As a football fan I knew this weekend was going to be a busy one with Superbowl 47 being played Sunday night but a couple of other things crept into our collective tech consciousness as well.
The super Tweets of #SB47 – Who would have thought that Twitter would stay up longer than the Superdome lights during Superbowl 47? According to Twitter there were 24.1 million tweets about the game and halftime show. Last years total of 13.7 million Tweets was surpassed by the start of the second half. Of all the planned ads that were broadcast nearly half displayed a hashtag in them compared to just one last year. And of course who amongst us will forget the blackout and the ensuing parody accounts and clever marketing from a couple of Superbowl advertisers that took advantage of it. Conspiracy theories aside, it turned into a great game for all concerned – well except for the 49ers.
Microsoft Might Offer a Surface RT Trade in Program for Surface Pro – Actually they will not be offering anything special as reported by Alex Wilhelm over at The Next Web. This little tidbit was first broadcast via Twitter by our friend Dave McCabe from SurfaceGeeks.net while he was visiting the Indianapolis Microsoft Pop Up Store and it sounded really promising. Actually, it was a nice break from the drone of the sports broadcasters 12 hour lead up to the Superbowl. I am not sure I would trade in my Surface RT anyway – it fills a need for me as a great companion device.
Keeping our users secure – Late on Friday, after most of the tech world had begun its typical weekend slumber, a story broke that Twitter had been hacked during the previous week and over a quarter of a million user accounts had potentially been compromised. The hackers, according to Twitter, had access to usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted versions of passwords. So Twitter forced a reset of all the impacted accounts and Twitter stayed hopping Friday night as the news spread like wildfire. Twitter also used the post to remind readers that they were not the only big company that had been the victim of recent hacks and also threw in the recommendation to disable Java. Good advice but both also totally unrelated to their hack.
So hopefully everyone who needed to reset their passwords have done so and are safely starting this new week.
Have a great one!
