While researching the new updates to Twitter’s third party app authorization process, something interesting caught my eye in the Google search results for “twitter”… Twitter itself came up as number one return, but Lance Arrmstrong’s Twitter account came up as number two- above the wikipedia entry for twitter, news, the twitter search engine, Twitter’s facebook page, reviews, and videos.

I don’t know about you but it is an everyday battle with designers, developers and clients on what the proper terminology for a box that holds content on the website is called. As a designer I know it as a module, for developers it is known as a widget and for clients it is known as the whatchamacallit/box/thing.

How can one simple box have so many different names for it? Why can’t the world wide web use one name instead of a range of names?

Today I got this email from Twitter, alerting me to changes in their third party app authorization rules and URL shortening. I have included it here in full…

Sprites originated from video game design from the early days of computers. The computer would grab one image at a time from a large group of images. Contrary to popular belief they are all not all sliced separate images. It is easier to create one large image; you can combine an unlimited number of images into one. In CSS it is the same principle when applying a navigation or buttons in regular and highlighted states.

I have been closely watching the news and sentiment surrounding the launch of Facebook Places over the last two days. Like most new Facebook announcements, it has been greeted with dislike, distrust, and much harumphing and discussion in the user community.

There are a LOT of tools for monitoring and tracking in Twitter. Tools that can track terms, occurrences, users, demographics, locale, etc as they happen according to a wide range of parameters. Here, I will only mention those tools that claim to measure SENTIMENT or the “feel” of the user on a topic – automatically. Many are free and some are only available as part of a paid subscription service.

Last October Facebook announced plans to remove the application boxes and application info sections from facebook pages, as well as reduce the width of application tabs in order to slim down for a new sleeker look.

Sometime during the week of August 23rd, those changes will be going into effect.

According to popular social media blog/news site Mashable (who have gained exclusive information), Twitter will soon be rolling out an official TWEET button for websites.

I logged into my personal Twitter account on friday and was surprised to see a new “feature” in my top right info box.

Twitter was making suggestions on who I should follow (rather than suggesting related Twitter links, applications and definitions like it had done in this space before.)

Today I received a free $50 credit from Facebook in my inbox to try out Facebook ads. So I clicked the link in the email and walked myself through the process of creating an ad – and snagged screenshots along the way.

While I didn’t actually end up completing the process, I thought I would share the images of my test walk through with you in order to give you a rough idea of the INITIAL process.