Followers

Her Twitter followers signed up fast, almost 1,000 of them a minute, to see what she had to say. And Hillary Rodham Clinton, debuting on the social-media site Monday with a biography identifying her as a "hair icon, pantsuit aficionado, glass ceiling cracker," kept them guessing. The end of her bio read: "TBD . . . " To be determined. Perhaps no figure in American political life has surfaced on Twitter quite the way Clinton did. But none shares her position in the public arena...

Taylor Swift is not a feminist. But Clara Beyer is, and she loves Taylor Swift's music and sometimes she wishes Swift would change her twangy tune and be a little more progressive. On June 11, the Alexandria native, a rising senior at Brown University, tweeted: "Idea for a single purpose twitter: feminist Taylor Swift. " Ten minutes later, Beyer's friend and classmate Kevin Carty called her to make sure she followed through. So Beyer created a logo — a picture of Swift's face photoshopped onto Rosie the...

The loaded question of who is Christian has inevitably resurfaced as two Mormons seek the presidency [On Faith, Metro, July 23]. Some Catholics and Protestants reportedly believe Mormons are not Christian; Mormons assert that they are. Who is right? Fortunately, we don't have to guess. Jesus clearly defined his followers, according to the Gospel of John.  Jesus said, "A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.  All men will know that you are my disciples if you love one another"...

A Boston hospital is starting the world's first hand transplant program for children, and doctors say it won't be long until face transplants and other radical operations to improve appearance and quality of life are offered to kids, too. The move shows the growing willingness to do transplants to enhance a patient's life rather than to save it as donated hearts, livers and other organs have done in the past. More than 70 hands and at least 20 faces have been transplanted in adults, and doctors...

Over the past few days, actor Ashton Kutcher has been racing CNN to be the first Twitter user with a million followers. Kutcher and other parties like EA have been pulling out all the stops to help his account gain followers as quickly as possible to hit the number. Clearly, this is a game ¿ and really, gaining followers on Twitter, for most people, is a game. Which raises the question: Should Twitter just remove the follower counts? Engadget cofounder Peter Rojas thinks it may be time for just that.

CLEVELAND — Late one recent night, well after he had tweeted a picture of his traditional victory cigar to his nearly 8,000 followers, but before sending out his morning "song of the day" picks — one each in English and Spanish — Manny Acta scrolled through the stream of replies and messages he gets on a daily basis on his Twitter account to find this ominous-sounding one: "Move Santana down or you will not last long in Cleveland....

Prolific author Max Lucado talked to Religion News Service about grace, the topic of his 29th book, and answered a range of questions from people who follow RNS on Twitter. Lucado, 57, is the minister of preaching at Oak Hills Church, a nondenominational congregation in San Antonio. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Q: You write that people don't have a deep understanding of grace. What's the difference between grace and mercy? A: My hunch is that most people...

It used to be that Twitter followers were worth something, or at least people thought they were worth something, which is the same thing. It was only about a year ago when Jason Calacanis was offering $250,000 to buy a spot on Twitter's Suggested User List, which would have guaranteed him perhaps a million followers before Twitter ended up revamping the SUL to be less monolithic. He never got on the list, but if his offer would have come to roughly $0.25 per follower. ...

Twitter's endless funnel of data is producing an equally endless series of studies — including on Twitter itself. The latest study offers fun tidbits about who is using Twitter and why. In "An Exhaustive Study of Twitter Users Around the World," analytics firm Beevolve claims to have crunched data from 36 million Twitter profiles. What they found probably corresponds to what you suspected: most Twitter users are young iPhone users from English speaking countries. Fond of...

A paid for twist on Twitter. The UK's SMS-based search service AQA 63336 (similar to the US's ChaCha and 4Info), founded by ex-Symbian CEO and former Psion MD Colly Myers, has launched a commercial microblogging service that allows users to make money off of the texts that are received by their followers, that is, if your followers are willing to pay for the messages that they receive from you. According to the announcement from the company today,...

CLEVELAND — The Cleveland Indians gave Anthony Rendon a second chance and he made them pay. Indians first baseman Nick Swisher made an error on Rendon's foul popup with two outs in the ninth, giving Rendon the opportunity to hit his first major league home run and lift the Washington Nationals to a 7-6 win over Cleveland. The inning appeared to be over when Rendon lifted the popup into foul territory, but neither Swisher nor second baseman Jason Kipnis made a move to catch it and the...

ARDMORE, Pa. — With the tease of an ace on each tee shot, players count down to the 13th hole. It's where the shortest hole at Merion Golf Club waits. And at the U.S. Open, that makes 13 the life of the 18-hole party, the off-campus bash down the block from the staid library. Playing in his second U.S. Open, unheralded Scott Langley and Morgan Hoffmann noticed they were turning into Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy as they walked toward 13. Fans tailed their group all the way...

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Kansas City Royals manager Ned Yost could have been excused for missing his team's game on the night his daughter got married. But he didn't. Yost was in Sugar Hill, Ga., on Thursday night with one eye on the wedding ceremony of his daughter, Jenny, while the Royals were playing the Tampa Bay Rays about 500 miles away. "I had the phone out, sitting on the pew right next to me, during the whole process," Yost said Friday afternoon. It...

SAN ANTONIO — An 11-year-old Latino boy whose singing of the national anthem at the NBA Finals set off a barrage of racist tweets earned a roaring ovation in an encore performance before Game 4 between the San Antonio Spurs and Miami Heat on Thursday night. Sebastien De La Cruz, a mariachi singer who first found fame as a contestant on "America's Got Talent," was congratulated by Spurs coach Gregg Popovich and Heat coach Erik Spoelstra at midcourt after he belted...

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama has authorized sending weapons to Syrian rebels for the first time, U.S. officials said Thursday, after the White House disclosed that the United States has conclusive evidence President Bashar Assad's government used chemical weapons against opposition forces trying to overthrow him. Obama has repeatedly said the use of chemical weapons would cross a "red line" triggering greater American intervention in...

Facebook has started to support hashtags, the "#" symbols to identify posts associated with a particular topic. In doing so, the social network falls in step with its rival, Twitter, where the tags are commonly used : Hashtags on Facebook will work in much the same way they do on Twitter. When you see a hashtag in a post, you can click on it and see a feed of other posts from people's profile and pages that use the same conversation marker. Users can also search for specific hashtags if they're...

Companies and celebrities are boasting about the number of fans and followers they've racked up across various social-media sites, which begs the question: Does that kind of following have any financial value, or is it just one giant popularity contest? In the case of Twitter, it's most likely the latter. Don Dodge notes that celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears are closing in on the one-million follower mark. But since Twitter isn't a proven direct-sales...

A few days ago, I noted that Seesmic Web had perfected the management of Twitter contacts. I was wrong. A new service has been brought to my attention that is much, much better. Actually, it's a must-use.While Seesmic Web is great for a number of things (it's arguably the best Twitter web client out there), ManageTwitter is great at one thing: managing your Twitter followers. To use it, you simply link up your Twitter account (via OAuth) and it lets you know which of the Twitter users you...

NEW YORK — U.S. stock futures slumped Thursday as selloffs in Asia and Europe overshadowed positive reports in the U.S. on jobs and retail sales. Cited repeatedly as the cause for this week's heavy declines is uncertainty about how central banks will ease out of the markets that they helped to prop up during the worst of the economic crisis. Dow Jones industrial futures fell 31 points to 14,947. The broader S&P futures slipped 4 points to 1,612.52. Nasdaq futures fell 4.5 points to...