Twitter – Page 12 – Media Culpa

Fake Zlatan Ibrahimovic on Twitter is no more

Regular readers of this blog know that I have been ranting about how someone pretending to be Swedish football forward Zlatan Ibrahimovic on Twitter has managed to fool Italian and international media at several occasions. Well, no more. The account @therealZlatan11 has now been suspended, or the prankster himself/herself decided to close the account.

If this Twitter account will be missed, fear not. Here are some other not-so-real versions of “Ibra” on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/IbrahimovicReal

http://twitter.com/zlatans_offical

and last but not least:

http://twitter.com/Zlatansofficial with 18,000 followers!

Footnote: Photo by Bengavoice.

Swedish TV4 suspended on Twitter

Two weeks ago, Spotify which is one of the most followed Swedish brands on Twitter, were suspended on Twitter for two days without any further information. In a comment to my blog post a representative from Spotify said it was due to technical reasons at Twitter.

Today I noticed that TV4, the largest Swedish tv channel, have also been suspended on Twitter. According to some recent data I have saved, TV4 have some 1,200 followers on Twitter.

The suspended account is @tv4se

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Curated.by has a new look

Curated.by is a site that lets users curate content in social media and share what they find valueable on Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. It is till in beta and works only with Twitter, but yesterday they announced some new features and a new design.

“Today we’re turning it into a place, that let’s you follow the topics you are interested in and create and share your own topics with everyone else.

As part of this process, we are moving away from being a pure Twitter curation tool and instead of just allowing you to curate tweets, you will be able to curate any information into your bundles from tomorrow on.”

Although I still can’t curate any other source than Twitter, there are some new features worth mentioning. For example, there is a tab for “mentions” which is a way for me to find out if any of my curated content has been used by anyone else on curated.by. There is also some statistics on each of the bundles that shows how many times the bundle has been viewed (a bundle is simply one channel or topic in which I create content).

I have created a few bundles like http://www.curated.by/kullin/sweden and http://www.curated.by/kullin/social-media. Below you can also find an embedded curated bundle about the SIME10 event in Stockholm.

Invites to Facebook mail probably fake

Twitter is currently buzzing about invites to Facebook Messages. Many people want to be among the first to try out the new mail that was announced by Facebook yesterday so when they see that you can get one of 100,000 invites by just retweeting a message, of course many take the chance.

The problem is that this is most probably completely fake. Why? Well, first of all, we’ve seen it before. When people were desperate to get an invite to Google Wave, they got tricked into retweeting the message ““RT @waveinvite Just requested my Google Wave Invite! Get yours at http://waveinvite.co.cc” which was fake. The link went to a site that contained material that was NSFW.

Second, how are they going to send an invite to someone who just retweeted a message, when they are not following you back? I don’t get that. And third, there are two different accounts pulling the same almost identical stunt, @fb_com and @FBeMail. Do you really think Facebook would communicate this way, using accounts that were just created? I don’t. So once again, think before you retweet something. It may not be true.

“100,000+ Advanced Invites to Facebook mail Available. Follow @fb_com and ReTweet for invite #facebook #facebookinvites #facebookemail“

“Advanced Invites to Facebook mail Available. Follow @FBeMail and RT for invite #facebook #facebookinvites #facebookemail“

You can apply for an invite on the Messages page inside Facebook. And if you want to see what it looks like when you get the invititation, Jeremiah Owyang has a screen shot on Flickr.

Spotify suspended on Twitter

This morning I was alerted by my Twitter friends that the official Spotify account on Twitter had been suspended. This is the first time I have seen that a Verified Account has been suspended. I haven’t found any explanation on Twitter to why this has happened but will follow the developement closely and update as soon as I hear anything.

With more than 65,000 followers on Twitter, Spotify is the Swedish company with most followers.

Fake Zlatan on Twitter continues to fool Italian media

Seriously Italy, get with the Twitter programme. Once again an Italian newspaper has been fooled by a prankster, pretending to be AC Milan striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic on Twitter. This time it is the Naples based daily Il Mattino that quotes the Twitter account “@therealZlatan11” in an article with the headline “The latest provocation by Ibra. Twitter: Aronica, nobody knows”.

Il Mattino, calls Ibra “cool and cocky”. Not entirely convinced, but suspecting this is the real Ibra, the paper says that he posted the following tweets after the Monday night game between Napoli and AC Milan (about Napoli defender Salvatore Aronica):

But really, it doesn’t take a genius to determine that this is as fake as a Twitter account gets. The English is lousy and way too provocative even for a person with Zlatan’s record of getting in trouble. And a simple Google search would reveal several blog posts pointing out the blinding obvious fact that Zlatan doesn’t have a Twitter account. Previous cases with fake quotes include AP and Sky Italia.

Fact checking, better than guessing?