Tweeting for Good

A Touching Twitter Story: OK, so this is one of those rare instances when I don’t hate Twitter. Alice Pyne is a 15-year old who has been fighting an aggressive form of cancer for four years. Recently, her diagnosis worsened and so Alice decided to start a blog to put up her bucket list of the things she wants to do before her time comes. It didn’t take long for her list to go viral; #AlicesBucketList became a trending topic on Twitter and people were soon tweeting and retweeting and visiting her blog with offers to help her cross off some of the items on her list. Alice has also used her blog to raise money for cancer research. Alice says her number-one goal for her bucket list is to encourage everyone inspired by her story to become a bone marrow donor. Alice’s story and her courage are undoubtedly inspirational, and what is also inspiring is that people can be good; and what’s more is that social media was involved. All too often social media does the opposite of good. There are too many awful stories involving Facebook; we are used to daily Twitter scandals; we have become accustomed to self-absorbed oversharing and self-editing. It’s really refreshing to see people use Twitter for something other than self-promotion, to connect and tweet for a truly good cause. Thank you Alice for inspiring generosity and kindness. WNEM

Words of Wisdom from the Zuck: Mark Zuckerberg, an advocate of young people and education, gave a speech at an 8th grade graduation in Menlo Park. Zuckerberg discussed how to overcome “I can’t” and offered thoughtful, positive advice to these soon-to-be high schoolers.  He forgot to remind them to be careful about what they do on Facebook. SF Chronicle

Duh of the Day: Unsurprisingly, a new study from Retrevo found that 35 percent of Americans have posted something online that they later regretted. Other results that are not surprising: younger people were more likely to post things they regretted, and also smartphone users were more than twice as likely to mispost. So all of you young people with smartphones, think before you post. And Anthony Weiner, of course. Mashable

Video of the Day: Before you do or say something online, think about whether or not you would do it in real life. This is what Facebook would be like IRL.

Website of the Day: What dog are you? Not sure how accurate this human-to-canine facial-recognition technology is (our editor-in-chief and I each tried it and got the same dog, and I don’t think we really look alike…), but try it anyway. It’s pretty neat. Doggleganger

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