Dave Haft

Twitter introduced several enhancements to embedded tweets Tuesday

Now embedded tweets look more like tweets you see on Twitter.com. Embedded tweets include photos, videos, and article summaries below the text of the tweet, and the embedded version will also include an accurate retweet and favorite count, so readers can instantly see how popular a particular post might be.

Content shown in embedded tweets is limited to that you see on Twitter cards on the website, so article summaries are limited to certain outlets, and Instagram photos will show as a link, while Twitter photos show as the full photo.

Your private Facebook statuses aren’t as private as you thought — when it comes to Storify.

A vulnerability in the popular online content-curation platform allows individuals to pull and publish statuses from any Facebook account or group regardless of privacy setting.

The first to notice this was Julie Pippet, a communications and public relations professional who stumbled into the privacy breach by accident. Using the Storify extension for the Google Chrome browser, which helpfully adds a Storify button to Facebook and other social Web pages, Pippet was able to add a friend’s Facebook status about Superstorm Sandy into her public Storify feed.

A cohort of Twitter users with fake names and profile pictures have become a trusted source of information regarding drug cartel violence in Mexico

These citizen journalists choose to remain anonymous to avoid violent backlash from gang members, but their reports have become increasingly influential.

On Jan. 8, a team from Microsoft Research published a paper called “The New War Correspondents: The Rise of Civic Media Curation in Urban Warfare,” which details a social media study conducted over the past two years. Their main finding was that as Mexicans increasingly turn to Twitter for reports of violence, a core of mostly anonymous yet trusted curators have led the dissemination of public safety information.

Scott Gerber is the founder of Young Entrepreneur Council, a nonprofit organization that provides young entrepreneurs with access to tools, mentorship and resources. The YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs grow businesses.

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From Foursquare to Facebook, using social media lists as a personal curation tool is an increasingly easy and fun way to sort through the noise on your favorite network.

Business owners can also use social media lists to curate content on behalf of their customers, whether it’s to emphasize nearby neighborhood hotspots for brick and mortar businesses or to maintain high-touch relationships with super fans

Google search has become part of our medical check-up these days. If you browse WebMD, Google or various online forums for answers before a doctor visit, you’re not alone

It’s tempting to see if we can find an answer to our health questions in an instant when a world of information is at our fingertips, rather than leaving work or home. Flawed and inaccurate as some of that information may be, there are also many useful sites and forums with advice from actual doctors

Jonathan Gardner is director of communications at Vibrant Media, a leading digital ad company. He has spent his career as an innovator at the nexus of media and technology, having worked in communications and as a journalist.

Another year, another attempt to predict the future. If 2012 was the year of Korean dance videos, citizen curation and Superstorm Sandy, who can possibly tell what 2013 might bring?

It’s exciting to think that a year from now we’ll be buzzing about all new startups, fresh apps to obsess over and maybe even a new device or two we can’t imagine ever having lived without

If you use Pinterest, you’re already well aware the visual social network is teeming with signs of the holidays, from gift ideas to Christmas cookie recipes to DIY crafts. You may have seen Pinterest’s interactive calendar, 30 Days of Pinspiration, curated by power users, brands and non-profits to guide holiday inspiration.

What you may not have realized, is the calendar is part of a company-driven effort to promote giving back during the holidays. While some of the pinners, like Katie Couric, share recipes, and others, like Nina Garcia, share holiday party outfit tips, others embrace the spirit of giving by sharing volunteer opportunities and charitable gifts

Twitter passed a geeky milestone on Sunday night: Its user IDs broke into the 10 figures

Adrianus Wagemakers, the founder of the Amsterdam-based Twopcharts, which tracks the most influential Twitter users by city, says that there was no account number 1 billion. Instead, Twitter registered account 1000000002, which was quickly suspended

Twitter assigns a unique user ID to everyone who joins the network. Though you can’t see it on your account, you can check yours here. Twitter started with number one and counted sequentially until July, when it surpassed user ID number 500000000. Sometime after that, Wagemakers says, Twitter began giving out three user IDs and then skipping the next three. The company also skipped about 70 million numbers and went straight to 700000000. Yet Twitter’s “give three, skip three” system is very consistent, which allows Twopcharts to keep accurate records.

Your (Facebook) friends may be stressing you out. And the more you have, the more stressed you may be.

Per a new report from the University of Edinburgh Business School, the more friends you have on Facebook — or, perhaps more accurately, the more “friends” you have on Facebook — the more stressed you’re likely to be about having them.

The finding, which is similar to one determined last year, is nice as a headline: It’s both unexpected (friends! stressing you out! ha!) and ironic (the currency of the social web, taking value rather than adding it!). What’s interesting, though, is the why of the matter: the idea that, the report theorizes, the wider your Facebook network, the mo…
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More About: Facebook, facebook friends, stress

Want to download and save every last one of your witty, history-making, memory-storing tweets? So say we all — or enough of us, apparently, that CEO Dick Costolo is hassling his engineers to make downloadable tweets a reality by the end of 2012.

Twice already this year, the Twitter chief has promised the ability to store your entire tweet history locally — called “tweet curation.” He did it once in July in a New York Times interview, and once in September at the Online News Association conference in San Francisco.

Currently, Twitter only gives you access to the last few thousand posts you made on the site.

Costolo’s third promise to change all that came during a talk Friday a…
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More About: downloads, tweets