The Social

Can't anybody tell that the fail whale is hungry?

(Credit: Flickr user Victoria Belanger)

Something has been rocking the boat over at Twitter, where stability issues on Monday afternoon caused the company to temporarily take down Twitter Lists, a popular and relatively new feature that lets members group Twitter accounts into categories.

"We began experiencing a very high rate of errors and we are working on the underlying problem," a post on the Twitter status blog read. It was later updated saying, "We are now recovering from this unexpected downtime. The Lists feature is temporarily unavailable as we diagnose the cause of the outage."

Many members had reported sightings of the "fail whale," Twitter's error message featuring a cartoon whale, earlier on Monday. It may have been more noticeable than usual because of the day's status as "Cyber Monday," a big day for holiday e-commerce deals--which in this day and age means plenty of people hunting on retailers' Twitter accounts for fire-sale promotions.

Obviously, amid all the seasonal shopaholism, somebody forgot to feed the whale.

An example of Brizzly's new tweet translation.

(Credit: Brizzly)

Web-based Twitter client Brizzly made a dual announcement Friday: first, it's opened up into a full public beta mode (previously, an invite code was required); and second, it can now translate tweets into your default language on the site.

To translate a tweet in Brizzly--which already expands links, videos, and photos posted to Twitter, creating a more visual experience--you can click on a question mark for an instant translation. This is interesting, as Twitter has made its first moves recently in launching translated versions of the service (starting with Spanish), meaning that there will potentially be many more non-English tweets flowing through the system. It uses Google Translate, so needless to say, it's not totally perfect.

Brizzly added Facebook Connect support last month.

It was a controversial new addition: Twitter had just started rolling out a new feature that built "retweets," a user-created way to quote other tweets, into the main Twitter application. But on Wednesday, plagued by errors, Twitter appears to have pulled the feature for further maintenance.

A post on the Twitter status blog late on Wednesday morning reads that it was "working on (a) high number of errors." The Next Web dug up some discussion from Twitter's developer IRC channel and found that "retweet is temporarily unavailable while we deploy a bug fix." There is not yet word on when it will be back.

The feature was so new that some Twitter users, myself included, never had it in the first place. But it promises to significantly change one part of the Twitter experience: with official, integrated retweets, gone is the signature "RT" in front of a quoted tweet. Instead, a retweet button pushes the original tweets into the retweeter's followers' streams of messages. Like so many Facebook redesigns and restructurings, that hasn't gone over so well with existing users. The blog Twitter Watch called integrated retweeting "the worst ever."

"While current users may get used to the feature, it's going to alienate new users," the Twitter Watch blog asserted. "Twitter isn't like Facebook; it can't boast the same network effect that makes Facebook indispensable. So it needs to keep things simple for new users. But now each new user will need to understand why much of their early friend feed will consist of messages they didn't subscribe to."

But there are advantages, too: with built-in retweets, it gets much easier to track exactly how popular or influential a given message or user is.

Unsurprisingly, at least one research company agrees that valuing a company at $1.1 billion before it's unveiled a long-term revenue strategy is a little bit premature.

A firm called Next Up Research released a study this week that estimates Twitter's actual value as somewhere between $526 million and $674 million--or somewhere between 47 and 61 percent of what its valuation was in September when Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, and other investors pumped nearly $100 million into the company..

The positives for Twitter? It's been able to scale to approximately 70 million users while maintaining a single office in San Francisco and about 80 employees--well, sure, but the fail whale does tend to rear its head--and the fact that you can use it almost exclusively as a low-end mobile application means a whole lot of potential for global reach.

Next Up's concerns are pretty predictable: It's not sure how Twitter will keep up its momentum as it prepares to roll out a revenue model. It spelled out a few options that have been tossed around over the past few years--ads on Twitter.com, ads in tweets, charging for access to its application program interface (API), premium accounts, selling data and analytics--but noted that "most revenue generation options available to the company have the potential to alienate at least some of cult-like Twitter's user base."

Regardless, the research firm is guessing that revenues will come. It's projecting $134 million in revenues in 2013, "in an optimistic scenario." Now let's sit back and see how Twitter does it.

Corporate tools take note: You can tell Twitter exactly what you're doing, and it'll tell LinkedIn too.

Chalk one up for the cringe-worthy marketing term "personal branding": there is a new partnership between Twitter, hub for informing the world exactly what you're doing and thinking at all moments of the day, and LinkedIn, the business-networking tool on steroids. In an announcement Monday, the two companies explained that LinkedIn status messages can sync with Twitter.

"The business use case of Twitter is turning out to be very important, and more and more people are finding that the persona they create for themselves on the Web is part of their resume in many ways," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a joint video with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman that was posted to the LinkedIn blog.

So, in short, LinkedIn's "status" feature now syncs with Twitter with an optional check box--a feature that the two companies say should be rolling out over the next few days. Likewise, can set your Twitter status as your LinkedIn status by using the hash tag #li or #in, so that you can rest assured that your tweet about "watching Gossip Girl and eating cold pizza" won't immediately show up to potential clients or employers trawling your LinkedIn profile. (Full disclosure: This was my Twitter status tonight. If you believe that it renders me professionally unsound, please feel free to let me know.)

All snark aside, this is probably a very good bet for LinkedIn, which continues to grow fast and make money but which hasn't yet really jumped into the latest social-networking trend of real-time, streaming information. Inking a partnership with Twitter is much easier than launching some other kind of initiative to get members to update their statuses more often. Tweets sent to LinkedIn, presumably, could also be grouped in with LinkedIn status messages to form some kind of business-intelligence live stream. The sort of information that people want to share specifically with colleagues and professional associates could be of interest to high-end advertisers or the market research community.

Twitter, meanwhile, is going to want to stay in the limelight of the business community as it considers a long-term business model--one of the microblogging service's potential moneymakers has been launching a "dashboard" of analytics for people and companies who use it primarily for professional purposes rather than, you know, filling the world in on which beer was just discovered in the back of the fridge.

Also for Twitter, this is yet another potential source of tweets as it attempts to become the world's foremost repository of real-time information. Earlier this year, MySpace announced an official way to sync Twitter and MySpace status, and in a matter of weeks its link-shortening service had become the second most popular on Twitter (trailing Twitter's preferred Bit.ly).

Facebook, meanwhile, appears to have been more reluctant: a Twitter app on its platform has pulled tweets into status messages for some time, and an unofficial app lets members tag selective tweets with the hashtag "#fb" to cross-post them to Facebook, but the only time that Facebook has put out a big, official announcement about syncing with Twitter was when it added an easy-sync feature for "fan pages," profiles for brands and marketers.

Not surprising. Twitter is a hot name in marketing these days, and in order for Facebook to establish fan pages as an ideal spot for brands to build a presence, an easy Twitter sync is a selling point. But in the long run, it's an advantage for Facebook, which once tried to buy Twitter and was snubbed, to keep its treasure trove of what-the-world-is-thinking somewhat to itself. After all, it can get away with it: with well over 300 million active users, Facebook is significantly bigger than Twitter, and could be diluting its own product by openly sourcing status messages out to Twitter. LinkedIn, better known for its networking features than any kind of status updating, isn't running that kind of risk.

Until then: "At SFO airport at bookstore. Deciding between @gladwell and @tferriss. Need real, serious insights. Thoughts? #li."

So how do you say "fail whale" en español? Twitter has launched a Spanish translation, according to a blog post Tuesday (in Spanish) by co-founder Biz Stone.

It's the first of multiple volunteer-assisted translations for the microblogging site, the post explained. A look at Twitter's public timeline will show that it's used in many languages across the world, but until this point, the Twitter.com site has been English only. Now, users can go into their settings to translate it into Spanish.

This could be key as Twitter attempts to grow bigger overseas amid allegations that its traffic has plateaued. Facebook, for example, saw significant growth overseas when it started launching user-translated versions of its site.

To better inform the Twittering masses, we have gone to the trouble of plugging the term "fail whale" into Google Translate to see how you say it in Spanish. That didn't go too well with the algorithm, so we tried "whale of failure" and came out with "la ballena de fracaso." Unfortunately, that just doesn't have the same ring.

But this is not actually the first time that Twitter has toyed with launching a non-English edition. Last year, Twitter board member Joi Ito hyped up the launch of a standalone Twitter Japan site, powered by an investment from Ito's Digital Garage, that was notable because it was ad-supported (Twitter still hasn't rolled out ads or even said that it will for sure).

Biz Stone filled in CNET News on the status of Twitter Japan via e-mail on Tuesday night: "(It's) doing very well. A few of us were there a few weeks ago to launch a brand new mobile service. We had a really fun tweetup in Tokyo."

Twitter hasn't said what the next translations of its site will be, though presumably they'd pick a language that's already spoken by many users or one spoken in a region where it hopes to make big inroads. Or they could just be cutesy and launch in Klingon or Pirate.

This post was updated at 10:40 p.m. with comment from Biz Stone.

A look at the Facebook news feed in Brizzly. Check out the buttons at the top to toggle back and forth between Facebook and Twitter.

(Credit: Brizzly)

Brizzly, a Twitter client that's still private beta, on Wednesday added the ability for members to follow their Facebook contacts as well through the Web-based service (unlike many of its competitors, Brizzly has opted to not take the form of a downloadable desktop app)--and to post Brizzly updates back to their Facebook profiles. For those of you who have Brizzly accounts, it should be live later on Wednesday if it isn't already.

It's a natural move: Most Twitter clients, like TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop, also support updates from Facebook to one degree or another. Brizzly, created by San Francisco-based Thing Labs and spearheaded by Blogger and Google veteran Jason Shellen, makes a Twitter feed look quite a bit like a Facebook news feed by expanding image and video links from services like TwitPic and YouTube.

Through Facebook Connect, Brizzly can pull in your news feed so that you can toggle back and forth between a Twitter view and a Facebook view. But it's a little bit limited for now: currently, it's just the revamped "top stories" news feed, not the live-streaming feed that had been Facebook's default until this week.

Of note: when you've clicked on Facebook view in Brizzly, the Brizzly bear mascot is wearing a Facebook-logo sweatshirt and waving a pennant. Now that's just plain cute.

UPDATE: We hear the bear's name is Phineas.

LOS ANGELES--There are a lot of reasons why the entertainment industry is still trying to figure out how to wrangle Twitter: real-time tabloid drama, on-set spoilers, and the fact that 140 characters offers a lot of ways to say a movie really sucks.

The 140Conf LA event, which took place on Tuesday and Wednesday at the Kodak Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, had a great opportunity to be the definitive discussion hub for tackling those tricky issues and complications that arise when the much-talked-about "real-time Web" collides with the old-school entertainment industry. That didn't happen. Instead, the event was a general showcase of the possibilities of Twitter, much like at the previous 140Conf event in New York this summer.

Conference organizer Jeff Pulver said that despite the Hollywood setting, he didn't want to take a purely entertainment-focused angle. "This really is not a Twitter conference, it's a gathering of people who use it as a platform and speak it as a language," he explained at a post-conference cocktail event on Tuesday. Pulver said he intended 140Conf LA to be "a celebration" of the possibilities of Twitter and the people who are passionate about using it, a disparate crowd that includes marketers, public servants, and yes, entertainment industry professionals. Indeed, 140Conf featured panels about police chiefs who use Twitter, teachers implementing it in the classroom, and how it's affecting the photography profession.

True, there were a lot of entertainment types there, mostly those talking about how Twitter has positively affected their business. Industry bloggers talked about how the blast-it-out nature of Twitter makes it easier to harness and report fast-breaking news. "Access Hollywood" personality Billy Bush talked about what he's learned from Twitter, like "no TUIs. Twittering under the influence is not a good idea." And "Tonight Show" blogger Aaron Bleyaert talked about the program's popular "Celebrity Twitter Tracker" feature, in which it makes fun of banal celebrity tweets. "Making fun of how celebrities think that everything they do (matters)," Bleyaert said, "Twitter's been great for us."

More interestingly, Sarah Ross, head of digital at the Ashton Kutcher-founded Katalyst Media, said paparazzi interest in the Twitter-happy Kutcher has actually declined since he started documenting his life on the microblogging service. That's fascinating, and it would've been cool to see whether the case is the same or different for other celebrities who tweet. It would've been great to hear from an industry personality who doesn't tweet, or one who's quit the service, or some perspectives from the production or public relations side of things, or perhaps someone who manages celebrity Twitter accounts. There's a lot out there.

But, Jeff Pulver said, he didn't think a Twitter-and-Hollywood conference would have much draw.

"I don't think anyone in L.A. would give a damn if we had a conference about the entertainment industry and Twitter," Pulver said. "It's not as interesting to people here as it is elsewhere."

Another conference attendee at the same cocktail party voiced a similar opinion. "This is not a studio crowd," he said of the people who'd showed up for 140Conf. Studio executives are "not innovators, not movers. They're very reactive."

Fair enough. Folks like Pulver, who have been using Twitter since its early days, are probably pretty sick of hearing about the latest gossip-blog diatribes getting plastered all over their conversation tool of choice. But headlines in the likes of Variety, The Los Angeles Times, and the Hollywood Reporter beg to differ. "Bones" creator Hart Hanson inadvertently created a mini-firestorm when a tweeted joke about swine flu on-set was taken seriously. Some studios have reportedly started inserting "no tweeting" clauses into contracts. As the likes of Perez Hilton and TMZ continually remind us, it's also given train-wreck pop stars a whole new outlet to hate on one another.

The entertainment industry has historically been reliant on the deft spin of public relations to keep a gaggle of wild personalities under wraps. Social media, not surprisingly, is a real problem. That goes double for Twitter, which can be updated on-the-fly from any mobile phone on the set of the latest hyped-up teen vampire flick or on the sidelines of a velvet-rope tiff at the Roosevelt Hotel. 140conf, rather than focusing on the glittering possibilities, could have given these very real issues some more face time.

Take the no-tweeting rules that are getting imposed by studios, production companies, publicists, and even sports leagues. "The majority of celebrity tweets are inane and not of concern to studios, but they still need the stronger contractual protections to cover themselves against the minority," entertainment attorney Jonathan Fuhrman, who previously served as vice president of business and legal affairs at The Weinstein Company, explained to CNET News.

"Every talent agreement--with writers, directors, producers, cast, and crew--has a standard confidentiality provision," Fuhrman continued. "That's what really is at issue here. In a world where anyone can tweet, the new, buffed-up confidentiality language is an important protection for the studio to prevent any of the talent from releasing this. And this is before you take into account the whole other issue about publicists and marketing campaigns: we are talking huge, million-dollar organized campaigns that can be compromised by an ill-advised tweet."

But on the flip side, that potential benefit of Twitter was paraded onstage at 140Conf. "Heroes" creator Tim Kring, for example, gave a well-attended talk on Tuesday about how Twitter has allowed the NBC sci-fi show's team to interact with fans in an unprecedented way. "You can follow the escapades of the show by following the people involved in it," he said.

Still, Kring also hinted at the complications of using Twitter as a vehicle for connecting with TV audiences: "We're now making Episode 13 and we are airing Episode 8, so at the beginning of the season we're up to two or three months ahead of where the audience is," Kring said. "The making of the show is so far ahead of where the audience experience is that it's hard to have a real-time relationship." Unfortunately, he didn't elaborate on how the show keeps tabs on its Twittering team. Have they ever had any accidental leaks or near-missteps? Kring didn't talk about that.

"Twitter has become hugely important in marketing movies," Fuhrman said. "The perfect example is 'Paranormal Activity.' What Twitter did for that movie, every studio would love to bottle that formula, and believe me, they'll try." In other words, it's a delicate balance. Twitter, for all its 140-character simplicity, has the potential to make or break a big Hollywood success.

Even though he didn't think it merited its own two-day event on the Kodak Theatre stage, 140Conf creator Jeff Pulver did acknowledge that he thinks the Hollywood-Twitter relationship is only going to get more complicated, especially when it comes to the big movie studios.

"They're scared because they want to be the gatekeeper," Pulver said. "It's a big conflict and it's going to get worse."

This post was updated at 11:33 a.m. PT on October 30 to correct the spelling of Jonathan Fuhrman's name.

LOS ANGELES--Twitter didn't rake in $100 million because it was about to run out of money, investor and board member Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital said in a panel at the 140 Conference on Tuesday morning.

There was still money left over, Sabet explained, from what the company had raised from Benchmark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners in February, which followed Twitter's Series C round in the spring of 2008. Twitter, according to Sabet, raised the money from Insight Venture Partners and T. Rowe Price last month because it wanted to grow up: hire new people, launch new products, strike partnerships, and the like. Contrary to Twitter's reputation for "fail whale" errors, Sabet insisted that the money wasn't needed for an emergency server shopping spree or anything. (Some may disagree.)

"The expectation when you raise a lot of money, it's a statement that you want to build a company, an independent company," Sabet said when moderator Robert Scoble asked him what he thought of the fact that Twitter has not yet put forth a long-term business model. "We didn't need the money...it was a very purposeful kind of commitment to try to make a company."

A billion-dollar valuation is pretty nice to have, too.

A correction was made at 2:13 p.m. PT: a source with knowledge of the deal confirmed that Twitter's April 2008 and February 2009 rounds of funding are considered to be separate rounds.