Twitter acquires Clutch.io, service essentially getting open sourced

Clutch.io is a service that allows iOS and mobile developers to easily and quickly do app testing, which helps them track just how customers use their apps. The service has been helpful in the past for a number of app developers and their products, but Clutch has now flipped over to just one client: The company has been acquired by Twitter. Clutch says it will work on the same type of work at Twitter, aiming to grow the company on a worldwide scale.

As for developers using Clutch now, there's both good and bad news. The bad news is that the service is getting shut down -- it will be supported until November 1, and after that Clutch's servers will no longer work. But the good news is that Clutch is basically open sourcing the whole thing. The company says it will release all of the necessary documentation and software for devs to continue to run the testing service on their own servers. And any currently running tests are designed to "fail gracefully" should Clutch's servers go down, so there shouldn't be any issues with end users at all.

All in all, it sounds like a good move for Clutch, and that developers who might be affected will at least have a way to deal with that. As for us Twitter users, I'm curious to see how this affects Twitter's mobile experience going forward. Twitter's one of my most-used services, so anything that makes it even better sounds good to me.

[Source: TUAW]

Tweeting Truck Lands on Mars

Overcoming its “seven minutes of terror” — and winning the hearts of geeks worldwide — the 2,000 lb. NASA Curiosity Rover landed on Mars at 1:39am, early Monday morning EST.  “We’re on Mars again,” said the exhilirated NASA chief, Charles Bolden. “It’s just absolutely incredible. It doesn’t get any better than this.”  Much of the Twittersphere agreed with him — especially as the Curiosity Rover’s official account was live-tweeting the whole landing, writing in what you might well call the voice of the Internet. 

[Source: To read the full article visit Mashable]

Olympics sparks 9.66 million Twitter mentions

Twitter's grand ambitions for the 2012 Olympics seem to be off to a mixed start. On the positive side, the service saw 9.66 million mentions of the Opening Ceremony from the start of the event at 8:00PM in London until the end of the delayed US broadcast. For the most part, the chosen time period eliminates anticipatory tweets about the event (with the exception of US viewers, who had to wait for NBC's delayed broadcast of the Opening Ceremony). On the negative side, many US viewers took to Twitter to express their displeasure with NBC's decision not to stream the Opening or Closing ceremonies, which Twitter may not be too happy about considering their decision to partner with NBC on Olympics coverage.  Twitter has grown exponentially over the past few years — a single day last week had more tweets total than during the entirety of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, according to a recent blog post. In 2008, the service saw just 300,000 tweets per day, not counting spam. The company's growing user base, its recent moves to curate news on important events, and the partnership that turned the service into the "official narrator" of the 2012 Olympics all show Twitter wants to become a significant media outlet in its own right. Now we just need to see whether those ambitions will be contained in a walled garden.

[Source: The Verge]

TweetDeck Twitter Security

Oh nooooo what a mess TweetDeck has made of my recent install on a new piece of Apple hardware. After cloning across a previous backup, I logged into TweetDeck (not Twitter) and it pulls all my Twitter & Facebook accounts across. 

I respond to an enquiry tweet from someone asking about VizBox.TV (the website I set up, but am no longer with) and TweetDeck responds from the VizBoxTV twitter account. 

I was so furious, the application would not even allow me to delete the tweet. Not having control of the account or the password, this was really weird.

What worries me though is a security flaw in TweetDeck. Of course I managed to manually remove the account, so the error cannot re-occur, but imagine if you got your TweetDeck account hacked. Worse than that, what if you restored someones else's Mac from a clone you had made… just one sign in and they would be able to tweet from all your previous accounts. I think an update with some security preferences would be a good idea.

More claims of 'Deep integration' of Twitter in iOS 5

Earlier this week various Tech Blogs have reported that Apple plan to intergrate Twitter much deeper in their iOS, going as far as to have it as a standard feature within the iOS. For regular twitter users this seems like great news as it would mate the App much more seamless and maybe abit more reliable, but many fear that for none regular users, its just going to be another icon which you can not remove from your homescreen 

[Source : MacRumors]