Social Networking, Microblogging | featured news

Hacker group The Script Kiddies successfully hacked another news organization when it logged onto USA Today's Twitter page and posted false statements Sunday evening.

People with accounts on both Facebook and Twitter have been able to update them both simultaneously for a long time -- but from Twitter to Facebook, and not the other way around. That’s about to change.

Twitter has launched its own photo-sharing tool, offering a native version of a feature that until now was mostly the domain of third-party apps like Twitpic and yfrog.

Twitter said it received a "significant" round of funding led by Russian venture firm Digital Sky Technologies.

Are those who post unverified reports on Twitter playing an important role in the new ecosystem of news, or being irresponsible and indulging in gossip? That question goes to the heart of the idea of news as a process rather than a finished product.

Twitter has bought TweetDeck, the desktop and mobile application for organising tweets in handy columns, for more than $40 million in a cash and stock deal, CNN Money reports citing sources close to the deal. But there’s no confirmation from either player in this game: “For all those who might be curious, we continue not to comment on rumors,” Twitter’s global PR account tweeted earlier this morning. There were no tweets at all on the matter from TweetDeck founder Iain Dodsworth.

Sina’s Weibo has nearly 8 times more users than Twitter. In 2010, Twitter had approximately 17 million users in the US, according to an Edison Research report called Twitter Usage in America 2010. Even if Twitter doubled in size this year, which is unlikely, its Twitter account numbers would be dwarfed by Sina accounts alone.

When Adorian Deck was home sick from high school, he entertained himself like countless other teenagers have in recent years: He started a Twitter account. Unlike other teenagers, Deck's account became a sensation. Deck, under the handle (at)OMGFacts, tweeted random bits of celebrity gossip and quirky trivia. In less than a year, he had attracted more than 300,000 followers.

A computer programmer, startled by a helicopter clattering above his quiet Pakistani town in the early hours of the morning Monday, did what any social-media addict would do: he began sending messages to the social networking site Twitter.

Twitter has released a slew of statistics in recent months, from how many tweets are sent per day to the number of accounts created per day.Here's another one that's been more elusive: the number of users Twitter actually has.