Twitter to Show Photos and Videos in the Stream [UPDATED]

A new Twitter () setting called “Tweet Media” has rolled out to some of Twitter’s users, strongly suggesting that the company will soon embed videos and photos in the stream.
Tweet Media, which the Mashable () team and others have been able to access under Twitter’s account settings, asks you whether or not you want to show photos and videos from everyone. It also comes with the following description of the setting:

Time-Lapse Twitter Visualization Shows America’s Moods [VIDEO]

A group of researchers from Northeastern University and Harvard University have gathered enough data from Twitter to give us all a snapshot of how we Americans feel throughout a typical day or week.
Not only did they analyze the sentiments we collectively expressed in 300 million tweets over three years against a scholarly word list; these researchers also mashed up that data with information from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Google Maps API and more. What they ended up with was a fascinating visualization showing the pulse of our nation, our very moods as they fluctuate over time.
The researchers have put this information into density-preserving cartograms, maps that take the volume of tweets into account when representing the land area. In other words, in areas where there are more tweets, those spots on the map will appear larger than they do in real life.
It will surprise almost no one to learn that findings indicate a general mood slump mid-day and mid-week, when we are most likely to be at work. Our tweets show that we’re happiest in the early morning and late evening; during the week, our mood tends to peak on Sunday morning.
Less predictable, perhaps, is the fact that West Coast tweets were “happier” than tweets from the East Coast. Although West Coast Twitter users expressed emotions in the same cycles as the East Coast users (with a three-hour gap, of course, because of time zone differences), the West Coasters didn’t dip as low in mood as the East Coasters by a significant margin.

Android Versus Android: Which Phones Are Winning on the Web? [STATS]

Smartphones are one of the most talked-about and hotly debated consumer electronics on the block these days, and manufacturers are pumping out more of these devices each month.
So, how are these devices measuring up in the arena of public opinion? A few 140-character user reviews can say a lot about a phone’s early success or failure, and we’ve got details on what social media junkies are saying about a few Android () devices, including the Droid X, the HTC Evo, and the HTC Incredible.
In the past year or so, we’ve gone from “smartphones” to “superphones” — slick, sexy pieces of hardware with huge screens, HD capabilities, powerful cameras, zippy processors, impressive browsing capabilities and more apps than you can shake a stick at. Technology has accelerated quickly over these months, and Android devices are competing nicely with Apple’s iPhones. How they compete amongst themselves, however, is another story.
Many of these phones are selling faster than they can be built. And each one is making a significant media splash at its launch. In the public eye, is there one Android to rule them all?

Coming Soon From Twitter: “THE MOST AMAZING CLIENT YOU’VE NEVER SEEN”

When Twitter bought Atebits in April, a lot of us were excited about the possibilities. After all, Atebits (aka Loren Brichter) was the company behind Tweetie, the best iPhone Twitter client and arguably the best desktop Twitter client as well (though Mac-only). Developers, however, were not as enthusiastic. Many wondered what it meant for the state of the Twitter third-party ecosystem.
So far, the results of the acquisition seem to have worked out well for everyone. Tweetie for the iPhone was reborn as Twitter for iPhone. And while it’s largely the same, it has added a few bells and whistles thanks to the tighter Twitter integration. But other third-party clients, such as Seesmic and TweetDeck, have continued to thrive as well.

The Trouble at Twitter Inc.

Running Twitter Inc. sounds like any entrepreneur's dream: Cash flows freely. The press is smitten. Celebrity users abound. But CEO and co-founder Evan Williams is said to be on the verge of being ousted from his microblogging paradise.
These should be Williams' glory days. Twitter is booming. The service recently announced 105 million registered users, which is roughly ten times its estimated user base from a year earlier when skeptics commonly derided the social network as a wasteland of lunch diaries from narcissists and cat pictures from shut-ins. In one year, traffic to Twitter.com more than doubled to 90 million people per month.

Williams, a painfully shy college dropout from Nebraska, has clearly won over Silicon Valley's cloistered fraternity of venture capitalists. Prospective investors competed so fiercely over Twitter's last funding round that the company was able to raise $100 million at a reported $1 billion valuation.
For Williams, this is the big one — the creation with the momentum to change the world forever, and to score for him a much more impressive jackpot than the $50 million in reported pre-IPO shares Google gave in exchange for his publishing system Blogger.com.

BROKEN: No One Could “Like” Anything on Facebook

For about an hour, Facebook’s Like feature wasn’t working at all, either on-site or off. Many websites depend on likes for incoming traffic, so outages like that can be big problems for a lot of people. Facebook moved very quickly to correct the problem.
When the error occurred, anyone who liked something using the “Like” button on a website didn’t see it register on his or her Facebook profile, and they couldn’t even like status updates in their news feeds. Attempts to like news feed updates, photos or other Facebook-hosted content were met with the above database connection error.

Twitter Decides It's Time to Make Some Real Money

Twitter's EarlyBird account is definitely a step in the right direction in terms of ad and revenue strategy, but will it work?
I'm glad Twitter is getting serious about making money. Maybe it's been serious all along, but the Promoted Tweets concept—something that may or may not still be alive—is a bit of a half-baked attempt to encourage partners and advertisers to toss their lot in with Twitter. EarlyBird is a better idea, by far.
For those of you who don't remember the April announcement about Promoted Tweets, basically, they're ad-based tweets that Twitter promised to promote more prominently on the top of relevant Twitter results pages—rather like Google's sponsored search results. The big, and I thought crazy, caveat was that Twitter would pull "Promoted Tweets" that weren't performing. This was something new in advertising. If consumers didn't like the ad, then it would be pulled it down. Maybe it was the language Twitter used and not the concept. I can understand that no one wants underperforming advertising out in the wild, least of all the advertisers. Here, however, is what Twitter originally said, "We'll attempt to measure whether the Tweets resonate with users and stop showing Promoted Tweets that don't resonate." It would have made more sense for Twitter to simply say, "If too few people retweet the Promoted Tweet, we'll apologize profusely to the advertiser and pull the useless Tweet."

LeBron James Surpasses 150,000 Twitter Followers in 7 Hours

His Majesty cannot be stopped, at least on Twitter. In just six hours, NBA superstar LeBron James’ Twitter account has surpassed 150,000 followers, outpacing the growth of other famous figures on Twitter, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
This morning, New Orleans Hornets’ point guard Chris Paul tweeted that James had joined Twitter () under the username @KingJames. Since then, James has been amassing followers, and there have been countless stories and tweets about the arrival of the NBA’s biggest star to the Twitterverse.
James has been the center of the sports universe for the last week due to NBA free agency: any day now, he will decide where he will play next season. Some even speculated that he joined Twitter just so he could announce his decision through the microblogging network, but his publicist has shot down that possibility.
It took just eight hours for Bill Gates to reach 100,000 followers, but James has already blown past that mark. If his rapid rise on Twitter is any indication, LeBron James could soon become one of Twitter’s most popular users.

What Twitter Places Means for the Future of Location

What Twitter Places Means for the Future of Location

Despite the bungled launch and short hiatus, Twitter Places is back in action. The feature has huge implications for the geo-location space and the location-sharing movement.
Places is a big improvement on Twitter’s () previous geo-location offering, which was never widely adopted or embraced by the majority of users. Whereas before users had to adjust their settings and agree to posting every single tweet with their geo-coordinates, now Twitterers are presented with an elegant way to attach a place to their tweet, one tweet at a time.