Earlier this week, San Francisco-based Six Apart released the newest version of its flagship product, Moveable Type Pro, and pushed the blogging community toward a very social future. It is not a new concept — but now, it’s time for blogs to evolve and embrace the different ways in which we’re sharing our digital lives with the world. In short, they need to become social - very social. Continue Reading. Continue »
Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’
Ev Williams: Twitter Not Limiting Followers
Updated with comments from Twitter: Dave Winer points to a series of discussions and blog posts about Twitter allegedly limiting people to 2,000 followers. In his opinion, it is a good idea, because “the expensive thing in Twitter is distributing status messages to large numbers of queues.” Actually, Twitter isn’t doing anything formal. Ev Williams, co-founder of Twitter, left a comment in response to an earlier version of a post that explains it all.
I’m afraid this has gotten confused. There is no limit to the number of followers you can have. There is a limit to the number of people you can *follow*. This is mostly to reduce spam and depends on a number of factors. More details here: (link)
In other words, there are no such limits. Earlier reports were based There is no official word from Twitter, and all on a couple of blog posts and status messages, where people reported that they were running into the 2,000 follower problem. Continue »
F|R Crib Sheet: 7 More Sites to Cut Your Startup Costs
Last month we offered bootstrapping founders a short index of cost-optimization sites to help cut expenses for things like health insurance, web hosting, wireless plans and electric bills.
Many of you wrote in to offer your own recommendations, so this week we’re expanding the list with seven additional resources to help you cut costs associated with project management, conferencing, financial planning and accounting — plus, an entire search engine devoted to sourcing free applications for just about everything else, including: data backup, CRM, product price tracking, professional video editing and more.
As always, if you’ve discovered additional tools for cutting startups’ commodity costs, please share them in the comments section. Continue »
Is There Money in Voice APIs?
The promise of APIs is that they make it easy to integrate different services — even those provided by different vendors — into a single application. But is simply providing an API to your telephony infrastructure enough to prompt the world to beat a path to your door? Don’t count on it. Continue »
Inside The Twitter-Summize Deal
So it’s confirmed: Twitter is buying Summize. As I’ve said previously, I think this is a super-smart move by Twitter, and if the company plays its cards right, one that will pay dividends in the long run. Here are some additional financial details of the deal. Continue Reading Continue »
GupShup, a Twitter-Like Service, Gets $10 Million
SMSGupShup, an SMS-based group messaging/microblogging service from Webaroo, is close to announcing that it has raised $10 million in new capital from Helion Ventures and Charles River Ventures. News of pending deal was first reported by some blogs in India. In its original form, Webaroo — a startup co-founded by Rakesh Mathur, formerly of Junglee, and Beerud Sheth, formerly of eLance — was going nowhere fast, until the company launched the SMSGupShup service, which has taken on a life of its own in India. (Disclosure: Rakesh is an investor in the parent company of this blog.)
I use the SMSGupShup service to send alerts to our readers in India, and our reach has been growing like a weed — much like the service itself. Here’s a link to my GupShup channel, in case you want to sign up. SMSGupShup is, according to some estimates, about seven times the size of Twitter in terms of users and about three times as big in terms of daily SMS messages. It rarely has outages because, as its name suggests, it is almost entirely focused around SMS.
With Summize, Twitter to Buy a Clue
The big buzz of the evening is that Twitter, a San Francisco-based startup that allows anyone to post short (up to 140 characters) messages to its platform and thus broadcast them to one or many using different media such as web and mobile, is about to acquire Summize, a Potomac Falls, Va.-based startup that uses the Twitter API to search and find relevant messages on Twitter.
The rumors of the deal were first reported by a little-known blog (not anymore, of course) by Josh Chandler. Subsequent to the news, I made a few phone calls and did confirm that it is not just a rumor and a deal is certainly in the works. It is likely to be announced as soon as next week. I’m still trying to dig up the financial details and will report further when I get hold of them.
The deal would be a good move by Twitter, and would be putting some of its recently acquired $15 million in VC funding to decent use as it would help the company get hold of of a business model. Here is why. Continue »
FriendFeed. More Like (Fake)FriendFeed
Recently the social web has begun to morph into something altogether different from what it promised to be. The latest example is life-streaming service FriendFeed, which is offering up well-known Internet personalities as “friends” its users can choose to follow. Continue »
Dash Express Gets Twitter App:
At first we were scratching our heads over the idea that the Dash Express, an Internet-connected navigation device, has a Twitter app — given how stupid texting while driving is. Surely tweeting while driving would fall under that category? However, the Twitter app for the Dash merely sends out a tweet telling your followers where you are and provides a link on a map. There are almost 30 other Dash apps that the company talked about today, including useful ones that provide route-specific coffee shops or local crime data.
A Two-part Rule for Naming Your Startup
What’s in a company name? Plenty. It’s your first opportunity to brand yourself. Get it right and you’ll stand out as clever, useful, and memorable to potential users and investors — even if your product isn’t any good. But get it wrong and you’ll flame out before your product even gets out of beta.
So, what makes Brightmail, PayPal and IronPort great names, but Lycos, Xobni and Vidoop really lousy? It turns out there’s a formula for effective naming and it’s surprisingly simple. Continue »
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