Tag Archives: Twitter

Royal Wedding Becomes 6th Biggest Event in Internet History

It looks like a record number of people have watched the live broadcast of the Royal Wedding online. Akami, the distributor of this service, has said that more than 1.6 million people tuned in to live stream the event – that’s a little more than last year’s World Cup, which peaked at 1.6 million hits also, albeit a little less than the Royal Wedding.

Global internet traffic for news regarding the event peaked at about 5.3 million pages per minute.

Things related to the event have been trending on twitter all day (even the phrase THEY KISSED is trending) – as has “William & Kate” for the past week and Facebook home feeds were inundated with statuses and comments about the event.

All of this merged together make for the 6th biggest event in internet history.

And if the sheer magnitude of this wasn’t overwhelming to comprehend (I mean, people seem to have too much free time, no?) the biggest event in internet history is nothing other than a World Cup Football game that took place in June 2010 simultaneously with the longest match in Wimbledon history, which peaked at more than 10 million pages per minute.

And yes, I have not watched a single thing related to this! Either way, let’s wish the newlyweds a life full of love and other necessary good wishes and let’s just move on.

Twitter Suspends UberTwitter and Twidroy

Twitter has just suspended two third-party twitter app developers: UberTwitter and Twidroy, for violating company policy.

According to a statement issued by Twitter, these companies allowed “direct messages longer than 140 characters … [and] changing the contents’ of users’ Tweets in order to make money.”

Twitter also mentioned that it has been in talks with the companies that developed these applications since April 2010 about their policies infringement and that it decided to announce all of this via its support center because many users were going to be affected.

Here’s the full Twitter statement.

We ask all developers in the Twitter ecosystem to abide by a simple set of rules that are in the interests of our users, as well as the health and vitality of the platform as a whole.
We often take actions to enforce these rules; in fact, on an average day we turn off more than one hundred services that violate our API rules of the road. This keeps the ecosystem fair for everyone.

Today we suspended several applications, including UberTwitter, twidroyd and UberCurrent, which have violated Twitter policies and trademarks in a variety of ways. These violations include, but aren’t limited to, a privacy issue with private Direct Messages longer than 140 characters, trademark infringement, and changing the content of users’ Tweets in order to make money.

We’ve had conversations with UberMedia, the developer of these applications, about policy violations since April 2010, when they first launched under the name TweetUp – a term commonly used by Twitter users and a trademark violation. We continue to be in contact with UberMedia and hope that they will bring the suspended applications into compliance with our policies soon.

Today… Proud To Be Lebanese.

As I followed my friend’s tweets on what he was going through in Tahrir Square in Egypt, today, I couldn’t help but feel proud to be Lebanese – at least for today.

I’m not going to start embellishing the life we lead in Lebanon for the sake of impressing a reader that might stumble on my blog. But today has proven the vital importance of something we’ve come to take for granted – at least in the last six years. Our freedom of speech.

We have gotten accustomed to saying anything that comes to our mind that we don’t really think about those who cannot do so.

Look at what happened in Egypt today… the government cracked down on those who tried to defy it. A bloodbath ensued in Tahrir Square.

Can you imagine what would have happened if the government cracked down on those that tried to topple it in 2006? They protested and had a two-year long sit in. And no blood was shed because of the protest directly.

Even more so, can you imagine what would have happened if March 14, which is very similar to what happened yesterday, on February 1st, in Egypt, was followed by a similar crackdown by the authorities to the one that took place in Egypt today?

So for all matters and purposes, I am proud to be Lebanese today. I am proud to be able to decide on a cold Wednesday in February to protest against the government and expect no one to beat me up in return. I am proud that I can support causes that most people frown upon and still expect nothing to happen to me. I am proud that I can criticize most top politicians in my country and be able to sleep soundly at night. I am proud to be from the country that is lightyears ahead of the whole region in everything that counts.

So do remember from time to time that there are things more important than super-fast internet, a booming economy and a fragile political peace… sometimes, being free is what matters the most.