twitter

Texting and tweeting through Obama's swearing in

Crowd control at President-elect Barack Obama's January 20 inauguration ceremony will present quite a challenge: On top of the 240,000 ticketed guests who will descend upon the National Mall that day, millions more are expected to join. Ten thousand charter buses will converge on the Washington area. Metro riders have been warned to be prepared "to stand in close proximity to several thousand people."

To manage all of those people, inauguration organizers are turning to text messaging and Twitter.

In an advisory released Monday, the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies warned that making calls from … Read more

Twitority refines Twitter search--or kills it

Twitority, the new alternative to Twitter's own search engine, is a brilliant idea. Or an incredibly stupid one. It depends on what you are looking for.

Over the weekend after Christmas, Seemic CEO Loic Le Meur put up a blog post saying Twitter's search engine is insufficiently discriminating. If you're looking for the best Twitter posts on a topic, he says, you want results from the most authoritative people to be ranked higher than Tweets from the rabble. Le Meur proposed a search engine that ranked Twitter posts based in part on the number of followers the … Read more

Daily Tidbits: Seventy percent of all Twitter users signed up in 2008

Online marketing firm, Hubspot, released a report Tuesday that details the "State of the Twittersphere" for the fourth quarter of 2008. According to the report, 70 percent of all Twitter users joined during 2008 and approximately 5,000 to 10,000 new accounts are opened each day. Thirty-five percent of Twitter users have ten or fewer followers and just 9 percent of all Twitter users don't follow anyone. The full report is available on Hubspot's research page.

Free eBook service Project Gutenberg, announced Tuesday that it has introduced a mobile version of its hosted content. Dubbed … Read more

Reimagining direct marketing with a (Twitter) spin

Michael Dell gets a lot of the credit for pioneering the direct sale of PCs to the public. The reality is that there is a legion of now long-forgotten mail order entrepreneurs who came along earlier. He just did it better than all the rest.

So it was with more than usual interest that I read a piece published by InternetNews.com earlier this week in which Dell's eponymous company claimed that sales alerts on Twitter had resulted in about $1 million in sales.

Before anyone sneers that a million bucks to a multibillion dollar company is relative chump … Read more

Twitpay brings micropayments to Twitter

The New York Times has a nice little writeup about Twitpay, an experimental new app that lets you send payments using Twitter.

Here's the premise: Sign up, put some cash in your Twitpay account through another payment service like PayPal, and then send out a "tweet" to another Twitpay member, structured like "@josh twitpay $10 for beers." Twitpay takes a five-cent commission. Its founders are hoping that, eventually, it can be used for charity and disaster relief payments.

It's a nifty idea, though not for everyone. You don't get cash out of it, … Read more

Twitter's hunting for a moneymaker

Another sign that Twitter is finally growing up: The company has put out a job posting hunting for a product manager to help it start raking in revenue. The San Francisco start-up, flush with venture funding and media hype, has yet to make a cent.

"As Twitter's first product manager focused on revenue generation, you will play a defining role in the formulation of Twitter's business," the job description reads.

Gee! You don't say?

Twitter CEO Evan Williams has hinted that the future of Twitter lies in some sort of corporate accounts. And indeed, the … Read more

Twitter promotions can add up to millions

Well, this is an interesting tidbit: Computer giant Dell told Internet News that its "Twitter sale alerts" have added up to about $1 million in revenue.

As we all know from Mike Myers' "Dr. Evil" character in the Austin Powers movie franchise, a million bucks isn't a whole lot of money for a major multinational corporation. But it does have something to say about how Twitter is transforming from gimmicky messaging tool to marketing powerhouse. Fire-sale start-up Woot showed that it's possible to take advantage of Twitter's rapid-fire nature to advertise fleeting deals; … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 873: Drunk sexy lunch

Listen all the way to the end of the show in order to understand what this title is all about. Wow, it's been quite the week here at BOL. But in actual news, the latest IE zero-day exploit just keeps getting worse (use another browser, people), the iPhone 3G has been unlocked, and Twitter is making millions...for other companies. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 873

Major security alert for Microsoft Internet Explorer http://www.obsessable.com/news/2008/12/16/major-security-alert-for-microsoft-internet-explorer/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/16/AR2008121601022.html http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/16/1319217… Read more

Vator.tv gets a centralized, Twitter-like news feed

Vator.tv, the "YouTube for start-ups" has a new feature going live on Tuesday morning that lets companies post short updates to their Vator.tv-hosted information pages. Similar to Twitter, the messages are limited to just a few hundred characters and other Vator users are simply able to follow a company to keep tabs on what it's doing.

Companies with access can post new updates anytime they'd like, and interact directly with users who can reply in the threaded commented section below each item. Vator has borrowed a page from Facebook in letting users get notified … Read more

Social networking quirks that annoy me (and maybe you too)

I'm a social-networking addict. I'm never away from my Twitter stream, I always check Facebook for friend updates, and Friendfeed is probably my favorite Web tool this year. I check out Hi5 to catch a glimpse into the future, head back to Friendster from time to time, and can't help but check in with LiveJournal every few months when I feel nostalgic.

But for all that work with social networks, I've also become a somewhat critical and cynical user. And anyone who suffers from my same addiction probably has as well. That's why I've … Read more