Novel Coronavirus, COVID-19 fallout has created a situation in which tax day in the USA needed a change. Generally the official filing deadline for all tax return documents is April 15. An announcement from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin today... made via Tweet... changed the date from April 15 to July 15, 2020.
Thirty-three thousand years ago, on the southern tip of the continent Africa, ostrich eggs were carved into beads and kept as ornamentation. These beads held value - they weren't just worn around necks for fun. As research published this week shows, humans shared these beads with one another, allowed these beads to play a significant role in their life - especially when it came to the reaffirmation of important relationships.
Twitter is launching a new ephemeral tweet system, called Twitter Fleets, which will automatically delete after 24 hours. Fleets will launch in Brazil first as part of a Twitter mobile app trial, but the company says that despite the similarity between Stories - the auto-deleting media on Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms - there are some unique differences.
This week, leadership at the European Commission (executive branch of the European Union) sent a staff-wide message pushing the secure messaging app Signal. This end-to-end encrypted messaging app was recommended on an EU internal discussion board for all staff. The message included, in part: "Signal has been selected as the recommended application for public instant messaging." Why would the EU do this?
Twitter just acquired a group of creators operating under the title Chroma Labs. They started their business in 2018 and quickly came to prominence with their Chroma Stories app. This app allowed users to easily create high quality "story" videos for sharing on multiple platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Twitter saw their value and moved in for the team-up.
Twitter doesn't always get dragged into controversy the same way Facebook does but when things happen, they often become huge issues. More often than not, they involve rather critical flaws in the social network that can compromise users' security and privacy. The latest happened not too long ago and is actually based on the same root cause for the high-profile hacking of CEO Jack Dorsey's account: Twitter's use of your phone number.
Misinformation and attention-seeking nonsense is appearing on social networks as coronavirus is declared a public health emergency worldwide. Social media brands like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others are in the process of enacting crack-downs on the spread of health-threatening and/or public safety-threatening coronavirus-centric information that's false or otherwise unverified. One way the networks have begun to do this is to attach notes to pages with hashtags, or as Facebook calls them, "pop-ups with credible information."
The customer support landscape has changed over the course of the decades and it can be a difficult terrain to navigate depending on who you ask. Those more advanced in years still prefer real-time communication, sometimes via voice calls even, while younger people often "crowdsource" by throwing their questions on social media. Google seems to be trying to cover all its bases and has just formally announced a new way you can get tech support via Twitter. And, as you might expect, it's already a sordid mess.
Twitter suggests that it'll be "sliding into your DMs like [emoji] [emoji] [emoji]" etc this week with an update for the basic app. The update will allow emoji reactions to messages in Twitter - direct messages, specifically - to allow the expansion of the platform to reach ever-closer to the vision held by its maker. Is this the right way to make Twitter an all-encompassing social network?
Today the Twitter app for Android is crashing - if you've got the newest version of that app, and a few bits are out of order. The official Twitter Support Twitter account suggested that they're in the process of fixing the issues at hand - but recommend that you avoid updating your Android app for Twitter until said fixes are in the mix. Meanwhile, there's a quick-fix for those savvy enough to drop into Android Settings.
Twitter plans to release a new feature that will make it easier for users to reduce the number of abusive or toxic replies to their tweets, the company announced at CES. The revelation was made by Suzanne Xie, the company's director of product management. In addition to limiting who is allowed to reply, the company will make it possible to completely block replies on some tweets.
Twitter may not have been dragged into major privacy and political scandals the way Facebook has been but it has its fair share of headaches. Most of these stem from technical problems, a.k.a. bugs, that leak users' information when they shouldn't. The latest seems to be an almost simple flaw that could match phone numbers to users by simply uploading a massive list of randomly generated numbers through the Twitter app on Android.