Hasta La Gadget!

For some strange reason, Sina Weibo’s always required folks to log in to view some of its posts, but now there’s more incentive for those who’ve yet to open a Weibo account. Announced yesterday, the website claims to be the first Chinese social networking platform to connect with Facebook — the irony being the latter is still banned in China, plus Tencent’s WeChat already beat Weibo on this one.

Anyhow, both new and existing overseas users (including those from Taiwan and Hong Kong) can now register their Facebook accounts on Weibo, thus letting them post Weibo messages to the former simultaneously. Understandably, it doesn’t work the other way round, but this should still somewhat help Weibo expand its user base of over 530 million.

As you can see in the above screenshots, this author took the new feature for a test drive and could only forward text-only Weibo posts to Facebook. That said, Sina’s press release states that through Facebook’s Graph API, Weibo users will eventually be able to also share images, videos, TV shows, music and mobile location to Zuckerberg World. For now, this Facebook integration is only available on the web client, but the Android and iOS clients will soon receive it as well. We’ve reached out to Sina to see what’s up with the Windows Phone version, so stay tuned.

Filed under: Internet

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Via: The Next Web, Engadget Chinese

Source: Sina Digital (Chinese)

It’s been possible for Twitter fans to embed posts and whole timelines for some time, but authors almost wouldn’t know it when they aren’t told that the sharing takes place. Users may not be in the dark for much longer — F-Secure’s Mikko Hypponen noticed this weekend that Twitter was briefly listing the sites embedding a given tweet. We’ve asked Twitter for more details, but the quick disappearance of the feature suggests that the company was conducting field tests. If the addition becomes permanent, it would be consistent with Twitter’s desire to track major events — we’d know just which tweets get the web community buzzing.

Filed under: Internet

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Via: The Verge

Source: Mikko Hypponen (Twitter)

Those who preferred Twitter’s earlier, more liberal ways have regarded May 7th with a sense of dread, as that’s when API 1.0 (and our chance at a truly competitive app ecosystem) was supposed to go dark. While the company isn’t about to reverse course, it is giving the refuseniks a break by delaying the shutdown until June 11th. More time is necessary for blackout tests, Twitter says. We wouldn’t lean too heavily on remaining API 1.0-era apps and services when that instability exists, but the extra month does allow for a gentler transition into API 1.1’s brave new world.

[Image credit: Coletivo Mambembe, Flickr]

Filed under: Cellphones, Internet

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Via: Android Central

Source: Twitter

We hope you weren’t overly attached to TweetDeck for Android and iOS on mobile, or AIR on the desktop. Twitter has revealed that it’s sending those birds the way of the dodo: all three will be pulled from their relevant app stores in early May, and they should stop functioning altogether not long after that point. Facebook integration also won’t hang around, the company says. The company argues that web-based versions of TweetDeck (and their native equivalents) will do the job on the desktop, and that expansion of the regular Twitter app should be enough to cover “most” smartphone and tablet users. However, it also acknowledges that there will be at least a few mobile users who’ll have no official recourse for a more advanced experience, especially if they value Facebook. Good thing the company isn’t limiting access to third-party alternatives… wait a minute.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Facebook

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Via: The Next Web

Source: TweetDeck

Now would be a good time to refresh your Twitter password. The social network has revealed that there was at least one attack on its servers this week that may have collected email addresses, passwords (thankfully encrypted) and session tokens for about 250,000 users. The real risk to users is unknown, but Twitter raises our eyebrows when it suggests that this was more than just a casual scripting hack: it claims the intrusion attempt was “extremely sophisticated,” and that other firms might have been subject to a similar breach. You’ll know that you were immediately affected only if you see Twitter send a notice of a forced password reset, like what you see pictured above. We’d be cautious, all the same — when such attempts seemingly increase in frequency by the day, it’s not a bad idea to stay on guard.

Filed under: Internet

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Source: Twitter