1. An Insider’s View of How Twitter Was Born:

Dom is one of the oldest team members at Twitter and was actually a part of Odeo, the parent company of Twitter. In this really insightful post he explains how Twitter came into existence and evolved through its early stages. He shares information on how Jack Dorsey got the idea and how Odeo gave it a chance to come up with something innovative.

2. Twitter Was Twttr at First:

Twitter got its present name a couple of months after the creation, before that, the founders referred to it as Twttr. Here are a couple of tweets from Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone to show that:

3. Twitter Was Born On March 21st 2006:

Jacks Dorsey has the oldest account on Twitter and his tweet was the first one ever.

4. Twitter Was Not a Unique Idea:

Dodgeball had the same idea and was started before Twitter, but they were surely lacking something because they gave up after a year.

5. TechCrunch Didn’t Like Twitter At First:

TechCrunch has written literally hundreds of posts about Twitter but their love for Twitter wasn’t always like this. In their first ever post about Twitter, there tone wasn’t too good and neither were their readers. Here are some earlier comments ever on TechCrunch about Twitter:

6. FiveLimes Was The First Product To Be Launched Via Twitter:

It is common for users to post about their new projects and businesses on Twitter but it wasn’t always so. Twitter was mostly used for personal updates and the first time somebody used it to announce their new project was the tweet about FiveLimes.

7. Ashton Kutcher Was First To Get Million Followers:

A lot of power users and celebrities have crossed this milestone now but Kutcher was the first to do so in April 2009.

These are some of the examples that illustrate the initial struggles faced by Twitter, after that, it has been a nice ride for them.

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If the previous tools does not work for you, you can now try out a new tool to download Hulu videos called Stream Transport.

Stream Transport will allow you to download Hulu TV Shows or record the Hulu movies you are watching and save them to your computer. The downloaded files will be stored in FLV format, which you can play using any compatible player or a standalone desktop FLV player. If you use Windows Media Player, you can also use a codec to play FLV files in Windows Media Player.

The software comes with a in-built browser using which you can browse video sites, and also other regular websites. If a video is available for download you will see options to download it in the bottom pane.

To start the download click on the download link and hit the Download button, this will open up a new download window. You can download multiple Hulu videos at one and even pause and resume the downloads.

Stream Transport works pretty well on Windows 7 and supports both 32bit and 64bit versions of Windows.

Techie Buzz Verdict

In addition to downloading videos from Hulu.com, Stream Transport also allows you to download videos from YouTube, Google Video, MySpace, Yahoo! Video, CBS, MTV, Megavideo, Photobucket, Dailymotion, Veoh and Demand Five.

This makes it a comprehensive tool and makes it a worthwhile download. However, like I said earlier, don’t expect it to work with Hulu all the time and specially don’t expect this to work outside of US every time you use it.

If you are looking for other tools, you can use our site search to find software to download videos to your computer from different sites.

Techie Buzz Rating: 4/5 (Excellent)

Download Stream Transport [via gHacks]

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Opera Mini 5 designed to work on pretty much any phone that supports J2ME applications. Native versions are available for some platforms (such as Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Android handsets), however the feature set for all editions is similar.

Opera Mini 5 is a huge improvement over Opera Mini 4 and bears little resemblance to its predecessor. The interface has been completely revamped and is both stylish and intuitive. New features include tabbed browsing, visual speed dial, adaptive zoom, touch-screen support, password manager, privacy manager, download manager, inline editing, find-in-page and copy-paste support. Existing features such as Opera Links (synchronization), RSS feed reader, address auto-completion and landscape mode have been retained.

Opera Mini is currently the most popular mobile browser in the world with more than fifty million users. Its biggest advantage is speed. In order to overcome the limitations imposed by the weak hardware of basic phones, all webpages are routed through Opera’s servers, where they are rendered and compressed. Opera claims that it can reduce size of pages by up to 90%, thus providing a dramatic speed boost while reducing bandwidth costs.

Opera Mobile 10 is the more feature-packed brethren of Opera Mini and currently supports Symbian S60 and Windows Mobile. It features the same rendering engine (Presto) utilized by Opera for desktop and is better suited to render dynamic content.

Other features include tabbed browsing, password manager, privacy manager, kinetic scrolling, auto-rotation, adaptive zoom, touch-screen support, find-in-page and speed dial. Opera Mobile 10 also retains Opera Turbo, which once again relies on server-side compression to reduce bandwidth usage and increase surfing speed on slow connections.

Opera was one of the first companies to envision a united open web. This has allowed them a head start over competitors. However, they aren’t resting on their laurels. “Keeping in mind the needs and wants of our 50+ million users, we have emphasized speed, desktop-like functionality and data savings in our mobile browsers. Today, we have made it even easier for everyone to surf, search and socialize on the Web,” said Lars Boilesen, CEO, Opera Software. Opera Software’s latest mobile offerings retain their tradition of innovation and are indeed a force to be reckoned with.

[ Download Opera Mini 5 and Opera Mobile 10 for your handset ]

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Now, it seems like Tumblr just got their hands on a lot of extra bandwidth because they are allowing users to upload a video on their Tumblr blog right from their computer. Each video file can be up to 100 MB in size, however, should not exceed a 5 minute time limit. This is not bad for an average Tumblr user because it is primarily used for short content anyways. If you want to upload a video of more than 5 minutes you’ll just have to use a service like YouTube or Vimeo. Most of the videos you upload to Tumblr don’t need transcoding and as a result, appear in your blog right away.

Recently, Tumblr has been quiet active in adding new features to their platform and with a multitude of Tumblr clients now available, it seems to be on the right path to become huge, though, it already isn’t bad with over 2 Million posts a day and 1 Billion pageviews each month.

[Via DigitalInspiration]

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• lose a friendship
• anger a family member
• lose a job
• get sued
• get arrested
• get hurt or killed

There’s also another reason.

It might be fun! How would you like to send an email that looks like it came from the President, Tax Office or Police? The possibilities for mischief are endless.

Whatever the reason, there are many resources available to those who need to send an anonymous email. The easiest methods are online services. Below I’ll list the top three for you.

send-email.org – simple plain text

anonymouse.org – simple plain text

deadfake.com – html (rich text)

I checked these services for safety using SiteAdvisor.

These email sites are easy to use. You’ll only need to fill out:

1. From: (make something up)
2. To: (who is this email for?)
3. Subject: (what’s the email about?)
4. Message: (give them the bad news)

Typically, no attachments are allowed and you’ll have to fill out a captcha form to keep the spammers from using these services.

See also: Send Anonymous Tweets With ShhTwitter

Now you’re either ready to save the world, a friendship or get a good laugh. Let me know if you have your own special way to send out secret email, by adding your comment below.

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Heather Dougherty writes in a blog post at Hitwise saying,

Facebook reached an important milestone for the week ending March 13, 2010 and surpassed Google in the US to become the most visited website for the week.

The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame.

This when compared to last year’s mere 2% of US web traffic, is a massive growth to the current 7%. This data has been released by Hitwise and we can make sure of this research, once other online firms release their reports on this incident.

Both Google and Facebook have their own ad services. If Facebook really wins the pageview game, it will work wonders for the already popular Facebook ads.

The complete report by Dougherty can be read here.

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A recent update to the Flickr app for iPhone shows that they have added new changes to support iPhone OS 3.2, which means that the app will definitely be a part of the iPad, which will run on iPhone OS 3.2.

The update to the Flickr app was released on March 11th 2010. The changelog for the Flickr app says "Support for OS 3.2", which went past through the app store approval panel, who would have definitely seen the changelog before approving the app.

So are we going to see Apple releasing iPhone OS 3.2 for the iPhone and iPod Touch soon? Or will be released only after Apple starts shipping the iPad next month? Considering that there are less than 3 weeks before the iPad starts shipping, we might see a iPhone OS 3.2 update by end of this month or so.

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A Greek site pestaola.gr has just published some concept pictures of the Nokia X9. The main features of X9 includes a large capacitive touch screen display, camera with video recording capabilities and HD 720p quad LED.

The device may also have HDMI support to connect the phone to the TV and slots to add external microSD cards. From the looks of the Nokia X9 concept pictures, we can definitely say that this will be a very popular device when it launches.

Visit the blog post from Pestaola to get more information on the Nokia N9 concept.

[via Daily Mobile]

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Hacker News is a social news sharing community by Y Combinator which is a startup funding company and is similar to sites like Digg and Reddit, where users can comment and vote on stories submitted to the site.

However, in a recent turn of events, Y Combinator has blocked Google and all other search engines from crawling the site. The news was flashed to all users through a Twitter update.

There is no official confirmation about why Hacker News blocked Google, however, the Hacker News community is definitely not happy about it since there is no official announcement on why the block was put in place.

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If people are going to use a browser full time, how can it not have support for Twitter? Chrome has had a few nice extensions for Twitter and we’re going to see which one is the best.

Chromed Bird

Chromed Bird is perhaps the first Twitter client that I tried on Chrome and I have been hooked onto it since day one. The only problem with Chromed Bird is that I can’t find any problem in it. Really. It just works, that’s all. It’s regularly updated and several of it’s setting can be modified from an ‘options’ page. It has support for Lists and can also preview short urls on mouseover. Other than that, you can set refresh intervals for each column, define font for the text and color for the columns. People who’d like to keep a track of their shortened links would be delighted to know that Chromed Bird supports bit.ly authorization through it’s api key.You can also choose from 3 provided theme for the extension.

Pros: bit.ly and lists support,  agile, notifications.

Cons: No support for Twitpic or other similar services.

Tweetings

The first thing that you are going to notice about Tweetings is its beauty. It’s got that Mac-like look with sleek columns and shiny buttons. It looks just elegant. However, beauty and brains should go together, and for Tweetings, this combination came hereditarily. Tweetings is based on on Chromed Bird. The underlying engine is probably same and the functions and features are also identical. All you get apart from Chromed Bird is a new design – a good design. (Tweetings is also available as a separate application for Windows and iPhone)

Pros: Personal account support for bit.ly and twtn.gs. Customizable retweet format.

Cons: No support for Twitpic or other similar services.

Metrist

Metrist’s design is nothing better than mediocre. Like all the others, you click a small icon in the menu bar and the application comes rolling down. Unlike Tweetings and Chromed Bird, Metrist doesn’t support Twitter’ oAuth, so you’ll have to enter in your Twitter username and password. Also, there is no support for lists, favorite-ing a tweet or Twitter new Retweet API. In spite of a dire lack of features, Metrist still stands as a decent Twitter client, for those who don’t need much except to post their one-forty characters.

Pros: Simple minimalistic design, agile.

Cons: No support for oAuth, no url shortening, no Twitpic, no new retweets or favorite-ing a tweet.

Skeet

The description for this extension is “A simple, usable Twitter client for Chrome”. Ok let’s see. Skeet might be simple but there ain’t no fun of being simple when you ain’t usable. All I could get on installing skeet was a “400” error. The developer said that this error occurs when the user has crossed his Twitter API limit. However, I was still afar from reaching my limit when I always got this error. So instead of taking the pain myself, I referred to Clif’s review of Skeet that he made a few days ago. He says: “Currently, my biggest problem with Skeet is that it disappears as soon as you click away from it. This can be maddening if you are in the middle of tweeting or replying, because your unfinished message also disappears.” Oh well, I know how that feels. Making a compact 140 character tweet from thoughts of a million words takes effort.

Pros: Search twiter from within the client, attractive UI.

Cons: Unstable.

Verdict

If you ask me, I’d say Chromed Bird any day; but if you want your tweet workstation to look pretty, there’s no harm in using Chromed Bird’s little brother Tweetings.

*Memory hog: Now people may comment that firefox is no memory hog. People, once you use Chrome, firefox looks like a fox with a butt larger than Manuel Uribe. Believe me.

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