Social networking

TV bakery enjoys astonishing Facebook melt down

"You people are all s***. Yelp s***, Reddits s***. Every s***. Come to here, I will f***ing show you all."

On reading these words in isolation, you might imagine they were written by someone whose senses had departed for chillier climes. Or perhaps merely by an exposed politician, contemplating a loss of fame and privileges.

But, no. These words actually adorn the Facebook page of Amy's Baking Company Bakery Boutique & Bistro in Scottsdale, Ariz.

The name is something of a mouthful, but the sentiments expressed by its management (yes, these words are from the management) … Read more

Pinterest makes mobile apps more social with mentions

Pinterest released a handful of updates to its iOS and Android applications to give its members on mobile more of the features they find on the digital scrapbook service's Web site.

The Pinterest for Android and iOS apps were updated Tuesday with push notifications, mentions, and a better search experience. People using the iOS app can also now pin from an external website inside the app.

Mentions mean that app users can tag other people in their updates and enjoy better pin-related conversations. Notifications for new comments or mentions give people a reason to keep coming back to the … Read more

Facebook kills social suicide app Social Roulette

A Facebook app that mimicked the real-life lethal game of Russian roulette in deleting user accounts apparently did not leave the social network fired up.

Social Roulette, which launched Saturday, gave players a one-in-six chance of deleting their own Facebook account, a form of social suicide, if you will. If you lost (or won, depending on your level of exasperation with social networking), the app would delete all aspects of the user's account, including posts, likes, photos, and friend connections, before deactivating the account.

According to its description, the app was intended for people looking to burn their Facebook … Read more

Twitter going deeper with ESPN

If you like sports highlights but spend more time on social networks than watching TV, Twitter and ESPN are going to do their best to meet your needs.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Twitter and ESPN plan to announce tomorrow a deepening of their existing relationship, agreeing on a pact under which the leading sports channel will unveil a wide variety of highlight clips in its tweets. The videos would be available on Twitter "shortly after" they take place live.

Naturally, the new arrangement -- which expands on a pact signed in December under which ESPN began … Read more

Twitter's latest buy: Big data startup Lucky Sort

Twitter's shopping spree shows no signs of letting up. Today, the social-networking giant said that it has acquired big data startup Lucky Sort.

Lucky Sort CEO Noah Pepper said in a blog post that his company's "goal was to make huge document sets easier to analyze, summarize, and visualize by building elegant and user-friendly tools for text analysis."

Neither Twitter nor Lucky Sort said precisely how the startup will be integrated into Twitter's larger plans, but Pepper said in his post that several members of his team would be moving to San Francisco to become … Read more

Joss Whedon joins Twitter

Joss Whedon fans can now catch the latest musings of their favorite creative guru in 140 characters or less.

Whedon finally hopped onto the Twittersphere early Monday using the nom de Twitter of @JossActual. Displaying his usual deadpan sense of humor, Whedon describes himself as a "ladies man, man's man, man about town... Java man, Isle of Man, Mandroid, Man Who Would Be King Ralph, girly man."

As of late Monday, the writer and director known for "The Avengers," "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer," "Firefly," "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" … Read more

Bill Gates: Steve Jobs was better at design than I was

When the sense of personal competition has gone, when time has passed, the memories become more acute and more accurate.

During Bill Gates' interview Sunday night with Charlie Rose on CBS's "60 Minutes," Microsoft's chairman released some emotion when speaking of visiting Steve Jobs during the Apple CEO's last days.

He said they're talked about what they'd learned and about families.

He said the conversation wasn't melancholy, but it clearly is an emotional memory for Gates.

When it came to business, Gates admitted that Apple "put the pieces" together on … Read more

Facebook makes break-ups harder to take, study says

It hurts when your lover casts you aside.

Especially when you know that he or she is acting out of self-loathing, personal inadequacy, or a complete lack of appreciation for your hidden joys.

And yet, in this world where everything is recorded by a social network (and/or a government), there are parameters that makes the pain more acute.

As a University of California, Santa Cruz study has discovered, Facebook can make a break-up even worse.

It seems that even when we have been kicked to the curb with more unfairness than a Turkmeni election we find it hard to … Read more

Gingrich to world: Rename the cell phone

It's time this country addressed the real issues.

Things cannot go on the way they are and cometh the hour, cometh the man. That man is Newt Gingrich.

No, the great Republican doesn't want to impeach the President, repeal Obamacare and institute conscription for everyone aged 15 and older.

Well, those aren't his current priorities. Instead, he believes that for America to progress we need to call the cell phone something else.

Please, this is serious.

In a video posted to YouTube on Friday, Gingrich made his case, while waggling his encased cell phone.

"If it'… Read more

'Pinterest stress' not just for moms?

I don't know exactly when it happened, but I can now say for sure that I live in a Pinterest household. The influence of the digital pinboard has infiltrated numerous aspects of life in the Mack family palace, from our wardrobe to nightly dinners to the bling I've been instructed to install on the door of the oven those dinners are cooked in.

That's right, I'm going to bling out my oven because my wife told me to, because it looked cool to her in a thumbnail on a punnily named social network.

This is not quite the future the Jetsons promised us, but we're living it.

So I was very interested to read the findings of a recent survey about what stresses out American moms. The online survey of more than 7,000 women in the U.S. was conducted by Insight Express/NBC News for TodayMoms.com and revealed one particularly fascinating nugget:

Measuring up to all the cool crafts they see on Pinterest causes stress for 42 percent of moms.