Queen Elizabeth II has sent her first tweet — though she kept things traditional, signing off with "Elizabeth R."

The 88-year-old monarch tried her hand at Twitter as she opened a new gallery Friday in central London's Science Museum, taking off a glove to press a tablet screen as 600 guests looked on. The message, "I hope people will enjoy visiting" the exhibition, was sent instantly through the official British monarchy account on the social media website.

It is a pleasure to open the Information Age exhibition today at the @ScienceMuseum and I hope people will enjoy visiting. Elizabeth R.

— BritishMonarchy (@BritishMonarchy) October 24, 2014

"Elizabeth R" is how the queen signs official documents. The "R'' stands for "regina," the Latin for queen.

Officials said the message came "personally" from the queen herself, although some eyebrows were raised about whether that was the case.

The message appeared to be typed ahead of time, and bizarrely appears to have been sent using the Twitter for iPhone app, even though video showed the queen was using an iPad or a similar tablet device. Officials wouldn't say if the queen personally wrote the message or comment on the electronic discrepancy.

"We're not going to go into the details," a Buckingham Palace spokesman said.

The queen does not have a personal Twitter account. Most members of the royal family do not tweet personally — they are represented by official accounts managed by spokespeople.

There are exceptions: Prince Andrew — the queen's second son — and his daughter Princess Beatrice both tweet in a personal capacity.

The Science Museum gallery, called "Information Age," explores the technological breakthroughs that have changed communication.

In 1976, the queen was the first monarch to send an email, doing so when the technology was in its infancy.

Google's music-subscription service will try to anticipate its listeners' mood swings as it amplifies its competition with Pandora, Spotify and other popular services that play tunes over the Internet.

Starting Tuesday, the $10-a-month All Access service will make music suggestions based on educated guesses about each subscriber's mood and likely activities at certain points in the day or week.

For instance, a subscriber who opens the service on a smartphone on a Monday morning might be offered a playlist suited for commuting, going to the gym or getting motivated for work. Opening the app on Monday evening, though, might generate songs appropriate for eating dinner, studying or unwinding.

Six different music mixes created for different emotions and activities — with such labels as "Jumping Out of Bed" or "In The Lonely Hour" — will be automatically displayed for All Access subscribers in the U.S. and Canada. The mixes won't be played unless the subscriber selects one. The feature won't be immediately available in the other 43 countries where All Access is sold.

The mood music also will be tailored to each listener's tastes, so a subscriber who already has signaled a preference for rock and an aversion for country music would be more likely to hear the Rolling Stones perform "Monkey Man" than "Dead Flowers" in their mixes.

Subscribers also will be able to request playlists designed for specific activities such as napping or housecleaning.

Google's attempt to cater to people's moods reflects the growing importance of delivering soundtracks that suit listeners' discrete tastes and lifestyles. Making the right recommendation is becoming more crucial now that Google, Pandora and Spotify have secured the licensing rights to most of the same music.

"The content is roughly the same, so the main thing you can do for a user now is to have the right context," said Brandon Bilinski, product manager for Google Play Music, which runs All Access. "We want to get our listeners to the right music to fit the mood and make them feel good."

Google Inc. picked up the mood-melding technology in its July purchase of Songza, a free music service with about 5 million listeners.

Google's All Access service launch just 17 months ago, leaving the company that runs the Internet's dominant search engine and other leading digital services in the unfamiliar position of trying to catch up.

Pandora Media Inc.'s free Internet radio station boasts 76 million monthly listeners, while Spotify has 40 million listeners, including more than 10 million subscribers to its $10-per-month service. Google hasn't disclosed how many people subscribe to its All Access service, which offers a music library spanning 30 million titles.

Selecting songs based on listener's shifting moods is similar to what a smart music player called Aether Cone does. That player draws upon the music from another subscription service called Rdio Unlimited, which also charges $10 per month.

Pandora, Spotify and other services all strive to lead their audiences to mixes and genres that will please them, though the others tend to depend on computer algorithms that analyze each person's preferences and listening histories.

Combining human knowledge with a computer's analytical powers is similar to what Beat Electronics was doing with its own music-streaming service before Apple Inc. bought it for $3 billion earlier this year. Apple has said Beats' recommendation system eventually might be blended into its own music-streaming service, though that hasn't happened yet.

Google's new feature includes several thousand playlists assembled by Songza music aficionados that include DJs, performers and critics. Songza's hand-picked playlists will be slightly adjusted by algorithms programmed to learn more about each listener's tastes and habits.

As time goes on, Google hopes to provide even more nuanced playlists that acknowledge a person's mood is likely to be much different while driving to work on a Friday morning than a Monday morning. For now, though, the Mountain View, California, company will depend on cues from each subscriber.

"We can be smart about a lot of things, but it's really hard to tell a person's mood," Bilinski said.

(ap)

(AP) — Facebook is suing several law firms that represented a man who claimed he owned half of the social network and was entitled to billions of dollars from the company and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The case was dismissed in April and the man, Paul Ceglia, is facing related criminal charges. Facebook Inc. and Zuckerberg filed a lawsuit Monday against DLA Piper and other law firms and lawyers, saying they conspired to file and prosecute a fraudulent lawsuit. DLA Piper is one of the world's largest business law firms.

Ceglia claimed in a 2010 lawsuit that he and Zuckerberg signed a 2003 software development contract that included a provision entitling him to half-ownership of Facebook in exchange for $1,000 in startup money for the budding company. Facebook's lawyers had claimed that while the two did have a contract, references to the company were slipped in for the lawsuit.

In its lawsuit filed in New York State Supreme Court, Facebook claims that the lawyers representing Ceglia "knew or should have known" that his lawsuit was fraudulent and "based on an implausible story and obviously forged documents."

Facebook, which is based in Menlo Park, California, is seeking unspecified damages along with reimbursement of its expenses racked up in defending itself against the lawsuit.

"We said from the beginning that Paul Ceglia's claim was a fraud and that we would seek to hold those responsible accountable," Colin Stretch, Facebook's general counsel, said in a statement. "DLA Piper and the other named law firms knew the case was based on forged documents yet they pursued it anyway, and they should be held to account."

DLA Piper called the suit "baseless" and said it was filed to intimidate lawyers from suing Facebook.

"DLA Piper, which was not part of this case at its outset or its conclusion, was involved for 78 days," Peter Pantaleo, the firm's general counsel, said in a statement. "Facebook and Mr. Zuckerberg claim that they were damaged in those 78 days, yet a mere 10 months after DLA Piper withdrew from the case and while the litigation was still pending, Facebook went to market with an initial public offering that valued the company at $100 billion."

Other law firms named in the suit, including Milberg LLP and Paul Argentieri and Associates, could not immediately be reached for comment Monday afternoon.

Ceglia is awaiting trial on criminal fraud charges related to the case. He is accused of doctoring and destroying evidence to support his Facebook claim, and has pleaded not guilty.

Facebook's lawsuit says Zuckerberg and Ceglia signed a two-page contract in April 2003, "months before Zuckerberg had even conceived of the idea that became Facebook."

"That contract had nothing to do with Facebook or any other social networking service," the lawsuit says, adding that Ceglia and Zuckerberg stopped communicating in 2004.

Facebook, then called Thefacebook.com, launched in February 2004 out of Zuckerberg's Harvard dorm room. It was first open only to Harvard students and the decade since it expanded into the world's largest online social network with more than 1.3 billion users. The company went public in 2012. It now has a market value of nearly $200 billion.

Its stock ended Monday up $1, or 1.3 percent, at $76.95.

Snapchat on Friday said it will begin weaving ads into the popular service for sending ephemeral smartphone messages, but promised not to be “rude” to its members.

The first Snapchat ads were to appear in the United States this weekend in a section of the service devoted to “recent updates,” the Los Angeles-based startup said in a blog post.

“We won’t put advertisements in your personal communication — things like Snaps or Chats. That would be totally rude,” Snapchat said.

“We want to see if we can deliver an experience that’s fun and informative, the way ads used to be, before they got creepy and targeted.”

The new ads will be the first paid content at Snapchat. Users will have the option of ignoring ads, which will automatically disappear after being viewed or within 24 hours, according to Snapchat.

The startup said the reason for dabbling with advertising is simply that it needs to make money.

“Advertising allows us to support our service while delivering neat content to Snapchatters,” the blog post said.

The introduction of ads comes just weeks after a huge trove of evidently intercepted Snapchat images and videos were exposed online, raising fears about what may be revealed in messages intended to vanish seconds after being viewed.

In what was referred to as “The Snappening,” people who used a third-party program instead of the official Snapchat application had copies of supposedly transient missives squirreled away by hackers who began posting them online.

About half of Snapchat users are reported to be 17 years old or younger, raising worries that sexy self-shot images they thought would disappear will be shared on the Internet in what would amount to child pornography.

Snapchat assured users that the startup’s servers were not breached, nor were they the source of the leaked images.

Outside applications eyed as sources for purloined Snapchat pictures are designed to let users undermine the intent of the service by keeping copies of self-destructing pictures sent or received.

Snapchat rocketed to popularity, especially among teens, after the initial app was released in September 2011. Created by then Stanford University students, the app allows the sending of messages that disappear shortly after being viewed.

Three times in the past several weeks, women have felt compelled to leave their homes after being targeted on Twitter with rape and death threats personalized with their home addresses — all because they voiced contrary opinions about the video-game industry while possessing two X chromosomes.

That’s a problem for the game industry, which is seeing what would otherwise be a worthwhile discussion of game-journalism ethics twisted into a reactionary lashing out against feminist critiques.

It’s a bigger problem for Twitter, where this breed of hateful nonsense has been going on since well before the current rash of harassment known as “Gamergate.” Unless the social network starts dealing with this problem more seriously, it will be festering long after the current controversy drops out of the headlines.

How Gamergate got ugly
Game developers Zoe Quinn (Depression Quest) and Brianna Wu (Revolution 60) and game critic Anita Sarkeesian separately ran afoul of a nutcase fringe of the gaming industry for reasons that amount to “only the right kind of women are welcome in our industry.”

That mind-set is not unique to games. Far too much of the tech business deals poorly with women taking roles outside of PR and HR. But in gaming, outright resentment of people working to change the gender ratio — often disparaged as “SJWs,” for “social justice warriors” — is public and prominent in many of the #gamergate tweets.

The contention that the feminist agenda — that all-powerful force that’s secured all of 20 percent female representation in the Senate after decades of effort — suppresses creativity in the industry is laughable. (A more common Gamergate argument, that game journalism needs more ethics and transparency, is fairer and less gender-weighted.)

Gamergate got especially ugly in three instances: When Quinn shipped an unusual and not-always-fun game, when Sarkeesian objected to the portrayal of women in games, and when Wu mocked Gamergate complaints. Hateful tweets led to various Internet creeps doxing these women — looking up their personal info — and using those details to personalize threats of rape and murder with their home addresses.

All three made the understandable choice to stay with friends for a while. Said Wu in an email Sunday: “I’d rather not talk about when I will be home, but I can say I’m in communication with law enforcement.”

“I’m not able to sleep very much right now,” she added.

Twitter is not helping enough
While Quinn, Wu, and Sarkeesian and other Gamergate targets refused to leave Twitter and other networks (see, for example, Quinn’s “ask me anything” on Reddit), two other accounts of social-media-fueled harassment emerged to underline that this isn’t just a gaming issue.

Developer and educator Kathy Sierra posted a lengthy essay about her experience being doxed and threatened by an online mob in 2007, and then choosing to leave Twitter this year. In it, she wrote that Twitter’s dynamics fuel these distributed attacks: “Twitter, for all its good, is a hate amplifier. Twitter boosts signal power with head-snapping speed and strength.”

Sierra’s post, in turn, inspired developer Adria Richards to speak about getting the same treatment after calling out sexist jokes at a developer conference last year. Her summary of the experience in an email: “Social networks feel like a city without 911.”

What makes Twitter so tempting to trolls? Until a target blocks them, they can make her read whatever they write by tweeting to that person’s username — and if they attach a photo that features images of dead or mutilated bodies, that is displayed by default. And when the recipient does block them, it’s easy to create another account.

Twitter has been shamefully slow in addressing this problem. It didn’t add a report-abuse button until August 2013, after British activist Caroline Criado-Perez was hit with a torrent of violent threats because she campaigned to get Jane Austen’s portrait on the £10 note.

Until perhaps a week ago, it routinely rejected third-party reports of abuse — its documentation still says only first parties or “authorized representatives” can do this.

If somebody tweets a violent threat and then deletes the tweet, good luck getting Twitter to act. Its report-abuse form still requires a link to a tweet, not a screen capture of it. Twitter public-policy rep Nu Wexler told me last year that screencaps suffice, but I keep seeing reports that this doesn’t work.

Last December, Twitter outright gutted the blocking function, then reverted after getting pounded for the move.

And Twitter still doesn’t give its users options to block certain types of accounts (for instance, those younger than 30 days) or content (like violent keywords) as developer Danilo Campos suggested in July. It’s shown no sign of learning from such collaborative-blocking experiments as Jacob Hoffman-Andrews’ BlockTogether. And it’s yet to apply its powerful analytics to detecting hostile behavior by its users.

A Twitter spokesperson emailed: “We evaluate and refine our policies based on input from users, while working with outside organizations to ensure that we have industry best practices in place.”

The site might want to start by talking to management at Facebook, which has been making a concerted effort to deal with toxic hatred. Said Soraya Chemaly, author of a nearly 5,800-word piece for The Atlantic about social-media misogyny: “Despite ongoing issues, Facebook is committed to addressing concerns and responsive when problems arise. Twitter is not this far along and seems to be just beginning to consider this process.”

Twitter can do this. I want to see this company, which showed that it had a backbone when it sued the government for its right to provide details about how often it fields national-security inquiries about its users, recognize the problem in its own house, and start the difficult work of fixing it. Today, please.

YAHOO