Super twitter fan

Twitter in Microsoft/Google Three-Way, as Search Giant Crashes Data-Mining Party

admin — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:27:22 +0000

How nonexclusive is Microsoft’s deal with Twitter?

So nonexclusive that just hours after Microsoft (MSFT) announced it, rival Google (GOOG) lurched forward to say that it has entered into a similar partnership with the San Francisco-based microblogging service.

The search giant may be second to this party, but it’s not going to be late. But make no mistake–this is very clearly a rush job.

Some proof? Microsoft has code running. Google does not.

Twitter and Google announced the deal in posts to their respective company blogs.

“Our friends down in Mountain View want to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” Twitter co-founder Evan Williams wrote. “A fast growing amount of information is coursing through Twitter very quickly, and we want there to be many ways to access that information. As part of that effort, we’ve partnered with Google to index the entire world of public tweets as fast as possible and present them to their users in an organized and relevant fashion.”

Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search, was similarly enthusiastic about the deal.

“We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months,” Mayer wrote. “That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”

Once Google gets around to indexing Twitter’s real-time data.

Raise Your Hand if You Didn’t Do a Deal With Twitter This Week

admin — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 07:12:49 +0000

Raise your hand if you didn’t do a deal with Twitter at this week’s Web 2.0 Summit at the Westin Hotel in downtown San Francisco.

With Microsoft Bing launching a Twitter search and Marissa Mayer from Google revealing that they too had a deal in the works, it was in partial jest that Federated Media CEO John Battelle asked mySpace CEO Owen Van Natta whether his company had also done a deal with the popular micro-blogging service.

As Battelle himself wrote in the Web 2.0 White paper, “The era of Web 2.0 [is] a race to acquire and control data assets.”

Sources tell Sfweekly.com that Microsoft beat Google in the race to aggregate social data by a couple of hours. And picked up the big prize by pinning down both Facebook and Twitter for their search function. But the most interesting puzzle piece is that according to Facebook COO Cheryl Sandberg no money exchanged hands between Facebook and Microsoft perhaps due to a big investment from the latter, whereas both Microsoft and Google paid Twitter for the use of its API.

Twitter Founder Evan Williams yuks it up with Federated Media CEO John Battelle

This excerpt from the White paper might explain the content smile on Twitter founder Evan Williams’ face during his talk, in which he basically showed who was sitting in the Web 2.0 catbird seat, despite the recent slow-down in the company’s growth.

From the Web 2.0 White paper:

If a company has control over a unique source of data that is required for applications to function, they will be able to extract monopoly rents from the use of that data. In particular, if a database is generated by user contribution, market leaders will see increasing returns as the size and value of their database grows more quickly than that of any new entrants.

Truth be told, Senator Ted Stevens was correct in his estimation of the Internet as a series of tubes, or as Unix geeks are more likely to analogize, pipes of data. Twitter (for the moment) has the biggest pipe in the business, turning it into a fire hose of information, and the “earliest source for many people to learn about what just happened.”

Perhaps the smartest guy in the social networking room, Napster founder and Founder’s Fund managing partner Sean Parker was more than correct in his estimation of the microblogging service’s dominance.

Phone calling coming to Twitter

admin — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:18:46 +0000

Twitter users on Thursday will, for the first time, be able to make voice calls directly to each other through the microblogging service.
A new third-party offering from Jajah known as Jajah@call is expected to go into beta Thursday morning that will allow Twitter users to initiate a two-way voice chat with other users by typing “@call @username”–where “username” is someone’s Twitter ID–into any Twitter client. During the beta period, the company said, the calls will be limited to two minutes, but the company will evaluate that length during beta. However, it sees the two minute period–after which the call will end–as “the verbal equivalent of a tweet.”

According to Jajah, an Internet communications provider with tens of millions of users, the service will allow a user to place a call to any other user, so long as the second person follows the first on Twitter and both have Jajah accounts. The service is free to use and is expected to work on any Twitter-enabled device, from PCs to smart phones.
One important element of the service is that users can keep their phone numbers private, yet be able to have voice chats with just about anyone on Twitter. To be sure, since the calls are initiated by one person, the recipient may well not be online, or may choose to ignore the call if they don’t want to talk.
There are currently several applications that allow users to create voice-to-text Twitter posts–known as tweets–but it does not appear that anyone has yet made it possible to initiate voice communications directly between Twitter users.
Coming on the heels of the announcement earlier this week that Facebook users will now be able to communicate with each other via voice–using a third-party application from Vivox–it’s clear that there is a strong interest, among service providers, at least, in taking leading social networks beyond strictly text communications. Whether large numbers of users choose to get on board is unknown at this point, of course. And given that neither the Facebook nor the Twitter voice services are being provided by the social networks themselves means that some users will choose not to get involved for fear of privacy, stability or other concerns.

Still, if these third-party services end up being successful, it would be natural to expect that Facebook and Twitter may decide they need to step up and directly embed such technologies into their offerings. And there is a precedent for such a move. After Vivox began offering Second Life users a third-party voice solution, the virtual world’s publisher, Linden Lab, decided it needed to take advantage of the technology. Today, thanks to a formal partnership, Vivox’s voice service is formally integrated into Second Life.
And while it may be some time before such a thing happens with either Facebook or Twitter, or any other major social network, one would have to think that it’s only a matter of time.

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Twitter throughout history

admin — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:57:15 +0000

Note: Tweets are read from the bottom to the top
Note 2: Everything was translated to modern English
Note 3: Yes, computers (and twitter) existed since before the first human walked the earth

The Dawn of Man

Several decades BC

Modern times

The future

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Twitter to Generate Revenue as Site Grows Like ‘Gangbusters’

admin — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:04:35 +0000

Twitter Inc., the Web site that lets people post 140-character messages, plans to add services for businesses that will generate revenue in the fourth quarter, co-founder Biz Stone said.

The products might include an “analytics dashboard” to help companies monitor Tweets about their business, or verified corporate Twitter accounts, Stone told reporters yesterday at an event in Mexico City.

Twitter, based in San Francisco, is seeking ways to generate revenue after reaching 20.1 million U.S. users in June, according to researcher ComScore Inc. in Reston, Virginia. Companies using the service to communicate with customers may be willing to pay for added features, Stone said.

The paid services would probably be offered on a limited basis at first, Stone said. He didn’t say how much they will cost or how much revenue they could generate.

While Twitter is growing “like gangbusters,” there are many people who are aware of the site and aren’t yet using it, providing an opportunity for further expansion, Stone said. The company has a goal of expanding to about 100 employees this year from about 65, he said. Still, Twitter is being careful about ensuring it hires the right people, Stone said.

This month, the company hired Dick Costolo, a former Google Inc. executive, as chief operating officer.

To attract more people to Twitter, the company’s designers are also working on a project to help new users discover others who might have similar interests or who live nearby, Stone said.

Will Sluts Be the End of Twitter?

admin — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 04:59:02 +0000

It’s an age-old tale: site becomes popular, slags and hags use it for financial gain, the olds get mad. And Twitter is not immune. Thus, Business Week’s Sarah Lacy warns the company to clean up its act.

Though she once praised Twitter, Lacy has since become disillusioned by the amount of skin-centric span that’s clogging her and her friends’ feeds. Yes, there are ways to block the site’s cabal of sluts, but Lacy argues it’s far too hard, so she’s offering Twitter her own advice — and knocks Tila Tequila in the process:

There’s no reason why Twitter shouldn’t be catching spam, or at least making it easier to report.

Unless, of course, Twitter wants to be the new MySpace (NWS). After all, a lot of that site’s early growth came from call girls, strippers, and purveyors of porn. Tila Tequila, who has been pictured in Playboy, Penthouse, and other publications, even got an MTV show out of MySpace…. If Twitter wants growth for the sake of growth, porn will do that.

But knowing the founders, my guess is that the site doesn’t want that kind of success. Lewd content helped hobble MySpace’s advertising efforts.

With The Olds leading the Twitter revolution, Lacy insists the site do something about this madness or face the consequences. But we say there’s a far easier solution: don’t “follow” or click on links to people you don’t know, especially if they have whorish names like “Kiki” or “Cocoa” or feature pictures of bikini-covered breasts.

Even if Lacy and other worried people do leave the site, it shows no signs of slowing down, especially since a federal judge just launched a page that educates kids on civics and DePaul University is offering a class all about the site. If anything, Lacy’s arguments will only help the site: you’re nobody until somebody tries to stir up a frenzy of “family values” outrage.

MySpace Hooks Up With Twitter, Offers Two-Way Sync