Twitter has finally acknowledged and stepped up its pressure against spammers, who wreak havoc on the social networking site. Twitter has filed a suit in the federal court in San Francisco asking for a trial by jury against five of what it calls “the most aggressive tool providers and spammers”.

Twitter identifies the perpetrators as Skootle Corporation, JL4 Web Solutions based in the Philippines and five individuals. It believes by taking out these entities, it would have dealt with the problem at a root level. “With this suit, we’re going straight to the source. By shutting down tool providers, we will prevent other spammers from having these services at their disposal. Further, we hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter.”

The suit also mentions how these defendants will be held responsible for their misconduct and how it further wants to protect the interest of the platform and users from blatantly abusive activities. Their actions go against Twitter’s Terms of Service, which the defendants automatically agree to by opening an account, the suit says.

Pinterest is the latest social networking tool that is rapidly gaining popularity and fan base due to its design that intrinsically provides for shareable content, which is basically an element of the design seen in most websites. Pinterest has taken this very popular element and allowed users to experiment with the online content of their liking which they ‘pin’ to their profiles and share on a seamless platform for others to see and like. Pinterest allows users to add people who’s ‘pinned’ news and internet ‘stuff’ they’d like to follow making it an interactive social network that is essentially celebrates internet and encourages the culture of social share-ability.

However, there is a raging debate the is currently focusing on the API that Pinterest hasn’t yet released into the public domain for fears on over manipulation and loss of the original social tool structure. API is short for Application Programming Interface which allows developers and programmers to add features as desired and sometime on demand for majority users. The aspect designed runs only on the interface of the social tool and is available for users to use through a financial model which varies from developer to developer. While comparisons are rife about the usage of API and Pinterest’s fears that the tool may eventually go the twitter way that left many developers angry when their additions to the interface were remodeled and integrated into the newer versions of Twitter as a whole.

A one click payment that uses social media login credentials to make payments is being tested by a major European media company. The inspiration behind such an idea was to make it easy for people to make minute or small scale payments, even in the range of 10 to 20 cents. The pay wall structure of online publishing houses can be bought down if the system comes into effect. For e.g. let’s say a user clicks on a link that interests him/her and leads to the article on the publisher’s website, however the article is behind a pay wall. In this scenario, one would have to miss out on reading the article or pay the subscription fee for the entire magazine. The proposed payment system will let you pay for this article alone in a single click by logging in through Facebook/Twitter.

Such a shrewd business idea can help online publishers, media companies, low-priced goods and service companies flourish. The system has been developed by a start-up company in Belgium. The company named Paycento will offer both small payment services as well as large scale.

Increasing pressure from regulators has forced Apple to re-think their privacy options concerning user’s personal contacts. Until now, many apps running on the iOS platform were free to download a user’s personal contact information like phone numbers and e-mail addresses without proper consent. The matter came into light after recent revelations of Social Network “Path” downloading user’s address books and keeping them on their servers without permission. The company quickly cleaned up its act by deleting the data and modified the policy.

The exercise has come to a stage, where it’s become a common practice in the industry. Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram are some of the usual suspects when it comes to collecting such data without consent.

Congressmen Henry Waxman and GK Butterfield have come down hard on Apple and have asked them to tweak the current functionality. They have also raised questions as to why Apple has not taken the privacy of the address data as seriously as its user’s location data. In 2011, the revelation that Apple had an in-built database that could track user location created quite a stir. Apple immediately obliged and made sure such data was removed. Much in the same vein, Apple has said that any application currently collecting user data without permission was in breach of its guidelines. In the next upgrade, it has promised to make sure that users will be asked permission before any data is downloaded.

In today’s society, technology is growing at an exponential rate.  87% of the American population own a cell phone.  61% of Americans get their news online and within this group of people 75% receive such modern information by visiting their favorite or preferred web sites.  The days of buying hard copies of newspapers from vendors are slowly dwindling.  What is growing paramount for the average Joe is to rely on SOCIAL MEDIA in order to progress and live in accordance with their dreams, whatever they may be.

Social Network sites like Twitter are an exciting new avenue for advertising and there has been a lot of discussion around their viability and profitability as a business. The fact that Twitter has been circumspect about its business metrics has ensured that there have been quite a few skeptics about its profitability. In the recent past there have been indications that this cautiousness is misplaced.

Twitter is a young company and is still innovating and experimenting with advertising, they have, after a few false starts, begun to turn heads with their ad units. Hilary Smith SVP for Digital Content at NBC a company that has purchased promoted Tweets, felt that this method of getting the word out was extremely successful and generated a lot of interest and consumer conversation about the product advertised. It has also been felt that Twitter is able to read the audiences better and ensure that ads are relevant and useful for the target audience. This is a view that is supported by Electronic Arts and their promoted tweets that were also extremely successful at generating buzz.