TweetDeck's new Facebook support.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)TweetDeck, the popular Twitter app for the iPhone, was pulled from the Apple App Store on Monday due to a crippling crash bug. An update was quickly resubmitted to Apple and the new version (1.1.1) is now available for download (iTunes Link). The new version includes Facebook integration, video uploading, and support for Twitter trending topics.
The Facebook support in TweetDeck for iPhone works very well, allowing you to add columns from Facebook by either selecting a feed of all your friends or separating them into groups. The feed support is restricted to status updates, so you cannot see when new photos or events are posted, but comments and Likes on status updates are visible. It also allows users to comment or Like a post from the app as well as post a message on someone's wall. Of course, Facebook's own iPhone app is a much more robust offering, but it is nice to have data from Facebook and Twitter centralized in one app.
TweetDeck now also offers video recording and uploading for iPhone 3GS owners. This service is supported by 12seconds, which has an iPhone app of its own. This type of short-form video plays nicely with the overall concept of Twitter and should help to cut down on upload times when posting new updates.
Additional features included in this update are the inclusion of Twitter trending topics, the ability to cross-post updates to Twitter and Facebook, nearby tweets, bit.ly support, and landscape composing. These are all features that make a lot of sense for TweetDeck and were surely highly requested.
A nice video of the new features, put together by the TweetDeck team, is included below.
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Twitter announced late Wednesday that it is starting a limited test of a new feature that displays the number of new tweets in your timeline since you last refreshed. This works in much the same way as the new tweet notification on the search page for a term. When you click the notification, the new tweets slide out in the same fashion as the search page.
While this functionality was probably not too difficult to implement, since it was already built for the search feature, it is a welcome addition and something that just makes sense. In fact, it would make a lot of sense for Twitter to build out a notification system for @replies, re-tweets, and direct messages, like Facebook has for Wall posts and other actions. Getting updates without having to manually reload the page is one of the big advantages of Facebook's current functionality, so I would not be surprised to see Twitter to follow suit.
While this feature is still in limited testing, Twitter says it hopes to roll it out to everyone as soon as it can. I, along with many others, am not in the test group yet, so please share your thoughts on the feature in the comments if you are.
Pandora, with new Facebook, Twitter, and Gift sharing features.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)Pandora on Wednesday announced the arrival of some new sharing features for the service. In the past, you have been able to share Pandora stations, but you were forced to do it via e-mail instead of taking advantage of one of the modern social networks. Now, Pandora is enabling station and song sharing via much more efficient means: Facebook and Twitter.
These features work pretty much exactly how you would think they would. Clicking on the Facebook icon pops out a Facebook window, allowing you to share either the current song or station. The Twitter integration works in much the same way, enabling you to tweet out a link to the current song or station. When you click on the station link that someone has shared, it whisks you away to their Pandora station and lets you listen. However, the song links only go to a landing page that gives you a 30-second preview and an option to create a station based on that song. Oddly, this page does not give the user the "Buy from Amazon/iTunes" option that Pandora's main app features.
In addition, Pandora is bringing more attention to its station-gifting feature. This feature basically allows users to create an entirely new station, pair it with an eCard and send it off to someone. Pandora is essentially trying to create the modern version of the mixtape. This feature has been around for a little while, but it has gained little attention to this point. The more prominent placing in Pandora's music player may change that.
These new sharing features should boost usage of Pandora. Tapping into the previously untouched power of Facebook's social graph and Twitter can only be a good thing. Pandora is just coming off of reaching an agreement on new royalty rates for music this summer and it's working toward its goal of being profitable by the end of the year. They're also facing some stiff competition from companies like Slacker. Pandora still has a long road ahead, but opening up its service to sharing on Facebook and Twitter is definitely a step in the right direction.
The L.A. Times and now, Mashable are reporting that a security hole in Twitter allows protected tweets to be indexed by Google. After looking into the matter, we have determined that Google is not displaying protected tweets but rather indexing all public tweets, some from accounts that are now protected.
At first glance, there seems to be a hole in Twitter's protected tweet security, with the prime example being tweets, supposedly written by Bill Clinton showing up on the search engine. However, the tweets that appear here belong to "Fake Bill Clinton" from when he owned the @billclinton username and the account was private. One of the tweets that is indexed by Google under @billclinton can be found, migrated to @notbillclinton's account here.
A few of the "protected" Bill Clinton tweets.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)It appears that all Twitter users whose accounts have been protected since they opened them are in no danger of their tweets being indexed. It appears that if, at some point, the profile was public, then the tweets made during that time continue to live in Google's index.
This incident was definitely a scare for users with protected accounts who value their privacy on the site highly and have placed some degree of trust in Twitter to keep their tweets safe. Twitter has had some security concerns in the past, with a slew of their corporate documents being exposed and before that with several high-profile accounts being hacked. Since the "protected tweets exposed" fiasco is essentially a non-issue, it appears that Twitter has the service's security under control for the time being. Privacy and trust are big issues for companies like Twitter and had this been a real issue, surely many users would have felt betrayed.
Kevin Rose started a new side project in March called WeFollow aimed at creating a Twitter directory in which any user can add their account to a category. Users are then ranked in the various categories on the site, creating a good way to see who the top Twitterers are in a given subject area. The rumor is now that Digg has acquired WeFollow.
Mashable noticed that the copyright on the bottom of WeFollow now reads "(c) 2009, Digg Inc." This would appear to mean that Digg has in some way come into possession of WeFollow. TechCrunch reports that WeFollow has in fact transferred the ownership of the site over to Digg, with no financial transaction attached. By this account, Rose just gave the site and its technology to his real baby, Digg, at no cost.
With this "acquisition," Digg is clearly looking to add some sort of Twitter or real-time component to the site. TechCrunch speculates that this new functionality will allow Digg to surface top stories on Twitter based on the data that WeFollow can gather. Additionally, WeFollow itself is tweaking its algorithm to give more weight in its rankings to those who tag themselves properly. This should help to cut down on people putting themselves in unrelated categories just to get more exposure.
Initially, this deal appeared to be a way for Rose to be able to cash out on WeFollow at the expense of his other company, Digg. However, now that it has come to light that Digg acquired WeFollow and its technology for nothing, it just appears to be a smart strategic move on the part of Rose to bring some real-time functionality to Digg.
The initial hype for Google Wave invitations was massive and ended up leaving those who were left out of the first 100,000 disappointed. The good news is that Google has started to send out a larger volume of invitations again after having slowly trickled them out since the launch.
Google Wave's Steph Hannnon tells us that they are sending out a bunch of invites.
(Credit: Twitter)Google Wave's Stephanie Hannon tweeted Sunday that Wave had overcome some of its stability issues over the weekend and that they were sending out a lot more invitations. As of Tuesday, "Google Wave" is the top trending topic on Twitter and the results are filled with users (including myself) bragging about receiving their invitations and not surprisingly, others begging for one.
The eBay economy for Google Wave invites has been pretty healthy, with some fetching upward of $80 to $100. This big influx of new invitees, all with 8 invitations each, will probably eliminate a lot of the demand for Wave invites on eBay, much like what happened with Gmail invites.
Google Wave invites are going for upwards of $80 on eBay.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)Google Wave will start to become a lot more valuable once more users get access to the site. It seems that Google is trying to roll out Wave to people as quickly as the service will allow, so the wait for those of you who haven't been lucky enough to snag an invite yet hopefully shouldn't be too bad. How many of you have been included in this recent wave (couldn't resist) of invites so far?
In a decidedly Facebook-style move, Twitter is asking for its users' help in translating the service into new languages. To start, Twitter is focusing on translating the site into French, Italian, German, and Spanish.
Twitter is starting with a small set of translators, but if you want to sign up to translate the service to the language of your expertise, you can enter your information here. They're looking for translators for just about every language from Finnish to Thai. As translations of the site are completed, Twitter also plans to offer up the translation files to the developer community to help translate their apps for Twitter's new markets.
Twitter translators get a special badge on their profile and are given levels (1-10) based on how much translation they have done. Twitter has also built leaderboards for each language being translated. You can see the one for the French translation here. This gives the translators a little more incentive above just knowing that they have contributed.
Twitter's new Translator badge.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)At the beginning of 2008, Facebook started a similar user translation effort, which has been a huge factor in the site's international growth. Recently, Facebook also introduced a translation tool that works with Facebook Connect and allows site owners to have their site translated by Facebook users. Twitter is hoping that expanding into new markets through these translations will blow up their user base, just like it did for Facebook.
It's been an interesting week for Foursquare, the location-based social networking site.
On Sunday, Foursquare might have been referenced on an episode of "The Simpsons" that was filled with Twitter and Facebook references. On Monday, TechCrunch reported that Digg founder Kevin Rose outed himself as an investor in Foursquare while he was at the Future of Web Apps conference in London. And on Tuesday, Foursquare announced that London will be added to the growing list of cities where its service is available.
Through a tweet, Foursquare announced that it will be bringing the service to London this week. This is Foursquare's second European city. Amsterdam was first, but London is a whole different animal. London is the top Twitter-using city in the world, so people may be open to a new social service like Foursquare.
Meanwhile, Rose is the latest Foursquare seed round investor to go public. Last week, it was revealed that Twitter creator Jack Dorsey was part of the round, along with Union Square Ventures and others still undisclosed. Rose's involvement definitely adds some star power to a service that has been growing in popularity. Rose's investment was revealed through a slide in his FOWA presentation that can be seen in a video of his talk at 50 seconds in.
Finally, Sunday brought some fun news for Foursquare. A new episode of "The Simpsons" includes a scene in which Lisa remarks: "Nobody even plays foursquare anymore, they just gossip." It's a pretty loose reference, but some people believe "The Simpsons" gave a nod to Foursquare.
Twitter on Wednesday announced a long-awaited feature to a small subset of its user base for testing. "Lists" lets users group Twitter accounts together for easy filtration.
For example, you can create a list of all of your work friends or one for all of your drinking buddies. By default, lists are public (although private ones can be created), so they can be shared with anyone on Twitter. Other users can then subscribe directly to one of your public lists if they are interested.
List sharing opens up a lot of possibilities for list curators to emerge on the service, creating a whole new class of influential users. This should help with the discovery of new Twitter accounts and hopefully help to keep fresh content flowing to you.
One of the big complaints about Twitter is that after you pass a certain number of people that you are following, the stream of tweets is impossible to keep up with. By giving users the ability to group people together, it becomes a lot easier to keep track of the accounts that you are interested in at a given time. This will certainly allow people to use the service much more effectively.
Lists has been one of the most requested features for Twitter for some time and it's great to see that they are finally rolling out the functionality. Twitter has said that information on how Lists will work in their API will come in a few days.
Goin' back to Philly.
(Credit: FX)The absurdly offensive "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" makes its season-five premiere Thursday amid a hard social media push by the FX network.
In addition to the standard features (meet the cast, wallpapers, episode guide), FX has included Twitter integration, exclusive video clips, and an awesome trailer mash-up creator.
To collect the buzz around the premiere, its Twitter page is gathering all the tweets with the hashtag #sunnyfx. There seems to be a decent amount of activity there, but it should really pick up as viewers rush to Twitter to offer their thoughts on the first episode.
The creators (and stars) of the show have also flocked to Twitter, maintaining their own accounts: Glenn Howerton, Charlie Day, Rob McElhenney, and Danny DeVito.
By far, the coolest thing the site features is the trailer mash-up creator. Built on GorillaSpot's video editing platform, the mash-up creator features signature clips from all the seasons of "Sunny." You can splice these clips together, with music and titles to make your own season-five trailer. From there, you can post it to a variety of social-media sites including Facebook, MySpace, and Blogger. You can also get the embed code, which lets you place your creation anywhere. The trailer I created is included at the end of this post.
I love to see companies doing really innovative things on the Web with their marketing campaigns. Here, FX went above and beyond what's expected and created an engaging experience for fans and potential viewers.
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