Technologizer

Twitter’s Ad-Free Nirvana: Going, Going, Gone?

Friday, November 20, 2009

I‘m at TechCrunch’s Real-Time CrunchUp, an interesting conference in San Francisco on the booming subject of Web sites and services that move just as fast as the rest of the world does–Twitter, some aspects of Facebook, and lots more. The first session this morning was a conversation between TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington and Twitter’s COO, Dick [...]

Twitter No Longer Cares About What You’re Doing

Thursday, November 19, 2009

0 Comments

Though not as noticeable as Retweets or Lists, Twitter has stopped asking users the completely uninteresting question, “What are you doing?” Instead, the social messaging service now asks, “What’s happening?” It’s a simple alteration that could help point new users in a different, less mundane direction. Or, in the words of Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, “maybe [...]

Xbox Live, Facebook and Twitter: Incompatible

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

7 Comments

Here’s a telling moment from my first experiences with social networking on Xbox Live: While rifling through status updates on Facebook, I spotted a comment that seemed worthy of a response, which would’ve taken forever to type on my controller. Also, there was a Web link which the Xbox 360 couldn’t access. So I got [...]

TypePad Takes on Tumblr With Free Microblogging Feature

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

1 Comment

Six Apart’s TypePad blogging service has long been aimed at bloggers who were serious enough about what they were doing to fork over money for a blogging platform. But today Six Apart is announcing TypePad Micro, a new level of TypePad service that’s meant for extremely casual blogging–and which is the first version of the [...]

The Myth of Platform-Independent Applications

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

2 Comments

At Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles this morning, Seesmic announced that its Seesmic Desktop, a popular tool among Twitter power users, is coming to Windows. Finally! Um, hasn’t Seemsic run on Windows all along? Well, yes, but that’s because it’ s written in Adobe AIR, an application platform that lets programmers write Flash applications [...]

Think Before You Tweet

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

1 Comment

My roommate recently put a bug in my ear about an October article in the New York State Bar Association Journal. The premise was simple: You can be held accountable for what you post on social media Web sites, and some people have gotten themselves into a real fix. Author Michael Getnick recounted stories of clients [...]

Sir Tim is on Twitter

Friday, October 23, 2009

0 Comments

He’s as important a pioneer as Johannes Gutenberg or Alexander Graham Bell –except that he’s alive, well, and very much deeply involved in determining the future of the medium he created. He’s Sir Tim Berners Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, and it was [...]

Google Previews Social Search, Talks Twitter

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

1 Comment

More news from the Web 2.0 Summit: Search honcho Marissa Mayer just previewed Social Search, a feature the company plans to launch as a Google Labs experiment. It’ll place user-generated content–blog posts, photos, and the like–at the bottom of search results. And that content will come from your circle of friends, which includes both people [...]

Is Twitter Basically Broken?

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

4 Comments

Yesterday evening here at the Web 2.0 Summit, Twitter CEO Ev Williams sat onstage and confidently declared “Scalability today isn’t an issue for Twitter.” If so, the Failwhale is a big fat liar: When he appears, he’s accompanied by a message that “Twitter is over capacity” and that there are “Too many tweets!” And while the Failwhale [...]

Yup, Google is Getting Twitter Search, Too

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

3 Comments

Did I just hear another shoe dropping? Shortly after Microsoft’s Bing launched Twitter search, Google’s Marissa Mayer has blogged that Google also has a deal to integrate Tweets into its results. Something will show up “in the coming months,” which could presumably mean either next week or sometime in 2010. Mayer didn’t have much to say [...]

Yup, Bing Gets Twitter Search

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

1 Comment

Back in July, Bing added some not-very-exciting Twitter integration to its search results. Today at the Web 2.0 Summit here in San Francisco, Microsoft confirmed the news that All Things Digital’s Kara Swisher broke (and my colleague Ed Oswald wrote about): Bing has a deal with Twitter to provide a much more sophisticated level of [...]

Real-Time Tweets Headed to Bing?

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

1 Comment

Kara Swisher over at Boomtown claims that Microsoft is close to a non-exclusive data mining deal with Twitter that would bring real time tweet results to Bing. According to her sources, an announcement on the deal could come as soon as the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, which is happening this week. Twitter is [...]

Will the CIA Snoop on Social Networks?

Monday, October 19, 2009

2 Comments

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has bought a stake in a company that monitors social media as part of an ongoing clandestine effort by the agency to aggregate content from public sources, Wired is reporting. The CIA has invested in Visible Technologies, a company that produces technology for search engine marketing for social media. The CIA’s [...]

Twitter’s Non-Failwhale Fail

Thursday, October 8, 2009

3 Comments

When something’s awry with Twitter, we’re used to seeing the Failwhale show up to relay the bad news. At the moment, though, troubles of a more subtle sort appear to be afflicting the site. Peter Kafka of All Things Digital is reporting on current problems with users’ Twitter timelines, and they certainly seem to be [...]

Twitter to Get Lists

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

0 Comments

For a service that’s famously slow to add features, Twitter is being awfully public lately about its to-do list. It says it’s working on a fully integrated way to retweet other folks’ items. It’s spoken of geolocation features. And now it says that it will soon add lists–basically groups of Twitter users that any [...]

Twitter, It’s Time to Fix Short URLs Once and For All

Friday, September 25, 2009

4 Comments

It’s not a gross exaggeration to say that without short URLs from services such as Bit.ly and TinyURL, Twitter might not have become the sensation that it is. They enable the sharing of interesting links and photos and generally let the service transcend its 140-character limit. But they also bring some major gotchas, such as [...]