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Back at E3 in June we learned that FacebookFacebook and TwitterTwitter as well as last.fm integrations were coming to Microsoft’s Xbox Live online gaming platform for the Xbox 360.

It marked a definitive expansion into social networking for the console and a strategy of broadening the Xbox brand into a wider entertainment realm beyond gaming.

Joystiq and Engadget both had a chance to get a first-hand look at exactly how these new integrations will work when they launch in beta later this month (and to the general public shortly thereafter), and were generally impressed with some of the user interface results…
Read on at mashable.com

TwitterTwitter’s “suggested users” list is a Who’s Who of Twitter celebrities, featuring the likes of Al Gore, Lance Armstrong, Ashton Kutcher, John McCain, Martha Stewart, and others with millions of followers. The New York Times claimed that a spot on the list would guarantee 500,000 additional followers and reported that social media guru Jason Calacanis had offered $250,000 to be listed.

Last Friday, Twitter did something remarkable. It added a number of well-known social entrepreneurs and innovators to this list, among them Social Edge, Skoll Foundation, Kiva, Matt Flannery (Kiva co-founder),Acumen Fund, Jacqueline Novogratz (Acumen Fund founder), charity: water, GOOD Magazine, Kjerstin Erickson (FORGE founder), and Room to Read. Not knowing what was going on, Kiva’s Flannery thought there was a spam attack and complained about the 500 new users a minute he was getting. But not for long…
Read on at cnet.com

TwitterTwitter’s traffic has grown tremendously in the past year, but how many people are actively using the service versus casually passing by? According to the latest research from eMarketer, that number will be at around 18 million by the end of 2009.

eMarketer considers “users” as people who access Twitter via any platform – Web, client, mobile or otherwise – at least once per month. The study was also US-only, and the research firm calls its estimates “conservative” in light of other stats that show Twitter has a high abandonment rate (see: 60% of Twitter Users Quit Within the First Month).

Nonetheless, the numbers are 50 percent higher the estimates that eMarketer made earlier this year, when they projected that TwitterTwitterTwitter would have just 12 million users at the close of 2009. Looking to 2010, the current estimate is for 26 million users.
Via mashable.com

As useful and fun as TwitterTwitter can be, it can also be both addictive and a major distraction. Many times in the past I’ve tried to write a blog post or work on some other big project and I’d lose my focus because I had Twitter open and kept getting drawn to it, wanting to tweet something, see what others were tweeting or just reply to somebody. Of course, this is a common and well documented problem with most social media sites, but I’ve found Twitter to be particularly bad, if for no other reason that it’s so simple and quick to use.

It’s now increasingly documented that multi-tasking, and just generally allowing distractions into your life is a poor way of getting things done. If you’re tweeting while trying to do your work, that work will take much longer and require more effort to do. If you don’t want to waste your time like that, try implementing these four tips when using Twitter:
# Set limits # Identify what you want to achieve # What value are you offering? # Cut out distractions
Read full post at twitip.com

This week TwitterTwitter announced changes to its Terms of Service spelling out that you own your Tweets, and that Twitter can place ads next to your content. What’s more, Twitter wants to crack down on spammers, bots and other bad behavior.

The refreshed Twitter Rules that are a part of the new Terms of Service spell out a number of different reasons why you may find your Twitter account terminated. Everything from inappropriate content and squatting to selling usernames could be cause for you to get the boot.

Upon closer look we noticed that Twitter is closing the curtain on at least 10 types of Twitter users we see regularly attempt to game the service. Here are the 10 people we won’t be hearing from anymore:
# 1. The Impersonator # 2. The Bot # 3. The Naked Chick # 4. The Serial Abuser # 5. The Squatter # 6. The Slimy Salesman # 7. The Hashtag Spammer # 8. The Plagiarizer # 9. The Über Oversharer or BullyBully reviews # 10. The Faker
Read full post at mashable.com

TweetDeckTweetDeck is fast becoming the de facto accessory for social media fanatics. The Twitter desktop application is certainly seeing formidable competition, mainly from the likes of SeesmicSeesmic, or web-based alternatives, but their ultimate mission is to become more than just a TwitterTwitter app and be a browser for the real-time web.

A new version of TweetDeck (v0.30), which launches this morning, aims to push the application in that direction. With Twitter still front and center, the new release also embraces a boatload of additional FacebookFacebook functionality and adds in MySpaceMySpace integration. It’s almost everything Conan envisioned for the year 3000.

The consummate Twitter follower will also love that today marks the simultaneous launch of the TweetDeck Directory which features predefined columns for one-click following en masse and instant column addition to your TweetDeck…
Read on at mashable.com

Your tweets, as ephemeral as they may be, may have some actual long-term value. If you need to reference one of your better whimsical musings or find something of real value (like a phone number in a direct message), good luck trying to track them down using Twitter Search after more than a few days: they will be gone.

You have a few options for finding those tweets again, but the newly launched TweetSaver offers you an almost fail-proof system for backing up your tweets. The subscription based service synchronizes with your TwitterTwitter account to provide you with a searchable database of your Twitter history and tagging options so that you can quickly find your best Twitter gems again…
Read on at mashable.com

The Safe America Foundation, a national safety group working with the U.S. government, announced yesterday that text messaging, social networking sites, and TwitterTwitter could help families stay in touch in the wake of a disaster. Although Twitter hasn’t always been known for its stability, in emergency situations when phone lines and other traditional communication avenues are down, social networking sites like it and others could turn into reliable backup methods for reaching loved ones…
Read on at readwriteweb.com

The mobile augmented reality space has really been heating up lately (check out our recent feature on the top 6 AR apps). Today one of the front-runners, Austrian software company Mobilizy, launched a new version of their mobile augmented reality browser Wikitude for GoogleGoogle’s AndroidAndroid platform. For those unfamiliar with the concept, augmented reality refers to the sci-fi-like display of real time digital data superimposed on top of the world around you, typically via your mobile phone’s camera. You point the camera at an object or location and get a resulting display of information related to those things or places. The most interesting update to Mobilizy’s mobile augmented reality offering is the relaunch and full integration of the Wikitude.me platform with the browser. Wikitude.me is a socially-aware geotagging site where you can log in with an existing FacebookFacebook, TwitterTwitter, Google or YahooYahoo! account and add location-based information that other users will be able to access later at that same spot…
Read on at mashable.com