More drama from PassThePopcorn (PTP), a hugely popular dedicated movie torrent tracker. It was only a month ago that PTP switched over to a new management due to an internal dispute – although it was announced earlier that the site would shut down, new management wowed to continue operations. Things have since been fine with PTP, until a strange message was Tweeted from the tracker’s official Twitter account earlier today. According to the Tweet, PTP had run out of donations money and was going to close down. The Twitter account had more than 500 followers and needless to say some loyal users of the site panicked. However, there is nothing to worry about – apparently it was just the site’s previous owners messing about, trying to create confusion among members.

Quoted below is the message Tweeted from http://twitter.com/passthepopcorn several hours ago:

After being open for just over 2 years, PTP will close its doors. We have run out of money and can no longer afford our cars off donations.

This however was denied by PTP staff – according to what esophagus posted on the forums, staff no longer have access to the said Twitter account:

Current PTP staff don't have access to that Twitter account. Feel free to ignore Pham/DAQ/whatever old sysop that is and anything they are spouting.

This wouldn’t normally make into news on this blog but having featured the same Twitter account a couple of months ago in our “BitTorrent Trackers on Twitter – 25 Torrent Sites You Can Follow” article, we felt we should let our readers know. At least for now, you should check PTP forum if you want updated site news.

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Everyone knows Twitter as a micro blogging tool that let’s you keep in touch of what others are doing. Well, that’s one use of it. As for me, I don’t use Twitter much to update ‘what I am doing’ – instead, I use it as a replacement for an RSS reader. Almost all major services on the net now have Twitter accounts and if you want real time updates, all you need to do is to follow these accounts. If you too are using Twitter both as a micro blogging tool as well as a news reader, here’s the perfect desktop client for you; Seesmic Look. Seesmic Look is optimized for Windows 7 – it’s based on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and has a kick ass user interface. This software is specifically designed to leverage the power of the real time web – it comes with pre configured news feeds, animated trending topics display plus a lot of other cool features.

When you fire up Seesmic Look for the first time, you’ll notice that it' has a different look and feel than most Twitter clients. On the left pane are your navigation options. These too are named differently than the normal Twitter terminology. Listed below are the available options and the functionality they serve:

• Inbox – private and public mentions of you, plus replies
• Social – your Twitter timeline
• Favorites – favorited Tweets
• Interests – lets you read various news streams from popular tech blogs, celebrities, news services, etc
• Channels – pre configured channels
• Searches – Let’s you search Twitter and displays results in a convenient way

If you are interested about reading news over Twitter, you’ll definitely want to check out the ‘Interests' tab. This has a number of pre configured Twitter feeds in numerous categories. As you can see in the screenshot above, the ‘Tech’ category has feeds of almost all major tech blogs including Techcrunch and Mashable. To read these streams, you don’t even need to follow them using your Twitter account. You can read more about Seesmic Look’s features in the official blog located here.

Download

Seesmic Look is optimized for Windows 7. It’s built on WPF and I’ve found that having a decent video card helps things render smoothly.

[Click Here] to download Seesmic Look from official download page

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• Blu – Twitter client with a great interface
• BitTorrent Trackers on Twitter – 25 Torrent Sites You Can Follow
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One of the reasons why Twitter became so popular is it’s excellent support for API functions. Twitter API let thousands of 3rd party developers build tools and applications for the service, driving it’s growth exponentially. One of the coolest products that utilize the Twitter API are Twitter clients. These 3rd party applications allow you do do pretty much everything you can imagine with the service, right from the comfort of your desktop. We’ve already posted about a Twitter client which we think was cool in this post. This article is about another relatively new but easy to use app, Seesmic For Windows. Seesmic has been available for Windows in many forms (SeesMic Web, Twhirl, etc) but they’ve finally decided to go native – the end product is a good one.

Windows users could earlier use Seesmic via twhirl, an Adobe AIR based client. Seesmic for Windows on the other hand is built on native code and is optimized for Windows Vista/Windows 7 etc. It has a great looking interface, support for multiple tabs, support for multiple Twitter accounts, automatic URL shortening (using several different services), automatic image uploads to TwitPic or YFrog and even new Twitter API 2.0 features such as Lists and native Retweet. In fact, the only feature I found missing in this client was the ability to minimize to tray (which some folks argue is not required for Win 7 -  I tend to disagree).

Seesmic for Windows is free and the initial setup program you have to download weights only ~650kb. Once you download and execute it, additional components required for the software will be downloaded to your machine. Note that you need to have Microsoft .Net Framework installed on your machine in order for the setup to work. 

Download

[Click Here] to download latest version of Seesmic for Windows (link auto updated with newest build)

[Click Here] to visit Seesmic for Windows homepage

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It’s self promotion time. Some snap open signup updates, movie and game leak news and other small updates that do not make it to a full article on FILEnetworks Blog are communicated only via Twitter. So, if you still haven’t done so, be sure to follow @filenetworks on Twitter and stay up to date :)

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No matter how hard you try, you cannot keep Twitter out of the picture – this is again a Twitter related post. Huge popularity this micro blogging tool has lead to the birth of a number of different 3rd party desktop clients for the service. Up until now, we’ve mostly been using TweetDeck and web interface to update/monitor FILEnetworks Twitter account. But that was until we discovered Blu. Blu has one of the best interfaces we’ve ever seen on a Twitter client – it’s simple, it’s easy to use, it’s flashy and it’ll look great on your Windows 7 or Windows Vista desktop.

Unlike other similar tools such as TweetDeck and Twhirl, Blu does not run on the Adobe AIR platform. Instead, it utilizes the Microsoft .NET framework 3.5. It doesn’t have as many features as some of the other Twitter clients out there but it does have the basic functions (@replies, favorites, automatic tinyURL generation, direct messages, replies, retweets, status updates, etc) required by a regular Twitter user. Best thing about Blu is its flashy and animated UI - this makes the available features very much accessible. Downside to this is that the application takes up a significant amount of RAM. On my Windows 7 desktop it usually takes about 50-70MB of system memory which would be ‘a lot’ on most low end systems .

Two features I’d like to see included in the next version of Blu is the ability to resize the UI and the ability to minimize the app to system tray. We Tweeted these as suggestion to @blueapp and we were told they’ll be implemented in upcoming Blu v2. We don’t know if this will really happen or not but at least they cared enough to reply. 

Download

Blu is free software and it’s not bundled with ads or any other crapware.

[Click Here] to visit official download page to download the latest version of Blu

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• BitTorrent Trackers on Twitter – 25 Torrent Sites You Can Follow
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