The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘list’

Twitter has just implemented a change that may well have a massive impact on the service. The company has revamped its highly controversial Suggested User List, in favor of a list of Suggestions based on topic. That’s big news in and of itself (before Twitter’s suggestions were not categorized), but there’s also apparently no way to add all of these users to your account at once. In other words, members of the SUL will likely see their user growth counts take a big hit. You can try out the new suggestions page for yourself here.

Update: Twitter employee Josh Elman has just posted about the change on the Twitter blog. One thing worth pointing out: these lists are now generated with algorithms, and will be updated regularly. If the algorithm decides a certain user isn’t appealing to new Twitter members, they may be removed from the list:

We’ve created a number of algorithms to identify users across a variety of clusters who tweet actively and are engaged with their audiences. These new algorithms help us group these active users into lists of users by interests. Rather than suggesting a random set of 20 users for a new user to follow, now we let users browse into the areas they are interested in and choose who they want to follow from these lists. These lists will be refreshed frequently as the algorithms identify new users who should be suggested in these lists and some that are not as engaging to new users will be removed.

We’re still playing around with the new suggestion feature, but here’s what we’ve gathered so far. First, it looks like members of the old SUL have been transitioned over to the new format. There are twenty categories, covering everything from Technology to Cuisine (there’s also sections for Staff Picks, as well as a spell list of Staff Picks for Haiti). Clicking on one of these categories will bring up 20 recommended Twitter users. It appears that the order of the users presented has some randomness to it — I’ve had the order of the Technology section switch a few times as I played around with it.

The Suggested User List has long been controversial, because it effectively guarantees anyone on it hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers (disclosure: TechCrunch is on the list). But the list certainly has a valid purpose —  it helps expose new users to interesting Twitter users (Twitter is pretty boring if you aren’t following anyone).

The old SUL would present 20 people, at random, from Twitter’s list of possible recommendations. It also allowed users to follow all of these recommendations at once. The new system has apparently removed this mass-follow ability, which may well cause a downturn in the rate at which members of the list get new followers. Granted, it’s still pretty easy to hit those Follow buttons next to every suggested user, but it takes much more effort than adding them all in one fell swoop.

Via Scobleizer.

Right off the heels of announcing an expansion of its Kindle Digital Text Platform to authors and publishers around the world, Amazon has announced that it will soon introduce a new 70 percent royalty option in the program that will allow them to to earn a larger share of revenue from each Kindle book they sell.

For each Kindle book sold, authors and publishers who choose the new royalty option – will will not replace the existing DTP standard royalty option – will receive 70 percent of list price, net of delivery costs.

Amazon says the new 70 percent royalty option will become available on June 30, 2010 and be restricted to books sold in the United States at launch.

From the press release:

Delivery costs will be based on file size and pricing will be $0.15/MB. At today’s median DTP file size of 368KB, delivery costs would be less than $0.06 per unit sold. This new program can thus enable authors and publishers to make more money on every sale. For example, on an $8.99 book an author would make $3.15 with the standard option, and $6.25 with the new 70 percent option.

Russ Grandinetti, Vice President of Kindle Content at Amazon.com says authors today often receive royalties in the range of 7% to 15% of the list price that publishers set for their physical books, or 25% of the net that publishers receive from retailers for their digital books.

The new royalty option aims to increase the revenue earned from book sales for publishers and authors, but there are certain requirements they have to meet in order to qualify, on top of the requirements books receiving the standard royalty rate have today:

- The author or publisher-supplied list price must be between $2.99 and $9.99
- This list price must be at least 20 percent below the lowest price for the physical book
- The title is made available for sale in all regions for which the author or publisher has rights
- The title will be included in a set of features in the Kindle Store, such as text-to-speech
- Under this royalty option, books must be offered at or below price parity with competition, including physical book prices

For the latter requirement, Amazon says it will provide tools to automate the process, and that the 70 percent royalty will be calculated off the sales price.

If you’re on Twitter, that means you registered an account with a password that isn’t terribly easy to guess. As you may know, Twitter prevents people from doing just that by indicating that certain passwords such as ‘password’ (cough cough) and ‘123456′ are too obvious to be picked.

It just so happens that Twitter has hard-coded all banned passwords on the sign-up page. All you need to do to retrieve the full list of unwelcome passwords is take a look at the source code of that page.

Do a simple search for ‘twttr.BANNED_PASSWORDS’ and voilà, there they are, all 370 of them.

This isn’t a security issue, of course, and in fact it’s helpful to distribute the list so you can check if your favorite password that you use for other services might not be as fail-proof as you’d like to think. For the full list, simply download this TXT file, but here are a couple:

- password
- testing
- naked
- stupid
- twitter
- 123456
- secret
- please
- beavis
- butthead
- internet
- hooters

What would be interesting to know is if Twitter got this list from somewhere else, or if they actually analyze which passwords were most commonly chosen by its tens of millions of users in the past, rendering them ‘too obvious’. If the latter, that means this list is probably representative of most Web services.

(Thanks to Dario Manoukian for the tip; a quick search turns up a post on The Wundercounter featuring the list too)

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I literally just said “Wow!” out loud looking at these screenshots of Perfect Dark for Xbox Live Arcade. There’s a few more screenshots on Rare’s Web site, but only the ones here have before and after comparison shots: While I’m all of a sudden looking forward to playing the game again, it’s sorta depressing to think that this will never happen to GoldenEye .

Original post:
You will be impressed by the latest Perfect Dark for Xbox Live Arcade screenshots

Robert Scoble allows 1,768 people to know where he is at all times. Let me repeat that: 1,768 people know his location at all times. How do I know that? A new list from Osnapz told me.

Osnapz’ Top Foursquare Users list takes advantage of Foursquare’s new API to create a list that sorts the “top” users of the service. I put “top” in quotations because the way they determine this by default isn’t a very good metric: It’s the number of people you allow to follow you.

On Foursquare, unlike Twitter, you have to explicitly accept new followers. The reason for this is obvious: Foursquare is all about sharing your location, so your probably are only going to want to do that with people you actually know. Well, unless you’re Scoble, of course. But truth be told, I’m on this list as well, at #42, with 234 people I allow to follow me. I wouldn’t consider myself close friends with all (or probably even most) of those people, but I do generally accept people that I’ve met before. But I have plenty of others that I don’t accept. That’s not meant to be a slight to them, but simply because the idea of random people knowing where I am is still a little weird.

This type of symmetric social relationship is of course the key to Facebook as well. But the rise of Twitter has led to the popularity of the asymmetric network. Even Facebook is doing plenty of asymmetric things now with its “everyone” sharing button and fan pages. But location adds a different element to this because it’s the bridge between the online social world and the real-life social world. That’s undoubtedly the reason that Facebook is taking its time with implementing native location elements to its service.

With time, people will become more comfortable with sharing their location with others online. But sadly, we’ll undoubtedly also see some situations of real-world stalking (both extreme and not-so extreme cases) that will crop up. The fact that Scoble and Leo Laporte (#1 and #2 on the list), who are both web celebrities of sorts, basically seem to be using Foursquare asymmetrically is interesting in that regard.

To be fair, Osnapz also allows you to sort the lists by number of mayorships on Foursquare (basically, what you get when you’ve checked-in to a certain venue more times than other people). That would seem to be a better indicator of “top users.” You can also sort these lists by the various cities that Foursquare supports.

“The foursquare API has a low rate limit so I can only add a few members at a time, but my process runs every hour to add more users, so over time, the list will be more comprehensive,” Osnapz creator Tuyen Nguyen also tells us. I hope so because I’d love to know if someone is more stalker-friendly than Scoble.

[photo: flickr/r.f.m II]

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A couple months ago, Wolfram Alpha launched an impressive iPhone application based on their “computational knowledge engine” (a fancy word for search engine predicated on math) of the same name. Unfortunately, they horribly miscalcuted what it should cost when they set the price at $50. But rather than simply lowering the price, they’re trying another trick.

As we pointed out at the time, one of the most humorous things about the app’s pricing is that the mobile version of Wolfram Alpha was completely free. Free beats $50 any day of the week, and I think WolframAlpha finally realized that as they have decided to destroy the mobile web version that was tailored for the iPhone and iPod touch, which TUAW noticed today.

Now, when you point your iPhone’s browser to wolframalpha.com, you’ll be greeted by a pop-up letting you know that the WolframAlpha app is now available in the app store, complete with a link to go there and download it. You can also click the “X” to close this popup, but if you do, you’ll be greeted by a version of the site that is the same as the regular web site — which is to say, not at all tailored for a smaller mobile screen. It’s still usable of course, but it is much worse than the previously custom formatted version.

If you try to go to wolframalpha.com/iphone (the page where wolframalpha.com would redirect to if it detected mobile Safari), you’re greeted with a full page once again touting the iPhone app. What’s humorous about this page is that it’s also not at all tailored for the iPhone. Come on guys, you could have at least made the page that is trying to sell the iPhone app to iPhone users look nice on the device.

Despite Apple featuring the app in the App Store, indications are that it’s simply not selling like hotcakes. One indicator: There are only 30 reviews for the app so far. Many popular apps have thousands of reviews. And many of WolframAlpha’s reviews are simply bitching about the price. Another indicator: The app is nowhere to be found in the top 100 grossing apps, the area Apple made in the App Store specifically to help showcase more expensive apps. If a $50 app is not among the highest grossing, that’s not a good sign for its sales.

The bottom line: The app is still too expensive. And nuking the iPhone-optimized version is not going to change that.

If you do happen to have $50 just burning a hole in your pocket, you can find the app here.

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Wow. Marketing email software provider ExactTarget has secured another $70 million in funding, according to an SEC filing, bringing the startup’s total funding this year alone to $145 million. The company raised $70 million earlier this year from Battery Ventures, Scale Venture Partners and Montagu Newhall. Not too shabby considering the state of the economy.

The latest round of funding comes from Technology Crossover Ventures, (TCV) according to a report in the Indianapolis Business Journal. The VC firm has also invested in HomeAway, Zillow, eHarmony, WhitePages.com, Expedia, Orbitz and Netflix.

When we reported on ExactTarget’s earlier funding, the startup said it would delay its IPO plan and had withdrawn its application with the SEC to trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol EXTG. Interestingly, TCV has helped guide many startups in its portfolio to an IPO, so it makes me wonder if ExactTarget is readying itself to go public in 2010.

ExactTarget’s software provides enterprises with email marketing platform that powers everything from email coupon offers and automated fraud alerts to e-statements and SMS text messages. ExactTarget’s software provides email marketing tools for a widespread group of big-name clients, including CareerBuilder.com, Expedia.com, the Gannett Co., and The Home Depot. The software is also integrated on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

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Venture backed adult site Zivity finally figured out that there’s a whole other market out there beyond guys (and a few women) who want to look at naked women. Lots of women (and a few men) apparently want to look at naked guys, too. So in a lightning bolt of marketing genius, they doubled their potential market size in a single blog post: Zividudes.

They’re taking nominations for who users want to see without their clothes on (topless for now). Once the list is set they’ll start going down the list to see who’s brave enough to say yes: “We’ll start with the top choice and work our way down until someone is brave enough to say yes! We’ll pay for the photo shoot by one of our top photographers, so the Zivity Dude will look *fantastic*.”

Who do you want to see shirtless? Twitter the name out with the hashtag #zividude and your vote will be counted. Early favorites include Kevin Rose, Chris Saad, Loren Feldman (although his wife is making the push), Jim Fishef and Sean Percival.

Let me know how it all turns out. And be on the lookout for Ashton Kutcher to try to steal the show. That guy will do anything for a little press. In fact, maybe Kutcher and Kevin Rose can do a dual bromance photoshoot?

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Jon Steinberg, now former Strategic Partner Development Manager on Google’s SMB (Small Medium Business) Partnerships team, has accepted a position as Executive in Residence at Polaris Venture Partners. Steinberg will be working from the VC firm’s New York offices, where he’ll help identify new investment opportunities as well as working with existing portfolio companies.

The investor’s portfolio is of course listed on CrunchBase in its entirety, but the most familiar to our readers will be JibJab, Sprout, Quantcast, LogMeIn, Thing Labs (of Brizzly fame) and Automattic (parent company to WordPress).

At Google, Jon Steinberg worked to acquire small business Adwords customers through reseller partnerships with yellow page and other media partners. Prior to joining Google in October 2007, he was the Director of Business Development at Majestic Research, and before that the founder of iBuilding, a VC-backed commercial real-estate software company.

(Via his Twitter account)

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Twitter has rolled out its new Lists feature to a larger portion of its user base right now. The feature allows you to group users you follow together and then lets you share those for others to also follow.

Setting up a list is simple. Currently, the homepage features a Lists banner that allows you to start simply by clicking on the “Create a new list” button. Once you do this, an overlay appears and you just type in the list name (which Twitter then converts into a permalink along the lines of twitter.com/USERNAME/LISTNAME), and set the list to be public or private. This is obviously an important distinction as the public one, others will be able to see, while the private one will be for your eyes only.

On the right hand column of you Twitter.com homepage, you will see a new “lists” area under you bio. Clicking on this will take you to your list overview page where you can manage your own lists, as well as see other user’s public lists that you are a part of. Also, on user profile pages you will see that the users’ lists are now listed under the “Favorites” area in the right hand toolbar.

Clicking on any of these lists will take you to a stream of just the users followed by that list. Basically, this is a filter, if used the right way. This is something Twitter proper has long needed (though plenty of third party services like Brizzly have stepped in to offer it).

Unfortunately, adding people to your list is not as easy as it should be. The reason for this is that there is no user search functionality. Instead, you have to either go to your “following” page, or to that person’s profile to manually add them.

A number of third-party sites and services were granted early access to the Lists feature, and have been working with its API to integrate the functionality into their services.

Much has been made about Twitter’s Suggest User List (Disclosure: We’re on it) and how it wasn’t a fair method of user discovery. These lists will undoubtedly help alleviate a lot of that strain.

Update: Initially, I suggested this was a massive roll out, it is not. As project lead Nick Kallen says, it seems that just a lot of people I happen to know were added. My bad, sorry to excite everyone. The feature is very cool though.

Update 2: We’ve made a TechCrunch Team List if you want to follow that — which you should.

Update 3: Twitter also has a team list, which is following 108 people. That would seem to suggest that they may be over 100 employees already, which is more than they’ve stated recently. Actually, strike that, that list include non-employee contractors, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams has just informed us.

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