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October 28, 2014 Bucky Turco

The shark — that’s Wall Street. The bird — that’s Twitter. Even after the bird served the shark a big meal, the shark still wants more and more from the bird. Unfortunately for the bird, it can’t attract enough new species per month to feed the shark, and by the end of the trading day […]

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September 30, 2014 Marina Galperina

Here are two twitter bots talking to each other. When an image is tweeted at @pixelsorter, the bot account sorts the pixels of the images using a few varying parameters. When an image is tweeted at @a_quilt_bot, the bot tries to “reproduce them using quilt fabric.” This is what happens when they get stuck in a loop. […]

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September 18, 2014 Bucky Turco

Take one part NYPD, mix it with one part L train, and this is the outcome: @NYPDLTrain. It’s the latest Twitter account the NYPD has created ever since the nation’s largest police force learned about social media. Cute. […]

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September 7, 2014 Bucky Turco

Comedian and actorish-person Seth Rogen apparently had some issues earlier today with his Citi Bike rental, so he responded like most sensible people would. He sent a public message to them and his over 2.2. million followers on Twitter. Fuck you @CitibikeNYC — Seth Rogen (@Sethrogen) September 7, 2014 Five minutes later, the person handling […]

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August 4, 2014 Sophie Weiner

Twitter may be the saddest social network. No other platform makes it easier to send a quick message of despair into the universe. The hugely popular account @sosadtoday demonstrates Twitter’s penchant for melancholy well, with recent tweets like “depression is now following you” and “btw it’s not going to be ok” that generate hundreds of […]

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July 15, 2014 Sophie Weiner

Yesterday, we noted how excited some police commanders are about their new Twitter accounts sanctioned by the NYPD. It seems this might have been a little hasty on their part: the same day, Captain Thomas C. Harnisch of the 25th precinct, who was one of the first five police captains to be granted official social […]

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July 14, 2014 Sophie Weiner

Recently, NYPD precinct commanders were given a full day of training on how to use Twitter. The initiative to get them tweeting came after Deputy Inspector Ronald Leyson of the 110th precinct started using the social network as @NYPD110Pct to keep his local community updated. According to DNAinfo, the commanders are being allowed a lot […]

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June 21, 2014 Marina Galperina

“I saw an honest being, with a beautiful child-like soul,” legendary filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky tweeted after his “pleasant” reunion with rapper Kanye West. “He puts on a big show. I read him his Tarot.” Kanye’s Yeezus tour is indeed a big show, heavily influenced by Jodorowsky, specifically The Holy Mountain as discussed at length in the “Hood Jodorowsky” forum. […]

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May 27, 2014 Andy Cush

Twitter is a treasure trove of information about the people who use it. With hundreds of millions of tweets posted every day, it’s possible to analyze everything from the emotional landscape of a particular geographic region to the linguistic characteristics of a city’s neighborhoods through the social network. Twitter’s API, however, only searches about one […]

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May 23, 2014 Andy Cush

Australia’s national science agency developed a tool that aims to map a region’s emotional landscape by pulling geotagged tweets and analyzing their content. If we’re tweeting the words “fuck,” “rain,” and “Memorial Day” frequently here in New York, for instance, it might indicate some state of general dissatisfaction about the coming weekend. New Scientist explains: Researchers […]

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