3
Jun
2010
Twitting Astronaut is Coming Home
Soichi Noguchi is a Japanese astronaut, and he has become quite the internet phenomenon thanks to his totally out of this world Tweets during his NASA mission. The man has been acclaimed worldwide for the amazing images that he took from outer space, with images of famous cities, major landmarks and even the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It has been recently announced that Soichi has finished his mission and is on the way back to Earth by the end of the week –just in time to buy the newly launched iPad released last Friday.
Known on Twitter as “Astro_Soichi”, Noguchi has become well known for his amusing one-liners and very eye-catching photographs. Of course, the big bonus with Noguchi’s images is that the perspective and view from outer space provides an all new look at the once commonly seen vistas of Mount Fuji, the Red Sea and others.
The Japanese astronaut has been able to go online straight from outer space thanks to a new form of technology developed by NASA. Originally, astronauts had to send their messages to mission control where it would be posted on Twitter by NASA personnel. With the new technology, astronauts could now post content directly online without any need for a third party to help out.
The new technology is called Crew Support LAN and is probably the most impressive form of wireless internet technology. Basically, the internet access piggybacks on the existing lines of communication from the space station to mission control. While the technology is impressive, they still have limited access to the internet –videoconferencing is reported to be available for limited periods only.
Thanks to Twitter’s new file hosting service, many Twitter users are now able to upload images and post links straight from their Tweets. The service has been long demanded by many users –especially those who love to upload images straight from mobile phones. At the rate that users have been uploading, it has been estimated that Twitpic will soon overtake the volume of images hosted on sites such as Flickr and Photobucket.
9
Feb
2010
Vodafone’s Little Twitter Incident
What may seem to be a lack of control on the part of Vodafone has led to a quick, and easily settled debacle as crowds thought that the mobile network operator had been hacked.
An offensive Tweet appeared on the Vodafone official twitter page that immediately drew a response and re-tweets from the 8000 subscribers. The post was quickly taken down and employees of the company were quick to apologize and assure everyone that the situation is under control and that Vodafone was not hacked.
In fact, the act was committed by an existing Vodafone employee who apparently had a little problem with his inhibitions. The matter has been settled internally and it was stated that the offending employee had been put on indefinite leave.
While the issue could have spawned a scandal about prejudice and similar topics, the concerns and worries leaned more towards the possible hack and compromised security. Since a network operator admitted to an information leak last year, people have been more aware and concerned about security issues caused by errant employees. While this little stunt on Twitter did not cause lasting harm, the possibility still remains.
This is not the first case of employees using social networking accounts to cause grievance to the company’s target market; which means that companies have to take a stronger step into ensuring that their public accounts are not compromised by access of random employees.
So far, Vodafone is on top of things. With this little issue already resolved, the company is back to doing what it does best. In the meantime, the number of iPhone subscribers to Vodafone is growing thanks to the stability and speed of their 3G network.
Read more about the Twitter message and other related details from Thinq UK.
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