Twitter makes another big purchase.

The social media company announced late Monday it is buying MoPub, a mobile-focused advertising exchange, in its fourth major purchase of the year.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Published reports put the price at about $300 million or more, based an estimated values of Twitter's privately-held stock that is being used to make the purchase.
Twitter's statement said that MoPub's technology lets mobile application publishers manage their inventory of multiple sources of advertising.

Twitter, which is believed to be weighing an initial public offering some time in 2014, has been buying a number of tech startups as it tries to transform itself into more of a multimedia hub.

In February it agreed to buy Bluefin Labs, a Cambridge, MA, company that provides advertisers, ad agencies and TV networks with information about social media reaction to television shows.

In April Twitter announced the purchase of "We are Hunted," an Australian music streaming and recommendation service. That deal came a week before Twitter unveiled its own music app.

Last month it bought Trendrr, a New York based company that tracks social media activity around TV programming. The terms of those deal were also not disclosed.

Source: CNN

New Web tool warns people if their tweet will get them fired.

Researchers from Hannover, Germany, have come up the FireMe! Web tool as a way of warning Twitter users if their tweets will get them fired.

Ever wondered if your tweets will get you fired?

A team from the University of Hannover in Germany has created a Web tool that warns people about their reckless tweets.

FireMe!'s goal is to raise awareness about the dangers and consequences of people being reckless online.

Kawase said he thought of the idea after attending a talk at his university about how the Web is influencing the work environment.

"After the talk I immediately started working on FireMe!," Kawase said, adding that he thought it would be a fun topic for research.

According to New Scientist, the team found that in a single week last June, nearly 22,000 people had tweeted about their boss or work in a negative way.

In order to illustrate just how extreme some tweets can get, FireMe! provides examples of actual tweets that got people fired.

Gilbert Gottfried was fired by Aflac for joking about the tsunami that hit Japan. New York University law fellow Nir Rosen resigned from his fellowship after his remarks about Lara Logan's sexual assault.

So how does FireMe! work?

According to Kawase, the system crawls Twitter with a set of predefined sentences that mention something negative about bosses or the workplace.

"Before it was an alert system — once we identified the user who had said something bad, a tweet was sent to warn them about the dangers of sharing such comments," Kawase said.

The alert system received a mixed response, Kawase said.

"Most people didn't care about getting fired," he said. "Still, 6 percent of users who got the alert actually deleted the tweets."

Twitter recently requested Kawaze to stop this alert system because it was violating the company's policy.

Today, Kawase's team has a website where people can see "bad tweets" via a live stream and check their own FireMe! score on the FireMeter.

Kawaze adds that the FireMeter is non-scientific. "It's goal is to improve engagement with the website," he said. "It's a mixed calculation considering the number of mentions to the boss, work and profanity in the users' timeline."

Source: MSN, New Scientist