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Follow @neilhimself @neilhimself Neil Gaiman And I guess if you're going to hack @ foxnewspolitics you might as well announce the assassination of President Obama. Why think small? about 20 hours ago via TweetDeck Reply Retweet Favorite There’s nothing even remotely amusing about this: some stupid kids – actual age unknown – have taken over the (verified) @FoxNewsPolitics Twitter account and posted a series of messages declaring U.S. President Barack Obama dead on the eve of the Fourth of July, the national day of the United States. The ‘hackers’ appear to have taken over the account around 2 AM Eastern time, and went on to claim President Obama was shot twice at an Iowa restaurant, that he passed away soon thereafter, and that the shooter’s identity was unknown. By the time this post was published, the account had seen no tweets for a couple of hours, but neither was it suspended or were any of the fake reports deleted, so whoever gained access to the Twitter account may still...

Following President Barack Obama’s announcement that he will actually start Tweeting from @BarackObama, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden has also joined Twitter, under the account @VP. This seems to be the Vice President’s first official active Twitter account. The White House Blog reports that Biden’s staff will be providing updates on the latest news and announcements coming out of the Office of the Vice President, “as well as a behind the scenes look at Veep-life.” In the first Tweet from VP Biden’s account, his staff wrote “VP & Dr. B hope you take time to think about our troops & military families this Independence Day, Happy 4th from OVP! @JoiningForces.” The White House and the 2012 Obama campaign is on a Twitter rampage. As we reported a few weeks ago, as the 2012 campaign heats up, Twitter has become a centralized platform for communications between candidates and the general public. President’s 2012 campaign took over managing Obama’s Twitter ( @barackobama ) and Fac...

Sometime on the morning of July 3rd, Google Realtime Search mysteriously went offline and, assuming it was just another example of things breaking on a holiday weekend, most tech publications ignored it. Well as it turns out the reason behind its disappearance was not so mysterious , on July 2nd Google’s access to Twitter’s special firehose expired and it pulled the feature in order to rethink its strategy. Bing, which had a similar deal with Twitter still has access to the firehose. What gives? While no one really has any details as to why the deal fell through, Google says that it disabled the project to incorporate Google+ results and Twitter says that it will continue to work with Google on other projects. “Our vision is to have google.com/realtime include Google+ information along with other realtime data from a variety of sources,” a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land. It’s not like Twitter will be pulled entirely from the service, Google can still crawl and organize p...