Niantic CEO’s Twitter account gets hacked

Niantic CEO John Hanke joins the list of high-profile Twitter users to get hacked. On July 31^st, a series of tweets appeared on his feed with the hashtag OurMine. The hackers claim it came from Brazil, where his company’s game Pokémon Go has yet to be released. Interestingly enough, OurMine is an actual company that claims to assess social network account security—making it seem like the hack is a marketing stunt that encourages users to upgrade the security of their profiles. The public’s reaction to the hack though is generally negative as they claim it’s a poor way to get that message across or even to express any criticisms about the game.

Source: CNET

Twitter introduces a new night mode into Android app

If you’ve been waiting for a night mode version of Twitter, Android users are getting dibs. The app released a simple implementation of it. There’s a toggle in the slide out menu to switch Night Mode on and off. No, you can’t see it automatically switch over at a certain time in the day but it’s pretty easy to enable it anyway. Your Android app should be getting the updated version already. No word yet though when the feature is coming to the iOS app though.

Twitter to let users apply to be a verified account

Twitter is offering its users the “blue tick” badge to all its users. This symbol for verified accounts was first made available to high-profile users, such as celebrities, politicians, public figures, etc.  But now all users can apply to get that blue tick attached to their profile. According to Twitter’s Tina Bhatnagar, Twitter’s goal is to give users access to “high-quality accounts to follow, and for creators and influencers—no matter where they are in the world—to easily connect with a broader audience.”

If you want to apply for the badge, you can check this link to access the online application form and Twitter will need you to meet some criteria, including a verified phone number, email address, website, and public tweet settings attached to them.

Source: Twitter | Via: The Guardian

Stickers are coming to Twitter with hashtag searches

It is clear now that we're slowly moving away from purely textual communication and slowly embracing various other forms of expressions beyond emoji, animated .gifs, stickers and funky text effects. We've seen what Apple has planned for iMessage in iOS 10 and now Twitter is giving users a wider palette of expression with stickers which you can search for using hastags. It's the Snap-chatization of messaging on a wider scale and more ironically, these features were all telegraphed by BlackBerry's BBM years ago, but not enough people were listening. We'll it looks like we're all listening now as this is an inevitable evolution of messaging applications.

Source: The Verge