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Posts Tagged ‘tweet’

While Loren Brichter may be hard at work on Tweetie Two for the Mac, he hasn’t given on his baby: Tweetie 2 for the iPhone. While the app hasn’t been updated since late November, a new build is due shortly with one big addition: native Foursquare support.

What this means is that anytime someone in your tweet stream sends out a tweet from Foursquare (which, to the annoyance of some users, happens automatically at times), that Foursquare link (shown as a 4sq.com URL) will be able to be opened in Tweetie in a way that displays the location information in a nice format. When a tweet is eligible for this feature, you’ll see a purple square logo in the upper right hand corner of the tweet in Tweetie.

When you click on a Foursquare link, you’ll be taken to a page that shows the venue’s address and phone number as well as the Foursquare mayor of the place. If you click on the address you’ll load a Google Map showing you exactly where it is. If you click on the phone number, you’ll be able to call the place right from the iPhone. Below all of that, there is a button to open the venue in Foursquare, which launches the Foursquare iPhone app.

A couple other new features in Tweetie 2 include Vodpod video uploads and the ability to attach messages along with your TwitPics to that service.

Look for this Tweetie 2 update soon in the App Store (it will be version 2.1.1). Meanwhile, Tweetie Two for Mac should be released in a private beta in about a month, according to new info shared on MacHeist today. Tweetie for Mac will soon be added to the nanoBundle 2, and in anticipation, they’ve added this message:

As a MacHeist customer, you’re not only receiving a free upgrade to the upcoming, highly anticipated Tweetie 2 – we’ve also arranged exclusive access to the pre-public beta for you guys!

Have fun using the best Mac Twitter client for now… and stay tuned for an email from us in about a month with your invite to the future of Mac tweeting.

When Chomp launched eight weeks ago in the iTunes store, it launched as an app for reviewing other iPhone apps. The app shows you a stream of realtime reviews, which you can filter by everyone or just your Facebook freinds. The app is showing some traction and should hit 300,000 active monthly users sometime tomorrow, according to co-founder Ben Keighran.

While it started out as an app, today Chomp launched a complimentary Website with full app search capabilities and links for each app. There, users can also see the stream of reviews, as well as dedicated pages for each app and vanity URLs for each reviewer. Developers can now link to the Chomp reviews directly from inside their apps using Chomp Connect, which also launched today in private beta. Chomp Connect lets developers add Chomp review buttons right inside their apps without forcing to go anywhere else.

Keighran contends that reviews on iTunes tend to have a more negative bias because people are prompted to submit a review every time they delete an app. With Chomp Connect, developers can ask their most engaged users to submit reviews.

He hopes to make Chomp a social alternative to iTunes reviews. By driving reviews straight from their apps, developers can promote their apps in the Chomp review stream. The more reviews, the more often it appears in the stream.

The Linux Foundation, the non-profit that supports the growth of the Linux kernel, has launched a merchandise store where people can purchase a newly launched line of original T-shirts, hats, mugs and other items that reflect “geek culture.”

According a release sent out by the Foundation, merchandise available in the Linux.com store is “designed to reflect the unique and varied culture associated with Linux” and will support the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds. For example, t-shirts contain phrases like “Free The Code,” “FSCK the Establishment,” and “Fork You.” All revenue generated from the store will go directly towards Linux Foundation activities, initiatives and events.

In conjunction with the launch of the store, Linux is holding a t-shirt design contest. Design submissions are due on the store’s site by April 11, 2010. The top five designs will be available for community vote at Linux.com through June 6, 2010 and the winning design will be included on T-shirts available for purchase in the Linux.com Store. The lucky designer will be awarded with travel to Boston to attend the Foundation’s annual conference LinuxCon in August.

The Linus Foundation has launched a number of unique initiatives to help raise funds for the organization and its open source initiatives. Last year, the Linux Foundation launched a branded Visa credit card.

About the Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007, the Linux Foundation sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and is supported by leading Linux and open source companies and developers from around the world. The Linux Foundation promotes, protects and standardizes Linux by hosting important workgroups, events and online resources such as Linux.com. For more information, please visit www.linuxfoundation.org.

When I wrote that location would be this year’s Twitter at SXSW, I also meant that Twitter’s geolocation would be this year’s Twitter at SXSW. The service has just turned on geolocation on its website today for the first time.

While Twitter’s geolocation feature has been live through its API since last November, there was no sign of integration into the main twitter.com site until now. As you can see in the screenshot above, for tweets tagged with location, right next to the source of the tweet there is a location placemarker. When you hover over it, it turns blue, and clicking on it brings up a little Google map showing the location that tweet was sent from.

You can see these maps as overlays both on individual tweet pages, and on tweets in your main stream. In some cases, depending on how Twitter geolocation API is being used, it looks like place names are even passed through to Twitter. For example, here’s a tweet sent from Foursquare that also says where the tweet is being sent from.

The timing of this move by Twitter is significant. Earlier today, the New York Times reported that Facebook would unveil its answer to location next month at its f8 conference. Twitter’s first-ever Chirp conference takes place just one week before f8. Google, meanwhile, is in the game with Latitude and to some extent Buzz (but could have been in it a lot more). And of course, every app and their mother appears to be launching with some sort of location functionality at the SXSW in Austin, Texas, which begins on Friday. Many of those apps use Twitter’s geolocation API to pass the data back to Twitter, so it makes sense that this would be a good time to turn the functionality on for the website.

Update: It looks like Twitter has just turned off the location functionality after having it on for a bit. Look for it to come back shortly — certainly some time before SXSW.

[thanks Chad]

Twitter has quietly changed the wording on the button users need to press to update their statuses on the Twitter.com website. It took them 10 billion (or so) tweets to realize we don’t ‘Update’, we ‘Tweet’.

A lot of people are noticing the change, although I have to say I had to hit the refresh button of my browser a couple of times before I saw it too. Could be Twitter bucket testing or a caching issue on my side.

Update: it changed back to ‘Update’

This is of course a minor interface change and likely has nothing to do with the “nifty features” that were supposedly soon finding their way to the Twitter web interface, which is still the most popular client for, well, tweeting.

As a reminder: Twitter considers the word “tweet” to be a trademark of theirs, even though it hasn’t been officially assigned to the company yet.

Hat tip to @Orli for the heads up and the TwitPic.

You know how TweetMeme started out trying to be the Techmeme of Twitter before it ventured off plastering its ReTweet buttons on every blog on the Web? Well now there’s a site that just launched today that wants to be the TweetMeme of Google Buzz called ReBuzzThis.

It is not much to look at right now—five lame links as of this writing. But the site wants to encourage blogs and other sites to add its ReBuzz buttons to posts and articles. The posts that get ReBuzzed the most shoot up the homepage just like on TweetMeme with ReTweets. Except that TweetMeme tries to count all retweets, not just those done through its buttons. ReBuzzThis seems to only count Rebuzzes done through its site and buttons, so it is not really capturing the most Buzzed about articles and posts.

But it may be onto something. One of the top feature requests on Google Buzz is a Rebuzz button. So we may see an official version of ReBuzzThis come out on Google Buzz itself.

There are lies, damned lies, and statistics, as Mark Twain once said. A couple days ago, I wrote a post titled, “What Happened To bit.ly’s Market Share” after I noticed some new statistics on TweetMeme which suggested that the market share for short URLs has shifted in the past few months and is actually diversifying as more and more short URLs inundate the Web.

John Borthwick, the investor who incubated bit.ly and then spun it off from betaworks, didn’t like that headline because it called into question bit.ly’s continued dominance. He also didn’t like it because there was a problem with the underlying statistics. Previously, the TweetMeme stats showed only the top 5 URL shortening services in a given 24-hour period. But then TweetMeme took down the stats for a couple months while it reworked the underlying architecture to better scale with the incredible growth in these kinds of links. When the stats quietly came back over the holidays, they looked different. Instead of bit.ly showing a 70 to 80 percent share of shortened links on Twitter, it only had 56 percent (today it’s at 58 percent).

One reason for the change was that TweetMeme was counting differently. It now included “other” as a category, whereas before it only showed the relative share of the top five players. Indeed, if you look at relative share, bit.ly is still in the mid-70s. Borthwick pointed this out to me privately via email and I corrected the post. It was something that I missed, but I wasn’t the only one who missed it. Borthwick and Andrew Cohen at bit.ly missed it when I ran the numbers by them prior to posting, and even TweetMeme’s Nick Halstead didn’t catch it. In fact, he told me the data was comparable.

I added the correction but didn’t change the headline because it was still a valid question. The numbers had changed.  Why?   Borthwick still wasn’t happy, so he wrote his own post this morning with a deliberately misleading headline (“charting the real time web OR the curious tale of how TechCrunch traffic inexplicably fell off a cliff in December”) to make his displeasure known. Duly noted. Of course, the headline got the post on Techmeme even though you have to get halfway through the post to find out “I actually don’t have any data to suggest that happened.” Borthwick also offered some of bit.ly’s own data suggesting that it still has a 68.6 percent share of total short links on Twitter (see his table below).

Now 68 percent does sound better than 58 percent., and it’s pretty darn close to the 70% bit.ly constantly cites as its market share. But here’s the thing. Borthwick’s data is based on something known as the Twitter “garden hose.” It is a trickle of data that is a sample of the Tweets going through the service.  You can see that by looking at the number of occurrences for each short URL: 4,193 for bit.ly, 6,112 for all of them.  TweetMeme’s stats are based on a much bigger set of data: the so-called “firehose.”  After filtering for only Tweets with links in them, TweetMeme’s stats are based on more than 3 million Tweets a day.  I think I’ll go with TweetMeme’s numbers, but God bless Borthwick for trying to put his company in the best light.

Yes, the numbers changed. But now we know that bit.ly’s market share was never 80 percent to begin with.  That’s not to say that bit.ly is not growing like gangbusters. It is—bit.ly went from shortening 12 million links to more than 2 billon in a year.  But so is the rest of the market, which is diversifying and fragmenting as new short-link domains inundate the Web, including ones which are not general-purpose link shorteners but rather tied to specific sites or apps, such as goo.gl or wp.me (Wordpress). We can argue about statistics all we want. The more interesting question is can bit.ly continue to dominate? For the record, I actually think they have a good shot.

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There’s been a bit of controversy around Ad.ly, which aims link up high-profile advertisers with celebrities on Twitter and then distribute links to marketing campaigns through the Twitter user’s tweet streams with full disclosure. Launched this fall, the startup has created an interesting way to use the viral nature of Twitter and celebrity reach to develop an advertising model.

Today, Ad.ly has launched analytics for its platform, letting marketers and Twitterati measure the impact of their advertisements and Tweets. Some of the analytics that Ad.ly can now provide to advertisers include user engagement, male and female segmentation, location, and sentiment analysis. Ad.ly has partnered with PeopleBrowsr, a startup that data mines Twitter, to provide the data to users. Ad.ly’s founder Sean Rad says the reasoning behind the new feature “provide Twitter users the data they need to become more prolific content creators.”

Here’s how Ad.ly works: Ad.ly’s platform is self-serve for both the Twitter users and the advertisers. So for example, an advertiser for Dell could choose which Twitter power-user to pitch their ad too and then submit a bid to a particular user. The celeb (or publisher) then approves or denies the request. Once the publisher approves the Tweet, the message is sent out via their account by Ad.ly. Each campaign requires the celeb to send out four Tweets over the course of a week. It’s important to note that each Tweet identifies Ad.ly and links to an online interactive campaign for a brand. Celebs are paid handsomely and advertisers get their reach.

Many have doubted Ad.ly’s model because advertisements within a stream could distort a celeb’s authority. The idea that celebs (and advertisers) would be monetizing their followers is questionable and has raised some interesting discussions.

Of course, Ad.ly is just one of several ways that Twitter can be used for advertising. Robert Scoble presented us with a compelling model for advertising on Twitter, called a Super Tweet. We know Twitter is going to be incorporating advertising of its own soon, but we don’t know what this will look like yet.

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Last month we wrote about Trefis, a new financial site that lets you tweak your stock predictions by adjusting variables in a company’s business model, depending on how you think different segments of the company will perform. These predictions are plotted out on attractive interactive charts, but until now those charts were all housed on the site’s homepage. Today, Trefis is launching support for widgets, giving bloggers and financial experts the chance to share their adjusted stock predictions with the world.

CEO Manish Jhunjhunwala says that the early adopters for the widget will likely be bloggers, freelance writers, and columnists who regularly write about business and financial content. He also notes that the site has gotten requests from a broader audiecne of writers who often write about a particular company (e.g. an Apple fan site).

Trefis breaks out a company’s businesses and products into different categories, then lets you manually tweak the contributions of those segments to the overall stock price. For example, Trefis currently says that the Apple TV represents 2.11% of the company’s stock price. If I think that’s about to change — say, because of the release of a new, superior model — I can manually adjust that value and see its impact on the overall stock price. You can get an idea for how the site works using the widget embedded below.

Jhunjhunwala says that the site has seen around 25K unique visitors in the last month.

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The latest version of TweetDeck, the popular Twitter client, is List-crazy: you can add lists on the fly, edit them, create new lists based on existing lists, and it even suggests people you may want to add to a list. Now TweetDeck is launching a List directory and putting it front and center on its homepage. Previously, the homepage was not much more than a place to download the Tweetdeck client, but with the new Lists directory TweetDeck wants to make its Website more of a destination site in its own right where people go to discover new people and lists to follow on Twitter.

The TweetDeck List directory is broken up into more than 140 categories, including technology, law, architecture, healthcare, media, startups, and video games. You can browse through the different categories, or get recommendations. Since TweetDeck already creates a tag cloud based on the most common subjects Tweeted about in any given list, it matches the categories to the tag clouds. It also looks at your profile information to try to target the recommendations a little bit better. Most other list directories simply rank lists by number of followers, which TweetDeck also takes into account but does not give it as much weight. Each list can also be voted up and down within a category or commented on.

The List directory is replacing TweetDeck’s old directory of suggested users). But you can still drill down to individual users to see their follow/follower count, tweets per day, tag cloud of what they Tweet about, all the Lists they have created and all the Lists they are on. The automatically-generated tags feed into the list search as well, showing you what lists match your query even if that keyword is not on the list. (See screenshots below).

There are other Twitter List directories out there which TweetDeck wil be competing with, such as Listorious, which now has more than 10,000 curated lists. TweetDeck however gets a feed of all the Lists on Twitter and can surface those through search or recommendations. Combining Lists with search provides a powerful way to do people search as well. For instance, Listorious recently turned on people search so that when you search for “VC” or “entrepreneur” you get people who are in lists with those (human-generated) tags. TweetDeck’s search now does the same thing, surfacing Lists with “VC” or “entrepreneur” in the title, descriptions, and tags (both those generated by humans and automatically based on the dominant subjects of the Tweets). As people rate the lists and add comments, those will factor into search results and recommendations as well.

TweetDeck has one more advantage: the millions of people who use TweetDeck and the one million unique visitors per month who visit the homepage. A button that will launch the new List directory will be included in an update to the TweetDeck client going out on Monday (v0.33), which also fixes some bugs from the last update and takes up less memory (always an issue with AIR apps)

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