Is Earth's Closest Cousin a Dying Planet? Twitter removing 140-character limit from Direct Messages. Twitter has been overhauling Direct Messages over the past several months, and today it's announcing an enormous change: plans to lift the classic 140-character limit.
Starting in July, DMs will seemingly be able to run as long as you'd like, turning it into much more of a typical instant message and group chat service. The limit stays for normal tweets It's a sensible move — the 140-character limit was always more of a nuisance in DMs, since they're private and not meant to be the same type of quick info bite as a tweet. It'll also be a huge help to companies that run customer service on Twitter. Twitter has already made it easier for companies to do that by giving them the option to let anyone initiate a DM, and now they'll be able to send long messages back and forth, rather than being arbitrarily restricted. Twitter Is Experimenting With A Major Homepage Design Overhaul.
When Doctors Must Treat Healthy Patients Made Ill By The Internet. Worldcrunch NEWSBITES* An estimated 12 million Italians say they are affected by a heart attack, tumors, diabetes or tuberculosis.
But almost all of these so-called illness are imaginary, or, more specifically, diagnosed by the Web. The word “health” is among the most searched online, but less known is the ailment of having too much medical information available at the click of a mouse. The figure of 12 million comes from a survey of 900 family physicians across Italy, one which reveals alarming data. Of 1 million patients concerned (scaled up to 12 million when projected to reflect the entire population), 35% arrive at the doctor’s office already with a self-diagnosis in hand and 20% percent detail symptoms they have tried to cure using online health sites. Online sites seem to be putting doctors on the defensive, with 22% lamenting their patients’ Web-dependence. Though stretched by Web-dependent patients, doctors, nevertheleses, may rely on the Internet themselves.
Photo - jfcherry. A documentary about addiction to technology that could save us — Online Video News.
Microsoft. Apple Using ICloud to Lock in Users After Online Misfires: Tech. Oct. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Apple Inc.’s iCloud service, part of its first product release since the Oct. 5 death of Steve Jobs, may cement the loyalty of millions of consumers lured by Jobs’s pioneering mobile devices over the past decade.
The service will automatically store photos, songs and other files on servers at Apple’s data centers and sync them with all of a customer’s gadgets. A photo taken with an iPhone would appear within seconds on a user’s iPad, iPod Touch, Apple TV set-top box and any personal computer running iTunes. The move steps up competition with Google Inc.’s Android and other mobile-device rivals by making it harder to switch away from Apple products, said Bill Whyman, a technology analyst with International Strategy & Investment Group.
Apple's Siri and the Future of Artificial Intelligence. Steve Jobs' last big project: The next iPhone. The iPhone 4S is not the last major project that Steve Jobs worked on, according to one analyst.
That would be the next iPhone--let's call it the iPhone 5. The next-generation iPhone "was the last project that Steve Jobs was intimately involved with from concept to final design. For that reason...this product will establish the high water mark for iPhone volumes," Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Rodman & Renshaw, wrote in a research note this week. He expects the iPhone 5 to be a "cult classic" because of Jobs' involvement. In the note, Kumar said the phone will have a slimmer profile and larger screen size but with the same dimensions as the iPhone 4S (the relatively-small 3.5-inch screen is not one of the 4S' best features).
Another source, who I spoke with this week and who claims to have knowledge of the redesign, said the iPhone 5 is a "complete redesign. That makes sense to me. California Governor Declares Oct. 16 'Steve Jobs Day'