Daily Archives: May 5, 2009

Why the Apple-Twitter rumours may be 140 characters short of reality

May 5, 2009 3:53 pm by Tim Bradshaw

Are there any companies left in Silicon Valley that bloggers haven’t suggested as potential buyers of Twitter?

Since Facebook approached Twitter last November, Google and Microsoft have both been linked with the rapidly growing (and manically hyped) microblogging service.

Now both Valleywag and TechCrunch are reporting that Apple has been in discussions with Twitter about a supposed $700m deal. Apple published a glowing profile of Twitter on its customer case-study pages last week, no doubt fuelling such speculation.

Since November, Twitter’s body language has consistently been that it wants to remain independent. Even so, an Apple deal doesn’t immediately seem logical. Read more

Tags: apple, twitter
Posted in Digital media, Internet | Permalink

Twitter and Facebook alienate users by closing accounts

May 5, 2009 6:30 am by David Gelles

Twitter and Facebook each made missteps recently, alienating users with overly-strict enforcement of their terms of use.

First Twitter shut down StatTweets, a service that broadcast scores from college and professional sports games. Twitter killed the service after StatSheet founder Robbie Allen and his wife manually created 650 accounts, one for every team, over the course of a weekend. The behaviour, Twitter said, violated terms including “copyright infringement”, “mass account creation”, and “squatting”.

Then over the weekend, Facebook turned off the public profile for Manchester United star Cristiano Ronaldo, which had 2.85m fans. Read more

Tags: Facebook, twitter
Posted in Internet, Tech | Permalink

techfile 05.05.09

May 5, 2009 6:00 am by morning call

The US Federal Trade Commission is looking into the close ties between the boards of Apple and Google, according to the New York Times. The regulators are looking at whether the fact that Apple and Google share two directors, Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and former Genentech chief executive Arthur Levinson, while also competing in several areas, falls foul of anti-trust laws, the New York Times said.
Amazon is on Wednesday expected to announce a large-format device similar to the Kindle that is optimised for reading textbooks, newspapers and magazines. Amazon has taken the lead in the rapidly emerging market for e-book readers with its Kindle and Kindle 2.