Former Twitter CTO Greg...

In its latest move to get top technical students to New York and started on new projects, the city’s Cornell campus has named a top technologist to a new position. Greg Pass , the former CTO of Twitter and previously the co-founder of search startup Summize , is now its Founding Entrepreneurial Officer. I’ll be getting the details on what the hire means when I talk with Dan Huttenlocher, Cornell’s dean for the new campus, later today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City . But I caught up with Pass last weekend, and got some more about what he’s going to be doing. Since the new campus is going to take years to build, he said he’ll be on the ground floor of the organization, among the first handful of people to help plan how it is going to grow. The program has said it’s aiming to get off to a fast start by moving some Cornell students down to the city as soon as this fall. Another announcement this week made it clear how that is going to happen. Google has agreed to rent the university 22,000 square feet of space out of its offices for the next five and a half years. In this early stage, Pass will be one of the main public faces, helping to shape the academic program to match what startups need in real life. He’ll also be working with students and faculty to create more ways to reach the larger New York tech community, through things like workshops and hackathons. Here’s some more about what Pass has done, via this post by top New York investor Fred Wilson : And the Summize engineering team had a lot to do with that. Greg Pass who was Summize’s co-founder and VP Engineering became Twitter’s engineering leader in the summer of 2008 and has built the team from roughly a dozen to somewhere around ten times that number. In my view, Greg is one of the unsung heroes of the Twitter success story. He brought a calm, steady hand to a ship that was caught in a storm. He got it going in the right direction and headed for calmer waters. I remember asking Greg during the Summize due diligence what his plan was for stabilizing Twitter. He answered that there was no magic bullet. He said they weren’t going to do one big thing, they were going to do lots of small things. The first thing they did was instrument the hell out of the system, they started measuring everything and finding the bottlenecks, and then they started knocking them down one by one. Twitter has an entirely new architecture now. But they did not rebuild Twitter, they just replaced one thing at at time and evolved it. They went from a monolithic beast where everything was connected to a distributed set of services that work together but are separate from each other. And that is Greg’s legacy.

“Hashtag App” Lets You ...

This is kind of handy – and just in time for TechCrunch Disrupt. The team at Lemon Labs just launched a new app called “ Hashtag App ,” which lets you follow Twitter hashtags on your iPhone or iPad. But there are a bunch of apps for that, including Twitter itself, you say? Very true. That’s why Hashtag App kicks things up a notch and supports Instagram hashtags as well. Fun! The app was designed for events and conferences (like # tcdisrupt , of course). However, you can use it to follow any hashtag of interest – not just those related to an event. Another nice thing about the app is that you don’t have to login to either Twitter or Instagram to use it. You just launch the app, enter a hashtag and go. The app uses the conventional “pull-to-refresh” feature, allowing you to update your hashtag-filled stream whenever you choose. It would be nice if there was a real-time option, like Streamboard , though. (Maybe in a later version?) When you want to change hashtags, you just click the “X” to head back to the homescreen. Nice. I’m going to give it a go today from Disrupt and see how it holds up. The app creators are Lemon Labs , a self-described “funky app production house” working in startup mode from Vilnius, Lithuania, of all places. They presented the prototype last month at  a tech startups conference  for the most promising entrepreneurs of the Baltics and Scandinavia. The app’s creators include Monika Katkute, Mindaugas Kuprionis, Marius Kazemekaitis, and Jonas Lekevicius. Katkute says they have not received outside funding, as the company has generated revenue from commercial projects they’ve done before. However, they’re currently talking to potential investors in the Nordics. You can grab the app from iTunes here .

Sure, Draw Something. J...

Pictures of the Prophet Mohammad have always been a highly contentious issue — they’re not explicitly prohibited in the Qu’ran but many Sunni Muslims forbid the idea, while others do not seem to mind as much. Among the latter group are those who feel that banning such images is a restriction on freedom of expression. The issue at the center of the Pakistan-blocks-Twitter story today has been reported to be around a viral activist campaign that’s been running for the past few years to point attention to this. But as with the actual blocking of Twitter itself in Pakistan — there has been no official Pakistani government statement about what is actually behind the current Twitter block at the moment (here is a screenshot of an  alleged email ordering the block to ISPs  with no specific reason behind it) – it’s hard to pin down exactly what content was actually sent around that caused the block in the first place. And at least one group is raising the question of whether this blockage could be related to the government testing an image filtering service — something with wider-ranging implications. A Prophet-drawing campaign started on Facebook in 2010 with a specific page, Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, created in response to the TV show South Park getting some heat for depicting the Prophet. The EDMD page was eventually taken down; but not before resulting in a temporary Facebook block in Pakistan. This year, according to  Wikipedia , EDMD was specifically geared at sending pictures around via Twitter, to protest the arrest of Saudi poet/journalist Hamza Kashgari for writing “insulting” tweets about the Prophet. However, there are a number of Facebook pages that come up when one searches for “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” — not clear whether any of these are “official.” And at least one Pakistani blogger/activist (and, yes, dentist) Awab Alvi has raised the point that there may be no direct blasphemy accusation involved today at all. In a blog post Alvi explains: Ever since the reports emerged we have asked affected users to help  test the site  from their ISP connections and within minutes we had hundreds of reports  The traceroute shows a very interesting fact, the block is at the DNS level, the url is not resolving right from the get go… My gutt [sic] feeling is that PTA is just testing their URL Filtering system, we had reports of them testing some image servers on facebook last week, and it disappeared by the evening. PTA choose Sunday to avoid any legal backlash exploiting the courts day off…. …The civil society has to its credit  a stay order on the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority  preventing them from blocking websites obtained on 19th April 2012 which can be used against them. Once they get through these testing days I am sure it can be later used as and when needed. Though the argument presented by PTA is that it needs this technology to crack down on Terrorism related issue, but one may never know when it can be used for political censorship Regardless of what is really behind today’s Twitter block, the issue of not being able to easily access the social network clearly touches on a sensitive point in Pakistan around freedom of expression: watch #twitterban to see how people in Pakistan and elsewhere are responding to the story. We have contacted the Ministry, Facebook and Twitter to try to get more information on this.

Report: Pakistan Blocks...

Another day, another example of a country making it harder for its people to use the web and some of its most effective channels of communication. There are reports coming in from Pakistan that it has become the latest country to ban the use of Twitter. According to the blog Dawn , the chairman of Pakistan’s telecommunications authority has today imposed the restriction because of blasphemous content: it reports that Chairman Mohammad Yaseen blocked the site today “because Twitter refused to remove material related to a competition on Facebook to post images of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.” Facebook, apparently, has complied with the request, says the blog. Others are now starting to report the same circumstances. Getting blocked in Pakistan is particularly ironic because the two, paired up, played a major role in one of the most important news events to be broken in recent history: the raid and demise of Osama bin Laden, which was tweeted by  at least two people  watching the raids as they happened in the mountains of the country. This is a developing (and slightly confusing) story: just yesterday, about 12 hours ago, Senator Rehman Malik, of Pakistan’s People Party, tweeted that nothing was getting blocked: “Dear all, I assure u that Twitter and FB will continue in our country and it will not be blocked. Pl do not believe in rumors,” he wrote. This is not the first time that Twitter has been blocked in the country: a similar ban took place in 2010 for the same reason. That lasted for two weeks. The move underscores how susceptible social networks remain to higher powers in government. And Pakistan is not the only one. Sites like Facebook and Twitter  are still officially forbidden in China (although millions use it anyway using VPNs — virtual private networks), with the bans often having strong political overtones around people expressing contary opinions. Developing countries with big populations represent some of the biggest potential growth opportunities for scale-oriented social networks — when they can get used. [Image: Farooq on Flickr]

Study: Twitter Sentimen...

Facebook’s IPO was obviously the single most discussed topic on Twitter today. The good folks over at social media data platform DataSift monitored what Twitter users were saying about the IPO throughout the day and came up with some interesting conclusions. Turns out, the ups and downs of how Twitter’s users felt about the stock pretty much mirrored the price of Facebook’s stock as the day progressed. Basically, DataSift notes, every time the volume of negative chatter on Twitter increased, Facebook’s stock price dropped within 20 minutes. “So if people had traded based on signals today to buy/sell Facebook stock,” the company told us,”they might have done quite well.” To create this graph, DataSift recorded 95,019 interactions from 58,665 authors over a period of 6 hours. Most interactions, of course, took place right during the early hours after Facebook’s stock started trading (and took an immediate dive from $42 closer to $38). The company also saw a second and much smaller uptick in interactions toward the end of the day as well. For the most part, of course, this is just a fun exercise in tracking Twitter data. It’s worth noting, though, that quite a few recent studies that looked into the connection between Twitter posts and stock prices found that there is at least a slight correlation between Twitter sentiment and volume and stock prices. You can find a bit more of DataSift’s data, which also takes a closer look at the total volume of posts about the Facebook IPO, here .