Test run of Twitter share sale successful

Twitter, which is expected to go public soon, has chosen to list on the New York Stock Exchange.
Shares will trade under the ticker TWTR.
The New York Stock Exchange's test run of Twitter's initial public offering (IPO) has been a success, according to reports.
It plans to sell 70 million shares between $17 and $20 each for a possible take of $1.6 billion.
Twitter will be the biggest technology IPO since Facebook went public in May 2012.
Analysts say that the company, which has more than 230 million users compared with Facebook Inc.'s more than 1 billion, is still unprofitable, as it spends to improve its advertising products and grow its user base in international markets.
In a recent video, which was posted on the website retailroadshow.com, CEO Dick Costolo pitches the reach of Twitter posts, or tweets, saying that 44 percent of Americans hear about them outside of the site — through TV channels or news stories.
"Broadcasters have increasingly found that Twitter is a perfect complement to TV as a way to drive engagement," he said.
There are more than 500 million tweets each day now, compared with 2 million per day in January 2009, the company has said.
The company makes money as advertisers pay to promote their tweets to a wider base of users, based on their interests.
Advertisers are paying for tweets that get users to download mobile applications, buy products or indicate their interest in a company or cause, Costolo said.
In a related development, Facebook says it has worked with several news organizations within the past year to drive more readers to their own sites.
The company found that news agencies that began posting stories more regularly on Facebook saw a significant increase in traffic to their own websites, according to Justin Osofsky, a vice president for media partnerships at Facebook.
On Facebook, news is a common but incidental experience, according to an initiative of Pew Research Center in collaboration with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Overall, about half of adult Facebook users, 47 percent, “ever” get news there. That amounts to 30 percent of the population.
The report was based on survey conducted Aug. 21-Sept. 2, 2013, among a nationally representative sample of adults 18 years of age or older.
The sample comprised 5,173 respondents in the US, 3,268 of whom are Facebook users, of which 1,429 are Facebook news consumers.
The survey questionnaire was written by the Pew Research Center and administered by GfK using KnowledgePanel, its nationally representative online research panel.
Facebook news consumers are defined as those who answered that they “ever get news or news headlines on Facebook.”
News is defined as “information about events and issues that involve more than just your friends or family.”
With a massive number of people connecting and sharing personal data, it has become more important than ever to protect ourselves from hackers and spammers.
Pew director Amy Mitchell said Facebook represents a different way of consuming news.
As one of the 5,173 adults who responded to Pew's survey said: "Facebook is a good way to find out news without actually looking for it."
Mitchell says there is no indication that Facebook users were spending less time seeking out news elsewhere. One-third of Facebook users said they have news organizations or individual journalists as part of their information feed.
With a massive number of people connecting and sharing personal information on social sites, it has become more important than ever to protect ourselves from hackers and spammers.
The alarm has grown after Buffer, an app that automatically schedules sharing from a company's social media accounts, was hacked on Saturday.
The attack was first noticed when a huge number of users began posting spammy weight-loss links to their Facebook and Twitter pages, AllThingsD reported.
Buffer has not provided details on the extent of the hack, but has temporarily disabled its app's Facebook functionality, it added.
Sites like Facebook and Twitter are making it very easy for users to protect valuable information. Unfortunately, many users disregard the security features available to them.