UK embraces Twitter

It was established as a communication tool for geeks and now counts showbusiness stars and the American president among its users, says The Independent.

The popularity of Twitter, the micro-blogging service used by president Barack Obama to remind Americans to vote, and by tennis player Andy Murray to update fans on the weather, has risen so much that it has seen its visitor numbers increase by nearly 1 000% among UK users.

Latest figures from Hitwise, the online intelligence service, show a 974% increase in traffic, jolting Twitter from the 2 953rd most popular site among UK users to the 291st most visited by mid-January.

South Korea's Samsung Electronics posted its first ever quarterly loss today, joining a host of technology companies, including Microsoft and Nokia, suffering from diving prices and slumping demand, reports the guardian.co.uk.

But Internet search giant Google proved relatively resilient to the economic gloom, joining Apple and IBM as one of the rare bright spots in the battered tech sector.

Consumer demand for computers, phones, TVs and other gadgets has slumped as the financial crisis grew into a broad recession that has already engulfed the US and much of Europe, and has damped demand in once-resilient emerging markets.

The Apple Macintosh desktop is officially 25-years-old and, while Apple's market share may still be small compared with Windows-based PCs, its users are, to say the least, a loyal and enthusiastic bunch, according to PC Magazine.

So what attracts such a fierce following? Design, design, and did we mention design?

With Steve Jobs at the helm, Apple put its money on blazing the trail in terms of form factor and the user interface, and it has certainly paid off in spades. And while some model lines were eventually retired (remember the Apple eMac?), others endure.

Enabling video game players to help make games, as well as play them, is becoming more than just a fad due to Electronic Arts' Spore and Sony Computer Entertainment's LittleBigPlanet, reports Reuters.

New expansions of Spore from Electronic Arts' Maxis studio continue to put creativity in the hands of gamers, and a sequel is in the works for LittleBigPlanet, both of which stand out with their user-generated content.

Spore is essentially a collection of editing tools that allows players to create creatures and then guide them through evolution, with over 65 million player-made creatures, spaceships and buildings so far posted on Spore.com.