Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’
Om Malik
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Monday, March 23, 2009 |
6:00 AM PT |
The growing popularity of Twitter and Facebook’s news feed functionality has made everyone embrace life streaming — essentially a way for us to broadcast our daily digital lives via photos, videos, postings and status updates — as a way to consume information. In a matter of months, expect both Yahoo and AOL to come up with their own news feed offerings, likely to be embedded in their more popular web services.
While Yahoo’s working on a life-streaming product called Yahoo Updates, AOL’s new offering, which takes a cue from Facebook Connect, is being called “Site Social” internally. Continue »
Om Malik
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Saturday, March 21, 2009 |
12:15 PM PT |
Jack Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter, today reminds us that it’s Twitter’s birthday. Michael Arrington, too, writes about the third birthday of the service that everyone is tweeting about. It was three years ago that a chance meeting with Noah Glass led me to write about Twitter, aka Twttr.
Since then, the service that’s estimated to be valued at $250 million has received a $500 million dollar buyout offer from Facebook, and when that failed, made Facebook change its game. It has inspired many books, blogs and a slew of startups that are betting their future on Twitter, the platform. In these depressing times, it is one of a handful of consumer web services people want to write about, talk about and actually really use.
What makes Twitter interesting: It is many things to many people. For some it is a microblogging platform. Max Levchin, founder of Slide (and PayPal), compared it to radio — it doesn’t stop and you listen to (read) what you can. To some it is a content discovery platform. In an interview with The Guardian, I labeled it the megaphone for everyone. It’s also the tool that has kept me connected to everyone who reads our blog. So what does Twitter mean to you?
Follow me on Twitter.
Stacey Higginbotham
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Sunday, March 15, 2009 |
12:29 PM PT |
Twitter has jumped the shark for the digerati attending South by Southwest here in Austin. Daniel Terdiman at CNET points out what everyone trying to follow the #sxsw tweets has discovered — there are just too many of them. It seems that, while Twitter’s hardware can scale for the many millions of people who have joined the community, the actual service cannot.
Twitter is still up and running, but the idea of generating a real time picture of what folks are doing, and extracting relevant information from that picture, is kind of like trying to pick out your grandma at the Washington Mall on the satellite image taken during President Barack Obama’s inauguration. It’s easy to see that a lot of folks were there, and hard to find that one thing you’re looking for.
Such a hiccup should give pause to those pointing to Twitter a source of real-time search capabilities, and possibly to those hoping for a real-time web, where every bit of information that’s interesting to you is delivered in real time. This will undoubtedly act as a catalyst for better Twitter filters and delivery methods, but it may also be a clue that tapping into thousands of people in real time through the web is just as unwieldy as tapping into thousands of people real time via the telephone or in person. When it comes to large crowds, Twitter’s strength isn’t in the details, but in creating the overall satellite image.
Stacey Higginbotham
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Saturday, March 14, 2009 |
10:34 AM PT |
Facebook today announced that your iPhone apps can be friends with Facebook at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas — something Om had written about nine months ago. David Morin, with Facebook, told the audience that now that they can play games or tie their iPhone apps to their Facebook friends anywhere — on the iPhone and the desktop using Facebook Connect. The company also announced a desktop client using Facebook Connect, and more funding through the fbFund for developers that want to build apps for Facebook Connect.
The announcement generated a lot of enthusiasm from the packed audience, and it’s pretty cool, provided you have an iPhone. So far there are nine apps that can tie into your friend network, including Movies by Flixter, UrbanSpoon and Tap Tap Revenge 2. Om has argued that Facebook’s future is mobile, and this is a great move to drive Facebook as a social platform across our two primary broadband connected screens –phones and PCs.
Facebook’s advances in the last few months, including the tweaks it made to allow the same type of (almost) live streaming and infinite friends as Twitter, and Facebook Connect, which now brings your Facebook friends not only to blogs, but also to your desktop with services like a Seesmic client, or uploading your iPhoto pictures directly to Facebook, are creating a compelling platform for what Facebook calls “the social web.” Now we just need to integrate it with non-iPhone devices.
Jose Fermoso
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Tuesday, March 10, 2009 |
5:39 PM PT |
When Google’s Latitude location service launched, one of the main problems users experienced was that the service only located users’ Google contacts — it didn’t include access to the most popular social networks, through which many users connect with friends. Therefore, it was only natural that someone would use Google’s Maps API and build a location service around social networks.
In Real Life (IRL) Connect, based in Amsterdam, opened a private beta this month that allows people to locate their Facebook and Twitter contacts on a map and interact with them on the social network from the map interface. I checked out the service, and my early verdict is that it has potential but maintains the same limitations as other location-based services — mainly, people need to opt-in in order to maximize its usefulness. Continue »
Brendan Gahan
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Wednesday, March 4, 2009 |
6:49 PM PT |
Facebook today announced several (and somewhat big) changes to their homepage/newsfeed, as well as the removal of most distinctions between public pages and profiles. These changes are an attempt to take on Twitter, which Facebook failed to acquire late last year. Facebook has always been the proponent of a more interactive web, but the growing popularity of Twitter has shifted the focus from mere interactivity to a more real-time web.
Real-time web, as we’ve argued in the past, is the next logical step in the Internet’s evolution. Twitter currently leads this move to a “now web,” but today Facebook took steps to becoming a real-time web company, though it has a ways to go. Continue »
Stacey Higginbotham
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Tuesday, February 24, 2009 |
6:55 AM PT |
Updated: Can technology users adapt to the relatively high failure rates of their favorite communications tools by skipping from service to service when one option fails? With Gmail down last night, Twitter traffic relating to the failure was all over the place. Update: Hitwise says Twitter’s traffic on Monday was an increase of 35% compared to daily average so far in 2009. A quick (but obviously unscientific) peek at my Facebook page showed more messages than usual from my friends, some even noting that Gmail was down.
The companies behind these web services have huge data centers packed with servers running their social networks or mail functions; they’re designed so when one of those servers fail, it doesn’t bring down the entire application (clearly, last night something did in the case of Gmail). As users, we apply this redundant approach to keep our digital lives in synch. Continue »
Mathew Ingram
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Wednesday, February 18, 2009 |
7:57 AM PT |
Updated: Users of social networks choose where to spend their time based on factors entirely outside of those such as uptime and reliability, according to report issued Tuesday (PDF link) by Pingdom, a service that tracks web site uptime and optimization for companies. Not that such things aren’t important — after all, a social network isn’t going to be of much use if people can’t log in or use the features. But the Pingdom report shows that when it comes right down to it, those things don’t matter nearly as much as one might think. Continue »
Mathew Ingram
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Monday, February 16, 2009 |
11:20 AM PT |
When Twitter first hit my radar screen sometime back in 2007, I (like many others) immediately dismissed it as a gimmicky little time-waster with no real value. I mean, a message limit of 140 characters? Lame. And what was it for? Nothing, apparently. It was like the Facebook status message, but all by itself, with no other services or features around it. What could possibly be the point? Continue »
Om Malik
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Sunday, February 8, 2009 |
9:05 PM PT |
On Friday, Facebook released a series of upgrades to its platform, allowing developers access to many core functionalities, such as Facebook Video and Notes, and giving them the ability to integrate them into their applications. But it was the opening up of a Status API that got the most attention. Given that Twitter had rightfully rejected a $500 million offer from Facebook, it’s been perceived as a Twitter-killer. VentureBeat did a good job of explaining why the Facebook vs. Twitter meme was a case of severe hyperbole.
In reality the decision to give broader access to its status application programming interface (API) is a recognition by Facebook that status and presence are core to its future as a real-time web company. Facebook developers I spoke with explained that, by allowing third-party developers access to Status, Facebook is hoping to compete with Twitter, which has slowly started to steal developer mindshare away from other platforms. Continue »
