NEW RESOURCES

Twitter is now offering Highlights. “When you opt in to receiving Highlights, you will get a notification on your phone up to twice daily letting you know your Highlights are ready. When you open the notification, you’ll go directly into the Twitter app where your Highlights will be displayed in a new interface. View them all by swiping through from right to left. When you’ve reached the last Highlight, another swipe puts you directly into your home timeline.” I’ll stick with Nuzzel, thanks.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Interesting: Google Chrome now does MIDI. Sorta. “Yes, as of more recent beta and stable builds, Google’s Chrome browser has built-in support for hardware MIDI. Plug in a MIDI controller, and you can play – well, this Web Audio MIDI Synthesizer, anyway…”

There’s now a quick way to find those cool 360-degree YouTube videos.

Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) has been released.

WordPress 4.2 has been released. Emoji are now available. Hold me back.

Apparently redesigned Google Glass will be out soon. Because the failure of Google Glass wasn’t about its complete disregard for human social norms and behavior, it was all about how it didn’t have nice frames. For crying out loud.

This should be interesting: LinkedIn has gotten a patent that could potentially fact-check your resume. “The patent for a ‘Interactive Fact Checking System’ was first filed in 2013 by inventor Lucas Myslinski and has been acquired by LinkedIn. According to the description of the patent, the interactive service ‘automatically monitors, processes, fact checks information, and indicates a status of the information.'”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Gah, there’s a kind of scary WiFi security bug out there. Heartbleed was almost exactly a year ago. I am not nostalgic for it. “In an e-mail today to the Open Source Software Security (oss-security) mailing list, the maintainer of wireless network client code used by Android, the Linux and BSD Unix operating systems, and Windows Wi-Fi device drivers sent an urgent fix to a flaw that could allow attackers to crash devices or even potentially inject malicious software into their memory. The flaw could allow these sorts of attacks via a malicious wireless peer-to-peer network name.”

Is Google gonna get all Pinterest-y? “A new feature called Collections is coming soon to Google+, according to sources of ours. While we have limited information about Collections at this time, from what we understand, the feature wants users to create ‘collections’ of their interests, which makes it sound a lot like Pinterest meets a blogging platform.”

Wow, Periscope already has a star. “Her name is Amanda Oleander. She’s 25 and upbeat and a Sagittarius, and since moving to Los Angeles two years ago, she’s worked as a freelance artist, an illustrator for E! Online, the director of client relations for a fledging app developer, and an extra in The Hunger Games. Perhaps most significantly, and definitely most randomly, in early April she was enjoying her status as the ‘most loved’ person on the new social-media platform Periscope.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

An interesting article on Twitter’s balance between free speech and safety. “When users push back against changes, or demand them, it often demonstrates the ways in which structure and profitability are at odds with community needs. Twitter’s fundamental structure, enabling as close to unfettered communication as possible, is simultaneously the source of its profit and its abuse potential.”

Can Twitter predict an IPO’s performance? “The most useful finding for investors may be the way pre-IPO tweets seem to predict a company’s opening day performance. Interestingly, researchers discovered that overall Twitter sentiment in the three-day run-up is usually the opposite of the way IPO performance unfolds. On average, raves on Twitter are associated with first-day price drops, while gloomy tweets are more likely to predict price climbs.”

I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!