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.
But Sloan's tweet, which he has nicknamed "The Pentagigatweet," does get at least some landmark status because it actually has the number 5,000,000,000 in the URL. That's because the number at the end of a tweet's URL is apparently the running count of tweets that have been posted until that point. We've e-mailed Twitter co-founder Biz Stone for more information and will update if and when we hear back.
The guy who posted Twitter's 5 billionth tweet.
(Credit: Robin Sloan's Facebook profile)It's sort of fitting that Twitter's 5 billionth tweet came not from one of the celebrities or marketers who have flooded the service in recent months, but from one of the quirky Bay Area dot-com nerds who formed its first loyal pack of users.
Sloan, who lives in San Francisco, recently departed his gig at Current--which is headquartered only a few blocks away from Twitter's own home base in the South of Market neighborhood--to write a still unnamed novel" that he is funding through creative-microfinance site Kickstarter.
He may have just gotten a convenient leg up in publicity.
Meanwhile, some third-party observers have been remarking that Twitter's rapid growth may be slowing down. The company recently raised another round of funding at a valuation somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 billion.
This post was expanded at 10:20 p.m PDT.
Correction at 2:25 p.m. PDT Tuesday: This post initially referenced an incorrect title for the novel Sloan is working on. The novel is still unnamed.
Current, the edgy news and culture channel co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, has come up with a new way to broadcast the presidential debates: show Twitter commentary on what people are saying.
Through an official partnership with the microblogging service, Current will broadcast "Hack the Debate," which will live-stream on Current.com as well as air on the network. Twitter updates, or "tweets," will be shown in real time for all four debates (three with the presidential candidates and one with the vice presidential candidates), which begin on September 26. It makes a whole lot of sense, given Current's slant toward young and tech-savvy news hounds (i.e., the people who use Twitter) and heavy focus on user-submitted content.
"The debate stage is only set for two candidates, but Current was founded to make room for millions of participants," Current CEO Joel Hyatt said in a release. "We're thrilled to work with Twitter and take advantage of their extremely powerful communication platform, giving people a chance to speak directly to Current's nationwide television audience."
Last year, MTV featured Twitter as a promotion platform for the Video Music Awards, and featured some popular tweets on-air, but did not incorporate them into a live broadcast.
Current has not said how the tweets will be selected for on-air display, but it's likely that they will be hand-picked to provide a range of perspectives and serious commentary. So expect more about the candidates' differing views on the economy...and less about vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's hair.
Let's face it: Video search blows. It's easy to use YouTube's search box to find straightforward Internet video memes like cats playing pianos, skateboard tricks, or Rick Astley remixes; try for anything more intricate and you might be out of luck. There are established companies in the space, like the U.K.-based Blinkx, but none of them has captured the market share that video search potentially could.
Enter VideoSurf, a company launching later on Wednesday at the TechCrunch50 conference that's been getting a choice spot in the tech-blogger limelight thanks to a Los Angeles Times preview.
VideoSurf CEO Lior Delgo told the Times that instead of only being able to search text tags and descriptions, the company's search technology goes frame-by-frame to recognize specific people. Additionally, VideoSurf says it has already indexed multiple video sites, from hubs like YouTube and Hulu to the digital libraries of networks like Comedy Central and ESPN. The company has attracted investment funding from former Vice President Al Gore and Joel Hyatt, the co-founders of Current Media; Hyatt is chairman of VideoSurf's board of directors.
But there's a caveat: nobody in the tech press has actually seen this company in action yet. Search Engine Land was very impressed by a demo, calling the company "genuinely radical," but doesn't appear to have done anything hands-on. The last shadowy video company that was this hyped was arguably Joost, which is still trying to stay afloat after failing to catch on. So don't count the chickens before they hatch, even if we're talking about a grainy cell phone camera video of chickens playing "Never Gonna Give You Up" on a piano.
Plenty of would-be buyers have been named for social news site Digg, but one we haven't heard much about: Current Media, the cable and Web news channel that was launched by former vice president Al Gore.
It's one of the juicy tidbits detailed in BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy's book, Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0, which hits bookstores on Thursday. In an excerpt posted to TechCrunch, Lacy writes about how executives Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose turned down a $100 million offer from Current in 2006 because they had, as TechCrunch paraphrased, "issues with control going forward."
The thinking is consistent with what founder Rose told CNET News.com in February when asked about selling his company. "I've had several friends that have been acquired by the Yahoos and Googles of the world, and while there is some upside in certain things, for the most part, it slows things down," Rose said at the time. "You can't get a product out the door fast enough."
Current, which filed for an initial public offering in January, now operates Current News, where users can vote on the news Digg-style and then see the top stories incorporated into an hourly news show on the cable network. Digg, meanwhile, remains the subject of acquisition rumors on the part of just about every major tech and media company around.
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