Twitter releases user details and hits the headlines

Front page news: The Sunday Telegraph on Twitter

There was further proof today that the online world is not entirely immune from offline rules.

Following a landmark court case in the US it has emerged that Twitter will reveal user details after a group of UK councillors complained they had been libelled on the site.

The microblogging site had already set out its privacy limits in January following both the social media-aided Egyptian protests and the aftermath of the Wikileaks affair.

European Commission’s #askneelie Twitter chat

Neelie Kroes answers questions on Twitter (picture used with permission from office of Neelie Kroes)

I’ve written about the European Commission’s Digital Agenda before on this blog and covered its health implicationson my InPharm blog too.

Today the European Commission’s vice president for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes (@neeliekroeseu) participated in a tweet chat using the hashtag #askneelie that covered many of the issues related to the Agenda, including net neutrality, open data, firewalls and much more.

I expect someone will (or maybe already has) done something clever with Storify to present the tweeted questions and answers, but ahead of that I’ve picked out a few of Kroes’ tweets that caught my eye. (Note: the links in the tweet images below are all fully clickable.)

Google goes local with mobile location-based news

Photo by Spencer E Holtaway (flickr.com/photos/spencereholtaway) some rights reserved

The regular requests for my location have so far been the most annoying feature of Google’s otherwise useful iPhone app.

Now this hitherto unexplained – and constant – request starts to make (a little) sense as Google pushes into local, location-based news for mobiles.

News Near You is a new feature on Google’s mobile app that analyses both the content of a story and the location of the source to find news about particular cities and their surrounding area.

Spotify continues the online music revolution

Photo by Rsms (flickr.com/photos/rsms/) some rights reserved

Since the late ‘90s online music has been characterised by technology companies revolutionising the landscape while the record industry struggles to comprehend the changes and the damage done.

Napster, mp3 blogs, Apple, MySpace and YouTube have all left their mark, some with a more lasting impact than others.

This year it’s shaping up to be the turn of online streaming and radio services, as they step up their pitch for the money in your pocket and a bigger slice of the action than ever before.