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Posts Tagged ‘tweetie’

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.

Last October, developer Loren Brichter set the App Store on fire with the sequel to his brilliant iPhone Twitter client, Tweetie. It looks like he’s about to do the same to the Mac.

Brichter sent out a series of teasing tweets today indicating that Tweetie Two is coming soon for the Mac. One, from his atebits account, reads:

Ready… ready?! News about Tweetie Tw… ROOOOOAAAAR!! NOOOO DON’T EAT M *BLAM BLAM*. *CHOMMMPP* Aaaaararrrrrgghhhhhh.

While clearly he’s about to say “News about Tweetie Two,” that in and of itself isn’t very useful. The more useful tweet comes from his personal Twitter account, where he links to a “leaked” screenshot, “Shhh, @atebits doesn’t know I’m leaking screenshots.” To which he replies to himself, “Damn you @lorenb!” Cute.

Better is the screenshot itself (below). While it doesn’t show much of anything beyond what seems to be a frame for Tweetie Two (which he humorously calls “Tweetie Too”), the fact that it’s far enough along to for him to feel comfortable leaking anything is a good sign.

Brichter released Tweetie for Mac last April, following the success of Tweetie (the first one) for the iPhone. It costs you $20 for the ad-free version, but it is well worth it if you’re addicted to Twitter want want a native, non-AIR app (though Echofon has a nice one as well).

So what else do we know about Tweetie Two for the Mac? Brichter actually set up a Formspring.me account where he has answered some questions himself. Notably, the pricing for Tweetie Two will be the same as the first one. Brichter basically spends all his time on the project. And he even designs it himself. Also, “The interface is going to be substantially different,” he writes.

Finally, when asked if he plans to develop for the upcoming iPad, Brichter has just two words, “Hell yeah.” Tweetie for iPad, anyone?

Earlier this week, Seesmic rolled out support for the new Twitter Lists for its Desktop client. Today, that same functionality comes to its web-based client. And with it comes a bonus: Geolocation support.

Now, to be clear, most users still won’t be able to use this geolocation support just yet, as Twitter has yet to enable it for most users. But if you do happen to have it, Seesmic supports it. As you can see in the screenshot, it looks pretty nice. If you see a little location marker on a tweet, you can hover over it to bring up a Google Map overlay showing where that tweet was sent from.

Last week, we previewed Tweetie 2.1, which will include geolocation support as well. Seesmic’s method looks like it may be a bit easier since it only requires a hover state to get to a detailed map of where the tweet was sent from, whereas Tweetie 2.1 requires two clicks (to the tweet and then on the tiny map to get a more detailed version).

Meanwhile, List support looks solid in Seesmic Web as well. As you can see in the other screenshot below, when you hover over a Twitter username, you have an option to add them to one of your Lists. Another web-based Twitter client, Brizzly, rolled out it support for Lists last night. The plan is to have all Brizzly “Groups” (a feature that worked like Lists) synced with Twitter Lists by tomorrow. Presumably, Seesmic will have its lists synced with Twitter Lists tomorrow as well.

It’s not yet clear when Twitter will do a wide roll-out of its geolocation support, but with several third-party services looking ready to go, it seems likely that it will be realatively soon. Following Lists full launch last week, Twitter has also begun testing its new Retweet funtionality to a small set of users.

Along with Lists and geolocation, Seesmic Web has a new Trending Topics area it is rolling out today as well.

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Earlier this morning, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis settled their lawsuits with eBay and a syndicate of investors in return for a 14 percent stake in the company they founded. The lawsuits were complicating the spin-off of Skype from eBay because the Skype founders still controlled the service’s underlying peer-to-peer technology.

In an interview with me this morning, Marc Andreessen, one of the investors through his new fund Andreessen Horowitz, told me, “The deal was never held up. The money was in escrow and was going to close” even if the lawsuits weren’t settled. The transaction is on track to close later this quarter. The other investors are Silver Lake Partners and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. Index Ventures and Mike Volpi are out of the deal. Josh Silverman will continue to be CEO.

Andreessen is glad that the lawsuits are settled and that the “Joltid IP is now owned by Skype,” but was prepared to litigate if it didn’t work out. He explains: “This was a completely known situation going into it. It was one of the reasons the deal was available, because of the situation. We assumed it would be a good idea to bring the founders on board and resolve all the issues, we are very pro-founder. There was some drama along the way, but we came out with everybody in the same boat rowing in the same direction.”

In addition to legal avenues, Skype also had the option to try to switch to a different technology, such as SIP-based Internet telephony. “Had this not happened,” says Andreessen, “there were various technological paths that could have been followed. Now that it is settled, it is not necessary to make any changes. The technology is scaling very well.”

Skype is on a $740 million revenue run-rate and boasts 521 million users worldwide. “Skype is gigantic and yet still a relatively small percentage of international call volume,” notes Andreesen. “This is, and ought to be, one of the most important companies on the Internet.”

Now that the deal drama is over, we’ll get to find out.

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By now, Tweetie 2 has probably stormed your iPhone. If not, you should check it out; in our opinion, it’s the best Twitter iPhone app out there (and yes, definitely worth the $3 [iTunes link]). But developer Loren Brichter isn’t resting on his laurels. Instead, he’s hard at work on Tweetie 2.1.

So what’s new? Well, there are a ton of small bug fixes, but also some pretty big additions. There are two that you’ll probably care the most about: New-style rewtweets and geolocation support. We got an early alpha build of 2.1 to try out, and it’s looking good.

Retweets

While Twitter has yet to enable the new-style retweets or geolocation for most accounts, Tweetie 2.1 offers a glimpse of how it will work. Tweets from accounts with the new retweet function show up in Tweetie 2.1’s stream. As promised, these are the tweets from the actual person who originally sent it, rather than the person doing the retweeting.

But Tweetie 2.1 highlights these retweets in a nice way. First of all, you see both the user icon for person who originally tweeted the item and the person retweeting it. The original tweeter’s icon is big, while the retweeter’s icon is small and stuck in the lower right hand corner (see image). These tweets are also tagged with a pinkish-red triangle in the upper right hand corner to let you know this is a retweet. Clicking on these tweets takes you to a page that shows you the tweet from the original source, but also says at the bottom “retweeted by @USERNAME.”

The way to retweet something in Tweetie 2.1 remains the same: You click on a tweet (or swipe a tweet in the stream) and hit the box with the arrow icon. The top option is “Retweet.”

There’s a growing concern that Twitter’s new retweet rules will cause some confusion (it already has) in users’ streams. But the way Tweete 2.1 handles it is solid, both giving recognition to the original tweeter and showing the tweet to be a retweeted item by someone you follow. Other third-parties thinking about how to handle the new retweets should look to Tweetie 2.1 as an example.

Geolocation

Likewise, Tweetie 2.1 also shows off Twitter’s new geolocation support. Again, for accounts that have it turned on, these tweets show up in Tweetie 2.1 with a tiny red location pin in the upper right hand corner. Clicking on these tweets takes you to the tweet’s page which also has a little map preview below it showing what city the tweet was sent from. Clicking on this map loads up a larger Google Map inside of Tweetie 2.1 that pinpoints the actual location with a red push pin.

If you want to geotag your tweets, you hit the 140 character counter at the bottom of the tweet input box. This brings up tweet options including a new “Geotag” button in the upper right. Clicking on this will first load up Twitter to ask you to authorize the app to see your Twitter location. Assuming you allow this (and again, this isn’t yet turned on for most users — though it is live for some), Tweetie will places a small red pin right next to the 140 character counter to indicate your tweet is geotagged.

Lists

One thing not currently available in this build of Tweetie 2.1 is Twitter’s new Lists element. “In a perfect world Tweetie 2.1 will have list support, or at least experimental support for it.  It should be 100% by 2.2,” Brichter said when I asked him about it.

Twitter fully rolled out Lists to all users at the end of last week (after testing it for a few weeks with a group of users). Reactions to the feature have varied, but generally seem to be good. And third-parties are already popping up that are either built around the Lists API or are supporing it (Seesmic Desktop added it today).

Brichter also confirmed to me that Tweetie for Mac version 2 will support Lists as well. But he says that will be coming after Tweetie 2.1 for the iPhone is available.

Timing

Brichter says that if all goes to plan, Tweetie 2.1 could hit its final beta testing stage later this week. If that happens, he’ll presumably submit it to the App Store for approval soon after that. And those who were up in arms over the fact that Tweetie 2 cost money even for people who bought the original Tweetie, put down your pitchforks: Tweetie 2.1 will be a free upgrade for Tweetie 2 owners.

For those interested, here’s a big list of the changes in 2.1 so far:

• Geotag work
• New retweeting
• Post ‘message’ parameter through to custom Image endpoints
• Switch to WhatTheTrend
• Reorganized Search/More UI
• Accessibility work
• Image compression options
• Vidly, Mobypicture, and Posterous as video options
• New protocol handler to make it easier to install custom URL shorteners
• Fix TextExpander goofups
• Fix Japanese double-posting bug
• Fix email conversation
• Fix handling of iTunes links
• Google Mobilizer option (and custom Mobilizer)
• Fix rare hang when viewing reply chains
• Fix calling from address book page
• Fix cases where saving state doesn’t complete
• Disable browser rotation option
• Overlapr
• Report Spam
• Fix rare crash translating tweets
• Disable “mark as read” button when no unread – history=1 for j.mp
• Fix upsidedown image viewer and browser
• Disable Pinstripes option
• Fix tweetie:///post? style protocol handler
• Reorder Settings
• Link to Manual

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Sometime soon, Facebook 3.03 for the iPhone will be available in the App Store. It should be a small update with some bug fixes. The bigger news is what will be coming soon after it: Facebook 3.1 for the iPhone, complete with Push Notifications.

While we’ve long suspected that this would be a feature in the next major iteration, developer Joe Hewitt confirmed it tonight on Twitter. And that feature will make what is already one of the best iPhone apps out there, even better. The lack of Push Notifications is probably the biggest complaint users have about the app, right now.

Facebook with Push Notifications could be significant in another way as well: It could well be the most popular app people are using with the functionality. Why that matters is that it could start showing everyone what some of us iPhone power users have realized for a while: The Push Notification management system beyond a certain threshold is basically useless. That is to say, when you’re getting a large number of Push Notifications on your iPhone, it’s almost laughable how bad the built-in system is for trying to figure out what you just got notified about beyond the most recent message.

That’s why Boxcar, a Push Notification app, is so great, it has a main dashboard where you can see a full list of your recent Push Notifications. I realize that I’m hardly representative of the average user, but I often find myself looking over this list after a few days, and there are a couple thousand Push messages accumulated. But sadly, this only works for notifications run through Boxcar. So if you have say, a notification from Foursquare, one from AIM, and one from BNO News, none of those will be in that list.

Boxcar (which also already does Facebook notifications, by the way) also doesn’t solve the issue of smartly displaying various kinds of messages on your main screen when they come in. For example, if I have a text message that comes in, but a Push Notification after it, the Push message will override the text message, so I will not know I have a text at all unless I unlock my phone and look at the Messages app.

There also badly needs to be a universal “quiet time” setting, when no Push Notification are sent to your phone. Several apps are starting to build this in, but that’s just more management for users to deal with on an app-by-app basis; it really should be a universal system setting.

The Push system is such a mess right now, that many of the most popular developers are letting others deal with it. Loren Brichter, the guy behind the excellent Twitter app Tweetie, tells us that he’s tabled Push Notifications for the time being, letting others like Boxcar handle it, because it’s a potential headache.

With iTunes 9, Apple completely revamped the way to organize and manage apps on your computer. It was a much needed, and welcomed change. The next step is to completely revamp the Push Notification management system. And I think Facebook with Push Notifications will go a long way in highlighting that need.

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As we first reported last night, Twitter appeared to have turned on at least part of its new Geolocation API. Today, the company has confirmed the roll out on its API Announcement Google Group page.

As Twitter API team member Raffi Krikorian writes today, “as some of you may have already noticed, we’ve started going through the first steps to get the geolocation API out our door.” Last night, a portion of the Geoloction API got turned on and it slightly borked the new, still unreleased version of Tweetie. Basically, it looks like it turned on geolocation coordinates for all tweets, even if they weren’t meant to be enabled. This gave every tweet a coordinate of 0,0, which put them in middle of the ocean off the coast of Africa.

Tweetie developer Loren Brichter quickly realized what the issue was and corrected it. Other third-party developers we talked to noticed similar things. As such, Krikorian explains a bit more about how the Geolocation API will work today. As he writes:

if you start to pull status objects through the API, you’ll notice that, for the majority of them, there is an empty tag and for the user objects there is a tag that is set to false.

And he continues:

for clarification: the will always be in a user object reflecting whether the user has opted-into the geolocation API.  there will also always be a tag in the status object regardless of whether there is a location attached to the tweet or not.  if there is no location, then the tag will be empty.  if there is a location (as above [here]), then the tag will be populated.

So it would appear that some of these apps weren’t taking the tag into account, and it may have been automatically setting it to ‘true’ which would then populate the tag with the 0,0 coordinates, since there was no actual geolocation data to share.

But, to be clear, the tag will always be there whether is set to ‘true’ or ‘false’, but if it’s ‘false’, it won’t be store any data and will self-close, I’m told.

Krikorian suggests that there have been some slight last-minute tweaks to the Geolocation API and that these are still in internal testing, but that they will be turning it on for a general audience “soon.”

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Howard Lerman can be a little intense. After the CEO of Yext finished his demo at this year’s Techcrunch50 (embedded below) he left one judge “speechless,” and during rehearsals Michael took him aside and asked him, “Are you on drugs?” He wasn’t. Lerman just has the heightened dopamine levels of an entrepreneur. And he hadn’t slept for 45 days because he was pushing his New York City startup to relaunch on an entirely new technology platform for TechCrunch50

Over the past three years, Lerman and his co-founders (who all went to the same high school together in Virginia), have built a local advertising business under everyone’s nose that is on track to generate $20 million in revenues this year.Yext is going after the huge, entrenched Yellow Pages business with online ads for local businesses that result in phone calls instead of clicks.

At TechCrunch50, which was the company’s public debut, Yext relaunched with a whole new product, going from plain vanilla pay-per-call ads to pay-per-action ads where the action is a relevant call that actually drives new business. Each ad has a unique trackable number that goes through Yext’s system, where it is recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. Yext customers get their own inbox for calls which is like a Google Voice for businesses. There is a transcript for each call, the phone number of the person who called, and a full audio file that can be played back. When a business signs up, Yext places ads for them across the Web in local directories such as Yellowpages.com, SuperPages.com, Local.com, 1-800-Free-411, 4Info, Topix, RepairPal, and more. It turns those ads into phone calls.

Yext uses speech-to-text recognition licensed from IBM and fine-tuned with its own algorithms for each business category it targets. Co-founder Brent Metz used to be an engineer in IBM’s speech science labs, and his name appears on many IBM patents. Only when certain key words related to the actual services offered by the business are mentioned in a call (”spinal decompression,” “oil change,” “install countertops”) does Yext charge for it. Wrong numbers, marketing calls, or calls from beyond a pre-determined geographic area are put in a junk folder and Yext doesn’t charge for those.

This means Yext needs to be really good at both driving relevant calls to local businesses and identifying them. “You’ve got to be transparent,” says Lerman. “We take all the risk, then we pull our pants down and show them what they get.” Lerman is so confident of his technology that at TechCrunch50, he switched all 20,000 local businesses already using Yext over to the pay-per-action system. It is a big, gutsy bet.

The minute he stepped off the stage, Lerman was inundated with emails and business cards from seemingly every venture capitalist and M&A officer in the room. He tried to ignore them and soak in the rest of the conference, but some of them were from people any startup CEO would be foolish to ignore. He took a few meetings with the most serious VCs, and ended up closing a $25 million B round, led by Institutional Venture Partners (which is also an investor in Twitter). The money just hit Yext’s bank account a few hours ago. “Anyone who doesn’t launch at TechCrunch50 is crazy,” says Lerman.

IVP partner Dennis Phelps will be joining Yext’s board. Sutter Hill Ventures, which had put in $3.5 million in an A round in June, 2008, also participated in this latest funding.

Yext is currently only in 12 local categories, including auto repair, chiropractors, gyms, vets, and yoga. There are 2,300 Yellow Pages categories. Lerman is going to take the $25 million and aggressively expand into those categories, hiring sales people to go after each one. He already has 75 employees.

Lerman is also extremely excited about getting Yext numbers into mobile apps. He thinks he can build an AdSense for mobile phones. “What do you think is the perfect action for mobile?”he asks. “It is a phone call, not a click.” App developers who sign up here can freely import Yext numbers into their apps by business type and category. So a travel app could bring up nearby auto garages or window repair shops for stranded travelers and get a cut of any call revenue they generate. Lerman has a lot of ideas like that.

Here is the demo from TC50 that got him $25 million:

Photo credit: TechCrunch/Chanaye Thomas.

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