Two men in the UK have been jailed for four years for using Facebook to incite disorder.

Jordan Blackshaw, 20, from Marston near Northwich, and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, from Warrington, appeared at Chester crown court on Tuesday. They were arrested last week following incidents of violent disorder in London and other cities across the UK.

Neither of their Facebook posts resulted in a riot-related event.

During the sentencing, the recorder of Chester, Elgin Edwards, praised the swift actions of Cheshire police and said he hoped the sentences would act as a deterrent to others.

Assistant Chief Constable Phil Thompson said: "If we cast our minds back just a few days to last week and recall the way in which technology was used to spread incitement and bring people together to commit acts of criminality, it is easy to understand the four year sentences that were handed down in court today.

"In Cheshire, we quickly recognised the impact of the situation on our communities and the way in which social media was being used to promote and incite behaviour that would strike fear in to the hearts of our communities.

"From the offset, Cheshire constabulary adopted a robust policing approach using the information coming into the organisation to move quickly and effectively against any person whose behaviour was likely to encourage criminality. Officers took swift action against those people who have been using Facebook and other social media sites to incite disorder.

"The sentences passed down today recognise how technology can be abused to incite criminal activity, and send a strong message to potential troublemakers about the extent to which ordinary people value safety and order in their lives and their communities. Anyone who seeks to undermine that will face the full force of the law."

- via guardian.co.uk

Now you can upload and share images of up to 3MB, right from Twitter.

Just click the camera icon located  in the lower left hand corner for uploading an image (a camera) and add an image to your Tweet (see the image below).

If this information is not enough, you can get details at: support.twitter.com/articles/20156423

Until recently, "tweeple" could only display media from "tweeple" they follow in twitter.com.

But now, the social network site has added in the users "Account Settings" section, more options to choose if you want to display media from people you don't follow and displaying media that may contain some sensitive content rendering them NSFW (Not Safe For Work), see the screenshot below for the options.

If you opt in to receive such information, as soon as you click on the "save" button, twitter will prompt you to enter your twitter account password for confirmation before applying the choice in your settings.

The announcement that can be read from their developers site, reads:

"Beginning today you may notice a new boolean field in API responses & streams containing tweets: "possibly_sensitive". This new field will only surface when a tweet contains a link. The meaning of the field doesn't pertain to the tweet content itself, but instead it is an indicator that the URL contained in the tweet may contain content or media identified as sensitive content. During this initial testing phase, there's nothing you need to do with this field and the field values cannot be relied on for accuracy. In the future, we'll have a family of additional API methods & fields for handling end-user "media settings" and possibly sensitive content."

...effective in identifying people with undiagnosed infection.

A pilot project in which people with HIV encouraged their friends and neighbours to be tested for HIV succeeded in recruiting people with a very high rate of undiagnosed HIV, Elizabeth Reddy of Duke University told the Sixth International AIDS Society conference in Rome yesterday. People who themselves had just tested for HIV also recruited people for testing, but with a lower proportion of their contacts being found positive.

The project is a modification of a partner notification scheme. Partner notification involves people with a sexually transmitted infection (often when newly diagnosed) identifying their sexual partners, who will be informed of their possible exposure to infection and encouraged to be tested themselves.

Recently, pilot projects in seven American cities found that asking people with HIV to contact friends and other people in their social network who may be at risk of HIV infection (rather than sexual partners) also succeeded in bringing a large number of people with undiagnosed infection forward for testing.

The project presented at the Rome conference was established in the rural Kilimanjaro region of northern Tanzania, where the estimated prevalence of HIV is 1.9%. The project asked individuals to offer vouchers with details of testing services to their sexual partners, family, friends and neighbours.

At three villages, mobile voluntary counselling and testing services were being offered, and all eleven people who tested positive at these sites during the study period were asked to recruit others and were given vouchers. Moreover, a random sample of 312 people testing negative were provided with vouchers.

At the HIV care and treatment centre (up to 20km away), a random sample of 75 patients with HIV were also given vouchers in order to recruit others to be tested.

When recruiters passed the vouchers on to their contacts, the recipients could either test at one of the mobile sites or at the treatment centre, with travel costs reimbursed.

Click here to continue reading this article (published at aidsmap.com)

Now that you've started (or soon will start) using Google+, here is some help to help you enjoy G+ features. 

credit: Simon Laustse [there is more in his albums]

Sharing LIVE events has never been easier!

I kept wondering how people used only cell phones to broadcast the LIVE events from Tahrir Square, Egypt, until I came across Bambuser!

Bambuser is one of the simplest ways ever that lets you broadcast live and interactive video from your mobile phone, webcam or DV-camera for free!

It is available on over 260 phone models.

I tried it today when I as watching TV and immediately as I hit broadcast, the video was streaming LIVE online. You can watch the videos on my channel : bambuser.com/channel/nukta77

No need to upload the video later! Once you start streaming after the connection is established, the broadcast video will automatically be stored on bambuster website.

Just follow the simple 1, 2, 3 steps that may take between 30 to 60 seconds to complete and have you broadcasting video events LIVE.

Once you've signed up, you can connect your facebook and twitter accounts and use them to login. You can set up these accounts to update your status automatically from bambuster whenever you start broadcasting. While streaming, bambuster will remind you to put a heading to your video so as to make it easier for people to know what you are broadcasting about. 

If you are a blogger you can put a Bambuster player on your blog where all your videos will be stored such that whenever you start broadcasting an event, it will atuomatically update the player for your visitors.

If you need more information, you can visit the help page at bambuser.com/help

Try it and see for yourself!

Someone asked me how I was able to quote Pope Benedict XVI's first tweet and embed it on the site and yet still displays as if it were on the very twitter page, unlike taking a screenshot, cropping and uploading as an image and add a link to it, making it clickable.

Well, there is no much secret in accomplishing that which I did.  xdamman had already created a service via blackbird wich has become a part of twitter that  can do just that. 

Here are the simple 9 steps:

1. Copy the full URL of a tweet (see PS below to learn how to copy tweets url)
2. Go to media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie
3. Click on the input text field
4. Paste the copied URL (in step 1)
5. Click on the “Bake it” button
6. Click on the text area where the HTML code is created
7. Select all text (press ctrl+a or cmd+a on a Mac)
8. Copy (ctrl+c or cmd+c on a Mac)
9. Paste the copied HTML in your HTML section of blog/site and voila! 

Done!

Gmail has released the Gmail people widget and here is the information from Support page:

The People Widget is located on the right-hand side of your messages.

It shows you contextual information about people you are interacting with in Gmail.

You can communicate with individual contacts easily through the people widget, or just use it to find basic information. 

Click on the contact’s name on the right side and from there, you will see:

• Information about your contact, which may include information such as their email address or occupation. This information comes from your account’s Contact Manager.
• Recent buzzes your contact has posted that are visible to you
• Recent email your contact sent you
• Google Calendar events if your contact’s Calendar is shared with you
• Google documents shared with both you and the contact

You will also be able to easily email, chat, or call your contacts using the call phones in Gmail feature, or edit contact details and settings.

If you have several contacts on an email thread, you can look up individual contact information as described above, by clicking the contact’s name in the People widget list, which will open an expanded view of information about that contact. On a thread with many recipients, contacts are listed in order of who last responded on the thread, who is currently online and available to chat, contacts that whose chat status are set to ‘Busy’, contacts whose chat status are ‘Idle,’ and then contacts who you haven’t yet invited to chat before.

You can also interact with the whole group by using features like:

• Start a group chat
• Schedule a Google Calendar event with this group
• Compose a new email message with all recipients on the thread

How do you disable People Widget?

If you ever decide you don't want to see the people widget, you can do so by clicking the gear icon at the top of any Gmail page and selecting Mail settings. On the General tab in Settings, select the ‘Hide the people widget’ radio button. Then, click Save Changes at the bottom of the page.

The leader of the Catholic Church in the World, Pope Benedict XVI for the first time tweeted via the Vatican’s English language Twitter page.

Surrounded by members of the Church earlier today, the Pope just pressed the "send" button to tweet a pre-written message that reads, “Dear Friends, I just launched News.va Praised be our Lord Jesus Christ! With my prayers and blessings, Benedictus XVI”, a message  that came in for the announcement of the launch of a new Vatican website. Watch the Youtube video below.

Alright, looks like Google is taking it serious in the social network world!

After the aheim "failure" on attempted Google Wave, the lesson also learned in the introduction of Google Buzz and recently +1 button (plus one), google is now working on Google+ (plus google) a project probably destined to compete with the leading social network sites, Facebook and Twitter.

You can read the full announcement in their google blog and see Google+ demo via plus.google.com

You can also read a review by a TechCrunch blogger who's been experimenting with Gooogle+