Twitter now available in three new languages

Twitter’s approach to making the social network available in more languages is unique: it crowdsources the translation process out to the users through the Twitter Translation Center. Well, it looks like this approach is paying off. Only a few months after becoming available in right-t0-left languages, Twitter has announced it’s now also available in Greek, Czech, and Basque.

To change the language of your personal Twitter experience, just go to your account settings. To help with the translation process for any language, you simply sign-in to the Translation Center with your Twitter account.

Jason Mraz fan-sources ideas for new music video

Singer-songwriter Jason Mraz is making a music video for his song, “The Woman I Love,” and is looking to his followers for help in the creative process. For one week from July 30 to August 6, Mraz asked fans to tweet him at @Jason_Mraz with possible plotlines using the hashtag #MrazingTheVideo.

A director will create a storyboard based on the best ideas. The music video will premiere this fall on Twitter and those who’s ideas were chosen will be credited by their Twitter handles appearing at the end of the video.

The first tweets from Mars

NASA’s Curiosity Rover landed on Mars at 1:39 am EST on Monday morning, and the Internet is going crazy for it. In addition to a livestream of the landing via Ustream, the experience is also being documented on Twitter. The story is being told firsthand by NASA employees as well as the Rover’s own Twitter account, @MarsCuriosity.

As complex and hard to understand as the actual process of a Mars landing is, the Twitter account maintains a playful voice. The account announced the landing by tweeting, “I’m safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!! #MSL“ Along with amazing color photographs, the account is continuing to tweet amusing exclamations such as “Look out below!”, “Now the adventure begins,” and captioning a photo “No @Instagram required.”

Twitter suspends, un-suspends, and apologizes to Guy Adams

On July 27, Guy Adams, a Los Angeles correspondent for The Independent, started tweeting criticisms of NBC’s coverage of the Olympics. One tweet contained the email address of the President of NBC Olympics, Gary Zenkel. In the tweet, Adam urged his followers to email Zenkel to express how they felt about NBC’s Olympics coverage. On July 30, he found his account suspended. In an email, Twitter stated that his account was suspended because he posted an “individual’s private information such as private email address, physical address, telephone number, or financial documents.” Adams maintained that because it was a corporate email, it should not have been considered private.

Most of the outrage over this incident was that Twitter claims not to monitor private accounts. However, Twitter has explained in a blog post that they did “proactively identify a Tweet that was in violation of the Twitter Rules and encouraged them to file a support ticket with our Trust and Safety team to report the violation.” The account was reinstated when NBC withdrew the request for account suspension.

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