Why Twitter Needs to Do More

Via Tech Crunch

by Don Reisinger on September 26, 2008

In case you missed the news, Twitter announced a new election page that will help its users filter all the election tweets across its network so users can find what they’re looking for as soon as possible. Twitter claims it decided to launch the service after seeing a spike in the number of tweets surrounding the election and the candidates.

The page is different than your run-of-the-mill Twitter page and it does a fine job of finding what you want, when you want. But it highlights an important point that shouldn’t be overlooked: Twitter needs more of these pages.

One of the most appealing aspects of Present.ly, a Twitter clone for the enterprise, is its ability to offer groups. In other words, if you own a company and you only want management to correspond on Present.ly without letting the other employees see what they’re saying, it’s quick and easy to set that up. But in the world of Twitter, you can’t create groups among your friends.

But what if you could create a group of like-minded individuals with interests much like your own on Twitter, regardless of whether or not they’re your friends? It would not only appeal to the majority of users who are trying to meet new people who are “in” to the same things, but it will help Twitter finally address some of its users’ desires.

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Twitter to Launch Special Site for Tracking the Presidential Debates

Via Mashable

September 25, 2008 – 5:49 pm PDT – by Adam Ostrow

Back in January, some developers built a mashup called Politweets to display live Twitter messages relating to the candidates during the Republican and Democratic primaries. At the time, I asked “Why didn’t Twitter build this?” Apparently Twitter isn’t going to miss the opportunity this time around, as the microblogging site will launch a special site for tomorrow’s Presidential Debate between Senator’s McCain and Obama.

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Social Mention is Twitter Search for the Whole Social Web

Via Mashable

September 23, 2008 – 12:02 pm PDT – by Paul Glazowski 7 Comments

Searching for things through a service that scours multiple engines is one thing. Searching for things through a service that scours certain aspects of the news and social discussion space is another. This is what a new invention called Social Mention allows you to accomplish.

Employing Yahoo’s increasingly noteworthy BOSS search platform, Social Mention, an Ottawa, Canada operation, distinguishes its results by their variety of source. If you’re looking for items to do with, say, today’s official debut of the T-Mobile G1 device, you can specify that the engine find blog posts, microblog posts, bookmarks, comments, events, images, links from social news websites, or videos.

Adding extra flavor to the mix is an asset labeled “Hot Conversations.” Everything deemed of the moment is listed, though these are not specific a category. If you search for the abovementioned handheld, and transition from left to right through the available tabs, the picks in the right-hand column stay largely the same.

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Yammer Hammers Forward With API Launch; See It Soon In Twhirl

via Tech Crunch

by Michael Arrington on September 18, 2008

Yammer, a Twitter-like messaging system for businesses, has seen solid growth since launching last week at TechCrunch50 (and taking the top prize).

CEO David Sacks says there are now 10,000 networks and 50,000 users just one week in. Yammer’s business model is to let people use the service for free, spreading it throughout the enterprise. When and if a company wants to take administrative control over the account, Yammer charges $1/user/month. Administrators can set access controls, such as IP controls and SSL.

The company already allows interaction with the service via the site, an AIR client, iPhone, Blackberry, IM, SMS and email. This evening they’ve also launched an API to allow third party developers to build Yammer into their applications.

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Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months

Via Mashable

September 16, 2008 – 2:09 pm PDT – by Adam Ostrow 3 Comments

The latest numbers are in, and Twitter is apparently growing at a torrid pace. According to stats just released from Nielsen Online, Twitter recorded 2.3 million unique visitors in August (US-only), an increase of 422% from the same period last year.

Moreover, visitors to Twitter spent 55% more time on the site on average – a total of more than 7 minutes per user. Those numbers point to rather robust growth for the site, especially considering many of its most rabid users access it through a third-party client like Twhirl or Tweetdeck.

Elsewhere in the social networking space, Facebook continued to narrow the gap on MySpace, a trend we also noticed last month. Unique visitors to the site grew to 38.2 million, representing a more than 10% month-over-month increase and a 100% jump year-over-year. MySpace saw 61.3 million unique visitors – up slightly from last month, but still essentially flat compared to the same period last year.

Some other trends worth noting:

- LinkedIn grew 146% year-over-year to 10.8 million unique visitors

- Imeem fell from 3.9 million unique visitors in July to 3.4 million in August. They could be one of the more impacted companies from this month’s expected launch of MySpace Music.

- Buzznet traffic fell 54% year-over-year to 1.8 million unique visitors. The company has recently made a number of acquisitions including Idolator and Qloud to bolster its audience.

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Current TV to Integrate Twitter into Presidential Debate Coverage

Via Mashable

eptember 15, 2008 – 2:29 pm PDT – by Adam Ostrow Add a Comment

Twitter is continuing to find its way into mainstream media, the latest example being today’s announcement that they have teamed up with Current TV to include Tweets in the cable network’s upcoming coverage of the Presidential debates. The Tweets – which will be selected by Current TV and Twitter staff – will take the form of an overlay on screen. To participate, viewers will need to use “#current” in their tweets during the debates, the first of which airs next Friday – September 26th.

The partnership with Current TV follows a slew of recent integrations of Twitter into mainstream media. Rick Sanchez has been reading Tweets and interacting with his growing Twitter audience on-air for CNN, while political network C-SPAN made heavy use of the microblogging tool during the recent Democratic and Republican conventions.

While those networks discovered Twitter on their own, signing an official deal with Current TV indicates that the company is now taking it upon themselves to forge deals with traditional media – one of the smartest bets they can make for trying to take the service to the mainstream.

Colorado Newspaper Twitters Three-Year Old’s Funeral

Via Tech Crunch

by Don Reisinger on September 13, 2008

In a move that was not only morbid, but called into question by a slew of critics, a Colorado newspaper reporter Twittered a three-year old’s funeral Wednesday after the child died in a car accident earlier in the week.

In what some are saying is the result of the newspaper’s undying desire to be the first to report on local news, it Twittered the live events at the funeral instead of waiting to report on it after it was over. The decision to Twitter the funeral was called into question by most in the Colorado press and elsewhere who claimed it wasn’t the right place, nor the right time to use a real-time social tool to discuss the events of the service.

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Yammer Launches at TC50: Twitter For Companies

Via Tech Crunch

by Erick Schonfeld on September 8, 2008

David Sacks, the founder of genealogy site Geni, just launched a new company called Yammer on stage at TechCrunch50. Yammer is an enterprise version of Twitter. If Twitter asks: “What Are You Doing?”, Yammer asks: “What Are You Working On?” Engineers at Geni created Yammer internally for the company’s own purposes, but Sacks liked it so much he decided to spin it off as its own company. He explains:

The purpose is to allow co-workers to share status updates. You post updates on what you are working on. You can post news, links, ask questions, and get answers for people in your company.

You can see most the most prolific people and the most followed people. It is a good way to discover who is the most influential in your company.

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Harper joins the Web’s twittering class

Via the Globe and Mail – by IVOR TOSSELL

If there was any lingering doubt that the curious blogging phenomenon called Twitter has gone mainstream, it dissipated the moment that Stephen Harper signed up.

For the past couple of years, this most peculiar of communications techniques has been gaining strength in the online world, that vast yet insular community of people who love the Web for the Web’s sake. Twitter is all about issuing tiny, one-line blog posts, and in short order, the Web’s chattering class became its twittering class.

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I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You

Via the New York Times – BY CLIVE THOMPSON

On Sept. 5, 2006, Mark Zuckerberg changed the way that Facebook worked, and in the process he inspired a revolt.

Zuckerberg, a doe-eyed 24-year-old C.E.O., founded Facebook in his dorm room at Harvard two years earlier, and the site quickly amassed nine million users. By 2006, students were posting heaps of personal details onto their Facebook pages, including lists of their favorite TV shows, whether they were dating (and whom), what music they had in rotation and the various ad hoc “groups” they had joined (like “Sex and the City” Lovers). All day long, they’d post “status” notes explaining their moods — “hating Monday,” “skipping class b/c i’m hung over.” After each party, they’d stagger home to the dorm and upload pictures of the soused revelry, and spend the morning after commenting on how wasted everybody looked. Facebook became the de facto public commons — the way students found out what everyone around them was like and what he or she was doing.

But Zuckerberg knew Facebook had one major problem: It required a lot of active surfing on the part of its users. Sure, every day your Facebook friends would update their profiles with some new tidbits; it might even be something particularly juicy, like changing their relationship status to “single” when they got dumped. But unless you visited each friend’s page every day, it might be days or weeks before you noticed the news, or you might miss it entirely. Browsing Facebook was like constantly poking your head into someone’s room to see how she was doing. It took work and forethought. In a sense, this gave Facebook an inherent, built-in level of privacy, simply because if you had 200 friends on the site — a fairly typical number — there weren’t enough hours in the day to keep tabs on every friend all the time.

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