Broadband - Opinions

Just how much is Twitter's burn rate?

Relentless biz-blogger Kara Swisher is pushing again for Facebook to acquire Twitter. Twitter will never IPO on its own, she says, and Facebook is Twitter's most natural fit as a parent company.

Was Facebook or Burger King right about user privacy?

Few Facebook applications manage to attain the level of viral adoption and mainstream stream press coverage that Burger King's Whopper Sacrifice application have received. By offering users a coupon for a free Whopper in exchange for deleting ten fri...

Five Twitter tools I use

I wouldn't call myself a power Twitterer, but I've been using the brevity-focused social network site since last April, largely via auto-posted headlines from my Alpha Doggs network research blog. More recently, I've gotten into the habit of posting ...

Twitter limits searches on site ... why?

Two Twitter questions have been nagging at me: Why on Earth would Twitter limit the number of searches a user may conduct -- a typical, relatively new user, such as me, not some piggy third-party app or bot?

We need a mobile broadband space race

On October 4, 1957, Russia launched Sputnik, the world's first-ever man-made satellite, into Earth orbit.

Why you can't trust 'friends' on Facebook

Every form of communication, from snail-mail to e-mail, chat and others, is subject to fraud and scams. But social networks like Facebook are subject to new, more dangerous opportunities for fraud.

What's an ISP? (That's not a trick question)

As President-elect Barack Obama begins fleshing out his agenda, one promising sign is that he considers Internet infrastructure to be key, judging from both his stated goals and the caliber of people he's asking to advise him on policy.

Post on Twitter by talking into a phone

Microblogging on Twitter is great. But sometimes you're just too busy to sit down and type that 140-character tweet. Maybe you're climbing a volcano, sprinting through the airport or running a marathon and just can't stop to type. Here's how to post ...

FWIW -- The origins of 'Net shorthand

Leetspeak, Internet shorthand, computer jargon for instant messaging -- whatever you call them, initialisms like BRB, LOL and BTW have now entered the public lexicon. (I know a few teenagers who actually say LOL to each other in person!)

How IPv6 is like the US financial crisis

Not long ago, the powers-that-be detected an impending crisis. To resolve it, they rushed into action crafting a proposal that represented an unprecedented upheaval of existing infrastructure. On the grounds that "something needed to be done" to aver...

Google has gone and redefined 'beta'

The question of why so many Google products are classified "beta" -- and classified thusly for so long -- has knocked around the tech press for some time. However, no one really seemed to know the answer, at least no one outside of Google.

I want my mobile social address book

Business cards are as obsolete as fax machines. And like fax machines, business cards have us still using paper to move electronic data from one digital system to another.

Predicting Wi-Fi performance: Can it be done?

Whenever I plan and configure an enterprise WLAN system, I always advise that an additional 10 to 20 percent of the capital budget be reserved for expansion and filling in holes in coverage or capacity that couldn't be anticipated during the planning...

Sarah Palin demonstrates the peril of webmail

If you needed any more reminders about why it isn't a good idea to use external mail services to conduct critical business, the recent break-in to US Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's [email protected] Yahoo inbox should be it. ...