The new year brought a treat for those who like to follow aging media moguls, with the launch of official Twitter accounts belonging to both News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch and his wife Wendi Deng, including some awkward banter around a tweet that Murdoch later deleted. The only problem with the voyeuristic appeal of this exchange, however, is that Deng wasn’t the real thing — although the account was marked as “verified,” with Twitter’s blue check mark, it was revealed to be a fake on Tuesday. A simple slip-up? Perhaps, but one that reinforces how little we know about Twitter’s verification process, something that is becoming more and more important as the service grows.

When Murdoch showed up on Twitter on December 31, there was widespread skepticism about whether it was the real News Corp. billionaire or not, despite the fact that the account was marked as verified. But a tweet from Twitter co-founder and chief product officer Jack Dorsey confirmed that it was the real Murdoch — and the “verified” check-mark, combined with the apparent back-and-forth between the Wendi Deng account and Murdoch’s, convinced many that it was also real (although some, including publishing industry veteran Michael Wolff, continued to doubt this).

How was the account verified? We don’t know

On Tuesday, however, it emerged that the Wendi Deng account had been set up as a prank by a British man, who said he “set up the account for a laugh” during the holidays, when he saw how much attention the Murdoch account was getting. The account’s creator said that he was as surprised as anyone when his account showed up with a blue check-mark, and that he hadn’t been contacted by anyone at Twitter about who he was or whether the account was for real, telling the Guardian:

I just couldn’t believe they would have verified such a high profile account without checking it out, but I absolutely received no communication from Twitter to the email address I used to register.

Twitter has refused to speak publicly about what happened with the Deng account, or to explain why it was verified and then suddenly un-verified — and the company has also repeatedly refused to talk on the record about how the verification process as a whole works, and why some accounts are chosen for verification and others aren’t. Even if the Deng verification was a simple screw-up due to reduced staffing levels over the holidays, Twitter’s radio silence on the issue makes it even harder to trust the entire process, and that could have ramifications that go beyond just the Murdoch case.

The “verified” program started with the blue check mark as a beta in 2009, primarily because a number of celebrities had complained about fake accounts pretending to be them, and the company said it wanted to help users figure out which were real. For a time, anyone could apply to have their account verified by using a form on the Twitter website, but this was later phased out and verification is now done on what the company calls a “case by case” basis, including advertisers and partners.

Twitter needs to be more transparent about the process

Given the rapid growth in Twitter’s user base, it’s not surprising that Twitter would have problems scaling a widespread verification program — and in some ways, doing this runs against the grain for the network, which has made a point of not requiring real names from users the way that Facebook and Google+ have. But even worse than having an arbitrary verification process is having one that doesn’t work properly, and one that the company is so opaque about. It’s not clear why Twitter doesn’t talk about it, but this vacuum of information is hardly conducive to gaining the trust of users.

And trust is something that Twitter needs in spades, especially as it grows and becomes a crucial part of the way that news and other information spreads in a social-media age. The network is already in a delicate situation when it comes to issues like free speech, with the State Department pressuring it to shut down accounts that belong (or appear to belong) to terrorist organizations, and other lobby groups launching legal claims against the company because it allegedly supports entities like Hezbollah by giving them a platform.

The company’s refusal to provide more details about how the verification process functions may stem in part from its desire to protect the users it is verifying, or to prevent the system from being gamed somehow. But if it is going to continue to ask for the trust of its users, it is going to have to be more transparent about how it manages the network, or risk losing the faith that it has spent so much time building up.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Hans Gerwitz and See-ming Lee

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An announcement from Google on Friday that it has added a feature called “News Near You” to the mobile version of its news platform isn’t that surprising; the regular web version of Google News has had a similar feature since 2008. But the move is another step toward offering news that is personally relevant to readers, something newspapers and other media outlets continue to struggle with. As more people consume news and other content on mobile devices, location is becoming a bigger part of the picture, but most traditional news entities are stuck on the desktop.

The idea behind the new Google News mobile feature is pretty simple. You allow the service to use your location — which your iPhone or Android device already knows, thanks to GPS and cellular network triangulation — and then Google selects from stories of interest that are close to you geographically. You can also do the same kind of selection by topic you would with the regular desktop interface, but the location aspect adds another dimension to the news.

From the descriptions I’ve seen, it works fairly well (I haven’t been able to try it because I live in Canada and the feature isn’t available here yet), although in some cases there may be no real news from the locations closest to you — and, of course, you have to be comfortable sharing your location, which some people may not be for privacy reasons.

Not everyone is going to want to filter their news by location, but I can see this being a pretty compelling service in some cases, such as when you happen to arrive in a new city or town and are looking for news about wherever you find yourself. There is no easy way to do this currently. It’s true you can go to the website of the local newspaper or other media outlet (if you can think of one), but then you’ll see only their news. Google’s feature gives you news from all kinds of different sources, including blogs.

Theoretically at least, AOL’s hyper-local Patch project could become a powerful source of local news for Google and any other platform that wants to focus on location. All that is really required is to have stories or blog posts geo-tagged properly.

This is one largely technical reason why some newspapers haven’t been able to take advantage of location so far. Most “content management systems” of the kind that news entities use — for publishing both their web content and their printed content — simply don’t make it easy to tag things with a location, or to do so in a format that works well with location-based services such as Foursquare (which did a small joint venture with the Toronto-based version of the Metro International free paper last year).

But even more than that, while some larger news entities may have gotten accustomed to dealing with specific locations, in terms of having “neighborhood” editions or regional pages (or web editions such as the New York Times experiment The Local , or the failed Loudoun Extra project launched by the Washington Post), most newspapers and other outlets have never really thought about their readers moving around much, or how that would affect their use of the news or interest in specific topics. News outlets have typically thought of their readers as being rooted in the ground, and thereby captive audiences.

As anyone with a smartphone or an iPad knows, that’s no longer the case for many people. Thanks to ubiquitous connectivity and smart digital devices, they can consume news and content wherever they might be, and in some cases that is going to be locally-specific content. Google is prepared for that future, but are other news outlets?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user William Hook

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Word on the street is that Nintendo is currently working on the DS2. You probably already assumed as much, yes. But did you assume this: it will have tilt controls, sorta like the iPhone? I bet not. Or yes, whatever, doesn’t really matter.

The point is, early development kits are starting to be sent to some of Nintendo’s favorite developers, chief among them The Pokemon Company. (I cannot believe Pokemon is still around. I tapped out at Pokemon Blue when I was 12.)

The only real news to trickle out from CVG’s source is that the DS2 will have some sort of tilt-based controls. You know, like the iPhone. Presumably Nintendo doesn’t want to cede any more portable entertainment ground to Apple.

As for timelines: you’re going to be waiting. The same source said not to expect any official information at next month’s GDC—we’re still a little while away before Nintendo says anything.

So, DS2. Count on it. You already were, right, gotcha.

Flickr

It’s the new year, and time for some new stuff from Lenovo. The laptop manufacturer announced their latest and greatest recently, the new ThinkPad X100e and the ThinkPad Edge (amongst others).

The ThinkPad X100e is one of Lenovo’s new ultra-portable line, running on either an AMD Neo or Turion CPU. It features a full size keyboard, ships with Windows 7, and is available in red or black. The X100e should be available now, starting at $449.

Additionally, Lenovo announced the release of the ThinkPad Edge, also available with the Turion or Neo chipset, and featuring a 13, 14, or 15 inch screen. The Edge system are said to be extremely energy efficient, and will reportedly run for up to 8 hours between charges. The 13-inch version is available now, with the larger screens coming out in 2Q1010.

Lenovo also made some changes to their ThinkPad T series. The T410 and T510 are the latest versions of their business line, and the only real news about these systems is their use of the new Intel CPUs, the Arrandale. These new systems will be available with the Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 processors. The T410 and T510 will start at $999, and will be available starting on the 7th. We’ll see if we can get some more information out of Lenovo when we visit them at their booth.

There’s some hotter stuff (the tablet-y U1 for instance) but we’ll cover those separately as the week progresses.

First, lets get the technical stuff out of the way. The just announced, but heavly leaked, HTC Tattoo rocks a 528MHz Qualcomm MSM7225 CPU, 512MB/256MB ROM/RAM, a 2.8-inch 240×320 QVGA screen, a 3.2 MP cam, GPS, 802.11b/g, GSM/EDGE, digital compass, Bluetooth 2.0, and yes, a 3.5-mm jack. Sounds nice, eh? We think so. But the real news is that this Android phone might be cheap enough to be either totally free or cost next to nothing once carriers subsidies it.

There is a good amount of the general populous that don’t like to spend anything on phones. These people just want the cheapest option, which is generally a dumbphone. The HTC Tattoo will likely introduce this market to the world of smartphones – and data plans. After all, the data plans are a cash cow for wireless providers and not the phones themselves. We just hope that the good-looking Sense UI runs better on this phone than it did on the HTC Hero for the first time smartphone users.

The phone will launch in Europe this coming October with other markets following shortly afterwards. If T-Mobile USA can snag this phone before Christmas and slap a price tag that says free on it, the carrier will sell a crapton as stocking stuffers.

There have been some other time-lapse videos of the LA fires, but this is the best I’ve seen. Not a gadget, but it’s thanks to a gadget-savvy population (you guys) that as something like this is happening, we get it in real time, writing, radio, news, and in an artistically-inclined format like this.

[Original, via Geekologie and iReport]