twitter

5 Twitter improvements we're still waiting for

I'll be the first to admit that I'm addicted to Twitter. Each day, it's kept in the coveted second tab in my Firefox window, lodged between Gmail and Meebo. But that doesn't mean it offers me everything I want or that I have no desire for more features.

In fact, I have a list of features I'd like added to Twitter.

Groups

I still don't know why Twitter has failed to add groups to the service. Maybe the company believes that groups would make it too closely resemble a social network, but who cares? … Read more

Scion PR offers a glimpse into social marketing

Wondering who that mysterious new Flickr contact is with all the slick product photos? Maybe it's a viral marketer.

That's what happened to Illuminata analyst and CNET blogger Gordon Haff earlier this week when Scion xB RS 6.0 added him as a Flickr contact. I thought it might be a marketing move, given that the Detroit auto show was under way, and indeed a little digging showed that to be the case.

"We are promoting the new Scion xB Release Series 6.0 vehicle online through a variety of social media avenues," said Kat Kirsch … Read more

Understanding OpenCalais...through Twitter

The power of Twitter arises from spontaneous, ad-hoc, and asynchronous communication. It can be very useful when you have a general question and have no idea to whom you should direct it.

Take, for example, a question I had about the OpenCalais project, which I wrote about last year but which I have struggled to understand. Yesterday I asked for feedback on what OpenCalais actually does, given that Reuters just announced the 4.0 version of the project, but I never really came to grips with OpenCalais 1.0, 2.0, or 3.0.

Throwing out the question - "… Read more

Yahoo shares your tweets, other online activity

Yahoo has fired up a major part of its Yahoo Open Strategy, the ability to broadcast blog postings, tweets, photo uploads, Yelp reviews, and other activity to members of your online social circle.

The change to Yahoo Updates makes the company potentially more competitive with services such as FriendFeed and Facebook, which do much the same thing, though they also offer to show activity on other services including Amazon, Digg, and Google Reader.

Offering the 21 third-party services helps with part of Yahoo's chicken-and-egg problem; the other half is actually attracting people to use it. Yahoo has hundreds of … Read more

Report: TweetDeck raising angel round

TweetDeck is all atwitter.

According to a report in AllThingsD, the software application maker is in the process of closing a round of angel funding, led by Betaworks.

TweetDeck is looking to land angel funding somewhere under the $500,000 mark, according to the report.

The company's desktop app, currently in public beta, splits stream of tweets into specific columns based on groups or topics.

Here is Webware's take on the app:

TweetDeck: This is yet another AIR-based Twitter client, but it has one very useful feature for the polite Twitter user: you can put a collection of … Read more

Let's Twitter a reaction to the overreaction to...Twitter

Each time our little world suffers a disaster, man-made or otherwise, count on the usual suspects to rush to their keyboards and pound out yet more bloviation about the existential importance of Twitter to our 24 x 7 ecosystem.

Before some of you jump ugly on me, let me hasten to mention that I've long found Twitter to be extremely useful. But how long before we can move past this "wonder of Twitter" moment? An earthquake in China, the Mumbai massacre, war in Gaza--Twitter's proved itself as a tool to report and comment on breaking news. … Read more

Yahoo BOSS + Twitter + Google App Engine = fresh news

Here's Web 2.0 at its finest: A Yahoo programmer has combined his own project, Yahoo BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), with Twitter and Google App Engine to create a new way to determine what news is both new and important.

The service, called TweetNews, presents Yahoo news search results in a different way, using results from the same search on Twitter to determine what should get high placement, according to a blog posting about it by BOSS engineer Vik Singh.

BOSS supplies Yahoo search results in a form that can be repackaged, processed, and published for free, … Read more

Photo of Hudson River plane crash downs TwitPic

The rapid-fire spread of a close-up photo of the US Airways plane that crashed in the Hudson River Thursday resulted in the service that hosted the picture going down.

TwitPic, an application that allows users to take pictures from their mobile phones and append them to Twitter posts, went down after at least 7,000 people attempted to view the photo of the airplane taken from a commuter ferry by Sarasota, Fla., resident Janis Krums.

According to Noah Everett, the founder of TwitPic, who still runs the service by himself, after the photo of the plane was re-tweeted by a … Read more

Twitter's strategy: As much open source as possible

On Tuesday, Twitter acknowledged what much of the Web 2.0 world has discovered but doesn't discuss nearly enough: it is a huge open-source beneficiary. However, Twitter isn't content to simply use the fruits of others' work. Twitter is also a significant open-source contributor:

When we plan new engineering projects at Twitter, we measure our requirements against the capabilities of open source offerings, and prefer to use open source whenever it makes sense. By this approach, much of Twitter is now built on open-source software.

In some cases, our requirements--in particular, the scalability requirements of our service--lead us … Read more