Twitter Announces Developer Conference

Twitter announced its first ever developer conference, Chirp, to be held in San Francisco on April 14 and 15.

The two-day event will start off with a full day of guest speakers at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre in San Francisco and will cover various topics including streaming, geolocation, business strategies and mobile integration. Day two of Chirp, a 24-hour Hack Day, will be held at the Herbst Pavilion, giving developers the opportunity to “hack away alongside the top developers of Twitter.” Attendees will have the chance to participate in several workshops and share ideas from the best in the industry. The 24-hour Hack Day will end with a contest for the best apps.

Keynote speakers throughout the event will include Ev Williams (CEO and co-founder of Twitter), Biz Stone (co-founder of Twitter), Ryan Sarver (Director of Platform at Twitter) and Dick Costolo (COO of Twitter). Twitter promises many other guest speakers and surprises to be announced, including a sneak peek at its un-released API features.

Twitter is releasing about 800 tickets at $469 a pop. The tickets will be released in waves on a first-come, first-served basis. For more information visit chirp.twitter.com.

Army Ready to Launch Secure Version of Facebook

Federal Computer Week says that the Army has been experimenting with its own version of Facebook with enhanced features designed to allow soldiers the ability to communicate with family and friends without compromising security. Dubbed milBook by Army officials, it has been in the testing stages since October 2009 and might soon be ready for widespread deployment with troops.

Currently, the beta version of milBook has 18,000 members. The project was announced earlier this month in a press release distributed by the Army that also touted plans to integrate security solutions developed for milBook across Army communications platforms.

“We prefer to categorize our sites as professional networking rather than social,” said Justin Filler, deputy director of the MilTech Solutions office. “The topics, information and relationships are based largely on professional similarities and common grounds.”

Global Time Spent on Social Media Sites Increases Year-to-Year

Global consumers spent more than five and a half hours on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, accounting for an 82 percent increase from the same time last year, according to The Nielsen Company. The new study found that overall traffic to social networking sites has increased over the last three years.

When ranked by average time spent online in December 2009, social networks and blogs were the most popular category, followed by online games and instant messaging. Facebook secured the number one spot as the most popular global social networking destination in December 2009, with 206.9 million unique visitors.

U.S. statistics from The Nielsen Company also reveal that Americans are spending more time on social networking and blog sites than ever before, with total minutes increasing 210 percent year-to-year and the average time per person increasing 143 percent year-over-year in December 2009. According to Nielsen data, year-over-year growth in terms of average time spent by U.S. users for both Facebok and Twitter.com, outpaced the overall growth in the category, increasing 200 percent and 368 percent, respectively.

Although month-to-month unique visitors decreased 5 percent, Twitter.com secured its first place slot as the fastest-growing U.S. social networking site in December 2009, increasing a whopping 579 percent year-to-year.

Pope Benedict Calls on Catholic Church to Embrace New Technology

CNET.com reports that Pope Benedict XVI has called on priests in the Catholic Church to embrace technology, particularly social media sites including Twitter and Facebook, as a tool to communicate with followers. In a message for the Catholic Church’s 2010 World Day for Social Communications, Pope Benedict encouraged the ministry to use new technologies to preach the gospel and interact with church members.

“Priests are thus challenged to proclaim the gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources (images, videos, animated features, blogs, Web sites) which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelization, and catechesis,” said Pope Benedict in his message.

Along with having a main Web site, the Vatican also has launched a Facebook application, YouTube videos and an iPhone app.

Facebook Designs New Facility

Facebook yesterday announced its plans to build a custom data center in Prineville, Oregon—a first for the popular social networking company that began its humble operations in a Harvard dorm room. In order to meet the demands of a growing user population that has reached more than 350 million users worldwide the new data center will provide enough computing and storage capacity to handle both current and future operations.

“Along with making sure Facebook operates quickly for you, we wanted to minimize the environmental impact of our new facility and its energy costs,” wrote Jonathan Heiliger, Vice President of Technical Operations at Facebook.

The new data center will use several energy-efficient technologies, including an evaporative cooling system, airside economizer and a proprietary uninterruptible power supply (UPS) technology to provide power to servers. The new UPS technology will reduce electricity usage by as much as 12 percent.

Bill Gates Joins Twitterverse

Despite being a computer mogul, Bill Gates has been reluctant to join the social media universe. The Microsoft founder stopped using Facebook recently after too many users tried to connect to him, but the Wall Street Journal reports that he’s giving Twitter a try as he’s signed up for the microblogging site and started posting under the user name @billgates.

Along with beginning to post on Twitter, Gates also launched a Web site called “The Gates Notes” to share his personal views with the world. The site is broken down into sections such as “What I’ve Learned” and “My Travels” will include posts on a variety of subjects.

His first Twitter post on Tuesday was far less deep: “Hello World. Hard at work on my foundation letter - publishing on 1/25.” Still, it was enough to convince more than 230,000 people to start following him within the first 24 hours.

AT&T Identifies Facebook Glitch

Following up on a AP report released Saturday that said an AT&T network glitch was responsible for giving some mobile users the ability to login to other people’s Facebook accounts, the New York Times Monday confirmed that the glitch “appears to be more of an issue with some misconfigured software at AT&T and less of an internet-wide security concern, as previously feared.”

According to the New York Times article, AT&T has regarded the incident seriously and has taken measures to prevent similar problems from happening in the future. Apparently the issue affected AT&T subscribers who were logging into Facebook using their AT&T phone numbers instead of a username/password combination. In addition to implementing security measures, the wireless company is working with Facebook so that its users will no longer be able to use their phone numbers as login credentials to access the social networking site from their mobile devices.

Twitter Ready to Launch Answer to Facebook Connect

TechCrunch reports that Twitter is set to launch its answer to Facebook Connect, which lets third parties integrate Facebook features into their Web sites and services. Through Facebook Connect, users can instantly post links from outside sites to their Facebook page. TechCrunch reports that 80,000 websites have integrated Facebook Connect with 60 million Facebook users.

According to influential TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, Twitter’s answer to Facebook Connect would “allow sites to authenticate users, pull data and then publish back to Twitter.” The current Twitter API includes the framework to do all of these functions, but Twitter has yet to package them into one program or series of widgets.

The Twitter Connect feature would go a long way to helping the company plug a leak in its business model. A report by widget provider Gigya said that people who have a choice of logging into a widget using Facebook, Twitter or Myspace will choose Facebook 65 percent of the time.

Facebook and McAfee Join Forces

Earlier this week Facebook announced a year-long partnership with security software company McAfee, making it possible for more than 350 million Facebook users to download a six-month subscription to McAfee’s security software at no cost.

In the Facebook blog announcement, the company reassures users that it is doing everything possible to make the Facebook experience safe and enjoyable. With the new McAfee partnership, users who are identified as having infected computers will be asked to run a scan before accessing Facebook. Along with standard security measures of detecting and blocking suspicious behavior, Facebook also works with third parties to get malicious sites added to browser blacklists or removed completely.

In addition to the free six-month subscription to McAfee’s security software, users who wish to continue their subscriptions will receive a special discount.

“We’re not aware of another free Internet service that takes this much responsibility for helping people keep their accounts secure,” writes Jake, project manager for the Site Integrity Team at Facebook.

Social Media Becomes Focal Point of Haitian Philanthropy Efforts

Social media sites have become a focal point of humanitarian relief efforts after a massive earthquake in Haiti on Tuesday that may have left hundreds of thousands of citizens dead. The Chronicle of Philanthropy lists several efforts that have been started on sites such as Facebook and Twitter to raise money or supplies for Haiti.

• Anyone who texts the word “Haiti” to 90999 will have a $10 donation to the American Red Cross for disaster relief automatically applied to their phone bill.
• Donors can also contribute to the earthquake relief fund of Yele Haiti, a nonprofit started by musician Wyclef John, by texting “Yele” to 501501.
• The Global Philanthropy Ground is encouraging its celebrity donors such as Ben Stiller and John Legend to take to sites such as Twitter and Facebook and encourage their fans to give to UNICEF.

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