Hasta La Gadget!

It seems that Twitter has a big announcement planned later today as television show, Good Morning America, has announced via its Twitter account that the social media company will be making an appearance on the show to make an announcement. They emphasized the word “big”, suggesting that this could be a major announcement for Twitter and we’re wondering what it could be. CNET is speculating that this announcement could be about Twitter Music, a music discovery service that Twitter could be launching themselves, especially after the confirmation that they had acquired another music discovery service We Are Hunted.

Twitter has since done a soft launch of its music website, but at the time of launching, no features were immediately available, suggesting that this announcement would basically unlock the features for the masses. With Twitter being a great way to get news updates and with bands already promoting themselves, music discovery might not be such a bad idea after all. Either way check back with us later in the day to see what this big announcement could be.

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Twitter announced today that advertisers can now target their ads based on keywords from user’s tweets. The keyword targeting ability will allow marketers to reach users in the right context, at the right moment. Twitter says that this new feature is an important capability for advertisers who are looking for signals of intent. Keyword targeting in timelines is available today in markets where Twitter ads are supported.

It is available through the Ads API and in the full Twitter Ads UI, allowing advertisers to reach users who have used those keywords in their recent tweets and the tweets with which those users have recently interacted with. As far as the users are concerned, they won’t notice any difference while using Twitter. This feature does not mean that ads will be shown more frequently in their timelines, and they’ll still have the ability to dismiss promoted tweets that they think are not relevant. Twitter believes that this feature will improve user experience with ads and that their tests have shown that users were more likely to interacted with promoted tweets in their timeline that used keyword targeting.

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Have you ever wanted to star in a music video but never had the chance? Well now you can, sort of, thanks to the group Light Light who has launched a website Do Not Touch (NSFW) where visitors to the website will be part of its crowd-sourced music video. However if you were hoping to get your face on camera, you’re out of luck because this music video will actually feature your mouse cursor! Yup, basically the minute you load the website, you are informed that the movements of your mouse cursor (on the site itself) will be recorded and you will be asked to follow a series of instructions.

Throughout the video, you will be asked to move your cursor according to the instructions on screen, such as staying within the green zone, choosing your gender, catching the green ball and so on. It’s a pretty cool idea and it’s quite novel to see the multitude of cursors moving on screen that belonged to other visitors to the site. If you have a few minutes to spare, you can grab your 15 minutes of fame by visiting the website in the link above.

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Those of you who have been using Netflix on your computer instead of a set-top-box or video game console are probably familiar with Microsoft Silverlight as it has been the plugin of choice to be able to stream Netflix videos onto computers for some time now. But it looks as though Netflix’s time with Silverlight will soon be coming to an end as the company is announcing it plans to move on from it to deliver their video content to computer users by way of HTML5.

Netflix has some work to do in order for its service to fully adopt HTML5, primarily support for DRM. The company says it has been collaborating with three W3C initiatives which when combined will offer the kind of functionality Netflix would require for its streaming video services. The combined extensions, dubbed the “HTML 5 Premium Video Extensions,” will allow Netflix to deliver its streams via JavaScript, allow DRM encryption and a third extension that will keep communications secure. (more…)

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Facebook has over 1 billion users of all ages from all around the world. The social network is quite popular with teens, despite recent reports claiming that teenagers are now bored of Facebook. Privacy on the network as well as off it has always been a concern, and Facebook’s rather complex privacy settings aren’t exactly easy for everyone to figure out. In a bid to make user’s lives and data more private on Facebook and on the internet in general, the social network has teamed up with the National Association of Attorney Generals to educate their teen users and their parents how privacy online can effectively be managed.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg says that they hope to “ensure that young people make safe, smart and responsible choices online.” Starting tomorrow, 19 different state attorney generals and Sheryl will release a public service announcement for the respective states, along with a video called “What you can Do to Control Your Information.” The names of these 19 states haven’t been divulged, but it is said that more states will be coming on board in the near future.

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