Finding out who is legitimate on Twitter’s free Vine app is assisted with the six-second videos seen on verified Twitter accounts, giving users the opportunity to narrow down whether they’re run by a company or just some opportunistic individual. This has prompted Vine to try out different ideas to verify accounts with the addition of Twitter badges to cut down the amount of fakers and install more confidence with its users.

According to Vine’s co-founder and creative director, Rus Yusupov, the Twitter-verified badge-style stamp intends to be an ideal way to ascertain the legitimacy of high-profile so-called Viners. In an article on Mashable, high profile users will be able to tell the difference between fakers and the legitimate people they are searching for.

With not too much in the way of privacy settings, there is an option to create a video within the Vine app and share it with others confidentially, while users will also have the chance to send it to their friends directly from your iPhone or iPod touch Camera Roll. As time goes on, we can see that many new improvements will be contemplated in an aim to create a better app with various enhancements, and a new site called Vinepeek currently lets users view a real-time stream of vines. Although we must inform our readers that this site is unfiltered, so some adult content may make its way to you.

Last week we spoke about the Vine app eventually making its way to Android devices and even though this free application is currently only available on iOS, Vice President, Michael Sippey says this app has been considered for other platforms, therefore we expect this to make an appearance sometime soon. Do you feel Twitter’s Vine app will be more attractive once it is available on all platforms?

The new standalone video-sharing app for iPhone called Vine has recently been launched by Twitter, which allows users to share clips up to six seconds in length that play on a loop within tweets. Currently a free application for the iPhone is available through the App Store, although there’s every intention to launch Twitter’s Vine app on Android.

According to a blog by Vice President of product, Michael Sippey, says the app has been considered for other platforms and will be coming sometime soon. The specifics of Vine’s social video application are documented on The Guardian viewing it as an iPhone only app for the time being, although company co-founder Dom Hofmann discusses the aim of this being more about abbreviation for people to enjoy quirky little windows into the people, settings, ideas and items that are used in everyday life.

Those of you who are not taken by Twitter’s new video app may want to find out more and this can be viewed in a hands-on experience on Mashable, which delivers some interesting insight after they performed tests by uploading videos to social networks. The reviewer explains that some went up immediately while others took sometime.

When it comes to video recordings in a noisy area the sound can be jarring and intense for viewers, therefore this works much better if you are recording in a quiet location. Have you experienced the Vine video app? If so let us know your thoughts.

Twitter is far more than just celebrities tweeting what they had for breakfast or what strange things they are getting up to, as it is also a very powerful business tool as well. The social networking service knew this, which is why they launched the Twitter Certified Products Program last year, and they have recently expanded this service because it has gained more partners.

TCPP is the perfect tool for businesses that need to use twitter more effetely than those with a standard account, and if they get it right the rewards could be amazing for these companies. There are now nine new members added to the service, which you can see a full list of the partners on Twitter’s developer page.

Those new partners added will bring much more to Twitter than without them, such as having the ability for several team members to be able to reply to tweets from one account to another. The likes of Adobe Social allows for a greater integration of their Adobe Marketing Cloud tool, which means users will better understand what tweets have the most value to them.

Bringing in new members is always going to come with added issues, but the hiring of Zach Hofer-Shall should help to facilitate the growing list of Twitter Certified Products Program members. It will also be his job to bring new members on-board, although he will have to evaluate if they will be able to bring more to the program. Apply here if you think you deserve to become a TCPP member.

It is not often that you will find Twitter go down, or Facebook for that matter, but today is one of those days that will see millions of Twitter users trying to access the popular social network and finding a broken page. The homepage will load occasionally although most of Twitter is down, so you can imagine the frenzy taking place in coffee shops, in offices, on the train, and many strange places where users love to place a quick tweet.

The Twitter status page doesn’t mention when the service will come back up, but they do inform users that the “Twitter Site Issue” is being worked on. In a quick update around 20 minutes ago Twitter explained users will experience issues accessing the service, although their engineers are working to fix the problems as soon as possible.

Are you having problems accessing Twitter, is it down for you? We have contacted a few of our work colleagues in Europe, and in the last few moments we have reports of Twitter being down in London, and Paris. What area of the world are you from, and how is Twitter running for you?

We’ll update you as we get more and at the time of writing we’re not sure if the downtime is affecting other related services, which includes the mobile apps. The outage has only started within the last hour, although it is not known how much longer things will take to fix or why the service went down in the first place.

Twitter’s growth over the last few years has been amazing, mostly due to celebrity adoption, and we did see frequent outages thanks to the heavy load. Twitter going down has since become something of a rare occurrence.

O2 customers reacted furiously this morning after it emerged that when they visit a website via their smartphone, the carrier sends the site their phone number. This serious security flaw means that any malicious website can get hold of your number and use it with a phishing attack or other scam.

According to an article at Mobile News the operator is putting in a customer’s number via header information when they visit a website. The security flaw was first found by user Lewis Peckover, and the number appears in the header information so the website can display the page to suit the user’s smartphone an OS.

This data is not usually recorded by a website, but could be spotted by an administrator of the site, and can then be easily be used for malicious purposes. A similar problem is also affecting GiffGaff and Tesco Mobile, but it hasn’t been found on Everything Everywhere, Three, and Vodafone.

O2 has said they are looking into the matter and added that “security is our top most priority“, but will come as little comfort to affected users. The problem was still found to be happening this morning when using a Nokia Lumia 800 on the carrier. Update: It appears that O2 has now closed the loop hole.

Are you concerned about this problem?

Murdoch took to Twitter to accuse Google of being the “leader” of internet piracy, and highlighted free links the search engine giant provided for the Mission Impossible movie. The boss of the News Corporation empire accused Google of “plain thievery“, and according to The Telegraph Google responded branding his comments as “nonsense“.

The media tycoon also accused the Obama administration in Washington of giving in to the will of the “Silicon Valley paymasters” because of plans to scale down online piracy legislation. This is not the first time Murdoch has taken to Twitter to view his opinions since opening an account earlier this month.

He ridiculed British people for the amount of holidays they take, and it seemed his wife took to the site to tell him off about his comments, but it turned out to be a fake account set up in her name. Murdoch’s latest tirade comes as an intense debate in the US regarding online piracy legislation.

The White House has hinted it may not proceed with proposals that would give the state power to interfere with the internet. This is what led Murdoch to make his comments by accusing Google of being a “piracy leader“, and streaming movies for free while selling adverts.

He went on to post further tweets complaining how online piracy was damaging the movie industry, and claimed to have searched for Mission Impossible and found a variety of sites offering links to the movie for free. He did add that Google were a “great company” and that it does block “many other undesirable things”.

Google has responded and rubbished Murdoch’s claims and added the company removed five million websites from their search results that infringed rules, and invested over $60 million to fight against bad advertisements. They believe they are some good ways to close down foreign criminal websites without having to censor the internet.

Do you agree with Rupert Murdoch?

The news comes after the CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection) center told the site ‘more can be done.’ Head of CEOP Peter Davies stated ‘Providers of online services have a responsibility to safeguard their environment in order to minimize the risk to children and close down opportunities for offenders.’

Facebook and Bebo are both reported to provide a substantial amount of data when it comes to reporting illegal activity incidents within their sites. Twitter on the other hand fails to provide as much information, only 1000 reports a month, which is not enough and their reporting mechanisms must be improved.

According to the report at the BBC, Twitter insists safety remains a high priority for the company despite what the CEOP may think. In defense of the site, another child protection organization claims that it is the police force and governments’ responsibility to protect young users from online threats and is not the fault of Twitter or other online social networks that this type of threat exists.

NetClean Chief Executive Christian Sjoberg says Twitter and similar companies ‘are doing everything they can to prevent this activity taking place on their networks.’ The fact of the matter is this type of activity cannot be completely prevented only addressed, which means such activity must be reported and acted upon straight away as the CEOP encourages. Communication is key.

Do you think more can be done to avoid these incidents or do you agree that these companies do everything they can to prevent this activity taking place?

The last Medal of Honor title was released towards the end of 2010, and now it seems almost certain that we will see a new release this year. A report on Gamerzines is saying that after a presentation by the publisher EA, UK retailer GAME took to Twitter to say that the publisher had revealed a new title from the franchise will launch this year.

It has now been deleted but the tweet also said EA would be launching Need for Speed 13 sometime this year, which is thought to be Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2. Late last year a promotional leaflet that was included with Battlefield 3 hinted a new Medal of Honor title was on route, but it didn’t reveal any timeframe.

Almost a year ago in February 2011 Medal of Honor Executive Producer, Greg Goodrich, revealed that Danger Close were already at work on the next game in the franchise. Any sequel has yet to be announced officially by the publisher EA.

If there was a new Medal of Honor game this year it would fill the gap between releases of the Battlefield series. DICE has hinted previously that it doesn’t want to release a Battlefield game every year, which will be unlike Activision with the Call of Duty franchise.

Are you hoping for a new Medal of Honor game this year?

The first thing you will notice is the a refined homepage, when logged in you will now see your number of tweets, followers and the people you are following in the upper left-hand side of the display, beneath this is a box which allows you to compose new tweets, when the cursor goes in this box it expands so that you can see all 140 characters and a add location and an image to your tweet (see below).

Underneath the ‘Compose new Tweet…’ box you now see the ‘Who to follow’ box, here you see three recommendations and you can simply follow these people with one click, or remove them from your ‘Who to follow’ list by clicking the ‘x’ symbol, alternatively you can click ‘View All’ to see all recommendations or click ‘Refresh’ to see three different Twitter users who you may want to follow.

The final thing to see on the left-hand column is the trends section, you can choose your preferred trend location (most use Worldwide) and see a list of the top 10 current trends, all of which can be clicked on to take you to a search page for that particular trend, you can see the entire left-hand column of the new Twitter layout below.

Your stream now shows on the right hand side and looks a lot like it always has, the only difference is when you click on a tweet, instead of now showing details on the right hand side the tweet expands a little and allows you to quickly see who has retweeted that particular tweet.

If you click on someone’s name or profile picture it now shows a popup-like window where you see the Twitter user’s name, user name, bio, a larger version of their profile pic and their three most recent tweets. There are also useful buttons and links allowing you to see more tweets, follow users and add them to lists.

What’s most noticeable is the new top bar which sits above both columns and stays at the top of the page when you scroll down, there are three main buttons which from left to right read: ‘Home’, ‘@ Connect’ and ‘# Discover’. Also on the right you can use search or access a drop-down menu which allows you to see your direct messages, lists and settings. You can also access help, view keyboard shortcuts and log out. Finally there is a tweet button which when pressed shows a popup window allowing you to compose a tweet.

When you click on the ‘@ Connect’ button on the top bar you can see your interactions and mentions, if you click the ‘# Discover’ button you can find out more about all current trends and see a stream titled “stories”, this stream shows images, videos and blurbs of text from articles. We’re not too sure whether this is the same for everyone or perhaps an intelligent stream of stories to suit your interests. We will keep you posted when we find out more about this feature.

On the whole we like the new look but there is room for improvement, firstly we think that the ‘@ Connect’ button on the top bar should light up when you receive an @ mention, also we would like to see a ‘Direct Messages’ icon on the top bar which lights up when you receive a direct message.

Below you can see a screenshot which shows the new look – do you like the design? Interestingly we checked Twitter.com with another account and the new design didn’t show up, is it showing for you?

A new survey has found that almost two-thirds of British users don’t want to be bothered by big name brands, and their marketing on both Facebook and Twitter. According to The Guardian of the 72,000 internet users taking part in the study, British people are less susceptible to online marketing messages compared to other countries.

It was found in the country 61 percent of internet users don’t want to engage with brands on social networks. This compares to 57 percent in other developed countries and 45 percent in Latin America. There is a bigger divide in attitudes regarding the cost of the internet though, as almost half of those asked in growing markets such as Egypt and India would use the internet more if it was cheaper.

Of the British people taking part in the survey one-fifth felt social networks were a good place to purchase products. This compares to a global average of forty percent, and a further sixty percent feel social networks are not a good place to learn about brands.

This comes as big brands such as Burberry and Pepsi are spending big amounts to try and get new business from consumers online. Facebook is predicated to raise $2.8 billion next year with Twitter getting $234 million. Meanwhile Google that makes most of its money from advertising is expected to raise $16.5 billion in revenue.

Do you get annoyed by ads on Facebook or Twitter?