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Why Yahoo Doesn’t Think Tumblr Has a Porn Problem

Peter Kafka in Media May 18, 2013 at 8:12 pm PT

Tumblr David Karp Wallstrip

Time Machine! Tumblr’s David Karp in 2007, Age 21.

Peter Kafka in Media May 17, 2013 at 3:03 pm PT

3039 posts and columns on Twitter

News Byte

Pope to Bless Twitter With His Presence

in Social on December 3, 2012 at 1:14 pm PT

Using the handle @pontifex (from the Latin for “bridge builder”), Pope Benedict XVI has joined the Twitterverse and will utter his first tweet Dec. 12. Got a question for His Holiness? The hashtag #askpontifex is already pulling in responses, and the Internet being what it is, not all of them treat the issues with reverence.

QOTD: Payments Biz Gets the Old Equine Wake-Up Call

Square just dropped a bomb on the retail payments industry, in one of those Godfather-dead-horse-in-your-bed epic move moments.

– Box CEO Aaron Levie on the Square-Starbucks deal

News Byte

Being Twitter Means Occasionally Having to Say You’re Sorry

in Social on July 26, 2012 at 3:03 pm PT

Twitter’s infrastructure team apologized — deeply — this afternoon for a two-hour outage earlier in the day, which it blamed on “the coincidental failure of two parallel [data center] systems at nearly the same time” (redundancy apparently being important even in company blogging).

News Byte

Twitter Introduces Employee-Friendly Patent Policy

in Social on April 17, 2012 at 11:51 am PT

Twitter said today it plans to implement an Innovator’s Patent Agreement that, in contrast to industry norms, will let its engineers and designers retain some say-so over their creations. Under the agreement, to be implemented later this year, Twitter pledges that the patents will be used strictly for defensive purposes and not wielded offensively without the employee’s permission, an arrangement that would stand even if the patent were sold. In a blog post, VP of Engineering Adam Messinger said Twitter is putting out feelers to see if other companies are interested in following suit.

News Byte

Now You Can Tweet Right to Left

in Social on March 6, 2012 at 11:45 am PT

With the help of some clever engineering and six weeks of work by 13,000 volunteer translators, Twitter now supports Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu and allows right-to-left and left-to-right languages to exist happily in the same tweet. This makes 28 languages in which Twitter is available.

QOTD: A Front-Runner in the Mayor of Space Race

“I just unlocked the ‘NASA Explorer’ badge on @foursquare! http://4sq.com/dseNyI”

– Astronaut Douglas Wheelock takes check-ins to new heights while aboard the International Space Station, kicking off a new NASA-Foursquare partnership.

QOTD: Way to Mow Down That Straw Man, Malcolm

“It was a very well-constructed argument but it was kind of laughable. He pointed out that you don’t ever get much of anything done by just telling people you’re going to do it; you actually have to do it….Anyone who’s claiming that sending a tweet by itself is activism, that’s ludicrous–but no one’s claiming that, at least no one that’s credible.”

– Twitter co-founder Ev Williams shrugs off Malcolm Gladwell’s critique of the significance of Twitter and other social media in bringing about social change.