Tech blog round-up: New-look Twitter, Zuckerberg photos hacked and Baldwin’s phone spat

Twitter unveils new look

Twitter has given users a glimpse of its latest redesign, which is based around four key areas: Home, Connect, Discover and Me. While Home and Me are fairly self-explanatory, Connect roughly corresponds to the current Activity feed of mentions, retweets and new followers. The Discover section is perhaps the most interesting addition. Here users will see content which reflects their interests, where they are, who they follow and what’s happening in the world.

The other key development is dedicated brand pages, featuring adverts and promoted tweets.

The San Francisco-based website said the changes are “just the beginning” as it attempts to match the recent strides made by Facebook and Google+. The new look will be rolled out to Twitter’s 300 million users in the coming weeks, but new iPhone, Android and TweetDeck apps were released on Thursday.

Zuckerberg photos ‘shared’ - but not on Facebook

Just a day after a BBC documentary went behind the scenes at Facebook, the world was offered another peak into Mark Zuckerberg’s life when 14 of his personal photos were leaked thanks to a security glitch. The hackers behind the plot posted the photos anonymously on the internet under the headline “It’s time to fix those security flaws Facebook”.

The shots included one of Mr Zuckerberg at home in California with his long-term girlfriend Priscilla Chan, wearing matching red aprons. Facebook later released a statement saying they had fixed the security flaw, but Zuckerbeg may well have had a red face to match his taste in kitchen garments.

Baldwin has words with plane crew

It’s not exactly rock’n’roll hellraiser behaviour, but Alec Baldwin’s obvious love of technology saw him kicked off an American Airlines flight after he seemingly refused to stop playing the ‘Words with Friends’ Scrabble game on his mobile phone while the plane was waiting to take off.

The 30 Rock star posted an apology but was unrepentent over his disagreement with the airline. “It was never my intention to inconvenience anyone with my ‘issue’ with a certain flight attendant,” Mr Baldwin wrote.

Baldwin, who kept the world informed of the incident through his tweets, has now also deactivated his Twitter account.

Wikipedia probe PR firm’s edits

Wikipedia has banned ten accounts linked to a PR firm after it was alleged in an undercover sting that they were editing pages on behalf of their powerful clients. An account called ‘Biggleswiki’ had been observed to add positive information to the pages of Bell Pottinger’s clients on the online encylopedia and then attempt to ‘lock’ out future edits. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales branded the activity “embarrassing”.

But Lord Bell, chairman of Chime Communications, the owner of Bell Pottinger, played down the claims. “I can’t see any bad headlines for our clients,” he told the BBC. “You won’t find anybody, including journalists, who doesn’t do exactly the same thing.”

Chrome overtakes Firefox

Google’s Chrome browser has just overtaken Mozilla’s Firefox as the world’s second most popular web browser - behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. According to StatCounter, Chrome recently crept ahead of Firefox with a 25.7 per cent share to its 25.2 per cent - a sign of how the Mozilla browser has been hard hit by Google’s impressively fast alternative.

Internet Explorer is still the browser of choice for 40.6 per cent (42.8 per cent in the UK) of surfers, but the new kid on the block is expected to close this gap over time.

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