Order a pizza by tweeting a pizza emoji at Domino's

Ever wondered what emoji's are good for? If you love Domino's pizza, you'll soon find out why. Soon, you'll be able to order a pizza on Twitter by simply tweeting a pizza emoji.

Twitter is about to spy on what other apps you have installed

Twitter grew by allowing anyone to quickly plugin into its service, promoting the development of 3rd party apps and services. Those days are long gone, and you can find countless services that have been shut down because Twitter "changed it's mind". Now, Twitter goes even further to make it's users rethink how they feel about this service, by spying on what other apps you have installed.

Twitter's Digits wants to free your mind from passwords

Passwords have become a burden of the modern digital age we're living, but there are people trying to get rid of those and make life simpler to us all. Now, Twitter hopes to do that with its new Digits authentication service that requires no password.

Twitter gets "Buy Now" button

It's no secret that Twitter has been trying to find a way to turn their millions of users into a money making machine. After the sponsored tweets ads, we're now getting a "buy now" button.

Twitter is causing excessive data usage in Windows Phones

If you have a Windows Phone with linked Twitter account, be sure to read this immediately. Twitter has been doing some changes (do they ever stop?) and it's causing excessive data usage in Windows Phones.


The social network integration in Windows Phone is one of its most valued features, but sometimes things can escape the control of Microsoft and the Windows Phone platform itself like in this case. Twitter is moving around their user's profile pictures, and that's been messing up Windows Phone which repeatedly tries to download it over and over again, easily eating up your mobile data plan and wasting gigabytes of WiFi data.

Microsoft has implemented an emergency patch that limits the downloads to a maximum of one per day, but even then, if you happen to have a long list of contacts on Twitter, it will still gobble up considerable data by the end of the month. Until Twitter sorts things out, you might want to remove your Twitter account from your Windows Phone to prevent this excessive data usage.

Be sure to keep an eye in your Data Sense app to see how how much data each app is using in your Windows Phone, and catch this sort of anomalies early on before they turn into a nasty surprise the next time you receive your phone bill.

Self-Destructing Tweets with Efemr

Tired of sharing time limited promotions on Twitter, and having your followers "complaining" hours (or even days) later because they can no longer find what you referred to? Well... there's a solution for that, and it's called efemr.

Using this service, you can specify a time limit for your tweets via hashtag. #5m means your tweet will only last for 5 minutes; #1h for one hour; ... you get the idea. Keep in mind this service doesn't mean you can say anything you wish, hoping it will be erased and stay forgotten. Anyone can simply retweet it via "RT" style and make it last forever... So, you'll still have to deal with that.

In any case, I think it's still quite useful just to get rid of promotional tweets you want to share with your friends, but you don't really want to keep around in your timeline after it expires. Now, if only they could add a scheduled tweets feature, we'd have both scenarios covered: tweeting in preset future events, and also have self-destroying tweets after the ellapsed period of time.

Vine Wants to be the Twitter of Instant Short Videos

Instagram has changed the way people took and shared photos (for the better or worst), and although I would have found hard to imagine - many years ago - that we'd reach a phase where, having high quality cameras in our phones, people decided it would b best to "dumb down" their photos to look more "lo-fi" than the actual photos, I too concede that it's far easier to take "artistic" photos with these programs. Now, Twitter is trying to do the same sort of thing... for video. Vine has been acquired by Twitter last year, and we finally get to try it out on the App Store.

The main part is: you can only create 6 seconds clips to share with your friends - Twitter's CEO Dick Costolo shows:

Steak tartare in six seconds. vine.co/v/bOIqn6rLeIDvia @dhof
— dick costolo (@dickc) January 23, 2013

I gave it a try and was surprised to see that Vine acts like a completely independent social network, meaning you'll have to add all you Twitter/Facebook friends over again (it would make much more sense to assume all your Twitter followers... although I understand some people might not want that).

Anyway... being a Twitter product, the first days are sure to be a huge success, with lots of vine videos popping all over the web. The real challenge is to see if people will keep doing it, or if it will die down after a couple of days.

P.S. If you happen to be redirected to another user's account... it's a known glitch that we hope to see sorted out soon!

How to Backup Twitter to Google Drive

Ever wished to keep a web browsable copy of your tweets, that would still be available even if Twitter decided to shutdown its service without any warning? Well, you're probably aware that you can request an archive with all your Twitter history... but that takes time, and the provided data isn't that useful unless you know what to do with it. Wouldn't it be better if we had our own "Twitter" backup on the web?

Well... you can, thanks to Google Drive and its powerful script capabilities.

You can use those scripts to automate the task of maiking daily Twitter backups on Google Drive, that will be available on the web (and also synced to your own computer - should you have the Google Drive Sync enabled). It might look like it's too complicated, but it actually isn't. Just follow the steps carefully, one by one, and you'll end up with your own twitter backup ready to rock the web.

New Twitter iOS6 Notifications

Seems like the new Twitter App is now using some nifty new notification methods on the iOS6 beta. Instead of the usual iOS notifications, that show up with a nice rotating effect, but have the drawback of partially hiding whatever's on screen at the time (and trust me, sometimes they do get in the way of what you're trying to do), these new notifications take up the space on the top status bar, and possibly "compressing" the entire screen, just like when you have a double height status bar.

Maybe this is yet another indication that the new iPhone 5 will indeed have a more fluid "vertical" alignment (with added vertical resolution)?

Twitter Launches new App for iOS and Android

Besides the new iPad Google+ App, today we're also getting the new Twitter Apps for iOS and Android. Apps that we we're already expecting for the past couple of days due to leaked information, but that now are up for grabs by everyone.

What's new?


Expand Tweets
Tweets with links to supported/recognized content will now be show directly in yout timeline. This includes photos from various online services, as well as videos from vimeo, and even Kickstarter projects. This new experience will roll out gradually to web, iPhone and Android users.


Experience events
Now you can discover the best Tweets and photos for events experiences like twitter.com/#NASCAR on your iPhone. Now, Twitter for iPhone complements any live event, whether you’re watching from home or from the stands.

Search simply
Twitter made some improvements in search autocomplete (major improvements they say) so that you will see more suggestions when you search for people. As before, you can search for real names or @usernames before you complete your query.

Receive notifications
You can now receive push notifications from people you follow whenever they send a new Tweet or Retweet; turn on push notifications for Tweets for any user via the action button on their profile, and edit these notifications in your account settings on your device.


You can get the Twitter Apps here.


(P.S. I still can't get over one tiny little detail that annoys me a lot. The minimum font size of 14pt. Thanks to this limitation, I can see just about 4 tweets per screen on the iPhone - and with "oversized" characters. For reference, using Echofon I can set it to 12pt fonts, and get up to 6 tweets per screen, while still plainly readable - in fact, I wish I could get the font size down to 10pt or maybe even less. Would it be so hard to allow it on Twitter official app?)

Feedbruner Socialize Twitter Missing

For anyone using Google's feedburner to send their blog updates to Twitter, you'll certainly be familiarized with its socialize feature that turns that task into something as easy as clicking a few options on your feedburner feed.

However, if you tried doing or editing that these days, you'll probably notice that the feedburner's socialize section is missing!

It used to be available between the FeedCount and Chicklet section on the Publicize tab... but it's nowhere to be seen now.

But fear not... you can easily access the Socialize section (at least for now) by typing it directly on your browsers URL input box.

Just click on the publicize tab, and then edit the "publicize" text in the url to "socialize", so that you get something like:

• http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/socialize?id=XXXXXX

Hope that might help.

Dlvr.it - Feed to Twitter and Facebook

There are still lots of people struggling to deliver their content into the multiple social plataforms out there today. If you own a blog or site and want to send your feed to Twitter and Facebook, here's a new service that might be of interest to you.

With this Dlvr.it, delivering content becomes as simples as clicking your mouse a couple of times. And, not only it allows you to send your RSS feed to Twitter and Facebook in real time, it also allows you to track how you're doing via real-time statistics.

Here's a short intro:

Serious Twitter OnMouseOver Exploit

If you're a Twitter user, please stay away from Twitter's website today.

There's a serious javascript vulnerability spreading like wildfire, that makes your browser execute potentially malicious javascript code as soon as you mouse over any link.

Please resist the urge to go see it for yourself - I know I didn't, and as soon as I went there to see what was happening, my browser started opening new windows and "viral" tweets were sent "by me".

Until this issue is cleared by twitter, you can either use a 3rd party Twitter App, or simply disable javascript in your browser.

If you need to logout of your current session, then just head to twitter.com/logout and click the button.

Flipboard for iPad

Looks like we have a revolutionary social-networking app arriving: Flipboard for iPad.

Basically, this Apps aggregates and analyzes you Twitter and Facebook social network and streams, and presents you the most interesting content in a very easy (and interactive) way.

I can't wait to try out out, but until then, check the following videos:

What lies beneath a Tweet?

It's no secret most people think a Twitter message (a tweet) is a simple string of 140 letters (a limitation that comes from the limitation of SMS message sizes.)

However, there's a lot behind those 140chars, lots of information that are usually hidden from sight and have been growing every time Twitter implements new features.

Besides the140 bytes for the text message, there's a lot going in there: user names and id codes, timestamp fields, places, coordinates, number of favorites and followers, and lots extra stuff.

And we're not yet considering what's to come. If you feel 140chars is a bit short, Twitter is working on a fix with their new "Annotations" - which will allow a tweet to contain up to 2KB (2000 chars) of text or any other type of information.

Tweetie to become Twitter for iPhone/iPad

In the past couple of weeks, a growing uneasy feeling regarding Loren Brichter - developer of Tweetie, the most popular Twitter App on the iPhone - was brewing.
His lack of replies, him missing the chance to launch a Tweetie for iPad on launch, and several other strange behaviors were cause for concern... but now we know why.

Twitter has acquired Atebits, the company behind Tweetie!

In the upcoming weeks Tweetie will become Twitter for iPhone... the official twitter App and. best of all, it will be tfree.

After that, a Twitter for iPad app is soon expected.


This was expected after Twitter's intentions were revealed in the past couple of days, that they wanted to get in the action, providing those services that quickly became essential for Twitter's success and were provided by 3rd party developers: url shortening sevices, photo and video sharing, and even gaming!

Of course, many developers are not very happy about this. They helped Twitter become what it is now, and will now be forced to compete with official similar services provided by Twitter itself? It's doesn't sound fair. But that's why some people think you shouldn't be dependent on a single plataform - or risk facing the consequences.

Let's see how it goes. Twitter has its first developer conference Chirp, coming next week. Let's see if they'll ease (or increase) the tension between them and 3rd party developers.

Twitter in Spanish

After english and japanese, the third language to gain official support in Twitter is... spanish.

Next in line is German, French, and Italian... but I can't help but feel a bit jealous why they always forget about my native language: Portuguese - people seem to forget its the 7th language with most native speakers in the world, above German, French and Italian...)

Remote Control your PC via Twitter

While on holidays, wouldn't it be nice if you could keep an eye on your computer back at home?

Sure there are lots of options to do it, via Remote Desktop, VNC, and the likes... But what if you don't have a computer around to do it with? What if you only have a cell phone? Wouldn't it be nice to do it via Twitter?

Indeed you can. With the TweetMyPC you can remotely control your PC via Twitter.

That means you can send commands via web, SMS, and also email or even chat! (Which may require you to use some extra services - but it's possible nonetheless.)

From then on, you can send commands to your computer, make it shut down, take a screenshot, have it download or upload a file, and lots more.

If you're interested, you can read a more detailed guide to using TweetMyPC here.

Official Google Twitter Accounts

If you're twitter addicts and want to keep track of google's latest info, get ready to add... not one, not 20... not even 30 new friends to your timeline... but over 45 google twitter accounts for different services.
(At least they're not keeping it a secret! ;)


Twitter accounts like:
twitter.com/Google - our central account
twitter.com/Blogger - for Blogger fans
twitter.com/GoogleCalendar - user tips & updates
twitter.com/GoogleStudents - news of interest to students using Google
twitter.com/YouTube - for YouTube fans

Geo-related
twitter.com/SketchUp - Google SketchUp news
twitter.com/GoogleMaps - uses, tips, mashups
twitter.com/GoogleSkyMap -Android app for the night sky

Ads-related
twitter.com/AdSense - for online publishers


Developer & technical
twitter.com/GoogleResearch - from our research scientists
twitter.com/GoogleWMC - Google Webmaster Central
twitter.com/GoogleCode - latest updates for Google developer products
twitter.com/GoogleData - Data APIs provide a standard protocol for reading and writing web data
twitter.com/app_engine - web apps run on Google infrastructure
twitter.com/DataLiberation - our initiative for complete import/export of all data
twitter.com/GoogleMapsAPI - about using Google Maps embedded in websites
twitter.com/GoogleIO - Google's largest annual developer event


And many more...

Expanding shortened URLs

With Twitter attracting more and more people every day, you've probably noticed URL shortening services becoming popular again. These service turn a long URL into a shorter link, saving precious characters for micro-blogging services.

This doesn't affect Twitter alone, and shortened links can be used in any other place like forums, mailing lists, chats, etc.

The problem is, clicking on any of these shortened urls can become a potential security risk:

For instance, while most people would think twice before clicking on a link showing http://www.icantbetrusted.com most wouldn't have a problem clicking it if it were hiding behind a http://tinyurl.com/xyz URL. And that's a real problem...

Fortunately, you can do something about it using greasemonkey.

With this TinyURL decoder script, all those shortened links will reveal its true identity. The same thing can be accomplished with this other Psychic TinyURL script, which adds the expanded URL to the link title.

via [Webmonkey]