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Twitter friend finder for FriendFeed gets official

If you were a user of the previously blogged about Twitter-to-FriendFeed Contact sync tool by Carter Rabasa, you'll be pleased to know similar functionality is now built-in to FriendFeed. On Tuesday the company quietly launched its own importer as part of its other friend-finding tools.

To find buddies from Twitter who are also using FriendFeed you simply type in your Twitter username and it does the rest. Unlike Rabasa's tool, there's no need to give the service either your Twitter password, or (obviously) the one you use for FriendFeed. As an added bonus, FriendFeed's import tool … Read more

Hitwise: Twitter surpasses Digg's market share

Could the odd confluence of a US Airways jet crash-landing in the Hudson River and Barack Obama's presidential inauguration finally push Twitter over the top and into the broad mainstream consciousness?

That could be the case, according to statistics released Tuesday by Hitwise, an Internet analysis firm.

Hitwise reported that as of Tuesday, Twitter, the popular microblogging service, had for the first time surpassed the market share of visits of the hit content aggregation site, Digg.

According to Hitwise, Twitter now stands at number 84 in its Computers and Internet category, one space up the chart from Digg.

A … Read more

TwitterEyes shortens tweets before you send them

Firefox users looking to shorten their Twitter messages to fit inside the service's 140-character limit should check out TwitterEyes. This new, experimental extension takes a look at what you've written and shortens any words it can. This includes any extra spaces you might have put in, along with words like "and" which gets turned into "&" as well as "first" which becomes "1st." In future versions developer Danny Pier says he intends to add a user-controlled dictionary that would allow you to add your own words and their shorter replacements.… Read more

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