The second screen phenomenon is now mainstream. Advertisers have discovered that you’re using Twitter to chat about TV shows or special events, and they plan to find you.

Twitter Thursday rolled out Twitter Amplify, an official program that lets broadcast companies and their advertisers push out promoted tweets. Yes, you’ll see more ads. But Twitter is betting that the content you get with those ads is worth the push.

Twitter has already dipped its toes in the water of second-screen partnerships. ESPN and Ford Fusion tweeted instant replays during college football bowl games, and the NCAA offered in-tweet highlights (presented by AT&T and Coke Zero) during March Madness.

Promoted tweets go beyond sports. BBC America and The Weather Channel were among the first to experiment with tweeting custom content.

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The latest victim of disruption by Internet technologies is a veteran of World War I: the missing persons search.

French police will no longer search for adults reported missing by their families unless there are signs that the person is in danger. The police have abandoned searches in progress and stopped accepting new search requests, according to an announcement on a government website Monday. The changes took effect on Friday.

Such “searches in the interests of the family” were conducted under an administrative procedure almost a century old, introduced to help families separated during the upheavals of World War I to find missing relatives, according to the French Ministry of the Interior.

Requests for the searches have fallen considerably in recent years, and are now most often used to find those behind on alimony payments, the Ministry said in a letter to police chiefs announcing the changes last month. The letter instructed them to refuse further requests, adding: “You can direct people towards social networks on the Internet, which offer interesting possibilities.”

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It’s not a groundbreaking feature, but nice to have nonetheless: Twitter has added a bunch of genre charts to its #Music discovery service to display the most popular songs and artists trending, in a bid to surface the most popular tracks on the social network.

The charts include ten musical genres, from rock to country and hip-hop, and there are also five additional charts for Superstars, Popular, Emerging, Unearthed and Hunted. The Superstars and Popular charts give you trending songs on Twitter, while the Emerging and Unearthed are meant to help users discover lesser-known artists.

The Hunted charts displays music popular in the blogosphere. Its very name is no doubt a tip of the hat to We Are Hunted, the chart-focused music discovery service recently acquired by Twitter.

The charts use Twitter’s data to surface tracks and artists most-listened by its users, and they are currently available only on the Web version of the service. The iOS Twitter #Music app has yet to receive an update to display the new charts, but it’s likely this feature will be added in the coming weeks. On the Web, you can access the charts from the top left button on the Twitter #Music page.

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Google’s latest Chrome build allows desktop users to interact with its iconic search engine simply by having a conversation.

The new Conversational Search service, already present in the mobile offerings of Google Now, is a big upgrade from Google’s previous voice-operated desktop search, even if it still makes you feel dumb testing it out in a crowded office. Expect some funny looks when you start asking your computer questions.

As the name implies, the fledgling feature allows you to have a somewhat natural conversation with Google’s search engine instead of worrying about carefully constructed search strings. You can simply ask Google questions on the topic you’re interested in, and it will provide results based on “hotwords.”

You can try conversational search out for yourself by updating to Chrome 27. If you already have Chrome you should be able to update in the browser, though on Macs Chrome seems to be having trouble detecting the update. Afterward, go to Google’s homepage, and click the microphone button in the right side of the search bar.

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Unless you’re in a movie, the chances of you suddenly waking up one day in a random part of the world are fairly low. But if you want to live out your fantasy of being completely and abruptly lost, GeoGuessr is the game for you.

GeoGuesser is a game based on Google Street View that drops you onto a random spot in the world. From there, you’re free to look around and explore the area to figure out where you are. The closer your guess is to the actual spot, the higher your score. Once you're done, you can share your score on various social networks.

[GeoGuessr]

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After a series of high-profile hackings, Twitter has finally introduced two-factor authentication.

Twitter on Wednesday said users will now be able to protect their accounts by registering a phone number and email address. This isn’t automatic: You have to select, “Require a verification code when I sign in,” on your Account Settings page.

Twitter

Once you add a phone number and email address, Twitter will verify your identity by sending an SMS text with a six-digit code you have to enter to complete the process.

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If you listen to a song on the Internet and no one else knows about it, does it make a sound?

Pandora is making it easier to validate your music choices with Facebook integration. The online radio service has long allowed you to share Pandora stations with your Facebook friends, but on Wednesday the two companies expanded their partnership. Now you can turn on automatic sharing of your listening activity, and publish specific tracks or artists you like, which will show up in Facebook’s new Music section.

“We’ve worked with Pandora for several years, but we recently rolled out some new features on Facebook, specifically around Timeline, which created a new Music section that shows you which songs you care about most,” Justin Osofsky, Facebook’s director of platform partnerships and operations, told TechHive. “Pandora thought it was a great opportunity to create deeper integration, and allow the Pandora community to express who they are through music.”

Your Facebook Music section will also feature radio stations you want your friends to jam out to.

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Online fan fiction (or "fanfic") has long been a bizarre literary sideshow where crazy people go to explore completely impractical scenarios and insane sexual fantasies involving established characters from all the branches of the pop culture tree. All the branches. However, this darkened surreal corner of the Internet may soon find itself dragged out into the light of legitimacy. Amazon has announced that it is jumping into the officially licensed fan fiction business with its new Kindle Worlds publishing platform.

Amazon has partnered with Warner Brothers Television Group to offer aspiring fanfic-ers the chance to create original works based on the popular book-cum-TV series Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries and promises that additional “licensed worlds” will follow.

Accepted works can be as short as 5000 words and will be published for the Kindle platform with royalties being shared amongst the rights-holders and the fiction authors (fanfic authors will receive 35% of net sales for works of at least 10,000 words, and 20% for works between 5000 and 10,000 words). Aspiring authors will be able to upload and self-publish their own novels, novellas, and short stories directly through the Worlds site.

The 50 Shades phenomenon

For most of its existence, fanfic has occupied its own weird little corner of the Web and was, for the most part, allowed to wallow in its weirdness in peace. But then two years ago, something truly crazy happened. A sprawling piece of BDSM-soaked Twilight fic was scraped of all its copyright-infringing content and adapted into the mom-porn epic Fifty Shades of Grey. Against all good logic, the Fifty Shades series became a gigantic hit and would go on to sell more than 70 million copies in 37 countries.

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Google upgraded Chrome to version 27, touting it as 5% faster as it patched 13 vulnerabilities.

Tuesday’s upgrade was the first since March 26, when Google plumped Chrome 26 into the release channel, the most polished of its three public builds.

Google touted just a pair of changes in the browser: a modest performance increase and an API (application programming interface) that Web app developers can call for synchronizing Google Drive storage space.

What’s new?

The speed improvement was meager, according to Google, which cited a 5% speed increase overall, with even smaller boosts for tasks like printing. To get the gains, Chrome now pre-loads images earlier in the rendering process, and more aggressively utilizes idle network time.

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Some teens are growing tired of the excessive sharing and “drama” on Facebook and more are turning to sites like Twitter and Instagram to express themselves, according to a new study.

“Many teens expressed waning enthusiasm for Facebook,” the Pew Research Center said in a study released Tuesday, based on interviews with 800 teens conducted between July and September last year.

They complained of too many adults on the site, the inane details shared by friends and the “drama” on Facebook, which they find draining, according to the study, conducted by the Pew Internet Project.

“The stress of needing to manage their reputation on Facebook also contributes to the lack of enthusiasm,” the researchers said. On Twitter and Instagram, however, teens felt free from the social expectations and constraints of Facebook, according to the study.

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Flickr always had its share of problems. The servers used to crash. The design was simplistic, then confusing, then outdated. The first iOS app was laughable. But the one thing you could always rely on Flickr for was honesty. From back in the day when cofounder Stewart Butterfield wrote a blog post titled “Sometimes We Suck,” to its current community guidelines, one of which simply says “Don’t be creepy,” you could always trust Flickr to speak simply and truthfully to you.

On Monday, Yahoo relaunched Flickr at a swanky press event in New York. And while most coverage will be of the site’s new design, the most significant changes are to Flickr’s business model. But my takeaway is that the days of Flickr's open and honest voice are over.

About that design…

Flickr’s design has been at war with whitespace since last year’s introduction of the “justified” view. This redesign ramps up that trend. Every pixel that could be filled with a photo has been, from corner to corner, often (but inconsistently) with infinite scrolling.

Until, that is, you scroll down an individual photo’s page, or wander into a part of the site that hasn’t been updated (like settings or uploading an avatar or the help forum). Then all of a sudden you’re back in Flickr’s old design, which is a jarring change. These pages will probably get updated eventually, but launching with these kind of omissions shows where Yahoo’s priorities lie, and it’s not with the community features that made Flickr famous.

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If you’re a New York City dweller looking to make a quick buck by renting out your apartment for a few nights on Airbnb, be careful of nosy neighbors. If they file a complaint against you, you could rack up thousands of dollars in fines.

One New Yorker is the unfortunate example of the state’s crackdown on short-term rentals. Web designer Nigel Warren rented out his room on Airbnb last September, making $300 on his guest’s three-night stay. On Monday, Warren was fined $2400 for violating New York’s laws against turning apartments into hotel rooms. Airbnb lets users rent out their homes (or in some cases, castles and treehouses) for a few nights, a few weeks, or even a few months. It's designed for people who are going out of town and want to supplement their income.

Airbnb is lobbying legislators in states like New York to change regulations in an effort to protect its users from the situation Warren is facing. In this instance, the company intervened as an interested party. An Airbnb spokesman said the company thinks the state's decision is wrong.

Warren was originally looking at fines as high as $30,000, so $2400 is a little bit easier to stomach. He can still appeal the decision. In an emailed statement, Warren said he doesn’t want the ruling to “stand in the way of what I think is, overall, a great start-up.”

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In March, Twitter announced that it would be shutting down its TweetDeck iOS and Android apps. That’s bad news for TweetDeck devotees, but good news for Twitter—I’m betting that the social network plans to funnel users to its own app, which offers basic functionality but allows the company to display paid tweets (better known as ads).

Although I love Twitter’s main app for its simplicity and ease of use, that doesn’t mean it’s for everyone. TweetDeck offered features such as scheduled posts, multiple-account management, and Facebook integration. If you’re missing those extra functionalities, you may want to look for an alternative.

No matter which smartphone platform you use, there’s a Twitter app for you. Which app you choose ultimately depends on what you want to do with your Twitter life—whether it’s reading tweets while you’re on the road or managing five different company accounts—but we selected a few of the best.

iOS: Echofon

iOS Twitter power users should check out Echofon, a clean yet customizable free universal app that can handle multiple Twitter accounts seamlessly. Echofon, which is also available for Android and Mac OS X, has everything you need in a Twitter app, including a fully customizable interface, push notifications, and a “signature” syncing feature that keeps unread tweets synced between your devices. If you’re halfway through reading your Twitter stream on your iPhone, you can open your stream on your Mac and keep reading right where you left off.

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After three months of public beta testing, Opera is finally ready to take on Google’s Chrome with its rebuilt Android browser. On Tuesday, Opera released the final version of its first—and possibly only—WebKit-based browser.

The jump to WebKit resulted in more than just a speed bump. The overall interface of the new Opera browser has been refreshed with a lighter color scheme, and there’s a new Discover tab that aggregates popular news stories from categories such as Arts, News, and Technology.

Opera for Android also has a built-in downloads manager, which lets you start, stop, resume, save and rename media files you keep on your phone. Handy-dandy.

The browser additionally offers a few standout features. One highlight is Off-Road mode, which uses Opera’s servers to compress website data and send you a smaller, more optimized version of the site. (Opera Mini users already know the drill.) The drop-down menu at the top contains the feature, though webpages might not look exactly the same when using Off-Road mode due to the compression technology.

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When Flickr announced its 1TB free storage giveaway on Monday, the company said it was offering you enough storage to “take a photo every hour for forty years” without filling up your allotment. Not content to wait four decades, hackers are already figuring out how to pack their Flickr storage with more than just photos and videos.

Two Github projects making the rounds on Hacker News Tuesday morning offer the ability to store any file type on Flick including documents, PDFs, and music files. Flickr currently allows only JPEG, GIF, and PNG uploads, as well as a variety of video formats including AVI, WMV, MPEG4, and OGG.

Read our hands-on with the revamped Flickr website

Both projects work in the same basic way: They take any file you want to upload and encode it into a PNG image file. That way Flickr believes you’re uploading an image, even though you’re actually uploading the latest Daft Punk album. The method appears to be working as of this writing, but don’t count on turning Flickr into a mega-Dropbox just yet.

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After years of languishing mostly unchanged, Flickr—the one-time leader in photo-sharing sites—finally got a major overhaul on Monday. With the update, everyone now gets 1TB of storage (for photos up to 200MB and videos up to 1GB or three minutes each), and the site itself got a massive facelift. I took some time to play with the new-look Flickr, and while the updated photo sharing service is a solid upgrade overall, it feels unfinished to a degree.

Welcome to new Flickr

The first thing you’ll notice when you log into Flickr is a completely new look. Instead of a homepage that is mostly text with image thumbnails, you’ll instead be greeted with a stream of big, beautiful photos from your Flickr friends, as well as recommended photos from others. The interface has a clean, simple, flat appearance, similar to what Microsoft uses with Windows Phone 8.

Profile pages

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After snapping up hipster blogging platform Tumblr on Monday, Yahoo summoned the tech press to a New York media briefing. But explaining why it dropped a cool $1.1 billion on Tumblr was so 15 minutes ago, Yahoo apparently decided. Instead, it used the event to focus on updates to Flickr, the tech giant’s Web-based photo hosting service.

The big news with Flickr was quite literally about size—users of the photo-sharing service will now get one terabyte of storage for free. Flickr’s website also got an overhaul, and there’s a new version of its Android app as well.

Still, when you spend $1 billion on a blogging site, that’s bound to get people talking, so part of Monday’s news conference did feature some Tumblr talk.

A new home, but not for Tumblr

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer began the press conference by introducing Mayor Michael Bloomberg who came on stage to announce that Yahoo would be consolidating its New York operations into a new office in Times Square. Yahoo just signed a lease for the former New York Times building (for which Times Square is named) located on 43^rd Street. The offices will house all of Yahoo’s 500 NYC employees and will have room to expand.

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If you’re not convinced that Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr is a positive move, you can easily move your published content on Tumblr to WordPress.

Background

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer took to her new Tumblr page Monday to officially announce Yahoo’s $1.1 billion acquisition of the up-and-coming blogging site.

In her announcement, Mayer promised Tumblr’s 105 million bloggers and 300 million visitors that they would “not screw it up”—but that hasn’t convinced everyone.

In a blog post Sunday, Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of rival blogging site WordPress, wrote that the number of blog imports from Tumblr to WordPress spiked from a normal of 400 to 600 an hour to more than 72,000.

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Yahoo won't ruin Tumblr, CEO Marissa Mayer says, but Tumblr users are understandably skeptical of that promise. Yahoo has a history of buying popular properties (Flickr, Delicious) and letting them wither away. But Tumblr will change. It has to. Yahoo must monetize the popular platform to justify its $1.1 billion price tag. And you know what that means: More ads.

What to expect in the Age of Yahoo

Tumblr has been experimenting with advertising for the last year, though founder David Karp has in the past expressed his strong dislike of online ads. Tumblr currently allows promoted posts on desktop and mobile version of the site and has experimented with interactive brand campaigns, but that’s it—so far. In a Monday morning conference call, Mayer said the company will be experimenting with different ways to advertise, including ads within users’ dashboards—Tumblr’s version of a news feed, which only bloggers see, not viewers. Another possibility involves Yahoo partnering with bloggers to display targeted ads on blogs. Mayer said bloggers would have to give permission for that to happen.

Native ads (also known as sponsored posts that look like real content, but are actually paid advertising) are all the rage these days, but Tumblr has struggled to make those ads translate into revenue. The power of Yahoo's massive sales team could change that.

But any increase in advertising should be incremental and intuitive for Tumblr’s existing community. Mayer risks alienating the kids Yahoo desperately needs to make the company relevant again. Slowly rolling out more dashboard ads and partnering with bloggers who want advertising to turn their blogs into money-makers is a good strategy for Yahoo, says Gartner analyst Brian Blau.

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Yahoo has promised “not to screw up” Tumblr now that it has acquired the freewheeling blogging site. But there are still several ways Tumblr could get better, and worse, as a Yahoo-owned company.

On the bad side, there’s the threat of excessive advertising.

“Tumblr has been unprofitable, and Yahoo has to figure out how to monetize it,” said Forrester Research analyst Zachary Reiss-Davis.

“But it has to incorporate ads tastefully,” he added. Failing that, Yahoo may not have much of a user base to advertise to. Matt Mullenweg, the founder at rival blogging site WordPress, has already reported a massive uptick in its blog post import rate from Tumblr.

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Walter White, Jesse Pinkman, and the rest of your favorite Breaking Bad characters return in August for the series finale, but if it wasn’t for Netflix the show never would have reached this point, the series’ creator says.

Breaking Bad, which revolves around a high school chemistry teacher turned meth dealer, owes a big debt of gratitude to Netflix, Breaking Bad Executive Producer Vince Gilligan recently told New York Magazine. Part of the credit may go to the Netflix feature that permits one to “binge watch” shows in just a few sittings.

“I don’t think you’d be sitting here interviewing me if it weren’t for Netflix,” Gilligan told New York. “In its third season, Breaking Bad got this amazing nitrous-oxide boost of energy and general public awareness because of Netflix.”

Kudos to bingers

Gilligan is just the latest Hollywood bigwig to credit part of a show’s success to the way people are consuming video online. In February, television director David Petrarca, who has directed episodes of Game of Thrones and True Blood, said online piracy doesn’t hurt hit shows, but instead helps them maintain “cultural buzz.”

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Following Google’s rollout of a new Hangouts service for mobile and Google+, the company is giving Gmail users the opportunity to replace Google Chat with Hangouts integration.

But heavy users of Google Voice may want to hold off on the switch, because the new Hangouts feature kills your capability to send SMS messages and make voice calls to landline and mobile numbers from Gmail.

The good news is this is just a temporary, yet annoying step. "We believe Hangouts is a better communications product for Gmail users than Google Talk," a Google spokesperson told TechHive. "But there are a few features that aren’t in Hangouts yet, including voice calling."

In a post on Google+ Monday (shown below), Google product manager Nikhyl Singhal called Hangouts the "future of Google Voice." He also noted that while Hangouts can't yet make outbound phone calls it can receive calls made to your Google Voice number.

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After a weekend chock full of rumors and speculation, Yahoo has announced it plans to acquire Tumblr, the popular social service that hosts more than 105 million GIF-filled blogs, for $1.1 billion in cash.

That's a whole lot of users, and a whole lot of cash. In her announcement—appropriately posted on Yahoo's Tumblr blog—Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer promised “not to screw it up.”

The deal is the largest made by Marissa Mayer since she took over Yahoo last summer and follows nine other acquisitions by the company. The Tumblr transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, is expected to take effect in the second half of the year.

Founder David Karp will continue as chief executive officer of Tumblr and “the product roadmap, their team, their wit, and irreverence will all remain the same,” Mayer said.

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Online lowlifes were busy last week spreading infections online, targeting Facebook and several financial institutions, according to malware fighters.

Facebook squashes Dorkbot

Facebook members were targeted by a pernicious program called Dorkbot. The program is primarily spread through Facebook chat, but it can also propagate thorough USB devices, noted Bianca Stanescu of Bitdefender.

Dorkbot pretends to be a picture file but is actually a program that installs malicious code on a machine when someone tries to open the file.

Online information locker MediaFire discovered the poisonous files on its servers and has taken steps to trash them, including wiping files with double extensions, such as .jpg.exe, .png.exe, and .bmp.exe.

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More bumps in the road are probably in store for Bitcoin. The virtual currency has seen some massive swings in value over the last several weeks, but that volatility is not likely to end soon, its lead developer suggested on Saturday.

"We've been on a roller coaster ride," said Gavin Andresen, chief scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, which provides much of the core backend development for the currency.

"I expect for the next few years we're going to remain on a roller coaster ride," he said, speaking in front of a packed room of developers, enthusiasts, venture capitalists and other industry players at Bitcoin 2013, the first conference in Silicon Valley to be held on the topic.

Bitcoin is a digital currency that is managed and traded on a peer-to-peer computer network. Often referred to as a form of "crypto-currency," it is intended to be a decentralized form of payment not regulated by any financial institution or governmental body. A variety of online retailers and a growing number of brick-and-mortar stores are now accepting Bitcoins, which can either be purchased through exchanges on the Internet or "mined" by using specialized hardware.

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College graduation is a time for celebration. It's a time to reflect on what you’ve learned, and to look back on all the hard work that earned you that mortarboard and gown.

And in between Grandma taking way, way too many pictures, and Mom crying and fussing with your hair, and Dad stumbling over his well-meaning but awkward advice, all you’re thinking about during the actual event is how uncomfortable your shoes are. And how the gown is a particularly itchy polyester. And whether the bar down the street will still be serving happy hour after the ceremony.

Plenty of other websites can provide how-to tips on surviving your transition to adulthood, but we roll differently at TechHive. You need levity during these stressful times, so we searched far and wide across a sea of URLs to bring you the following collection of grade-A animated GIFs. Each should give you a laugh and help you remember that you’ve earned this.

When you realize your final project is due tomorrow—and you haven't started it yet:

Trying to study for finals when you have relatives in town for the ceremony:

When it's 4:17 a.m. and you're trying to pump yourself up to finish your last paper:

When people start freaking out during finals week:

When you still have five more pages of your thesis to write but you're out of things to say so you start to improvise:

Literally five minutes after you've finished your last final:

Selling your books back for the last time:

When you're feeling sassy in your cap and gown:

How you feel about your diploma during the graduation ceremony:

When they call you up to accept your diploma and pronounce your name wrong:

The first time you get to use the line "Do you want to come up and see my diploma?"

When your student loans start showing up in the mail:

When you see how much you owe on those student loans:

What you feel like doing after you calculate how long it will take you to pay it all back:

When people ask what you're going to do with your English/Art History/Philosophy degree, the first time:

When people ask what you're going to do with your degree, the fiftieth time:

Whenever anyone asks you "So, have you found a job yet?"

When you've sent out 50 resumes—and then realize you've misspelled your email address:

When you think you've completely blown an interview, but get a call back:

When your best friend lands his dream job, and you're still working retail:

Writing your first cover letter:

When you go for your first "real" interview—and find 20 other people waiting to interview for the same position:

When a position requires you to apply using Taleo. Which then deletes all your fields when you save:

Trying to determine if the job listings on Craiglist are legit:

When you land a paid internship in your field:

When your boss at your unpaid internship tasks you with alphabetizing the whole filing system:

Three hours later, when you realize you've misfiled the last 100 files:

In between projects at your internship:

How you feel when you've accepted a job:

When you land a job that is actually relevant to your degree:

Six months into your first professional job, when you start feeling like a "real adult":