- We can work it out. Actress Katherine Heigl and the Duane Reade chain of drugstores have settled a $6 million federal suit filed by Heigl this past April in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The suit centered on Duane Reade’s March 2014 tweet, “Love a quick #DuaneReade run? Even @KatieHeigl can’t resist shopping #NYC’s favorite drugstore,” which linked to a paparazzi photo of Heigl carrying a Duane Reade shopping bag. The actress had alleged a violation of Section 43(a) of the Lanham Act, which prohibits false advertising, and of Section 50 of the New York Civil Rights Law, which prohibits the use for advertising or trade of a living person’s name, portrait, or picture without having first obtained that person’s written consent. As part of the settlement, Duane Reade has reportedly agreed to make a contribution to the Jason Debus Heigl Foundation.
- With a little help from my friends. Facebook is reportedly testing a new mobile application feature that permits users to search by keyword through old posts from their friends. This innovation—much like the search functionality in cloud-based mobile mail applications—could make it easier for people to revisit otherwise difficult-to-find content, content that may have been “pushed off the page” in light of the chronological structure of social media news feeds.
- All together now. What if hundreds of thousands of people all agreed to tweet at the same time? It happens! Although countless folks flock to social media sites on or around New Year’s Eve, according to Twitter’s Senior Director of Site Reliability Engineering, most users in Japan “tweet-in the new year” precisely at midnight local time—for example, take January 1, 2012, when Twitter “ground to a halt” as users in Japan tweeted over 16,000 times per second. Wired provides an interesting take on Twitter’s “stress testing” framework, aimed at handling incredibly high-volume traffic like this.
