strip the 46-year-old congressman of his committee assignments, a blow that would severely damage his effectiveness.A damn fucking shame.
Bill Maher and Jane Lynch read verbatim the tweets of Rep. Anthony Weiner. Totally NSFW.
At least one of the silliest "scandals" of the year is (mostly) over.
According to Salon and The Smoking Gun, the person who appears to have hacked Rep. Anthony Weiner's Twitter account may have been in prior contact with GOProud backer (and notorious liar) Andrew Breitbart, who first "broke" the story. Hit the links, it's all verrrry interesting.
Twitter has acquired my obsession, Tweetdeck. Via Washington Post:
Word has been circulating for weeks now that Twitter was soon to be swooping up the popular third-party app. In early May, Mike Arrington reported that the deal was as good as done, but the two companies were not yet willing to publicly release the numbers. That changed today, as CNN and CNET broke the news that TweetDeck has officially been acquired by Twitter for $40 million. Twitter has yet to officially confirm, but judging by what we’re hearing from sources close to the deal, it’s done and done.
If you use the popular service Twitpic to post photos to Twitter, here's some interesting news.
World Entertainment News Network, a news and photo agency, announced this month that it had become the “exclusive photo agency partner” of Twitpic, a service with over 20 million registered users that allows people to upload images and link to them on Twitter. The deal allows the agency to sell images posted on Twitpic for publication, and to pursue legal action against those who use such images commercially without its permission, according to the agency. “There has been much unauthorized use of Twitpic images which we shall be addressing without delay,” said Lloyd Beiny, the agency’s chief executive.
The Family Research Council is furious about my constant misquoting of them by posting verbatim screen shots of their words.
Twitter has suspended their affiliation with UberMedia, a company that owns a broad variety of Twitter applications used to amplify the traditional user experience. UberMedia owns TweetDeck, UberTwitter, EchoFon, and Twidroyd, among other Twitter-based applications.
Twitter says:
We ask all developers in Twitter ecosystem to abide by a simple set of rules that are in the interests of our users, as well as the health and vitality of the platform as a whole. We often take actions to enforce these rules; in fact, on an average day we turn off more than one hundred services that violate our API rules of the road. This keeps the ecosystem fair for everyone. Today we suspended several applications, including UberTwitter, twidroyd and UberCurrent, which have violated Twitter policies and trademarks in a variety of ways. These violations include, but aren’t limited to, a privacy issue with private Direct Messages longer than 140 characters, trademark infringement, and changing the content of users’ Tweets in order to make money.TweetDeck, to which I am addicted, does not appear to be suspended (so far) and is operating at this writing. That may change as UberMedia only acquired Tweetdeck a few days ago.
Google has created a work-around for Egyptians cut off from the internet. Via the company's official blog:
Like many people we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service—the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection. We worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter, Google and SayNow, a company we acquired last week, to make this idea a reality. It’s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet. We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time. Our thoughts are with everyone there.Nice work, Google.
Twitter has issued a statement which partially references events in Egypt.
Our goal is to instantly connect people everywhere to what is most meaningful to them. For this to happen, freedom of expression is essential. Some Tweets may facilitate positive change in a repressed country, some make us laugh, some make us think, some downright anger a vast majority of users. We don't always agree with the things people choose to tweet, but we keep the information flowing irrespective of any view we may have about the content.Their "the tweets must flow" headline reminded me of this, of course.
The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact. This is both a practical and ethical belief. On a practical level, we simply cannot review all one hundred million-plus Tweets created and subsequently delivered every day. From an ethical perspective, almost every country in the world agrees that freedom of expression is a human right. Many countries also agree that freedom of expression carries with it responsibilities and has limits.
As we saw last year in Iran, the roles of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube cannot be underestimated in these things.
Porno Pete and GOProud's Chris Barron have forged a Twitter love affair tonight over their mutual hatred for the "gay left Taliban."
