Menlo Park: Facebook has acquired patents from IBM as it girds itself for litigation, including a lawsuit by Yahoo. A company spokesman on Thursday confirmed the purchase but did not provide details. Earlier, Bloomberg News said Facebook acquired 750 patents covering technologies dealing with software and networking. It cited a person with knowledge of the transaction who was not named in the report Thursday. Last week, Yahoo Inc. sued Facebook,...
12:31 PM, Mar 23, 2012
New Delhi: Exactly six years ago, on March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, posted the first ever tweet. "just setting up my twttr," read the tweet from @jack. At only 24 characters, the first tweet was way within Twitter's 140 character limit. The reason Jack Dorsey mentions Twitter as twttr is because that was the original code name for the project. The public launch of what was to...
02:06 PM, Mar 21, 2012
Lincoln: When Karen Williams' son died in a motorcycle crash, the Oregon woman turned to his Facebook account in hopes of learning more about the young man she had lost. Williams found his password and emailed the company, asking administrators to maintain 22-year-old Loren Williams' account so she could pore through his posts and comments by his friends. But within two hours, she said, Facebook changed the password, blocking her...
09:45 AM, Mar 16, 2012
New Delhi: The delicious irony in the Prime Minister's YouTube channel that had audio trouble with its debut video was hard to miss. Twitter users targeted the gaffe with savage fury, making it the butt of jokes centred on Manmohan Singh's usual reserve. Compared to the flamboyant Nicolas Sarkozy or the charismatic Barack Obama, the Indian PMO's Twitter account is fairly dull. Notwithstanding its virtuous intention, @PMOIndia has followed only...
12:38 AM, Mar 13, 2012
Seattle: Facebook's automatic efforts to connect users through "friends" they may know recently led two Washington women to find out they were married to the same man, at the same time. That led to the man, corrections officer Alan L O'Neill, being slapped with bigamy charges. According to charging documents filed Thursday, O'Neill married a woman in 2001, moved out in 2009, changed his name and remarried without divorcing her....
10:05 AM, Mar 10, 2012
New Delhi: A Delhi court on Monday dismissed a case against Internet giant Yahoo for allegedly hosting objectionable content on its site and penalised the petitioner for dragging it in the litigation along with other social networking sites. Administrative Civil Judge Praveen Singh imposed a cost of Rs 5000 on plaintiff Mufti Aijas Arshad Quasmi for impleading the company as a party without disclosing any cause of action against it....
01:57 PM, Mar 05, 2012
New Delhi: In a major relief for Yahoo India, the Delhi High Court on Friday stayed the personal presence summons issued to its chief by the Patiala House Court. The Patiala House Court had issued summons to all the 21 websites involved in the objectionable content case to appear before court on March 13. Facebook and Google have already got the summons stayed. "The summons issued against Yahoo India is...
04:41 PM, Mar 02, 2012
San Francisco: Yahoo has demanded licensing fees from Facebook for use of its technology, the companies said on Monday, potentially engulfing social media in the patent battles and lawsuits raging across much of the tech sector. Yahoo has asserted claims on patents that include the technical mechanisms in the Facebook's ads, privacy controls, news feed and messaging service, according to a source briefed on the matter. Representatives from the two...
01:00 PM, Feb 28, 2012
New Delhi: Now that everyone on Twitter has been moved to the new version of the Twitter interface, you can accelerate your tweeting experience using keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard shortcuts may feel a bit difficult to remember, but you will start using them on reflex once you get a little hang of it. Here's a list of the keyboard shortcuts that can make tweeting faster and more fun: Actions F FavouriteR...
12:27 PM, Feb 17, 2012
San Francisco: Buying ads on Twitter is about to get easier for small businesses as the online messaging service adds a key piece to its moneymaking model. Twitter is unveiling a long-awaited automated system that will enable advertisers to manage their marketing campaigns and budgets without having to deal with sales representatives. Before Twitter opens the system to all comers later this year, the self-service approach announced Thursday will only...
10:21 AM, Feb 17, 2012
Brussels: A European Union court ruled that social networking sites cannot be compelled to install general filters to prevent the illegal trading of music and other copyrighted material. The decision is a victory for operators of social networking sites in the EU, but a setback for those who seek to protect copyrighted material from being distributed without payment or permission. It also comes as protests are growing in Europe against...
07:44 PM, Feb 16, 2012
Sao Paulo: Facebook's popularity in Brazil has exploded over the past year, and the company may have its biggest competitor to thank for it. In its recent initial public offering filing, Facebook said its number of active users in Brazil had nearly tripled in 2011, finally placing it ahead of Google Inc's Orkut service as the No. 1 social network in the country. "I can't think of an example where...
08:13 AM, Feb 16, 2012
New Delhi: Expanding its online reach, Indian Railways' Delhi Division has come up with a dedicated Facebook page where passengers can check out availability of berths, train timings and other related information. "We have opened a page on Facebook to inform passengers about the status of vacant berths as well as the arrival and departure of trains. The page is linked with the National Train Inquiry Service and constantly updated,"...
04:39 PM, Feb 13, 2012
New Delhi: Market watchdog SEBI seems to be the latest to catch the fancy of social networks like Twitter, Facebook and blogs for spreading its message to investors as also to snoop on discussions at these platforms as part of its investigation and oversight activities. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) is hiring specialist IT officers, whose role would include keeping track of social media platforms like Twitter...
12:34 PM, Feb 12, 2012
Washington: It isn't often you see the words "love", "romance", and "Federal Reserve" in the same sentence. But on Friday, the US central bank and many economists who spend countless hours monitoring its decisions began their Valentine's Day flirtations a bit early. It started with Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, who tweeted this morning: "You're my long-run target; my nominal anchor" - with the attached hashtag,...
10:10 AM, Feb 11, 2012
Nashville: A Tennessee couple who 'unfriended' a woman on Facebook were murdered in their home by the jilted woman's father and another man, police said on Thursday. "It's the worst thing I've ever seen," Johnson County Sheriff Mike Reece said, adding he had never seen anything like it in his 27 years in law enforcement in the area. "We've had murders, but nothing like this. This is just senseless." He...
01:27 PM, Feb 10, 2012
Sao Paulo: A request for an injunction to stop Twitter users from alerting drivers to police roadblocks, radar traps and drunk-driving checkpoints could make Brazil the first country to take Twitter up on its plan to censor content at governments' requests. Twitter unveiled plans last month that would allow country-specific censorship of tweets that might break local laws. "As far as we know this is the first time that a...
10:32 AM, Feb 10, 2012
New Delhi: Continuing with its tweaks to the Facebook user interface Facebook has rolled out its new photo viewer to more users. The latest change in the Facebook photo viewer seems to be inspired by that in Google+. Quite like the Google+ photo viewer the interaction panel is to the right, instead of its previous position below the image. This update to the Facebook photo viewer comes a year after...
01:51 PM, Feb 08, 2012
Vienna: US social media group Facebook seems ready to publish categories of data it collects from users, an Austrian student group lobbying for stricter privacy rules said on Tuesday. Facebook had agreed in December to overhaul privacy protection for more than half a billion users outside North America after a three-month investigation found that its privacy policies were overly complex and lacked transparency. "This (data) access issue as well as...
05:57 PM, Feb 07, 2012
San Francisco: Looking for a promising career in a lousy economy? A new study suggests you're apt to find it in apps - the services and tools built to run on smartphones, computer tablets and Facebook's online social network. The demand for applications for everything ranging from games to quantum physics has created 466,000 jobs in the US since 2007, according to an analysis released Tuesday by technology trade group...
12:06 PM, Feb 07, 2012
