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Posts Tagged ‘implication’

Twitter’s Trending Topics area is one of the easiest things to game on the web. Even when trends start out as real items, spammers often latch onto them with bogus tweets hoping to ride the wave and get some people seeing their spammy nonsense. Today, Twitter is acknowledging this.

In a post on its blog, Twitter notes that the “noisiness of the conversation” has led Trends to be less interesting. So beginning today they’re going to be experimenting with ways to surface more relevant tweets in this area. While they don’t come out and say it, the implication here seems pretty clear: They’ll be in some way curating the topics and the tweets. It’s not clear if this will be algorithmic or manual yet.

Actually, Twitter has kind of been doing this with topics for a while. When a spammy topic gets into Trends, Twitter quite often will remove it. But this sentence, “Specifically, we’re working to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful,” seems to suggest that it will be curating tweets within trending topics as well. And that it may even in some way rank tweets to show more relevant ones for the topic at hand.

Twitter notes that users may not notice the improvements at first, but soon they will. Their wording is also interesting in that they note that this is about “unearthing more value in search.” Again, that would seem to suggest that Twitter is thinking about the bigger picture of how to rank tweets based on relevancy (not just in Trending Topics). That could be by user authority, which has been a sticky issue in the past.

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In the Steven Spielberg movie Minority Report (yes, I make some reference to it about once a week), there’s a scene in which John Anderton (Tom Cruise’s character) is walking through an urban retail center and his eyes are getting scanned as he moves, which is serving up custom greetings and deals from retailers. It’s both creepy and cool. But that movie is set in 2054, we’re not there yet. But AT&T had a demo at its Tech Showcase today that is inching closer to that.

As you can see in the video below, the idea behind AT&T’s system is that you can walk around a city with a phone in your pocket and get alerted when a nearby retailer has a deal for you. Users of Foursquare and soon Loopt will recognize this concept, but AT&T’s idea is a bit different. By using AT&T’s network as the bridge to be constantly updating your location (assuming, of course, you opt-in to such a feature), these retailers are able to push these coupons to your phone via SMS. Currently, something like Foursquare requires that you “check-in” to a place to see that there is a deal there or nearby.

Naturally, this could get very annoying to a consumer if they don’t like the place offering the deal, but customization is the key to this. A user could, for example, say they like Mexican food, and those types of coupons would pop-up when they were in the vicinity.

Obviously, a system like this could be very lucrative for retailers and restaurants who want to entice the impulse buy or just increased foot traffic in stores. It could also be lucrative for AT&T if they were to strike deal with these retailers to serve these up — or even just charge SMS fees.

This is just a proof of concept at this point, but you can probably bet something like this is coming soon. And the next logical step after that is the Minority Report system. “John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right about now!”

[image: Dreamworks & 20th Century Fox]

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A new survey shows that 1 in 4 Americans text while driving. That’s not good news for road safety, no sir. The survey, which was conducted by Vlingo, says that 26 percent of people admit to texting while driving—the implication is that plenty more people text while driving than admit to doing so. (Note: Polls are created with this type of “are they telling the truth?” scenario in mind, so it should make a huge impact on the final percentage.) The poll surveyed 4,800 people.

Fotolia, a marketplace for microstock photography and video, is launching PhotoXpress, a free, premier-quality image bank, which will offer users royalty free image licenses for personal or professional use, ranging from Web site design to advertisements and editorial imagery.

Patrick Lor, president of PhotoXpress North America, says the site will feature a collection of more than 350,000 images and illustrations, but Lor’s ambitions are to have close to a million photos available free of charge. Lor, who also holds the title of president of Fotolia North America, recently joined the company. Lor previously helped to build rival and now Getty-owned iStockPhoto, which he helped co-found (Lor left in 2006, shortly after Getty acquired the startup for $50 million).

Lor says PhotoXpress will remain independent from sister site Fotolia, however the two are intricately connected. PhotoXpress members will be able to license up to 10 images daily, free of cost. The images are sourced from stock illustrators and photographers from around the world and span more than 22 categories, including global landscape scenery, photos of people in professional settings, architecture, and generic backgrounds. Only proper attribution is required. Professional ad agencies and firms who might need more than 10 images a day will be sent to Fotolia. In this sense, PhotoXpress is a lead generator for Fotolia. But more than that, it is a way for professional photographers to expose some of their work for free to a larger Web audience, while inculcating a respect for copyrights among Web consumers. It is an attempt to bridge the two worlds, and Fotolia wanted to do this before its competitors did.

Lom says the biggest challenge is convincing the photography world to give away stock photography for free. PhotoXpress is still working out if the site will make any revenue—the obvious revenue stream is third-party advertising on the site, but Lor couldn’t confirm or deny that there will be ads on the site. PhotoXpress’s main competitor is Hungarian site Stock.xchange, which happens to be partly owned by Getty Images. Currently, Stock.xchange has close to 400,000 images to choose from.

At TechCrunch, we often uses Flickr images licensed under Creative Commons for the best choice of images and the ability to publish the images freely. Bloggers will definitely find it helpful to tap into the wide selection of PhotoXpress’s site to find royalty free, high quality images to illustrate posts. This is exactly the right model. Image use is free up to a certain level (i.e., for most consumers, who serve to spread the images around and market them in effect). If you need more, then you start to pay a reasonable, modest amount.

(Photo courtesy PhotoXpress).

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