NEW: Twitter launches Twitter Dashboard app for managing business accounts

Twitter has launched an app exclusively for business owners to manage their business accounts called Twitter Dashboard, which is aimed at helping small to medium-sized businesses manage communication and engagement with their followers.
Following the launch of Twitter Engage which was geared towards creators, Twitter Dashboard is geared towards small and medium sized businesses as large organisations typically have the advantage of sophisticated tools provided by Twitter ecosystem partners.
In a blogpost, Twitter said:

Twitter Dashboard offers a single destination to get things done as it gives business owners a clear picture of what’s being said about their businesses, lets them schedule tweets, and offers insights about their tweet performance”.

With Dashboard you can:
Easily engage with your audience: Create a custom feed to find out what’s being said about your business. (Chances are there’s more than the mentions you’d normally be notified about!) Use your custom feed to get right to the Tweets you want to see first and better engage with your community.

• Tweet when the time is right:  Now you can schedule Tweets to reach your audience when they’re online and you’re busy doing other things. If you want to edit your scheduled Tweets while you’re on the go, you can use the iOS Dashboard app to update your Tweet queue.
• Get Tweet ideas and inspiration: Kickstart your creative process with Tweet tips geared just for businesses. They can help you start conversations and engage your audience in those moments when you’re not sure what to Tweet.    

Twitter Dashboard is currently only available in beta stage to all US-based businesses as a desktop appand as an iOS app with no announcement yet for a global roll-out.
Image Credit: Twitter Blog

Finally Google announces the name of its next Android OS

Google has announced the name of the next version of the Android operating system on Snapchat and it is to be called: “Nougat”.
Last month at Google I/O 2016, the company said that it was accepting suggestions for the name of the ninth major version of the Android operating system which will succeed the Android Marshmallow operating system (6.0) that was officially released in October 2015.

During the announcement on Snapchat, Google showcased some of the other names that were considered, though it didn’t reveal if Nougat was one of the top choice in its  name suggestion contest with the company also showing off the various statutes representing all the dessert-named versions of Android, before the uncovering the new statue for Android Nougat in a short video story.

Nougat follows in the tradition of Google naming it’s Android operating system after confectioneries starting from Android Cupcake and currently on Marshmallow.
Now we’ll have to wait for Nougat to be released later this year

Apple: ‘Unencrypted’ kernel allows optimization of iOS 10’s performances

Apple’s developer preview for iOS 10 has been available for more than a week, but there’s one big change that people are only noticing now — the kernel code is not encrypted.

The kernel is the core of the operating system — it controls software requests and helps process them to instruct the device’s hardware. The kernel has always been encrypted in previous iOS versions, but with iOS 10’s developer preview it wasn’t, sparking surprise from technology researchers and security experts, according to MIT’s Technology Review.

It’s an unexpected move because it’s now much easier to search for security vulnerabilities, and it was unclear whether it was deliberate or an accident. The Cupertino company has now confirmed that it was done on purpose, and its reasoning is that “the kernel cache doesn’t contain any user info, and by un-encrypting it we’re able to optimize the operating system’s performance without compromising security.”

Encryption and Apple have been one of the headline-grabbing topics of 2016. It all began with two terrorists in San Bernardino who killed 14 people in December 2015. One of the shooters left behind a locked iPhone, which the FBI couldn’t access. The bureau asked Apple for help, and while the company initially complied, the FBI later got a judge to issue a court order demanding Apple to create a special tool that would offer backdoor access into the iPhone.

Apple rejected the order, saying that if such a tool fell in the wrong hands, its customers’ security and privacy would be at risk. The FBI eventually dropped the case, and a separate New York one, after it found a way to break into the respective devices. Since then, the U.S. Senate has been drafting encryption legislation and there has been more and more discussion about law enforcement dealing with locked devices as encryption is becoming a widespread standard feature on smartphones and in messaging apps like WhatsApp.

Producing a non-encrypted kernel could mean that Apple is beginning to encourage developers and users to report more bugs in its software — Apple’s response only mentions improvements designed to optimize iOS’ performance. At the same time, however, opening up the kernel also makes it easier for more people to take a look — and possibly find vulnerabilities or weaknesses in the operating system.

NEW Study finds people don’t read the majority of news they share on Twitter

Social media is now the most popular source for news in the U.S. Web giant Twitter even re-branded itself as a news app in order to reflect this shift in user behavior. But do people actually engage with the millions of articles that are redistributed through these platforms?


A new study has thrown doubt over the perception of social media as a viable news provider. The research, courtesy of Columbia University and the French National Institute, claims that six in 10 people who share news URLs on Twitter don’t actually bother with reading them.

The study looked at 2.8 million shares on Twitter, splitting the data into two categories: one that contained Bit.ly shortened URL links to five major news sources during the course of a month, and one that contained all the clicks attached to the first set. This, the researchers said, allowed them to create a map to show how a news item goes viral on Twitter.

The study’s findings reveal that users don’t click on 59 percent of the news shared on the social network. The spread of this unread news impacts what becomes a trending topic on Twitter. The researchers say that this senseless sharing of news may be having a greater impact on political and cultural agendas than previously realized.

“People are more willing to share an article than read it. This is typical of modern information consumption,” said the study’s co-author Arnaud Legout in a statement. “People form an opinion based on a summary, or a summary of summaries, without making the effort to go deeper.”

In terms of Twitter’s influencers, the study found that when its general users did click on an article it was more so from links shared from individuals and not media outlets.

This indifference toward news on social media could even be driving the clickbait trend that has overtaken the likes of Facebook, and changed the way news companies operate. Clickbait is, after all, one way to attract a person’s attention with the implicit purpose of making them click through to a web page. On the other hand, the increase in clickbait could also be the reason so many people are simply unwilling to read what is shared online. Would you read this article if its title was “You’ll never believe what the majority of Twitter users are doing online”? Probably not, right? But you could end up sharing it with your friends and followers anyway.