TECH STOCKS: Twitter Among Few Gainers In Weak Tech Session

By Rex Crum, MarketWatch

Social-media firm gets mild lift; Rackspace falls on earnings

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Tech stocks put in a mostly negative trading session Tuesday, with Twitter Inc. closing with a small gain and Rackspace Inc. losing ground after the cloud-hosting company's middling quarterly results.

Twitter (TWTR) ended the day up 1.3% to close at $43.81. Late Monday, the social-media company said in a regulatory filing that 11% of its 271 million monthly active users used Twitter via third-party apps during the second quarter of the year. Twitter had earlier said that 14% of its users accessed Twitter through such apps.

In its filing, Twitter also said "8.5% of all active users used third party applications that may have automatically contacted our servers for regular updates without any discernable additional user-initiated action." Put another way, nearly 23 million Twitter users are actually automated "bots."

Twitter also said it has begun testing a sponsored video feature that allows advertisers to both post videos and measure how effective such postings are on Twitter's site.

Mild gains also came from Intel Corp. (INTC), Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT).

Rackspace (RAX) shares fell almost 6% to close at $29.50. On Monday, the provider of cloud-based hosting services reported second-quarter earnings that were essentially flat with a year ago, even as sales rose.

Losses also came from Facebook Inc. (FB), eBay Inc. (EBAY), Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) .

The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index (RIXF) fell 12 points to close at 4,389 and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOX) also closed with a small loss.

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