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Friendster goes dark on May 31st. In other news, people still have Friendster accounts.
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.
Facebook users in America, Canada, Australia, Britain and several other countries now have two more options when announcing their relationship status: civil unions and domestic partnerships.
The changes were made in consultation with Facebook's Network of Support, a group that includes LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] organizations such as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, and the Human Rights Campaign. "As LGBT people face a patchwork of relationship recognition laws, this gives people more tools to adequately describe their relationship," said Michael Cole-Schwartz, spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign. "Facebook has been a company that has tried to be inclusive of the LGBT community and this just one sign of it."
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.
News Corp is reportedly putting MySpace up for sale after cutting staff by 50% this week. If there are no immediately takers, the site is expected to shut down by June. This will come as a shock to millions who thought MySpace was already gone. The site lost $100M in the fiscal year that ended last June.
