Google Joins Twitter

Today, Google Tweets started showing up on Twitter. I guess you know you’ve formally arrived when Google joins your network. Maybe Google is taking Twitter for a test drive before they drive it off the lot?.

Google made their grand entrance with the following post, about 5 hours ago:

I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010

I think that post represents the amount of Dollars the founders of Twitter are about to receive. Follow Google on Twitter.

Schiphol Jet Crash Gives Twitter Shining Moment

Twitter had a shining moment amid a terrible tragedy in Schiphol this morning as a Turkish Airlines plane crashed at the Amsterdam airport. Tweets began appearing about the crash a full 15 minutes before the BBC broke the story.

“Schiphol” rose to the top of TwitScoop.com within minutes of the crash. I quickly navigated over to TwitterFall.com (like many other users I saw blogging on twitter) to watch the action unfold. Many tweets and pictures like the one above are still being posted by people on the scene.

Twitter may well change the way some of us receive our breaking news (head of everyone else).   Is this what CNN was hoping for with Ireporters?

Wind Power More Deadly Than Nuclear Energy in United States

Wind Power more dangerous than Nuclear Energy!? How can that be? You have to take this all with a grain of salt, but let’s line up the facts about Wind vs Nuclear:

Summary of Wind Turbine Incidents (December 2008):

• 41 Worker Fatalities, 16 Public- Includes falling from turbine towers and transporting turbines on the highway.
• 39 Incidents of Blade Failure- Failed blades have been known to travel over a quarter mile, killing any unfortunate bystanders within its path of destruction.
• 110 Incidents of Fire- When a wind turbine fire occurs, local fire departments can do little but watch due to the 30-story height of these turbine units. The falling debris are then carried across the distance and cause new fires.
• 60 Incidents of Structural Failure- As turbines become more prevalent, these breakages will become more common in public areas, thereby causing more deaths and dismemberment’s from falling debris.
• 24 incidents of “hurling ice”- Ice forms on these giant blades and is reportedly hurled at deathly speeds in all directions. Author reports that some 880 ice incidents of this nature have occurred over Germany’s 13-years of harnessing wind power.

Summary of Nuclear Power:

• There has not been one single injury to a nuclear plant worker in all its 104 power plants and 40 years of service in the United States.

Track US Bank Failures Online

Want the play by play on which of your local banks is going belly up this week? After following a tweet posted by @jerell about a local bank failing, I found this index of PR’s from the FDIC. Interesting read and way to track the pace of failures.

FDIC PR Page:
http://www.fdic.gov…(visit external link) – most recently updated today.

Twitter Tools WordPress Plugin

Hooked on Twitter and WordPress Blogging? Simplify the relationship with the free Twitter Tools Wordpress Plugin from Alex King.

Twitter Tools allows you to pull your tweets into your blog (as posts and digests) and create new tweets each time you create a blog post from within WordPress.

1) Once you’ve downloaded and unzipped the Plugin Files, just upload the entire /twitter-tools folder it to your /wp-contents/plugins/ directory.

2) Log into your Wordpress Admin area, navigate to Plugins , then click “Activate” text by “Twitter Tools”. Once activated, you’ll need to perform a few basic configurations. Access the Twitter Tools configuration menu by clicking on “Settings” then selecting “Twitter Tools”. The setup is easy and takes about 45 seconds.

3) To show the last X number of your tweets in your sidebar: Navigate to Appearance -> Widgets -> enable the Twitter Tools Widget. Here you can set a few basic display configurations and choose where to display the widget.