microblogging

Microsoft said on Monday afternoon that it's investigating allegations that a recently launched microblogging site in China lifts the code and interface of a start-up's rival service.

"Microsoft takes intellectual property seriously, and we are currently investigating these allegations," company spokesman Mark Murray said in a statement. "It may take some time due to the time zone differences with Beijing."

Earlier on Monday, Canada's Plurk went public with charges that Microsoft's Juku service "rips off" the look and feel of its microblogging service and also appears to use more than … Read more

A start-up says that a microblogging service recently launched by Microsoft in China "rips off" its user interface and also contains a huge percentage of similar code.

Plurk, which runs a microblogging service of its own, says more than 80 percent of the code for Microsoft's Juku service appears to be lifted from its service.

"Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but blatant theft of code, design, and UI elements is just not cool, especially when the infringing party is the biggest software company in the world," Plurk said on its company blog. … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--In anticipation of an onstage interview with Twitter CEO Evan Williams at the Web 2.0 Summit on Tuesday afternoon, conference organizer and Federated Media CEO John Battelle told the audience to expect "a surprise" during the talk.

Turns out that "surprise" was actually a recently unearthed video clip of Williams in 1994, explaining the Internet on behalf of a company called Illumination Labs and sporting a haircut that looked like it belonged on the set of '90s alterna-teen flick "Empire Records." (No, we don't have a snapshot of it yet.)

Williams … Read more

Former Current Media executive Robin Sloan appears to have posted Twitter's 5 billionth tweet, in the form of a reply to another user that otherwise read only "Oh lord."

A third-party app called Gigatweet has been measuring the service's total tweet count for some time now, and last week some onlookers picked up on the fact that it was getting awfully close to five billion. That said, Twitter's engineers have bumped up this number at least once or twice, and who knows how many test tweets were sent out in the company's early days.… Read more

Holy cow. Is nothing on the Internet working these days? Facebook's acknowledged that a number of members have had account maintenance issues, and now Twitter has confirmed that "many" users are experiencing timeline delay problems.

Basically, the lowdown is that you can post tweets, and they'll publish, but that your timeline--the stream of updates from the Twitter accounts you follow--isn't bringing up any new tweets. For me, it looks like this started at around 8:00 a.m. PT.

Twitter, which has been prone to many an outage in its three-year history, says it is … Read more

The enterprise microblogging service Socialcast is getting some interesting analytical functions. Unlike the data you can get from Bitly (the closest most people get to seeing real analytics on microblogging), Socialcast's new Social Business Intelligence feature is designed to help the mucky-mucks in your company "understand the social dynamics or your organization," not just see traffic patterns.

If your company uses the Socialcast service for more than just occasional hobbyist microblogging--that is, if whoever hooked up your company with Socialcast also set up the important features the service offers, like integration into CRM, wikis, employee blogs, and … Read more

Yes, Twitter's megacash infusion is real. CEO Evan Williams confirmed on the company blog Friday that Twitter has raised a new round of investment from Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, and existing investors Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital, and Benchmark Capital.

Williams says it's "a significant round." He didn't say just how close it was to the roughly $100 million that The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. Nor did he say whether this values Twitter at $1 billion.

"It was important to us that we find investment partners who share our vision for … Read more