Twitter confirmed its acquisition of Tweetdeck in May 2011, but it was unclear if the company would continue to update Tweetdeck or kill it altogether, as my colleague Mathew Ingram wrote at the time of the deal. Twitter’s relationship with third-party client developers has been become fairly fraught, as those clients attempt to replicate the Twitter experience outside of the web, which has only gained importance as Twitter has worked to make money on the web experience through advertising. This past summer, Twitter issued a warning to developers that third-party clients would be forced to adhere to a new system of rules for using tweets that could limit their growth.

Tweetdeck users of both the Chrome and web apps will now have more options to change the content they view and filters they apply. A Tweetdeck blog post explained the updates:

“Today we’re releasing a powerful set of column filters for the TweetDeck web and Chrome apps. These allow you to show or exclude specific words and phrases from a TweetDeck column –– especially useful when you want to focus on a particular element of a column. You can also choose to view only Tweets that contain media (images and/or video). This turns any of your existing columns into a media column, making it very easy to scan content and find what you’re looking for.”

The company notes in the blog post that it’s introduced a variety of updates to Tweetdeck recently, including real-time updating of tweets in columns, keyboard shortcuts and search improvements, among others. In October 2012, Tweetdeck released visual updates to its product, including updated colors and fonts for a variety of platforms including web, Chrome, Mac and Windows.

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But not everybody thinks that Twitter is too much. In fact, U.K.-service Bonfire.im wants to turn up the heat — by adding a chat interface on top of Twitter itself.

Bonfire, which has just gone live, is a browser extension that uses some smart code and clever techniques to add an instant messaging layer into the Twitter website. If another user you follow is currently on Twitter and using Bonfire, they’ll have a little green light next to their name — just click on their button and you can start up a chat session right there, without ever leaving the page.

Founder Josh Russell describes it as “Facebook chat for Twitter”, which gives you a good idea of what it feels like to use — and to some degree what it looks like, too. But it’s also more than that: it brings the idea of presence to the site too, which in many ways could end up being as important to the service as the ability to talk. After all, it’s one thing to read people’s messages; it’s quite another to be able to see that they’re looking directly at Twitter right at that moment.

If used properly Bonfire could not only be a godsend for IM and Twitter addicts — but for all the people who follow them, too. After all, think of all those times you’ve been barraged with two people chatting away publicly to each other and wanted to tell them to take it off Twitter… well, now they can do it really easily.

Of course, Twitter already has a way for people to have private conversations, through direct messaging — but it’s got an entirely different interface, it’s a long, long way from real-time and it suffers from a few interface problems. Bonfire could prove to be a smart way for — whether it’s individuals, groups of friends, or companies who use Twitter for customer service.

It’s not going to be for everyone, but with 100 million active users globally Twitter is a broad church. Russell suggests there may be a significant audience for what he’s offering — particularly for those who are already heavy IM or BlackBerry Messaging users, for example.

“Twitter is a big place,” he says. “It’s hard to nail down a typical Twitter user. But we think it’s likely that we’ll see both the BBM generation and people who get their news from Twitter being big groups of initial users.”

It’s still very early days — the team has been working on the service for just a few months, with some small seed investment — and the feature set is fairly limited right now. But ultimately, says Russell, Bonfire may consider developing further features or adding other platforms, too — but he says it’s important to avoid mission creep for what is already a potentially overwhelming product.

“We’re building Bonfire to service as many people as possible, and we have that in mind when considering every feature,” he says.

Still, for anyone who thinks that adding instant messaging is just too much to cope with for Twitter users, there’s a one-word answer: Tweetdeck. The power users’ client of choice, also based in London, is utterly overwhelming to anyone new to Twitter… and yet it was so well-used that it ended up being bought by the service itself in a deal estimated at $40 million last year.

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Entrepreneur Bill Gross is already famous in technology circles for developing the search-related keyword advertising model that Google has since made billions by perfecting. Now, he is launching a content-focused social network called Chime.in that will compete not just with Google’s new social platform Google+ but with Twitter and Facebook too, and link-sharing sites like Reddit and Digg as well. Does the world need another social platform for sharing content? Gross says that it does, and that his connections with content companies will help Chime.in succeed — but the odds are stacked against him.

Gross may be well known to some as the guy who created the first version of Ad Words, which he did at a company called GoTo — later renamed Overture, and eventually acquired by Yahoo for $1.6 billion in 2003. More recently, however, he has become infamous for his somewhat tense relationship with Twitter. First, the real-time information network shut down Gross’s attempts to monetize tweets through advertising, then when his company started acquiring Twitter clients like Twidroyd and UberTwitter, it shut off several of his apps for bad behavior.

To add insult to injury, Gross reportedly tried to buy the Twitter app Tweetdeck, only to have Twitter buy the company instead. There were even reports that UberMedia planned to start a competitor to Twitter, although Gross denied these reports at the time.

Chime.in may not be a direct competitor to Twitter, but it is clearly a shot across the bow. According to the support pages for the service (which have since been taken offline), it will allow users to post to Twitter or Facebook or Google+ as well as to the Chime.in network, and is therefore not competitive but “additive to the ecosystem.” But it seems obvious that Gross wants to appeal to users of these other networks who feel overwhelmed by the amount of content and want to focus their interests more clearly — and he wants to appeal to content producers as well, and offer them a better home for their content than Twitter, and a share in the ad revenue.

Gross said that the service, which hasn’t launched yet (an iPhone app that made it into the U.S. store appears to have since been pulled) is meant to help users focus on following topics rather than people, as a way of filtering through the noise coming from social networks. Of course, each of Chime.in’s competitors also have a way of doing this — Twitter and Facebook have lists and Google has “Circles” — and it’s not clear why anyone would choose Chime’s approach instead. The service will also provide not just a stream but dedicated webpages devoted to content, which Gross said would appeal to publishers, and the company has invited entertainment companies such as Universal Pictures, Bravo TV and Disney to take part.

Content relationships may get Gross and Chime.in the attention of publishers, but with some users complaining that they lack the time for even one new network like Google+, how much chance does Chime.in stand of drawing a large user base? Content from mainstream publishers also wasn’t much help to Digg after an ill-fated relaunch last year, much of which was devoted to making it easy for publishers to post their content to the network. That may have appealed to content companies, but it didn’t appeal to very many users, and Digg wound up rolling back almost all of its redesign.

But the biggest hurdle for Chime.in is the simple fact that Facebook now has 800 million users and Twitter has 200 million or so, with Google+ in the 50 million range. Useful features aren’t always enough for a social network to flourish, especially when there is so much competition. In the end, even if you build it they might not come.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user See-ming Lee

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Twitvid started out as one of countless Twitter video sharing sites, but it has manage to stick around even as a number of its competitors (12seconds, Twitvid.io, Twiddeo) had to shut down. Part of that may have to do with partnerships with popular Twitter clients like TweetDeck; part of it may be because the service embraced mobile platforms early on, publishing its own apps for iOS, Android and BlackBerry.

However, it’s getting awfully crowded again in the social video sharing space these days, with companies like the Justin.tv spin-off and social video network Socialcam and new startups like Tout trying awfully familiar-sounding ideas.

The biggest test for Twitvid may be how it can adapt to Twitter’s own increasingly aggressive media plans. The relaunched Twitter website incorporates more video, and Twitter also teamed up with Photobucket in June to power its own image hosting. One has to wonder when Twitter will extend this kind of partnership to video clips as well, and what this would do to startups like Twitvid.

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Before you get started, you’ll need to fill out a few details or sign up using your OpenID, Google or Yahoo account. Authorize the app to work with your Twitter account(s), and you’re ready to go. The Twimbow screen is divided into three main columns: “Personal Buzz” (your tweets, @ replies, and DMs), “Home Buzz” (your main Twitter stream) and search.

Color-coding your tweets

The “Personal Buzz” column is color-coded by default. As shown by the icons at the top of the column, your tweets are blue, @ replies are green, DMs you’ve sent are yellow, DMs sent to you are orange, tweets retweeted by you are pink, retweets of your tweets are olive, while tweets you’ve marked as a favorite are red. Clicking on one of those icons at the top of the column filters those tweets from the column, so clicking on the red star will remove favorites from the column.

The “Home Buzz” column contains your main Twitter stream. Similarly to the “Personal Buzz” column, it also has color coding, but you’re left to define your own system. You can define labels (such as “News,” “Friends,” “Work,” and so on) and give each label its own color. Apply a label to a tweet and it (and all of the other tweets from that user) will be color-coded. You can also filter the stream to show or hide tweets with each label.

The column to the right has a real-time search feature. Saved searches can be moved to the “Monitor” box at the bottom of the screen if you want to keep an eye on a particular phrase.

Filtering noisy tweets

As well as the color-coding, one other Twimbow feature that aims to help clean up your Twitter stream is the “noise killer,” which enables you to set up a filter to remove tweets containing specific keywords from your stream. This could be useful when an event is happening and there are tweets flooding your stream that you’re not interested in, for example (although you’ll need to make sure to remove the filter after the event has finished).

Twimbow certainly has a pretty interface, but it’s not without a few drawbacks. Despite working well on my smaller laptop screen, there’s no mobile version. You can’t check out trending topics. And while the interface looks pretty, it’s not exactly intuitive — it took me a little while to figure out how the color-coding and search columns worked, for example.

It’s not a full-featured social media dashboard

You should also note that, despite its use of columns, Twimbow is not really a full-featured social media dashboard like, say, HootSuite or TweetDeck. You can’t add additional columns beyond the three that Twimbow provides, nor can you configure how each column works, as you can with HootSuite and TweetDeck. However, as an easy-to-follow and novel web-based Twitter client, it works really well, and for a web app, it’s impressively responsive. If you’re finding it impossible to keep up with your fast-moving and noisy Twitter stream on the official Twitter website, even with the help of lists, Twimbow is definitely worth checking out; it’s free.

Twimbow was previously in private beta and required an invitation to access, but it’s now open to all; you can sign up here.

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Updated: According to news reports on Thursday, the Federal Trade Commission is looking into Twitter’s business practices — and specifically, the way it has dealt with third-party developers whose products and services rely on the Twitter platform. Although the news doesn’t necessarily mean Twitter is under official investigation, since the FTC often conducts informal inquiries that never proceed to the official stage, it means the company’s behavior must have raised enough critical flags to catch the regulator’s attention, which is rarely good.

A report from Business Insider, which appears to be based on anonymous source, says the FTC has contacted UberMedia, the company founded by well-known technology entrepreneur Bill Gross that has had a fractious relationship with Twitter for some time (we’ve reached to UberMedia for official confirmation, and will update if we get a response). Another maker of Twitter-related apps reportedly said that the company’s legal counsel “advised us not to talk about” the topic. Twitter communications manager Matt Graves, meanwhile, told us the company had no comment on the reports. Update: the Wall Street Journal says a source confirmed that the FTC is “reviewing” Twitter’s behavior.

If the FTC — which rarely comments on investigations when they are in the informal stage — is actually conducting some kind of inquiry into how Twitter has treated third-party apps and services, the regulator is going to find plenty of material. The network has had a love-hate relationship with what some have called its “ecosystem” for the past year or more, something we have documented a number of times here at GigaOM.

From fledgling service to dominant player

When Twitter was just getting started as a fledgling service and trying to expand its user base, the company seemed happy to allow anyone to build a Twitter-related app by using the open API (the application programming interface that provides access to Twitter’s data). Soon, the market was filled with Twitter clients and services that posted photos to the network — such as Twitpic and Yfrog — URL shorteners like Bitly and other applications. But that attitude changed dramatically when Twitter started buying apps and creating its own competing features.

The turning point seemed to come when the company acquired Tweetie, a Mac client for Twitter, and Twitter investor Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures wrote a blog post about how third-party companies should focus on other things apart from just “filling holes” in Twitter’s feature set — the implication being that this was a recipe for disaster.

Evan Williams

Twitter co-founder and former CEO Evan Williams later admitted that the company “screwed up” in the way it handled this affair and its evolving relationship with developers. But soon Williams was replaced as chief executive by Dick Costolo, and a number of observers say the Twitter culture changed dramatically as far as its ecosystem was concerned: the company started tightening the rules on use of its API, and it also started cracking down on third parties like UberMedia.

Gross’s company seems to have originally triggered Twitter’s ire by trying to launch its own advertising service, just days before Twitter launched its own ad-related offering called Promoted Tweets. Gross began buying up third-party Twitter clients like Echofon and Twidroyd, and there was talk that UberMedia wanted to create its own alternative Twitter-style network — but then Twitter shut down several of the company’s apps for what it said was behavior not allowed by its terms of use.

Twitter nabs TweetDeck from UberMedia

At about the same time, UberMedia was reportedly in negotiations to acquire TweetDeck, a popular client used by power users of Twitter to monitor multiple accounts and lists through a single interface. But following the shutdown of its clients (who were later reinstated by Twitter after UberMedia responded to the company’s complaints), the deal fell through. Within weeks there were reports that Twitter was negotiating to acquire TweetDeck, and that acquisition ultimately went through in May.

What the FTC’s interest is in opening an inquiry is, or whether it will amount to anything but a few innocuous letters to Twitter competitors, is impossible to say. But whatever the outcome happens to be, an inquiry can’t be a positive thing for a company that is busy trying to grow quickly enough to justify the valuation its last financing assigned to the company. Some observers believe that financial pressure has contributed to the kind of behavior the regulator is allegedly looking at, by forcing Twitter to control its platform more rigidly and squeeze out potential competitors (Twitter is launching a site for developers that appears to be aimed at repairing some of those relationships).

This isn’t the first time Twitter has come under FTC scrutiny: the company was the subject of an investigation about privacy breaches that saw user information taken from the system, and Twitter eventually settled with the federal regulator in March.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Social Sidekick and Wikimedia Commons

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Thinking about how we do work takes time. It’s time well spent at the beginning of a project or at critical junctures. However, thinking about the work instead of doing it during a project can be disruptive and counter-productive. When we find effective practices and tools, we want them to become so ingrained in our process that we use them without thought.

Creating a seamless workspace

As a user, be thoughtful when you develop your personal workspace. Consider your options in terms of human skills and needs, technology, tools, and organizational practices — but then get to work once you have found an approach that is effective for the given setting.  Create a system for re-evaluating your design choices, but be biased toward stability rather than change. It may make sense to re-evaluate your workspace by the project rather than by the day or week.

If you are a content, tool, or practice supplier, do not create hurdles to seamless working.  Here are some examples of vendors that have inadvertently created hurdles to seamless working:

• Tool functions that do not match the cycle of the work. In an early use of BlackBerry handsets for law enforcement, the officers found themselves having to re-login in the middle of pursuits.
• Device blocking. The NY Post recently began blocking iPad users who are browsing via Safari. Users are redirected to a page explaining that they must purchase the NY Post iPad app to see the content. This, and all sites that admonish iPad users to download an app rather than just showing the page, break search flow.

Examples of tools that remove hurdles to seamless work are those with options for distraction-free screens (such as iA Writer for Mac) or the ability to easily control notifications (such as Tweetdeck).

Should application design or our personal work design help us navigate these hurdles? Both.

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Twitter has spent the last few months scouting a European HQ, but it seems that plans to expand the company’s London office are now rolling out in earnest. As of today, two important positions have been filled. Jessica Verilli, who has been working in corporate development at the company’s San Francisco base, landed in London this weekend to begin what she called ”my next chapter”. Meanwhile the company has also hired a new European head of communications, Rachel Bremer — an experienced hand on Europe’s tech public relations scene, who had previously represented a wide range of European startups and investors for Spark PR.

They aren’t the first in Twitter’s London team, of course. There was the recent acquisition of Tweetdeck last month, and before that, the appointment of former Googler Tony Wang as general manager of Twitter UK. That decision that was particularly notable since the company has chosen a career lawyer (Wang was a counsel at the Googleplex) to head up efforts in a country that is already developing a tricky legal relationship with the service.

Today’s moves indicate that the team seems to be assembling rapidly — but the real question is what Twitter’s shape European operations will have in the longer term.

It’s not unusual for American technology firms and startups to open European offices as they expand, but the vast majority of them are focused on sales and publicity. Some see the continent’s large, technologically-engaged population as a cash cow waiting to be milked; others recognize that managing local relationships (particularly with the press) is important for growth.

Sometimes it’s simply the case that opening an office inside the European Union makes some legal and financial issues easier to deal with (being able to shift corporation tax liabilities around Europe, for example, are one important reason that Ireland and Switzerland have become corporate centers for a large number of American corporations in recent years). Only a handful of businesses go further, and try to build up significant engineering or product development outside Silicon Valley — usually preferring to drag employees across to home base, where they can be more easily integrated.

Looking at Twitter’s hiring strategy in London, it looks pretty much like the business is drawing its tactics straight from the standard playbook. The open job listings suggest it’s mainly recruiting a sales team in London — positions as account executive and sales account manager are still open, for example.

That doesn’t make it unusual, of course. It’s the model followed by Facebook, which has a London office that is focused almost entirely on sales. Indeed, European operations are run by Joanna Shields, a genuine sales wizard who was so effective at cajoling new businesses into the digital world that she was largely responsible for turning Bebo from just-another-social-network into a site that was attractive enough to be purchased by AOL for $850 million. That acquisition ended disastrously, of course, but her reputation was sealed.

The trouble is, while sales are really important — particularly for a revenue light business like Twitter — focusing on sales and marketing above all else represents a real missed opportunity. With Facebook, as with many other companies, it’s apparent that Palo Alto drives the product agenda while London merely tries to monetize. Compare that with Google, on the other hand, which has spent a lot of time hiring talented European developers. It’s now the case that a significant proportion of Google’s mobile efforts are driven and built out of its London offices. It more successfully embeds in the local culture, feeds back into the company strategy and enhances the business.

The truth is that not every engineer in Europe wants to live in Silicon Valley, and not every engineer sitting in San Francisco understands the complexity of foreign markets — or the potential that they can hold. Twitter already has a headstart with the developer community thanks to the good fortune that Tweetdeck is based in London, but Europe will only truly benefit if that move becomes the rule, rather than the exception.

Photograph used under Creative Commons license, courtesy of Flickr user dcinput

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Now it seems that British lawyers have been on the offensive again. Over the holiday weekend, it emerged that Twitter has handed over the private details of at least one U.K. user, a controversial individual known as Mr. Monkey.

Since 2009, Mr. Monkey has been using Twitter to wage a war against local government representatives in the north of England — accusing members of South Tyneside Council of everything from rigging votes to taking drugs to cheating on their expenses. Under local laws, the targets of his claims want to sue him for defamation — except they couldn’t be sure who he was.

So they made a legal complaint to Twitter in California, aimed at finding out the identity of the person responsible. And while the company had taken no action in the Giggs case, it handed over Mr. Monkey’s details. And the individual in question, it turns out, was another councilor, Ahmed Khan.

On the surface it seems strange: Twitter held back in the Ryan Giggs case, and yet it seems to have done precisely the opposite with Mr. Monkey.

Given this apparent conflict, the rights and wrongs of the case are currently being argued in the media — and the general consensus seems to be that Twitter capitulated where it had previously stood firm. “Until now, Twitter has resisted releasing information about users”, chided the Telegraph.

Not everyone agrees, however. James Ball, a former Wikileaks activist, argues we should celebrate Twitter’s stance because the company works hard to protect users. Pointing to an incident where the company fought to unseal a court order forcing it to reveal the details of people behind Wikileaks-related accounts, Ball says Twitter’s action so far should be applauded, not jeered.

Twitter has gone further than any of the other big online organizations in sticking up for the privacy of its users – and has received virtually nothing but opprobrium for its efforts.

And it’s a fair point: Khan told journalism professor Kathy Gill that he’d been notified by Twitter that they had been asked to reveal his details — but he waived the opportunity to fight the order in California because he couldn’t afford the legal costs. So it seems that Twitter’s initial suggestion that it’s working to protect users first, remains relatively intact.

Will this change? It’s possible. The more popularity Twitter gets for being a source of gossip, the more scrutiny is likely to be applied to its privacy rules, and the more pressure it will be under to release particular details.

But there’s something else that may have a greater impact.

Britain has some of the most notorious libel laws in the world, and is often seen as a great venue for libel tourism — with plaintiffs from overseas using the English courts to punish people for making derogatory statements about them.

And it’s quite possible that suing Twitter in Britain may become a lot easier once its $40 million purchase of Tweetdeck is completed. Twitter is planning to open a U.K. office later this year anyway, but Tweetdeck’s London-based team suddenly gives Twitter a significant British operation. That means that not only will those making a complaint in Britain have some sort of local entity to name in legal documents, but they’ll also have significant assets that could potentially be taken by the courts.

Lilian Edwards, professor of e-governance at Strathclyde University in Edinburgh Glasgow, told me that any action could potentially result in Tweetdeck bearing the load.

“Even if Twitter only had a bank account in England, it could be seized,” she said. “Having more assets, e.g. offices, just makes it easier.”

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Twitter/TweetDeck rumors have been flying around for weeks now, so lots of folks have had time to form opinions about the tie-up. Here are some of the more interesting takes on the situation:

• TweetDeck could be a big part of Twitter’s new advertising revenue strategy.
  
  Twitter CEO Dick Costolo stressed TweetDeck’s appeal to “brands, publishers, marketers” in his blog post announcing the deal. TweetDeck’s CEO Iain Dodsworth placed similar emphasis on his company’s high-end appeal as a tool for “brands, influencers, the highly active and anyone that just needs ‘more power.’”

  Entrepreneur James Eliason translates the official spin from Twitter/TweetDeck as such:

  Tweetdeck is now Twitter's branded power user app. It will be heavily ad supported. And you can pay for no ads. #prediction—
  James Eliason (@jameseliason) May 25, 2011

• TweetDeck’s valuation may have been sweetened by UberMedia rumors.
  
  Although terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed, various reports have pegged the Twitter/TweetDeck deal’s value at $40 million in a mix of cash and stock. It’s always worth noting that unconfirmed deal and valuation rumors can’t always be relied upon. TweetDeck itself has been incorrectly reported to sell before, most notably in a February report that it had been bought by UberMedia at a value of some $25 million.

  While the UberMedia/TweetDeck rumors clearly proved false, GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram wrote earlier this month that the buzz probably amped up Twitter’s interest in the company:

  “One of the obvious motives for acquiring TweetDeck, as we’ve written before, is to keep it out of the hands of UberMedia — the Bill Gross startup that has had a contentious relationship with Twitter since it was first created last year, in part because the company made it clear that it wanted to set up a competing advertising model and possibly a complete alternative network to Twitter. UberMedia was also said to be in talks with TweetDeck, but those expired without any resolution. Preventing Gross from acquiring the company, and bringing those users into the Twitter family, could justify the $50 million that Twitter is reportedly offering.”

• TweetDeck’s compatibility with Twitter’s competitors is now in jeopardy.
  
  One of the biggest concerns among TweetDeck users is that the service will no longer integrate with other social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, PC World’s JR Raphael wrote this week:

  “But would [Twitter] want to maintain the integration with competing services like Facebook and Foursquare under its company banner? Would it be in Twitter’s best interest to leave TweetDeck’s robust customizability in place? …I’m not so sure it would.”

  Social media marketing exec Tammy Fennel was more straightforward with her prediction:

  “Tweetdeck will probably be a Twitter only client. Goodbye Facebook, Goodbye Linkedin.”

  For the record, in an interview with AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka Wednesday morning, Tweetdeck CEO Iain Dodsworth said he “can’t see [TweetDeck's multiservice integration] going away anytime soon.” But he also pointed out that “the reality of it is that TweetDeck usage has been heavily Twitter based, withe the external services.. acting more as a value add.”

• Buying TweetDeck could be another stickiness play for a maturing Twitter.
  
  In an article published Wednesday morning, International Business Times reporter Manikandan Raman wrote that this could be an attempt to bring more of the Twitter ecosystem in-house:

  “The deal makes complete sense as Twitter as a way to read and write tweets is a no-frills platform that loses many people once they get some experience and start to explore alternatives. A recent report from Sysomos shows that 42 percent of all tweets are made using non-official Twitter services and applications, which included TweetDeck.”

If you have any thoughts on the Twitter/TweetDeck deal, please chime in using the comments.

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