Article Lead Image

The Tweekender: Pope helps ad company get more followers

Advertising startup Pontiflex—not to be confused with @pontifex—got an unexpected boost from Pope Benedict XVI's choice of Twitter handle.

 

Kris Holt

Trending

Posted on Dec 7, 2012   Updated on Jun 2, 2021, 5:54 am CDT

With hundreds of millions of tweets per day, it’s impossible to follow everything happening on Twitter. Every Friday, the Daily Dot rounds up notable Twitter news and stories from the past week—in 140 characters or less.

  • Your tweets are about to get shorter, as changes to Twitter’s link shortener will cut available characters in a tweet by two.
  • Twitter claimed it fixed a vulnerability when tweeting using SMS.
  • Twitter’s placing a strong focus on growing in France, while 100 new towns got city-specific trends.
  • Did the Muslim Brotherhood lie about clashes in Egypt?
  • A Twitter fight led to a real-life dust up at a Texas high school.
  • After asking someone to bring him cocaine publicly, Bret Easton Ellis sent a sexist tweet about director Kathryn Bigelow. Nice guy.
  • One enterprising individual at the University of North Alabama is helping students cheat the system for a pretty penny.
  • Film directors now announce casting news on Twitter, with Marc Webb revealing the new face of Spider-Man’s frenemy Harry Osborn.
  • A cute stolen bulldog puppy was returned home after a campaign.
  • Did Bloomberg pinch a city’s airport code/hashtag to promote an interview with Barack Obama?
  • It doesn’t seem like Jack White is much of a Twitter fan, though Albert Brooks is addicted.
  • A police officer’s under investigation over his “whistleblowing” tweets.
  • Puerto Rico prisoners are tweeting about their prison experiences.
  • Have a similar Twitter handle to that of the Pope? You too can pick up a bunch more followers without even trying.
  • State Department employees may wave farewell to live tweeting as their tweets might be subjected to a two-day review period before posting.
  • Here’s how giving up Twitter for a month helped one man gian a different perspective on life.
  • If you’re running Google+, it probably shouldn’t be surprising that your boss asks you to stop tweeting.  

The week’s best new accounts: Awards season is upon us, and who better to get the inside track on the Oscars from than its producer Neil Meron. British soccer analyst Alan Hansen is also a newbie, but hasn’t tweeted yet.

Photo of the week: Antivirus software pioneer (and murder suspect) John McAfee’s life on the lam ends in custody in Guatemala. (@PNCdeGuatemala)

Share this article
*First Published: Dec 7, 2012, 9:27 pm CST