Jilted Guy Hides Ring in Twitter Treasure Hunt

Here's a tip: No one cares about your food

(NEWSER) - If you want to avoid driving away all the Twitter followers you've accumulated, you may want to take a look at this list from Katie Heaney on BuzzFeed of 11 things that will really, really annoy them:

• Using your followers as Google: If you want to know what restaurant to visit in a new city, just look it up yourself.
• Tweeting about what you're eating: Absolutely no one cares, unless you're a famous chef. Assuming you're just a normal person, "just put food in your mouth about three times a day, chew it quietly, and swallow. There are no other necessary actions."

Test running in New Zealand only

(NEWSER) - Want to make sure your friends see your latest uber-important Facebook update? Now you can—if you live in New Zealand and are willing to drop a couple bucks. Facebook is testing a service in the country that allows users to pay between about 40 cents and $2 to highlight posts, the BBC reports. A user who spotted the offer and reported it to the media thought he was being conned at first. Nope, said a Facebook rep. More»

We only actually like 36% of what shows up in our stream: study

(NEWSER) - A new study in the Harvard Business Review confirms what you probably already know if you've spent any time on Twitter: Just 36% of tweets are actually worth reading. Another 39% are "just OK," and a full quarter aren't worth your time. That's according to 1,443 users, who evaluated 43,738 tweets. The tweets that scored the best were funny or exciting thoughts, tweets that shared information or asked questions, and even self-promoting tweets—particularly those that included links. More»

They're also a lot more cautious with their content

(NEWSER) - Women are the less fair sex when it comes to social networking. Ladies are a little more likely to delete friends on sites like Facebook and Twitter than gentlemen are, and a lot more likely to keep their pages private, reports AFP . A Pew Research Center study found that 67% of women say they've deleted friends compared to 58% of men, and women are 19% more likely to set their profile to private. More»

Twitter, Path blamed in privacy controversy

(NEWSER) - Leading smartphone apps are taking a lot more of our information than we realize. If you use Twitter's "Find Friends" feature, the company receives every phone number and email address in your address book—a fact that Twitter hadn't clarified, the Los Angeles Times reports. The company now says it will fix the problem. But it's just one of many companies storing user information with a view toward ultimately using it for advertising. More»