Raid that killed Osama bin Laden unknowingly liveblogged on Twitter

The raid that killed Osama bin Laden was unknowingly liveblogged on Twitter by Sohaib Athar, an IT consultant, and Mohcin Shah.

Here’s a timeline of Sohaib tweets using his handle ReallyVirtual:

http://tweetlibrary.com/damon/osamaraidlivetweets

It’s worth it to go read the rest of his updates because ReallyVirtual is quite a witty guy.

Thanks to sippoin for the news. 

Rumors that Skynet, the artificial intelligent system, has taken over Amazon is unfounded. But Amazon EC2 is still down.

Skynet

Dear BuzzGrowlers,

You may have noticed that BuzzGrowl is not growling today. This is due to an outage at one of our web infrastructure partners, Amazon. Amazon EC2 went down yesterday at 1:42am PT. This affects a number of start-up companies including Foursquare, Quora, Reddit and us at BuzzGrowl.

To address this issue, we immediately created a static BuzzGrowl. While you won’t be able to see any social media posts on your growl, you can continue to share to Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, without interruption.

You can see the status of Amazon EC2 services on their rather technical dashboard with easy-to-read green/red icons. You can also read more about Amazon Cloud’s two-day outage at Forbes Blog and CNN.

Sorry for the outage. We’ll post an update as soon as we have a better idea of when things will get back to normal. And oh yes, Skynet’s takeover of Amazon was simply just a rumor!

Sincerely,

The team at buzzgrowl

BuzzGrowl, a cool, new social way to shop online, adds real-time shopping coupons

Smart shoppers, fashionistas crazy about off-price online shopping, geeky thrifty tchotchke collectors, this one is for you: BuzzGrowl is launching real-time shopping coupons on BuzzGrowl today.

Using BuzzGrowl is a cool, new, social way to shop online

If you’ve been using BuzzGrowl for a while, you know that BuzzGrowl lets you see what others are saying or recommending about products (or articles) on a site in the form of a growl. Users on say, the uber-fashionable ultra-trendy site, urbanoutfitters.com, will see tweets like this.

  

But what’s online shopping without the free shipping offer, the off-price bargain, the discount c_o_u_u_u_p_o_n ?

A hotter, better, social way to shop online: BuzzGrowl with coupons

Now shoppers don’t have to search for shopping coupons or offers, BuzzGrowl will automatically let them know if there’s one while they are online shopping. Its never been easier to find shopping coupons and offers at just the right time.

See this green icon?

Saving icon

Did you see it? Here it is again.

Saving iconSaving iconSaving iconSaving iconSaving iconSaving iconSaving iconSaving icon

If you see this, click on it because it represents dollars you could be saving! This icon indicates shopping coupons for the site you’re on, that’s elsewhere on the web.

Why?  Just so you can save that extra bit of dollars on a dress (or on that cool alien facehugger plush) to buy the latest fad lip gloss (or the even cooler Star Wars garden jawa lawn ornament)!

BuzzGrowl is an app add-on for your browser. It is available for Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer. BuzzGrowl is the top social plug-in on the Chrome web store. You’ll be able to see coupons and offers for over 30,000 retailers. Give it a whirl and a spin today! 

Here’s several online sites where BuzzGrowlers have already found shopping coupons.

Victoria Secret discountCafepress discount

Twitter Arms Marketers With More Tools to Target Users

Twitter is arming marketers with more tools to help them target users with a new followers dashboard and the ability to aim messages at specific locations. The changes, while not ground-breaking, show how the company is working to improve its business plan by making it easier for marketers to use the network to reach consumers. This is an essential part of Twitter’s monetization plan, making companies more comfortable in leveraging Twitter to advertise to its user base.

What is BuzzGrowl premium for websites and blogs?

BuzzGrowl for sites is the technologically advanced social media add-on for your website or blog

BuzzGrowl for websites and blogs helps you show social media about your website on your website. It looks like this, and appears on the bottom right corner of your web page. (not to be confused with our free social media app which is the leading social media app on the Chrome web store. see note at end of this blog post for details)  

BuzzGrowl is a must-have for your website or blog

  • It’s fun!
  • It lets your website visitors know how popular you are
  • It encourages your community to share because they see other people sharing (unlike static share buttons like those by addtoany, addthis, shareaholic)
  • It makes it easy to share via the easy tweet, retweet, facebook buttons. Sharing drives new traffic to your site
  • It enables your community to connect with each other, building a stronger community 
  • Did we say it’s fun yet?
  • Er, ignore that green dollar button … that’s a secret feature I’m testing that we’ll launch soon … shhhh.

BuzzGrowl premium has all the bells and whistles you need

Powerful content rules

You can define rules to control the social media content that is “growled” at your website visitors or blog readers.

Selecting Include posts about sub domains as shown above, means you include any tweets or facebook posts linking to your domain and subdomains (e.g., buzzgrowl.com and blog.buzzgrowl.com and buzzgrowl.com/news). Not selecting it means it’ll only show posts linking to your domain, e.g., buzzgrowl.com, but not posts that link to blog.buzzgrowl.com.

Not selecting Include replies as shown above, means you don’t want blog readers to see @ replies. Twitter defines replies as those tweets starting with @ and we use the same definition. For example, if the tweet reads “@modcloth love this skirt” this tweet reply will not show to your website visitors. Tweets like “love this skirt @modcloth” are not replies per twitter’s definition so they are not affected by this rule (i.e., “love this skirt @modcloth” will show on BuzzGrowl).

If you don’t have alot of tweets, we suggest you select Include retweets, as shown above. Again, we use Twitter’s definition so retweets are defined as anything that starts with “RT” or that use the new twitter retweet function.

Flexible style

Theme         

Now the fun part begins - styling your BuzzGrowl! Choose light or dark or Custom if you want to add your own CSS. However, if you want more time to spend in the sun or to make almond butter, leave the theme to us! Choose Auto and BuzzGrowl automatically designs BuzzGrowl to match the font, colors and styling of your website. Its like magic, right? Yah, we think so too :P

Animation        

Want BuzzGrowl to buzz all the time? Choose Fixed. You can also choose BuzzGrowl to fly or fade in. We recommend Fixed as data shows people share more when they see others sharing.

That’s it! That’s BuzzGrowl premium. Don’t forget to try it out free for 30 days. I mean, you already made it so far, give it a spin! No credit card required. If you don’t like it, let us know. You never know, we may build it because we always love new ideas.

twitter bird Tweet

p/s BuzzGrowl is also available free to everyone. Install it on the Chrome web store here. We are the leading social media app on the Chrome web store, growing faster than addthis, shareaholic, the tweet button, cortex, layers, etc.