Tech Week in Review 2-26-2010

Twitter Helps Bring Free SMS to Haiti

Twitter has set up a deal with Digicel to provide users of that service with free SMS tweets. This will assist those in Haiti with communicating with the world because it gets rid of the per-message charges. To set up the service, all the users need to do is text “follow @oxfam” to Twitter at 40404.

Stone credits Twitter mobile lead Kevin Thau with striking the deal. He’s also been the one behind similar deals in several countries around the world such as India, the UK, and others. This is part of Twitter’s broader plan to go back to its SMS roots to enable people around the world without broadband access or smartphones to use Twitter easily. (via TC)

Apple Pulls Sexy Apps

Apple recently made a bold move and decided to get rid of all apps containing any overtly sexual content from the app store. In these new application restrictions, they also ban swimsuits. While this is an odd move on their part, it’s made even more weird by the fact that they are inconsistent with their new rules. Sports Illustrated, FHM, and even Playboy apps are all still allowed. They’re even promoting the SI app on the homepage. Full story and photos at TC.

Twitter Hits 50 Million Tweets Per Day…So?

Twitter recently measured their tweets and found that they’re sitting at 50 million per day after excluding accounts marked as spam. This comes out to about 600 tweets per second. Impressive numbers, but I’m willing to bet at least 25 million of those daily tweets are spam. I’m sure there are 10 people following you right now that tweet the same 3 links every couple of minutes, mixed in with some motivational quotes and a joke or 2. This just reinforces the point that most stats mean nothing.

How To Ditch Cable and Watch Everything Online

Who doesn’t want to get rid of cable? Lifehacker offers a bunch of solutions for ditching cable and watching your favorite shows and movies online. It may not be as easy as cable, but finding your shows online is a lot easier than you might think. Watching shows online can also save you a lot of money. Some of the solutions we’ve covered here, like Clicker, Hulu, and Boxee. There are many other methods I didn’t know existed before, though. One omission I noticed was Rippol, which goes a long way to helping you find videos/shows/movies online.

Twitter Adds Ads and Makes a Deal With Yahoo

This is actually more interesting than it sounds. Essentially, what will happen in the partnership Yahoo is that Twitter will become a feature of Yahoo. This could possibly get less tech savvy users to actually use the service by presenting it in a manner that appears useful to them. This comes on the heels of an announcement that Twitter will finally monetize itself and enable ads.

The press release breaks down the partnership into three key areas. First, Twitter feeds will be available across Yahoo, from the home page to mail and beyond. Yahoo’s users will also be able to update Twitter and share content directly from Yahoo. Search results will also contain tweets as well as a number of Yahoo media properties, such as news, finance, entertainment and sports.

About the Author
Rahsheen has been a certified geek since before it was the thing to do. He started programming and tinkering in the 4th grade. Now, Rahsheen mostly writes on various sites about technology trends in social media and mobile. . He is also a musician, singer, rapper, writer, and producer. @rahsheen - +Rahsheen Porter - coachrah.com
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