Jacob Hall, Editor-in-Chief of TapSauce | APPS | 08.22.2012 @ 1:00 pm
If you’re the kind of person who lies awake in bed every night wondering what parts of the country use the F-bomb most often on Twitter, you’re in luck! The Twitter Heatmap is a site that tracks the use of specific words on Twitter and relays their origin geographically. As you’d expect, the above-mentioned profanity seems to be most concentrated on the coasts and in major urban areas (including Austin, Texas!). Right now, only the ultimate four letter world and the phrase “good morning” (which is strongest in the Bible Belt) have been tracked, but this idea is irresistible Hopefully, it’ll keep going.
Thanks to a recently revealed vacation blackout for Verizon employees starting on September 21, it looks like we know when the iPhone 5 will be on sale. Internet speculation has already decided that the device will be announced on September 12, so if Verizon needs all hands on deck just a week later…well, everything appears to be falling into place!
Sure, we all hate ads with the passion of a thousand blazing suns, but they’re totally a necessary evil. YouTube has had the good grace to make most of their ads skippable after the first five seconds, making them a tolerable annoyance instead of a detriment. For better of worse, these skippable ads are now coming to their mobile apps. On one level: Ads! Boo! But on another: Ads! But they’re skippable!
Here’s an app for the political junkie in your life! The Super Pac App does for political ads what Soundhound does for music: you open it when an ad is playing and the app instantly identifies it, provides background on where it came from and who paid for it and let’s you know how accurate the information is. If you’re tired to feeling lied to or misled by fishy political ads, this looks like your new favorite tool.
Which TED talk is the most popular? Sir Ken Robinson’s 2006 speech on how schools kill creativity. It tops a list (compiled by TED itself) of the twenty most popular talks since they began in 2006. Be careful if you click this link. As the writer over there will also warn you, these can be addicting.