microblog

A study from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology has found that most microbloggers are updating their status with "mundane" messages.

Curiously, the Finnish institute chose to examine the also-ran microblogging platform Jaiku. In sifting through 400,000 messages on Jaiku, HIIT found that the most common messages users send out include the words "working," "home," "work," "lunch," and "sleeping."

"Microblogging works because of the total control users have over their postings, but it is a hobby that seems to require a significant investment of time which … Read more

Twitter recently changed its default user avatar--you know, the one that pops up if you haven't uploaded a picture of your own--to a cute little bird icon. Unfortunately, then the service got a little bit overzealous and started chomping up existing users' photos, replacing them with the defaults. Oops!

"Many people in my timeline suddenly have default user icons," Twitter engineer Alex Payne posted to his Twitter account on Thursday. "This is probably not intentional. I have inquired with colleagues."

By the time the end of the day rolled around on Friday, there were still … Read more

The development team at Twitter has released a mockup of its forthcoming "retweet API"--basically, the first formal way that Twitter has baked retweets, the copying and attribution of other Twitter users' posts, into its own product. It displays the user avatars of members who have retweeted a given tweet below the original, "collapsing" them into a single space.

Some background detail on the forthcoming new API: Retweets have been a mainstay of Twitter for some time now, but the feature was created by users rather than officially. Several third-party Twitter clients have built in retweet … Read more

I recently talked to execs from two companies that do exactly the same thing but in completely different ways. In one corner, Yammer, the 2008 TechCrunch50 darling. It's a Twitter-for-the-enterprise service that's hosted by Yammer. Any company can get its employees on to the service, but all the data is run through, and hosted by, Yammer itself.

In the other corner, Presently (found at Present.ly), another Twitter-for-the-enterprise product. Customers can use Presently in the cloud, just like Yammer, but the company makes its money from, and has most of its users on, its software that customers can … Read more

Sometimes it's hard to know why people do things. But it's easy to see why some creative minds have come up with Woofer.

This is a site whose look bears a remarkable resemblance to Twitter--right down to its pale-blue colors. But its conceit is to create an entirely new form of blogging: "macroblogging." You see, Woofer requires every post to have a minimum of 1,400 characters. Yes, minimum. This, of course, contrasts with Twitter's "microblogging" platform, which limits users to 140 characters per tweet.

This means that finally, the world has a … Read more

Well, it looks like Twitter will actually do it.

In an interview with VentureBeat on Thursday, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone elaborated on the company's goal to put out a revenue model before the end of the year. He said that yes, it will involve offering paid accounts to businesses that use the microblogging platform for marketing, customer relations, publicity, and what-have-you. That's something Twitter has been hinting at for about a year now.

There's not a whole lot of detail available. But paid accounts will definitely involve statistics and analytics that aren't available through Twitter's … Read more

One of the issues when you create something simple, easy to use, and phenomenally popular is that there will invariably be some folks who come along and say that it was their idea first.

Naturally, that's started to happen to Twitter. Earlier this month, a patent lawsuit was filed against Twitter on behalf of a Texas-based company called TechRadium, which has a patent to "allow a group administrator or 'message author' to originate a single message that will be delivered simultaneously via multiple communication gateways to members of a group of 'message subscribers' over e-mail, text message, or … Read more

Surprise! A full 40.5 percent of posts on Twitter--or tweets, as they're called--can be classified as "pointless babble," according to a new study from Pear Analytics. Coming in second was "conversational," which the company says makes up 37.55 of all tweets.

Pear Analytics published its investigation, which was conducted through a series of random samplings from the Twitter public timeline, into the different species of tweets on Wednesday. That means that only public tweets were indexed; the numbers could be different if friends-only accounts were taken into consideration as well. (Obviously, that would … Read more

Dear Person Who Constantly Tweets About What He Or She Is Eating For Breakfast,

Twitter is not all about you anymore. Now go drown your sorrows in a bottle of delicious maple syrup that you're about to pour on that giant stack of blueberry pancakes.

Indeed, the microblogging service unveiled Tuesday its revamped home page, which doesn't change anything for people who are already using Twitter--it's just a different look and feel for twitter.com if you haven't logged in.

"Helping people access Twitter in more relevant and useful ways upon first introduction lowers the … Read more