Tag Archives | social networking

The Return of UberMedia's Twitter Apps

UberMedia has released a statement saying that it’s responded to Twitter’s concerns about its apps and this morning’s blockade against them is over:

Early Friday morning, Twitter shut off access to its service by several of our Twitter client applications:  UberTwitter, Twidroyd, and UberCurrent.  Twitter then notified us that they believed we were in violation of several provisions of their terms of service.

We were immediately in touch with Twitter, and the changes they asked us to make were very small.  As a result, we have completed the changes, and new apps are currently being posted to their respective stores.  Twitter has assured us that as soon as those changes were complete, they would reactivate our applications.

Twitter also asked us to modify the name of UberTwitter.  We began a process of changing the name three weeks ago by polling our users, and we’ve decided based on their input to change the product name to UberSocial, which we completed today.

To our millions of loyal users, we appreciate your patience during this temporary period.  We look forward to continuing our innovations on the Twitter platform.

Bill Gross, CEO

UberMedia, Inc.

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Twitter Blocks UberTwitter and Twidroyd

Are you a user of UberTwitter (a popular BlackBerry Twitter client) or Twidroyd (a major Twitter client for Android)? If so, you need a backup plan: Twitter began blocking both apps today for violating its rules. (Both are owned by UberMedia, which seems to be intent on cornering the market on third-party Twitter apps–earlier this week, it acquired TweetDeck.)

Twitter is releasing a statement to various sites saying that the offending apps (and sister app UberCurrent) are guilty of “violations [that] include, but aren’t limited to, a privacy issue with private Direct Messages longer than 140 characters, trademark infringement, and changing the content of users’ Tweets in order to make money.” It also says it’s been trying to resolve concerns with UberMedia for months. Even if Twitter’s gripes are entirely legit–and they may well be–it’s a fascinating question of conflict of interest given that UberMedia’s apps all compete with official ones from Twitter itself. Ones which Twitter plugged in its message to UberTwitter and Twidroyd users.

Any users of UberMedia’s apps out there? If so, what are you doing today?

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Facebook's Silent Change to Your Newsfeed

Facebook has been making a few changes to the way your newsfeed operates, some of which have been very visible. But it’s also made one change which you may have not even noticed, and might not want.

The visible changes are nice. For one, clicking on a picture now opens a pop-up rather than taking you to the page with that photo: nice for those like me annoyed they “lose their spot” and have to rescroll through previously read updates. Another is changes to the fan page design, which now mirror the look of profiles and gives Facebook a uniform design throughout.

Okay, nothing wrong with those tweaks. However if you’re like me, and comment on your friend’s statuses and prefer to just watch others, you may have noticed some people apparently are commenting much more, and others much less. This is due to a change in how the site displays your newsfeed: if you haven’t commented, liked, or looked at a person’s profile regularly, they have now seemingly disappeared.

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Congress Wants Answers on Facebook's Data Disclosure

Facebook’s plan to give developers access to users’ addresses and phone numbers has not gone over so well with many, and now the heads of the House of Representatives’ Privacy Caucus want answers. The feature only lasted three days as the social networking site decided to suspend it pending a better (and less controversial) option.

In a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Representatives Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas) are asking for specifics on the plans. Among the questions are how this information would be shared and how the process was vetted, as well as asking for specifics on why Facebook ultimately decided to shelve the plan.

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Twitter's Ad Revenues Expected to Triple by 2012

It seems like it was only yesterday that all the analysts were saying that Twitter was doomed because it couldn’t make money. But times have changed: research firm eMarketer says the social networking service could bring in $150 million this year, and $250 million in 2012. Those numbers would be a significant increase over the estimated $45 million in ad revenues this past year.

One  of Twitter’s challenges was figuring out how it to monetize the service without cluttering its users’ timelines with ads. Thus it has gone a different route through “promoted” tweets, which it introduced in April of last year. And while the company hasn’t provided too many details, it looks like it’s seriously considering other money-generating strategies as well.

eMarketer seems to think so too, saying the tripling of ad revenues will have a lot to do with a self-service ad feature that the firm expects to be launched in 2011. Other companies such as Microsoft and Google have built siginficant advertising business, supported in large part by the self-service platforms both companies have built and maintained.

Advertising was something that I think we all knew was eventually going to come to Twitter. A company can grow at Twitter’s astronomical rate only so long without a solid source of revenue. Let’s just hope whatever it decides to do is not disruptive to the user experience.

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Facebook Wants to Be on Your Dumbphone, Too

While Facebook has definitely been able to expand its reach through its smartphone apps, there is still a signficant portion–a majority, actually–of mobile phone users who do not own a smartphone, or maybe even want one. The social networking giant seems determined to put itself in front of those consumers as well.

In collaboration with Snaptu, a company that specializes in developing stripped down apps for use on so-called “dumb phones,” Facebook has launched an app which will work on about 2,500 devices from a range of manufacturers including Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and LG. It aims to provide a similar experience to that of its fancier smartphone counterpart.

It appears that the focus (at least initially) is to expand mobile usage of the site into developing markets. Facebook has struck deals with several carriers across Asia, Europe, and the Dominican Republic to offer use of the app for 90 days without any data charges.

Facebook plans to offer the application to other carriers worldwide over the next several months, it says. The offering is much like “Zero,” its free-to-use low bandwidth website that the company launched last year.

One caveat–if you are downloading Snaptu in an attempt to get Facebook, unless you’re on a launch carrier it will not work (whether you pay for the data charges or not). It’s not clear when this restriction is set to be lifted. Snaptu still has its own unofficial app, which according to TechCrunch is similar to the official one.

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The Tech That Got People Talking on Twitter in 2010

Topsy is a search engine whose results are determined the pages people are talking about and linking to on Twitter. The more a page gets mentioned–especially by influential Twitter users–the higher it’s likely to show up in Topsy’s results. It’s an interesting approach that works well for stuff that people are chattering about at the moment (strangely enough, the results for “chrome os” are meatier than the ones for “rutherford b. hayes.”) It can also do things like show you a list of Twitter users who are oft-retweeted on a given topic (such as HDTV or cars).

The site is built around a giant database of Tweets that have been analyzed and indexed, so the Topsy folks know a lot about the terms that show up most frequently on Twitter. I asked them to compile a report for me on twenty tech terms and how often they were referenced. It’s not a perfect mirror of the Twitter zeitgeist–Topsy only pays attention to Tweets that contain links and ones which have been retweeted, and it finds keywords even if they’re in a URL rather than the meat of the Tweet–but it’s still a useful reality check.

Here it is…

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New Facebook Messages: I’m Intrigued! And Apprehensive!

Facebook's Andrew Bosworth and Mark Zuckerberg at today's event

I spent this morning at Facebook’s press event. As expected, it involved the transformation of Facebook’s Messages feature into full-blown e-mail–except that Mark Zuckerberg kept saying that the new service isn’t e-mail. Depending on how you look at things, either he’s right or it’s both e-mail and a whole lot more.

I shared some initial details and impressions over at Techland; now I’m sitting back and wondering when I’ll get to try the new service. (Facebook said that it’ll roll out to users over the course of the next few months, but that those of us who were at the event should get it soon; I tried e-mailing myself at harrymccracken@facebook.com, but it got bounced back.)

(Update: My friend Rafe Needleman has a spare invite and says he’ll send it to me. Bless you, Rafe.)

As I tweeted the proceedings, I was somewhat surprised at the (mostly) negative feedback I got from people who were following along at home. Here’s one representative example:

I wasn’t trying to egg on the doubters–okay, I admit that I did mention Google Wave in one tweet–and I have an open mind about the whole thing. But one of the things I like about Facebook Messages in their old form was the utter simplicity–no spam, no messages I’d rather not deal with, no Gmail-style feature overload. I concede that I’m not one of the teenagers who Zuck said inspired these changes, but I hope that new Facebook Messages retains the no-nonsense personality of old Facebook Messages. Like Zuck, I don’t want Facebook Messages to turn into e-mail–but I also don’t want it to stop being Facebook Messages…

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