Om and Frank Eliason of Comcast

Om and I met Wednesday night with Frank Eliason of Comcast, better known as the person behind @comcastcares. Eliason is a genuinely cool guy who started out as the person solely responsible for handling Comcast complaints on Twitter, and who now has a staff of 10. Each day, he and his staff look over some 10,000 blog posts, handle countless tweets — and then seek to do something about any problems.

Since he’s such a Twitter power user, I asked him what his favorite applications for the micromessaging site were. Continue »

A pair of slices from a massive scrape of Twitter’s API could be of great use to programmers and researchers alike — as long as users don’t mind. The company behind the mining effort, Infochimps, is trying to demonstrate and promote its data aggregation service while offering up some useful information to interested parties.

At the end of last year, Infochimps posted a heftier version of its scrape of Twitter, which was taken down at the behest of the micro-messaging site over user privacy concerns. By releasing curated, anonymized chunks of data, the company may avoid most of the user privacy concerns that arose last time around. Then again, it may not. Continue »

Twitter, the San Francisco-based micro-messaging startup, recently raised about $98 million dollars from T. Rowe Price, Insight Venture Partners, Spark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners, valuing the company at a whopping $1.1 billion. NeXt Up Research, the firm founded by veteran financial analyst Michael Moe, disagrees with that post-money valuation, and instead values Twitter at about $526-$674 million. NeXt Up’s research report is offered to users of SharesPost, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based private online exchange that allows the sale of shares of private companies to willing buyers. Most of their concern is coming from the lack of revenues and worries that any diversification into money-making services could alienate the Twitter user base. According to the report, Twitter has over 70 million users. Continue »

BT’s Ribbit is taking on Google Voice with a cloud-based service that combines Internet voice, smart call routing and voicemail transcriptions. Like Google Voice, Ribbit Mobile allows consumers to transfer calls from an existing mobile number to Ribbit’s platform, which includes features such as routing calls to mobile phones and transcribing voicemails. Ribbit Mobile can forward calls to Skype, MSN or Google Talk Accounts, and can alert users to missed calls or new voicemails via e-mail, Skype, Google Talk or text message. Continue »

For those who thought its email-only device targeted too broad a market, Peek Inc. has gone even more niche — and more absurd — with the first mobile device dedicated entirely to Twitter. TwitterPeek, as the gadget is branded, enables users to read and send tweets, reply, retweet and send direct messages on the go. The device sells for $99 plus an $8 monthly fee or $200 for a lifetime of service. Continue »

I got several good laughs out of Tsahi Levent-Levi’s speculative post “What If Microsoft Developed Twitter?” In it, he conjures up a Redmond-enhanced version of the microblogging platform that would look and work a little, er, differently from the one we’re using now. “You would have to sign a EULA for each tweet you send out,” he imagines. “You would have to reset your Twitter client every day,” he adds, and “you would have to get used to the blue tweet of death.” Here are four more attributes that we might expect from a Microsoft version of Twitter. Continue »

Adweek today released its annual list of the hottest 10 digital media companies, some of which stretch the definition of digital media (iPhone, anyone?). The list shows some interesting bias, dumping Google to the No. 4 slot from last year’s No. 1 position primarily because its search algorithms aren’t people-powered like Facebook (No. 1) or real-time like Twitter (No. 3). The ranking also seems focused on what’s been hot for the last year, but it’s missing some big innovations that are getting hotter, like Google’s Android mobile OS or a company that’s pushing the envelope on offering location. I’d suggest Skyhook.  The complete list, below the fold: Continue »