Hasta La Gadget!

Google’s announced on its official blog a small project they’ve quickly cobbled together to help Egyptians (who –in the midst of protests — are having serious connectivity issues) communicate via Twitter. With almost no connection to the internet through normal channels, Google has made it possible for anyone to send a Tweet simply by dialing one of several international phone numbers (+16504194196, +390662207294 or +97316199855) and leaving a voicemail. What happens next? The service Tweets the message using the hashtag #egypt via the Speak to Tweet account.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Google, SayNow, and Twitter team up to make Tweeting from Egypt possible via voicemail originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Feb 2011 06:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tonight, President Obama will deliver the annual State of the Union address, and while partisan politics (and some great shots of various people nodding off) will rule the night, the US government is getting into the Web 2.0 game in a big way tonight. The speech — scheduled for 9:00 pm ET — will be streamed live on the web, and immediately following said speech, the White House will host an ‘Open for Questions’ event on Twitter making use of the hashtag #sotu, while other government officials will answer questions submitted on Facebook, as well as the White House website’s webform. On Thursday night, the President will also answer questions on YouTube. We’ll let you know if and when the government hatches a plan to answer questions on Yahoo! Answers.

[Image Credit: Pete Souza for the White House]

Obama’s State of the Union address goes Web 2.0 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Jan 2011 17:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Japan may have produced the most tweets per minute. Twitter may have saved one local from a toilet mishap. Yes, everyone may seem to be raving about Twitter. But could the backlash be about to begin?

The media has been awash recently with reports of a part-time employee of a high class hotel tweeting about a celebrity couple apparently staying the night on January 11th.

Naturally this is rather intrusive and a clear breach of the hotel’s confidentiality. What actually happened? In truth, it’s fairly innocent.

“Aoi Takenaga” (@aoi_tkng, account now protected), a female university student worker, noticed J-League soccer player Junichi Inamoto and model Miho Tanaka in a restaurant inside the Westin Hotel, Tokyo.

[Image source here and here]

The culprit later went online to Twitter and posted:

Junichi Inamoto and Miho Tanaka have come to the restaurant. Miho Tanaka’s face is so small and cute…Looks like the two of them will stay the night : )
「稲本潤一と田中美保がご来店 田中美保まじ顔ちっちゃくて可愛かった…今夜は2人で泊まるらしいよ お、これは…（どきどき笑）」

This almost immediately spread in the local internet stratosphere, before making its way into mainstream news. Needless to say, the tweeter responsible is no longer working at the Westin. (It later transpired that the couple were simply celebrating Tanaka’s birthday and may not even have stayed the night.)

While obviously embarrassing for the hotel, this might not seem such a big problem for westerners, used to an environment where entertainers regularly have their personal activities exposed for all to see. However, celebrity life and media coverage of it is much more controlled in Japan.

Moreover, the culture takes privacy very seriously and normal users also famously shy away for the most part from having real online identities. This is one obvious reason for Facebook’s stagnant growth here while other SNS where fake names and avatars can be used have gone supernova.

Hold on to your seats, stat lovers, 2010 is about to hit you with the full force of its quantifiable web exploits. Web monitoring site Pingdom reports that last year we all sent 107 trillion emails to our loved and unloved ones, which breaks down to 294 billion per day, though only 10.9 percent of those weren’t spam. There are now 1.88 billion email users around the globe and when they’re not too busy communicating, they’re surfing one of the net’s 255 million total sites (21.4 million of which are said to have arrived in 2010). The compendium of numerical knowledge wraps up with a look at social media, where Twitter still has a way to go before catching up with email — there were only 25 billion tweets last year — but continues to grow like mad, having added 100 million users during the year. Facebook added even more, 250 million users, and its thriving population is sharing 30 billion pieces of content (links, pics, video, etc.) each and every month. This isn’t madness, this is the internet.

World sends 107 trillion emails in 2010, most of them about enlarging your stock portfolio originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 15 Jan 2011 11:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There are some things you can always count on. Things like Courtney Love. She may clean herself up and become a “serious actress” one minute, but you can bet that, like clockwork, she’ll be back to that old, loveable, mic throwing Courtney the next. You see, her methods of delivery may change over time, but the message will stay the same.

Love and fashion designer Dawn Simorangkir have been having a Twitter fight–and by “Twitter fight,” I mean, of course, that Love has been yelling at Simorangkir on Twitter. The parties have been fighting over a $4,000 payment, and Love has taken her message to the microblogging site, calling Simorangkir a “drug-addled prostitute,” a “nasty, lying, hosebag thief” (hosebag?), and a “52 year old desperate cokes ass [sic].”

Oh, and it gets better–she’s also threatened the designer, stating that she would wind “up in a circle of corched eaeth hunted til your dead [sic, sic, sic].” Her one women screaming campaign has also lead to posts on MySpace and online craft storefront Etsy.

Simorangkir fired back in 2009, with a suit against Love, featuring 20 some pages worth of examples. Not above personal judgments of her own, the libel suit says that Love has “drug induced psychosis, a warped understanding of reality, or the belief that her money and fame allow her to disregard the law.”

Love attorney James Janowitz, is taking a strongish stand on the matter. “We don’t believe there’s any defamation, and even if there were defamatory statements, there was no damage.”