No sports-related tweet is complete without an emoji, or three. What’s even better is when your team gets its very own personalized Twitter icon. That’s exactly what the NBA unveiled today for every single team in the league, all of which will be in play throughout the entirety of the 2016-17 season.
Each icon corresponds with a team’s logo and can be activated by entering the team’s official hashtag. The latter include an assortment of phrases — from the conventional (#BullsNation for the Chicago Bulls) to the inventive (#OwnThe Future for the Milwaukee Bucks) — that will be familiar to fans, but may leave everyone else puzzled.
#NBA fans…. Use your team's hashtag to unlock their emoji! pic.twitter.com/FTzCjEQjS9
— NBA (@NBA) October 24, 2016
Considering Twitter reportedly charges brands up to a million dollars for a single emoji during major events, it’s rather generously been doling them out to national sports leagues. Last month, the social platform assigned a hashtag-activated emoji to all 32 NFL teams just in time for its Thursday Night Football live-streams.
To ensure basketball fans don’t feel left out, Twitter is set to broadcast two original NBA live shows, beginning on Tuesday with The Starters — described as a live podcast made exclusively for the platform. Another, as yet undisclosed, NBA Twitter show is also reportedly in the works, meaning those emojis will be put to good use outside of live games. The Starters is also available to those without a Twitter account, and can be streamed on the service’s live-streaming apps for Xbox One, Apple TV, and Fire TV.
Twitter previously teamed up with the NBA for a set of emojis dedicated to every All-Star 2016 starter and reserve player. It also tweeted out a series of 360 videos, created in partnership with Samsung, behind-the-scenes from the NBA Finals in June. The 2016-17 NBA season commences on Tuesday.
Discord is trying to push more visibility on the internet for some of its biggest communities, and there's a good chance your messages could end up in a Google Search. The platform is preparing to make conversations from certain public servers searchable on the web, so there's a privacy setting you might want to check before the rollout begins.
According to Discord's official announcement, the changes will roll out in two stages. Starting November 16, qualifying servers will have public web pages featuring automated summaries of conversations. By mid-December, individual messages from eligible public channels could also appear word-for-word in Google and other search engines.
You just opened X and started typing your thoughts. Imagine the jump scare when a hand suddenly pops up on your screen, pointing at the promote button. It doesn’t say a word and simply points. For a growing number of X users, this isn’t a made-up scenario but something they have been seeing since yesterday, and very few of them are amused.
Most of us have learned to tune out the usual in-app upsells, whether it’s a glowing upgrade banner or a pop-up about a premium plan. A floating hand hovering over your draft is much harder to ignore, and that’s probably the whole point.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?