Twitter is officially announcing that Buy button today — in a blog post, the company says it will be visible to “a small percentage of U.S. users (that will grow over time).” As a result, users will actually be able to make purchases directly within tweets. If you see something you want, you hit “buy”, bring up a little information, enter your payment and shipping information while still Twitter (it’s encrypted and stored for future purchases), and complete the transaction “in just a few taps.”
And even though the test is starting out on mobile, a company spokesperson said it will be moving onto desktop soon as well.

Twitter says it’s partnering with a number of companies to make the Buy Now button happen, starting social shopping company Fancy, digital content seller Gumroad, fan commerce company Musictoday, and payments company Stripe. The initial sellers include musicians (Demi Lovato, Eminem, Pharrell), nonprofits (Donors Choose, Glide, RED), and retailers (Burberry, The Home Depot).

Lavingia added that creating a purchase experience that’s “really simple and really fast has always been super important for us” and that he hopes that similar experiences will “over time become the norm because of things like Twitter.”

For its part, Twitter describes this as “an early step in our building functionality into Twitter to make shopping from mobile devices convenient and easy, hopefully even fun,” so you can probably expect its commerce initiatives to expand. (We’ve also heard that the company was working on something closer to a marketplace separate from the main river of content.)

This seems like a pretty natural avenue for expansion — not only is it a potential source of revenue on its own, but if Twitter successfully drives sales, that could encourage businesses to become more active on the service and to advertise more.

The Times of India basically wants its journalists to hand over their Facebook and Twitter profiles - which means usernames and passwords - to the company so that the latter can use them for professional purposes. The Times of India journalist now has two options - either to convert his/her personal social media account into a company account or to create a new account to be run by the company. Moreover, no journalist will be allowed to post news and related material on their own Facebook and Twitter accounts.

The company shall be the owner of the access passwords, username and associated email address for the User Account, which shall be used by you on behalf of the Company to make posts. Company retains administration rights of the User Account, which shall be made accessible to the Company on demand. It is understood that sharing of such details of the User Account shall be an integral part of your contract with the Company and shall also be necessary for processing any settlement related to termination of such Contract.

Thus, according to the new contract, the company can post at will on the journalist's social media account even without his/her knowledge.
Even worse, the journalist will not regain exclusive use of his/her account even after he/she has left the company. Times of India will retain the right to continue operating the account in the journalist's name.
In short, as a Times of India journalist you will be promoting the company's stories and viewpoints on social media even after you quit as an employee! As the contract reads:
The company may upload news or other material on the company User Account through any means, including automated upload streams, at its sole discretion, notwithstanding any termination of your contract with the company.

Here's a relevant part from the contract:
The posts made by you on User Account shall contain news and other related material and may also contain any personal material and interaction, which we encourage. You shall inform the company about your personal user accounts and the same will be allowed by the company, subject to you refraining from posting any news and other related material on the same. The personal user account shall always belong to you and carried by you in the event of any severance of your contract with the company. At your request, while in employment, your personal user account may be converted into a company User Account. It is specifically agreed that on such conversion, all intellectual property rights in such converted User Account shall be vested in the company.

To be fair though, the company's journalists are still active on Twitter, so the new policy does not seem to have come into effect yet.

But this is not the first instance of a bizarre, even oppressive clause being part of the Times of India contract. For example, though the contract stipulates that an employee should not receive gifts from a person/s who may have dealings with the company, it even goes on to state that gifts given as prizes at exhibitions or as part of a free raffle may be accepted but 'in principle' it belongs to the company.
In conclusion, apart from the fact that the proposed social media policy constitutes a violation of the personal space of an individual, it also means the employees are reduced to virtually being PR agents of Times of India. While it is unclear whether the policy has been implemented as yet, the ethics of it must be questioned.

Twitter has introduced a new anti-spam system called BotMaker and says that it is responsible for a 40 percent reduction in its key spam metrics. The BotMaker anti-spam system was created with one low-latency sub-system (Scarecrow) which checks in real time the content posted on the site and decides whether the content should be approved or not. The second computationally-intense and learning sub-system (Sniper) checking in ‘near real time’ the user and content event logs that make it past the Scarecrow.

The BotMaker is constantly fed information by Scarecrow and Sniper, and issues commands to approve, deny or challenge posts. The micro-blogging site also runs periodic jobs on all the data compiled by the BotMaker system for routine checks to specific exercises by the engineering department.

Twitter’s Raghav Jeyaraman stated in an official blog post the challenges faced by the team in creating BotMaker. He stated that due to Twitter’s wide-ranging developer APIs, meant for third-parties to interact with the platform, spammers “know (almost) everything” about how the micro-blogging network functions, which makes it difficult to create an anti-spam system.

Jeyaraman wrote, “These operating conditions are a stark contrast to the constraints placed upon more traditional systems, like email, where data is private and adding latency of tens of seconds goes unnoticed. So, to fight spam on Twitter, we built BotMaker, a system that we designed and implemented from the ground up that forms a solid foundation for our principled defense against unsolicited content,” he said. “The system handles billions of events every day in production, and we have seen a 40 percent reduction in key spam metrics since launching BotMaker.”

A recent report by Twitter revealed that nearly 23 million of active users on the site are ‘Bots’. However, the company says that these accounts are not necessarily spam accounts, which make up less than 5% of total MAUs. These spam accounts affect advertisers who are interested in reaching potential customers through the micro blogging site.