Group items tagged

Up front, text messaging is like e-mail—boring, yet incredibly effective. Even though there are numerous options for mobile communication, the good old text message is still a surefire way to reach the masses. According to Clickatell, 9 out of 10 Americans can receive text messages, when, for instance, Twitter reaches only about a quarter of the population. And, in 2010, around 6.1 trillion text messages were sent globally. The astonishing number (that’s thousands of billions) also represents steady growth, as it is triple the amount of text messages that were sent in 2007.

adding new functionality to its Groups feature

making threaded conversations within groups similar to face-to-face professional interactions by removing the wall between original remarks and off-site content such as news articles. You can share links on Groups the same way you would on the homepage. And your profile picture will now be attached to any comment you make on a group, personalizing the experience.

You can also now roll over the images of the last three participants on any thread to see comment previews

A group of computer security experts want to turn that model on its head with Wickr, a new mobile app that they hope will set a new standard for how personal data is disseminated. Wickr’s motto: The Internet is forever. Your private conversations don’t need to be. The app, which became available in Apple’s iTunes store on Tuesday, lets users transmit texts, photos and videos through secure and anonymous means previously reserved for the likes of the military and intelligence operatives. Text messages, photos and videos sent via Wickr are secured using military-grade encryption and never stored. The service camouflages user names and other identifiable information, such as a phone’s identification number, by appending several random digits to each value, then mashing them up with a mathematical algorithm, a process security experts refer to as “salting” and “hashing.” Wickr hashes and salts that information several times and only stores the encoded result.