The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘twitter-search’

Say what you want about Skittles’ branding on the Internet, but at least it’s never boring. Following the decision last year to change the Skittles.com homepage into a Twitter Search page, which led to to things from racial slurs to pedophilia talk showing up, they’ve now redesigned again. And the result is once again interesting.

Titled “Experience The Rainbow,” Skittles.com is now a never-ending (it auto-refreshes to keep going as you scroll down) page of trippy, odd, and colorful images. For example, the first image is a clown dressed as an astronaut. As you keep scrolling down, you get a mixture of this weird stuff alongside fairly clever marketing and statistics for the candy. As a weird sumo wrestling graphic shows, Skittles currently has over 3,600,000 fans on Facebook, but only 272 followers on Twitter (because they just started their Twitter account yesterday along with this website).

In fact, the entire site is clearly a ploy to gain more Facebook and Twitter followers. As you scroll, the one constant is the ability to hop over to Skittles’ Twitter or Facebook page at anytime. Also, each entry has a Facebook, Twitter, and email link to easily share any item. And the ploy appears to be working, as there is no shortage of talk on Twitter about the new site.

The wackiness even goes so far as to include a bunch of ASCII art images in the HTML source code for the page.

There may be no topic high-profile women in the Valley tire of more than the question of why there aren’t more high-profile women in the Valley. I’ve written about it for nearly every publication for which I’ve worked. No matter who I talk to, the upshot always seems the same: Most people wish there were more women CEOs in the Valley, the few that do exist hate talking about the topic because they’d rather just be recognized as good CEOs or founders, and people tend to blame the problem on a lack of women in science and math and the lack of a work-life balance when starting a company.

I don’t mean to sound insensitive. There are definitely times my life has been harder as a woman just writing about this scene. But wake me when there’s something new to say.

Still want to obsess about it? Then you should start by reading the new book “Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age,” by Kurt W. Beyer. (Chance to win a free one below!) Hopper was the third programmer on the world’s first computer and lived her life presaging the future. She broke down three gender barriers as a woman in the 1940s: Ivy League academia, the Navy and the business world. You want badass? Hopper was the first woman to get a doctorate degree in mathematics from Yale. In a business that describes an easy UI as something “even your grandmother could understand” Hopper got most of her notoriety looking the part of a central-casting little old lady, knitting needles and all.

You may have seen this older Hopper on 60 Minutes or Late Night with David Letterman, but Beyer tells the story of Hopper’s younger years—demons, challenges, triumphs and all. The book was a painstaking seven-year project for Beyer, who was stunned when he moved to Silicon Valley in the late 1990s and so few people knew of Hopper’s contributions to the tech world. (There’s more from Beyer in the clip below from Press:Here.)

At the taping, I twisted his arm to give us 10 free copies of the book to give away to readers. Leave the name of your favorite unsung tech hero in the comments (male or female) and we’ll pick the ten most heartfelt or original for a free book.

Twitter has a problem: A number of users tweet, then lose interest. It needs a way to reengage them in the site. And tonight it’s starting to test one way: Notifications.

The test is currently only rolled out to a “limited” number of users right now, according to this update. But those who have it should notice an indicator similar to what Twitter does to let you know there are new search results on a query (see a capture above and below). There’s another service that does these types of notifications for new messages also: Facebook. Yes, Twitter for once is taking a playbook from its rival rather than the other way around.

When Twitter was still a young service, it used to auto-update with new tweets as they came in, in realtime. That was one of the first features killed off as the service began to explode in size and was having trouble scaling. FriendFeed implemented a similar live-updating stream before the Facebook acquisition, and that seemed to help boost engagement. Twitter currently offers live updating stream with its widgets.

There has always been some debate as to whether a constantly updating stream is better than notifications. Twitter is clearly now choosing the latter. When FriendFeed first launched it, plenty of users complained that the live updating was moving too fast. Seeing as Twitter is much larger than FriendFeed ever was, that could be an issue. The notification method is probably easier on server load than the constantly moving stream, as well.

As you can see in the screenshot below, these notifications shows up in the titlebar as well (just like with Twitter Search).

[photo via stephromanski]

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Last night, at a retreat in Arizona, two people died and another 19 had to be hospitalized after something went horribly wrong at a sweat lodge. Normally, such a story, while interesting, wouldn’t be right for TechCrunch. But there’s a tech angle here.

Apparently, the man who rented the place and threw the retreat, author James Arthur Ray, is also an avid Twitter user. And yes, during the night of the incident he was tweeting about it. Ray later deleted those tweets and all the tweets about the retreat. But, as Mark Maunder discovered, they’re still available in Twitter search. And a couple are pretty interesting:

JamesARay: is still in Spiritual Warrior… for anything new to live something first must die. What needs to die in you so that new life can emerge?

JamesARay: Day 5 of SPW. The Spiritual Warrior has conquered death and therefore has no enemies, and no fear, in this life or the next.

Now, we’re not presuming to know what happened that night, and authorities are still looking into the matter. But those are two very odd things to say on a night when two people died. And deleting them, obviously, does not look good.

The fact that these tweets still exist in Twitter Search is very interesting. Twitter recently updated its terms of service agreement, making it very clear that “your tweets belong to you.” But that ownership for whatever reason, be it technical or otherwise, doesn’t fully extend to the point that when you delete a tweet, it is gone forever.

This isn’t a new issue, but this could bring complete control of your data on Twitter to the forefront. If you delete a tweet, it’s not really gone, so be extra careful about what you say.

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So yes, President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize earlier this morning, and Twitter (and the rest of the Web) immediately blew up. I don’t think I’ve ever seen something become a trending topic on there ever since reports about the death of Michael Jackson started surfacing (I’m not sure which news item was more surprising).

But when I went to Twitter Search to find out what people were saying about the announcement in real-time (cause, you know, that’s what it’s good for) I noticed something I hadn’t picked up on before. Apparently, Twitter automatically refines search queries for trending topics to maximize the number of results you get. This is something that other real-time search engines so far don’t do (at least not OneRiot or Topsy, which are the ones I checked).

I have no idea when this started occurring exactly and I haven’t seen any earlier mentions of this that I can remember. I’m sure you’ll correct me if it turns out to be a really, really old feature and move on to tell me I’m a moron. To try it out, click the current trending topic ‘President Obama’. Only, that will not be the search query that will kick off an overview of tweets, but instead it’ll become “President Obama” OR #obama which evidently turns up much more results.

Update: ok so this appears to be nothing new. Now I’m wondering why they don’t explain why topics are trending anywhere on Twitter Search.

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Sonoma Wire Works, makers of RiffWorks recording software and the FourTrack and InstantDrummer iPhone Apps, has acquired the entire Submersible Music product line, including the DrumCore and KitCore software and drum content.

Yes, I didn’t know either one of those companies or products either. But I do know Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft and founder of investment firm Vulcan Capital, who apparently started Submersible to “help him in his own songwriting” (release).

Submersible started as a project within Vulcan and was initially meant to be a search engine designed to manage an extensive collection of loop libraries.

The company eventually went on to develop its flagship product DrumCore, which is essentially a combination of a database/browser for musical content, a library of drum content from ‘world-class’ drummers like Matt Cameron (Soundgarden, Pearl Jam) and Sly Dunbar (Bob Marley), and software tools for audio content generation and export.

But the main caveat is that the company was started by Allen, of course. The man lost a cool $5.5 billion the past year according to Forbes, about one third of his net worth as estimated in 2008, so maybe he’s simply offloading some of his assets to make up for it. No word on if the Submersible software ever actually helped him become a better songwriter, unfortunately, but we’re digging for more information.

And yes, that really is Paul Allen in that picture (credit: The Sydney Morning Herald)

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Normally, when you use Twitter’s search service, you can avoid clicking shortened URLs blindly – which is a security risk – by expanding them and taking a look at where they’ll be taking you exactly. I use it all the time, and I’ve even gotten accustomed to using Brizzly for Twitter on the web partly because it automatically expands any shortened URL.

I’d recommend anyone never to click short URLs without knowing where it goes, even when it comes from people you know and trust, because that’s not a guarantee for safe links either. In that regard, it doesn’t help that Twitter Search now no longer appears to expand Bit.ly URLs, which is the default web address shortener used by Twitter.

We’re not sure when this problem started occurring, but Twitter app developer Mallikarjun Reddy noticed it earlier today and adds that it is not an issue on Bit.ly’s side since its API for URL expansion seems to work just fine. Fortunately, the expansion for most other URL shorteners still functions, but since bit.ly is the most widely used tool of its kind on the social network, this is not something to simply brush off. Even if bit.ly is doing its own part to warn users of malicious links, Twitter has a responsibility to its users to protect them as good as they possibly can.

One more item to add to the ever-expanding to-do list of Twitter’s engineers.

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Twitter Search is great, but you have to be on Twitter’s site or one of the third-party apps to use it. This requires an active approach; you must enter terms and load or reload the results to get what you want. That’s why Twitter’s old “track” feature was so great, it would ping you every time a keyword you were searching for came up. Unfortunately, as growth exploded, Twitter had to axe the feature. But third parties have slowly been bringing it back. And a new one offers a pretty nice way of doing it.

Exclaim Track is a very simple service. It’s Twitter track over IM. Right now, it works with Google Talk (via Jabber), and all you have to do is follow exclaimtrack@appspot.com. Once that name is on your contact list, simply IM it with “track ” and it will IM you all Twitter mentions of the term you put in.

But here’s why Exclaim Track is really great: It’s so simple to both track and un-track items. For example, today is the Michigan/Notre Dame football game. I can’t watch it because I’m stuck at the office doing work for TechCrunch50 (hope to see you there Monday and Tuesday). I want to know what people are saying about the game, but don’t want to keep reloading Twitter Search, so instead I set up an Exclaim Track query, and now I’m getting pinged every time something comes up. After the game is over, I won’t care about the search anymore, so I simply type “remove ” and it’s gone.

You can also easily turn notifications on or off simply by IMing “on” or “off” to the Exlcaim Track IM account. That’s great if you want to mute notifications, but don’t necessarily want to remove a term. Also, you can search multiple terms at the same time, so removing all of them to quite the service might be a pain, without the “off” command.

Exclaim Track is a part of Excla.im, a service which allows you to update your Twitter status via IM. The developer, Harper Reed, set up this new tracking feature using the Pubsubhubbub real-time pinging service and Superfeedr, which does real-time feed parsing. He simply used Google’s App Engine for the messaging and hosting aspects, so the service actually costs him nothing to run.

One small downside to Exclaim Track is that when you first start tracking a keyword, it will find most of the recent mentions of the term that are available in Twitter Search. This means you’ll get a punch of non-real-time information. But once this runs through (usually just seconds or minutes), you’ll start to see new results pop-up in near real time. “Near” is an important thing to note, it’s not quite real time, but it’s usually pretty close, usually under a minute of the mention on Twitter.

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So, as the entire web seems to be talking about at the moment, Gmail is down. But what’s amazing is the volume of people talking about it. When I first noticed it being down, I did a Twitter search and just minutes later there were over 10,000 new results. A couple minutes later, there were over 20,000.

It took a few minutes for it to show up on Trending Topics, but now it’s there, but it was giving Twitter Search fits. For a while, if you clicked on “Gmail” in Trending Topics, you would have seen “No results for [blank]” returned. If you hit it again, its kept stacking the messages on top of one another (pictured below).

It looks like Twitter has resolved the issue, and made a strong comeback, but the influx of tweets continues to be amazing. This could be a good test for Twitter to see if it can stay up and everyone bitches about one of the most popular web services on the planet being down. And remember, this test comes before that new datacenter is in operation.

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SkyFire is getting ready to roll with its rich mobile browser. Last May, the company (finally) released its Symbian program after a long beta trial and announced that a BlackBerry version was in the works.

Earlier this Summer they hired former Travelocity executive Jeffrey Glueck to lead the company into the next phase. Now a regulatory filing reveals the startup has raised a Series C round of funding to the tune of $5 million, reports peHUB.

There were no new investors cited in the filing, so it’s safe to assume this was a follow-up round from SkyFire’s existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix Partners and Trinity Ventures, who had previously invested $17.8 million in the mobile browser maker. The total amount of funding raised by the company now reaches a healthy $22.8 million.

Skyfire is free and the only mobile browser that currently supports Flash, Silverlight, and a number of other technologies generally reserved for desktop browsers. The software runs on Windows Mobile (smartphones and PPC) and Nokia N and E Series (Symbian S60, 3rd Edition) phones.

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