It's not every day we see Windows Phone being used to launch a major new feature, but Twitter has done just that. An update to its official app has just enabled automatic translation if you happen to be reading a person's tweet that isn't in English. The tweet isn't translated in your actual timeline; instead you have to manually click through, but that's nothing to complain about. Microsoft's Bing Platform, also released yesterday, is likely being used as the backend, so this feature could very well come to Twitter's official apps on Android and iOS (not to mention a whole range of other apps) in the near future.

As was mentioned in the WWDC 2013 keynote, the forthcoming iTunes Radio will feature a dedicated Twitter #music station. The Twitter #music station will allow users to listen to trending songs that are shared on Twitter with an option to buy the songs via the iTunes Music Store.

But as The Verge points out, iOS already has a dedicated Twitter #music app that is struggling to gain popularity. The agreement between Apple and Twitter to include a dedicated Twitter #music station obviously works out well for both companies. Apple gets access to social feeds from one of the most popular social networks ever, including increased revenue streams from users who buy tracks from the Twitter #music stream. But Twitter may be the biggest beneficiary in the agreement as inclusion of a dedicated Twitter #music station gives the company's fledgling music service an increased awareness to hundreds of millions of users.

Vine is a way to shoot short videos and share them on Twitter, but it's been an iOS exclusive for the last few months. Well, Twitter has finally seen fit to grace the lowly Android users with some mini videos. Happily, the interface has a bit of Holo to it.

The Vine app is still propagating in the Play Store, so don't be alarmed if the link doesn't work yet. Once you get up and running, you'll be able to shoot 6 second videos with sound. That might not sound terribly impressive, and from a technical perspective, it isn't. Vine is useful because it makes sending videos over Twitter much easier.

Vine for Android will be available on phones running 4.0 or higher. The Twitter blog post promises future updates will bring support for front-facing cameras, search, mentions, hashtags, push notifications, and Facebook sharing. If the initial release is sounding a bit barebones, the Android version is at least getting a unique feature: zoom. Twitter promises more Android-only features in the future.

Twitter on Friday updated the website for Twitter Music, the company’s music discovery service, to better emphasize its charts feature. The new site features top categories like “emerging,” “popular” and “hunted,” as well as breaking down music categories by genre. It’s a push to offer users easier music discovery and navigability. Charts are Web-only right now, but I’d guess it’ll be coming to the mobile app soon enough. No word on how well the service is doing since its launch in April.

Social media could "provoke great masses”, said Binali Yıldırım, Turkey's Transportation, Maritime and Communication Minister, when he announced that the country is planning to block access to Facebook and Twitter in order to prevent a “threat to public safety.”

In May, the Turkish government announced the new measure would take place in August and thousands of Turks concentrated in some 40 cities and towns around the country. Turkey’s Internet regulator wanted to introduce a selection of filters that users would choose from before browsing the Internet. Also, some words could be banned, such as “blond” and “sister-in-law”.

According to the journalist Olcay Aydilek of the Turkish newspaper Habertürk, Yıldırım affirmed that social media is a “threat” and “measures must be taken.”  The block would be momentary or last only a few hours, a report said.

Ministry's reports allegedly showed that the social networks acted as a "catalyst" that generated ethnic and religious confrontations at times of crisis, especially after attacks by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). For instance, in July two Turkish soldiers were killed and ten others were wounded in a clash with terrorists in south-eastern province of Hakkari.

Besides, Yıldırım appeared in the television saying that these kind of social sites were “very effective” after a deadly bomb attack in Gaziantep, near the police station, on 20 August, the second day of the Ramadan. People published on social sites  "false reports of a second bombing, and claims that the Peace and Democracy Party offices in the city were torched. These are very troubling," he said.

Likewise, the minister stated that these platforms facilitated the revolutions in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, calling them “revolutions of communication.” He said that social media may have caused “good things to happen there but it could also be used to provoke great masses and misguide them.”

In an attempt to not be called as “censorship”, Yıldırım contacted Turkey's Information Technology and Communication Board (BTK) to create a balanced way to interfere with Turkish Internet users' access to Facebook and Twitter.

Turkey has 31 million Facebook users and 9 million Twitter users; 18,4 million of them use internet 34 hours per month.

The French organisation Reporters Without Borders released in March its list of the 12 “Enemies of the Internet”. China, Cuba, North Korea and Syria are at the top of the list, but other countries are under surveillance, such as Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia. However, with this new measure, Turkey may climb up soon a big number of positions.

Two-step verification has proved a very effective method in keeping online accounts secure. In the past, services such as Microsoft, Evernote and Twitter have started the use of the verification method. LinkedIn has also joined the list.

LinkedIn has been under criticism since passwords of millions of its users were exposed in a serious security breach last year. Many users were prompted by the company to change their passwords. The entire episode cast a rather bad impression about LinkedIn’s security.

To counter the damage done and to ramp up its security, LinkedIn has introduced a two-step verification process as part of the login process. Since the feature is optional, users can tweak their account settings to enable it.

By enabling two-step verification, users will be able to login only after they provide the password as well as the security code. This code will be sent straight to the users’ mobile phones.

If you wish to activate the feature on your LinkedIn profile, you can read this link here which provides detailed instructions as to how to turn on two-step verification on your account.

Source: LinkedIn

Iain Dodsworth, founder of the power-user application TweetDeck, announced Friday that he is leaving Twitter two years after TweetDeck was acquired by the microblogging company.

“Two years since the @TweetDeck acquisition and now feels like a perfect time to start something new. Goodbye @Twitter, it’s been marvellous,” Dodsworth said in a tweet on Friday morning. (The picture to the left is Dodsworth celebrating with his soon-to-be-former colleagues.)

Dodsworth didn’t give specifics on his next venture, but given that the departure comes almost two years to the day his company was acquired, it’s likely he was staying through the end of an agreed-upon retention contract.

Questions arose as to the future of TweetDeck in recent months, given that Twitter decided to kill its Adobe Air and native mobile apps. Dodsworth’s departure could be seen as a foreboding sign for the future of the product as a whole.

I doubt that, though. Two weeks ago Twitter hired Sharath Bulusu, a new product manager who will head up the project after Dodsworth’s departure. And the company nearly doubled the size of the TweetDeck team over the past year.

My hunch — expect continued focus on TweetDeck for the Web. In the post where TweetDeck for Air was put to pasture, it’s where Twitter emphasized most of its efforts for the future. “In many ways, doubling down on the TweetDeck web experience and discontinuing our app support is a reflection of where our TweetDeck power-users are going,” the blog post read.