Twitter acquires Summify

Twitter has acquired Vancouver-based startup Summify, a service that creates daily summaries of news content from your social networks, including Twitter. The service aggregates the most popular links shared among your social connections and delivers them either via iPhone app, email, or web. The service announced in a blog post that they have disabled new user registration and will stop delivering their summaries, which are my favorite emails to receive every day, in the next few weeks. Five members from Summify will be joining Twitter’s growth team in San Francisco, but how the platform will be used is still a mystery.

Users take to Twitter to discuss SOPA blackout

We’ve already written about the blackouts to oppose SOPA that took place on January 18, but Twitter was not discussed. Since the internet had a few thousand less functioning websites than usual, of course people took to Twitter to talk about it. While Facebook did not go dark, Mark Zuckerberg did want to share his opinions on the legislation, and did so in a Facebook post. But he then brought his Twitter account back from an almost 2-year coma:

Tell your congressmen you want them to be pro-internet. My Facebook post is here: facebook.com/zuck/posts/101…

— Mark Zuckerberg (@finkd) January 18, 2012

There were also several Trending Topics about the movement, including #factswithoutWikipedia and “Stop SOPA and PIPA”. There were also students confused as to how they were supposed to do homework without Wikipedia, which also shows how incredibly reliant we can be on such sites. Several other sites have posted funny tweets from the blackout, such as  The Huffington Post, Laughing Squid, and Gawker.

After fumble, 49er receives death threats on Twitter

San Francisco 49ers wide receiver and punt returner Kyle Williams has been receiving death threats on Twitter after fumbling the last punt of the championship game. The fumble put the 49ers’ opponent, the New York Giants, in position for a field goal that led to a win in overtime and a trip to the Super Bowl. Tweets included harsh words such as “I doubt I will ever forgive kyle williams”, but some were much more serious, such as this one: “Kyle Williams better keep one eye open… Im gonna bust both that dudes kneecaps see if he ever plays in red and gold again.” His father, Chicago White Sox general manager Kenny Williams, told ESPN “it certainly makes you question our culture of sports.”