Twitter’s music page at music.twitter.com is very nearly live, and the expectation is that it will launch today.

Here’s the story.

Would you use a music service provided by Twitter? Is this a smart move for the social media giant?

From our section THE TAKEAWAY:

How Jack Dorsey’s Lifelong Obsessions Became World Changing Companies

Jack Dorsey wasn’t your average kid in St. Louis. He had a speech impediment. He loved maps. He studied trains. He listened to the emergency dispatch center. And he noticed something interesting: Everybody was talking with short bursts of sound.

“They’re always talking about where they’re going, what they’re doing, and where they currently are,” Dorsey recently told Lara Logan on 60 Minutes, “and that’s where the idea for Twitter came.”

The Takeaway: The dots will connect. Like Dorsey’s fascinations brought him from St. Louis to New York to Silicon Valley, entrepreneurial energy has a way of taking you into unexpected—and fitting—places.

Read the full story and see the video here.

How The UN’s New Data Lab In Indonesia Uses Twitter To Preempt Disaster

Predictive disaster relief is the goal, says Robert Kirkpatrick, Director of the UN’s Global Pulse initiative, and Twitter data may be the key. The program uses social network analysis to study living conditions throughout the world and preempt crises. “We found that a combination of food words and mood state was able to predict the consumer price index several weeks ahead,” says Kirkpatrick.

Read the full article from our new section Co.Labs here.

WHY FACEBOOK AND TWITTER ARE NOT MOST INNOVATIVE COMPANIES

The simplest reason Facebook and Twitter are not on this year’s Most Innovative Companies list: Neither produced innovations worth celebrating.

“Both companies have turned their focus away from users and toward shareholders to get bigger, not better. Revenue is great, but not at the expense of the product.”

[Image: Adam Simpson]

Want to see what people are making with the new Twitter video app, the Vine?

Here’s 7 Places To Watch Videos On Vine, Even If You Don’t Have The App 

1. Vinepeek

2. Vinesmap

3. All Around The Vines

4. Vinecats

5. VineRoulette

6. VinesZap

7. Just Vined

Body Buried In U.K. Car Park Is Richard III, Reveals DNA Testing

Twitter is going crazy with the news that a skeleton found beneath a car park in Leicester belongs to none other than Richard III. The news was announced this morning at a press conference at Leicester University, by the lead archaeologist Richard Buckley. DNA testing—seen here on a 21st-century villain—was used successfully, despite the remains dating back to the 15th Century. And this is how they did it.

The first attempt was made by matching DNA of the remains with that of Richard’s brother Edward, using a couple of strands of Edward’s hair which had been kept as one of those weird medieval keepsakes. When that didn’t work, they traced the line down to a Canadian-born carpenter, Michael Ibsen, who was a 17th-generation descendant of Richard’s older sister, Anne of York, and used his DNA. The results proved “beyond reasonable doubt” that the skeleton was indeed that of Richard III, the final Plantagenet king of England.

(Source: guardian)

Some interesting facts about the Superbowl XLVII by futurejournalismproject:

Super Bowl Twitter Numbers

Twitter released some of their numbers from the Super Bowl. They include 24.1 million total posts along with:

• 231,500 Tweets Per Minute during the power outage.
• 183,000 Tweets Per Minute when the Ravens finally won.
• 268,000 Tweets Per Minute at the conclusion of Beyonce’s halftime show.

It also took a mere four minutes into the power outage before the first advertiser took out a promoted tweet against it.

Other, non-Twitter, odds and ends:

• The street value of the silver used in the Vince Lombardi trophy is $3,500.
• The Paul Harvey “So God Made a Farmer” speech used in the Dodge Ram commercial was made in 1978.
• CBS used 62 cameras to broadcast the game.
• A 30-second ad cost $3.8 million.
• It’s estimated that Americans bet $10 billion by halftime on various aspects of the game.

sunfoundation - co.design

Watch Tweets Appear Worldwide In Real Time

A visualization called Tweetping shows us what the world is tweeting—not that we can possibly begin to process it.

Need a little Twitter guidance? Fast Company compiled a list of 

16 Twitter Stars To Add To Your Feed Now

So if you want to:

1. Change The World

New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof

2. Laugh With The CEO/Standup/Sage

Box CEO Aaron Levie

3. Read Fiction In 140 Characters

The fictional Fathom Butterfly, created by author Josh Gosfield.

4. Be Better At Being Happy

Gretchen Rubin, author of the The Happiness Project.

5. Work And Play Smarter

Work-life balance guru Laura Vanderkam.

6. Find Inspiration

Filmmaker and Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain

7. Get Globally Informed

Pierre Omidyar of philanthropic investment firm the Omidyar Network.

8. Keep Up With Syria

Former Middle East reporter and creator of Syria Deeply, Lara Setrakian.

9. Imagine Innovation

Thrive Labs’ self-proclaimed “visioner” Priya Parker.

10. Discover An Alternative Front Page

Editorial director of Digg David Weiner.

11. Get a Crash Course In Media

CNN producerJason Samuels.

12. Geek Out

The Wall Street Journal programmer Jeremy Singer-Vine

13. Fine-Tine Your Pitch

Startup advisor, entrepreneur, tech journalist, and founder of PitchTo Wayne Sutton.

14. Uncover News For Deep Thinkers

New Yorker staff writer David Grann

15. Be In On The Joke

Weeds actor Romany Malco

16. Wrap Your Mind Around Something Different

Penguin publicity manager and Publishing Genius author Melissa Broder.

[Image: Flickr user Thomas]

laughingsquid:

Twitter’s Speech Problem: Hashtags and Hate

As an advocate of free speech, Twitter has held fast to its policy of minimal moderation and censorship, until now. A French civil court has  ordered Twitter to reveal the identity of a number of users accused of posting anti-Semitic content as well as requiring it to have mechanism that would allow it to censor illicit or racist comments and hash tags. 

Soon you may be able to show what you can’t capture in 140 characters.

Twitter is working with video service Vine to offer a mobile app that will let users embed videos into their tweets. 

[Image from Twitter]

A heart-wrenching thread through this past college football season was that of Manti Te’o, a well-liked Heisman candidate from Notre Dame whose girlfriend Lennay Kekua, a reported Stanford student, died of cancer the same day that Te’o’s grandmother passed away.

But on Wednesday, one of Nick Denton’s websites, Deadspin, reported that Kekua wasn’t a real person. At the very least, Te’o, who, some have argued, used Kekua’s story to boost his popularity in college football, was “Catfished” by a group of soul-less Internet pranksters. Or, at the very worst, was in on the hoax the entire time.

Te’o, in a statement, said it was the former. But on Wednesday night a Twitter account with the same name that had reportedly began the lore of Lennay Kekua in the first place tweeted the following (though there was no way to verify the account’s owners):

Others reported that at least one NFL player swore he met Kekua and she was indeed real while others, such as Chicago Tribune reporter Brian Hamilton, began poking holes in Te’o statement.

Pete Thamel, one of the many well-known sports reporters who was duped by the Kekua story, added this:

Nev Schulman, the host of the MTV show “Catfish,” who perhaps is the most famous face of a fake Internet girlfriend, assured his followers he was looking into it.

So what do you think? What did Te’o know and when? And who is Lennay Kekua? Also, crisis communication experts—any ideas on how Te’o can get out of this one before the NFL draft?

[Photo by Flickr user Neon Tommy]