Borneo Magazine

It’s raining in San Francisco. Hard. Trees have already fallen, and the skeletons of cast-off umbrellas are tumbling down the street. This is the kind of storm that drives a girl to social media to watch the drama unfold. And while Twitter historically has been the best place to unearth real-time updates and descriptions, it’s not nearly as compelling as the stream of images flooding Instagram today. Don’t believe me? Go ahead. Try it. Pull up your app and hit the magnifying glass on the bottom left. That’s the explore tab. Now search for rain in San Francisco, or better yet, try searching for the hashtag #Hellastorm. There’s a photo of cars driving down a road so flooded their wheels are invisible beneath the water. There’s a photo of a sign on the door of Santa Rosa Junior College, announcing it’s closing at noon. And there’s the one I just posted of my friend Carla throwing sandbags into the back of her station wagon to stop the water currently gushing into her garage. Embedded i...

Image source from wired.com. Twitter is finally learning a lesson from Facebook: If you can’t buy it, build it. In the coming months, Twitter plans to update its mobile applications to introduce filters for photos that will allow people to share altered images on Twitter and bypass Instagram, the popular mobilecentric photo-sharing network, according to people who work at the company but asked not to be named as they are not allowed to discuss unannounced projects. The filters on Instagram make photos look like they were shot with 1960s Kodachrome or with 1890s sepia tone film. Although adding photo filters to Twitter may seem like a trivial addition to a social network that processes nearly a billion 140-character missives every two days, it could prove to be an important part of the company’s business. As most smartphones are now equipped with high-resolution cameras, photography and mobile devices go together like peas and carrots. Flickr, which was once the go-to photo-sharing site...

Tesco has removed a sign next to a superhero alarm clock reading "fun gifts for boys" from its stores after a social media backlash inspired by a seven-year-old girl. Karen Cole tweeted a photo of her daughter Maggie pointing to the sign at the Tower Park branch of the supermarket in Poole, Dorset, which was subsequently retweeted over 10,000 times. In a message on her Twitter page , which is now protected, she wrote: "My superhero loving 7yo daughter not impressed when she spotted this sign in @Tesco today @LetToysBeToys." Maggie had pointed to the sign and said it was "stupid." The retailer has now removed the sign and a spokesperson insists it would "make a great gift for both girls and boys." Mrs Cole explained her thinking behind the tweet in a blog post. "Last year [Maggie] started coming home from school saying some of her friends were suggesting some toys were for girls and some for boys. I explained that they were wrong, if the toy ...

Twitter has long said it works best as a tool for serving  up news on whats happening as it happens. Twitter has long said it works best as a tool for serving up news on what’s happening, as it happens. Now, Twitter hopes that will work with commerce on its network, as well. On Tuesday, the company unveiled a program that introduced deals to tweets on the 284 million-user social network. The program, Twitter Offers, is aimed at marketers who want to drive sales directly through Twitter advertisements and is an attempt to kick-start Twitter’s nascent efforts to build e-commerce into its platform. After buying a Promoted Tweet — a paid ad that appears as content inside a user’s Twitter stream — a marketer can insert a deal, such as a time-sensitive discount, which users can redeem on their smartphone. Twitter says it believes that for advertisers, the program will be a novel way to woo new customers to their stores. “I think new customer acquisition is going to be the primary use cas...

Twitter is Already a real time emporium for news. Twitter is already a real-time emporium for news, photos, video clips and 140-character snippets of thought. Now, the real-time social network wants to be a shopping mall for real products, too. The company announced on Monday that it would begin publicly testing a “buy” button that can be embedded in posts to allow users to buy a product with a couple of clicks. The feature — initially limited to mobile versions of Twitter and aimed at selling limited-edition or time-sensitive items like T-shirts and event tickets — could eventually create a new revenue stream for the social network, which currently relies on advertising for virtually all of its income.The test comes as competition in the world of mobile e-commerce intensifies. Still, billions of dollars of online sales are already associated with social networks. Many marketers post messages on services like Twitter and Facebook promoting their products and offering links to external...