Twitter is five, IE9 launches, endangered languages

It started, with a tweet. And in five years Twitter has gone from “inviting coworkers” to a non-stop ‘fire hose’ sending 140 million messages every day.

460,000 new accounts are created daily and it plays a part in revolutions, emergencies and even meltdowns among deluded celebrities who believe they’re “winning”.

But despite the undeniably impressive numbers Twitter released to celebrate its first five years, for now the site is still little brother to Facebook’s Big Brother.

LinkedIn Today, Spotify milestone, piracy sloganeering

LinkedIn has stepped into the content curation space, hoping its business focus will give it the edge over existing services and “deliver the day’s top news”.

The idea is appealing. Every day online information overload threatens, and the situation is severely exacerbated by social media. But can LinkedIn cut through this? It’s betting industry-segmented news links, generated from the content its 90 million members share, will prove a winning addition to its social network.

But on first glance LinkedIn Today, which comes across like Paper.li on steroids, feels a bit lightweight – the most important story in the world today is that people are queuing for an iPad 2? It also raises the question, as the number of these services increases, of who will curate the curators for us.

The digital divide in the UK and Europe (statistics)

I shared some statistics on the ‘digital divide’ during yesterday’s Health Care Social Media Europe tweet chat and, asked for sources, this post is my >140 response.

The UK statistic – that 9 million people have never gone online – came from The Connected Kingdom report Google commissioned last year from Boston Consulting Group.

It’s worth quoting at length from what the report has to say on the UK’s digital divide.

Unofficial NYT Tumblr calls it a day at legal dept’s behest

To the Reader,

Thank you for reading 111-111-1111 — Ten Ones — my real-time edit of NYTimes.com visual matter. At the urging of The New York Times legal department, I have suspended postings and removed the archive.

How Al Jazeera uses social media in its reporting

At last week’s TED Conference in California the head of Al Jazeera provided a fascinating overview of the historic changes taking place in the Arab world.

Wadah Khanfar went on to explain (at about the 5 minute mark) how Al Jazeera used social media to cover the recent tech-empowered, youth-led revolutions, and noted how “the internet and connectivity has created a new mindset” in the region.

There’s more about Al Jazeera’s use of Twitter and Tumblr in particular over on Mashable.

The iPad second coming, Android apps, Facebook privacy (again)

The second coming of Apple’s iPad looks set to continue the company’s lead in the tablet market it re-energised and dominates, at least for now.

Unveiling the iPad 2 this week Apple chief executive Steve Jobs had some impressive numbers to boast of, including 15 million iPads sold in just nine months, and he must have had no small amount of satisfaction noting that’s more than every tablet PC Microsoft ever sold.

Summing up Apple’s current market-leading position Sarah Rotman Epps said – with understatement, “Apple understands desire”. However, “the tablet wars are far from over” the Forrester analyst added, suggesting serious competition may yet come form Sony, Microsoft or even a ‘disruptor’ candidate like Amazon (see below).