Tag Archives | Twitter

Obama Praises Tech Giants

Posted by David Worthington on September 8, 2009 at 9:50 pm

U.S. President Barack Obama heralded the technology industry in a speech today about the importance of education. The speech, which was given to school children across the country, emphasized personal responsibility, hard work, and perseverance.

In his remarks, Obama told school children that students sitting in classrooms a generation beforehand had grown up to produce Facebook, Google and Twitter –changing the way Americans communicate with one another. Those successes would have been hard to come by without an education, the President noted.

Obama successfully leveraged social networking in his campaign to become President, building a large grassroots following on the Web. His campaign leveraged Web services to rapidly convey his message and to respond to political attacks.

Despite the President’s praise, technology didn’t get a free pass in his speech. He cautioned against too much of a good thing, and asked parents to manage how much time their children spend watching TV and playing Xbox. (Obama singled out Microsoft’s game console rather than mentioning the PlayStation and Wii as well, a fact some folks noticed).  He also told children to be careful about what they post online (which was a world away from President Eisenhower’s generic appeal for students to study math and science).

Here’s the speech in its entirety, in two chunks–thank you, YouTube:

Controversy aside, the President gave common sense advise that it would behoove every child to follow. Maybe the inventor of the next big thing was listening in, and became inspired by the President’s words.

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Sonos Does Twitter

Posted by Mari Silbey on September 4, 2009 at 2:34 pm

The Twitter Everywhere meme is popular this week, and Sonos joins in by announcing (via Twitter) that soon owners of the multi-room music streaming experience will be able to tweet from their Sonos controllers. The new feature empowers listeners to share artist tracks with one click, or edit automated tweets before publishing.

I love this experimentation phase for Twitter. I don’t know that I have any interest in regularly tweeting my musical tastes, or in accessing Twitter from devices that don’t give me the full conversational experience. However, the idea of using Twitter in broadcast-only or receive-only mode is certainly gaining traction. Like PiMPY, the tweeting washing machine, it suggests new possibilities for both lifecasting and automated data collection.

With regard to Sonos specifically, my guess is that the company’s customer base is music-obsessed and sophisticated enough to make the new Twitter function appealing. The application will work from both the new Sonos Controller hardware and and their iPhone app later this year.

(This post republished from Zatz Not Funny.)

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Facebook and Twitter Will Cost Money on Xbox 360

Posted by Jared Newman on August 28, 2009 at 3:43 pm

XboxLiveTwitterOne of the nice things about Facebook and Twitter is that they’re free to use, but won’t really be the case on the Xbox 360.

Microsoft confirmed to G4 that an Xbox Live Gold subscription will be required to use either service, at least beyond a “free trial period.” A Gold subscription costs $50 per year, and also includes online play, access to Netflix streaming and other perks.

I understand what Microsoft is trying to do here. Xbox Live, traditionally, has been a venue for fiercely competitive online play. Despite most games’ ability to match players based on skill, it can be difficult for a casual player to find fair competition. I consider myself fairly skilled at video games, but I’ve been beaten down countless times in Street Fighter IV, Gears of War and Fight Night Round 4.

That’s not a bad thing, except it doesn’t appeal to the so-called casual crowd that Microsoft will be trying to attract in the years ahead. Slowly, we see that Microsoft is trying to build a compelling case for Xbox Live Gold even if you’re not an online gamer. Aside from Twitter, Facebook and Netflix, Gold subscribers will soon be able to stream music using Last.fm and play in the 1 vs. 100 online quiz show (currently in open beta).

But unlike those other services, Facebook and Twitter aren’t worth paying for. Microsoft can talk all it wants about how the social networking is “seamlessly integrated” into the console, but I don’t think they’ll gain many converts with a free trial.

A better solution might be to offer “Lite” versions of Facebook and Twitter. We know that the services will include advanced features, such as the ability to upload game screenshots into your Facebook profile, so maybe Microsoft should withhold those features for Xbox Live Silver members. That way, people could slowly become persuaded of Xbox Live’s overall value, instead of being forced to make a decision when their trial period runs out.

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Health Care Reform becomes Comedic Gold on Twitter

Posted by David Worthington on August 19, 2009 at 3:53 pm

Twitter logoThe U.S. debate over President Obama’s health care reform proposals has taken a humorous turn on Twitter today.

Tweets making light of some of the more outlandish claims that are being made by the President’s political opponents have become trending topics: Under Obamacare and #Obamacarefacts. Here’s a sampling of some of the wittier remarks.

@WinstonUK

Under Obamacare two grandmas enter… one grandma leaves. http://tinyurl.com/m67qt9

@anish7

Under ObamaCare, Soylent Green will be people. #obamacarefacts (via @Southworth)

@mootinator

#obamacarefacts Under Obamacare only Chuck Norris will be allowed to practice medicine. Administered via roundhouse kick

@RadHamster

Under ObamaCare, keyboard cat will play YOU out. #obamacarefacts

@emilaragundi

#obamacarefacts Under ObamaCare, organ donates you!

@aspleenic

Under ObamaCare, ADHD drugs for children will be replaced with swift punches to the offending child’s arms http://tinyurl.com/ngsqgm

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Tech Folks to Follow on Twitter

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 17, 2009 at 9:24 am

twitterlogoTechRepublic Editor-in-Chief Jason Hiner has published a nice hand-picked list of one hundred tech-related folks who are worth following on Twitter. (Yes, it includes me, but that’s but a minor lapse–and it still leaves ninety-nine worthy candidates.)

Jason points out that Twitter needs a way to follow a group of people with one click–an equivalent to what OPML provides for RSS feeds. (If Twitter doesn’t feel like offering this feature itself, a third-party could presumably do so.) His list is also a reminder that the world could use a definitive directory of Twitterfolk who are worth your time in various major categories. WeFollow is useful, but like too many guides to Twitter users, it sort of devolves into an index of people with large numbers of followers. I know people with a couple of hundred followers who are good reads, and there are multiple people and organizations who prove that having hundreds of thousands of followers is not necessarily a sign of quality…

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Qik Goes Legit on the iPhone

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 14, 2009 at 5:26 pm

qiklogoLivestreaming service Qik finally has an app available on the iPhone App Store. (A version for jailbroken iPhones already existed.) It’s good news, but not without a major gotcha: The App Store version of Qik doesn’t permit you to stream live video from your phone to Qik’s site. It does, however, allow you to record video with an iPhone 3GS which is  then instantly and automatically uploaded to Qik (along with your GPS location), as well as share it via YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Which is useful in and of itself, and similar to the tactic taken by competitor Ustream to get into the App Store.

The biggest limitation of this Apple-approved version of Qik is that you can only upload via Wi-Fi, not 3G. Qik says it’s submitted a 3G0-enabled version of the app to Apple, though. That one should be a decent stopgap until the day comes–I’m an optimist and assume it will-that Apple lets developers write apps that stream video on the fly over 3G.

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Retweeting Gets Official

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 14, 2009 at 9:47 am

RetwitterOne of the best things about Twitter is that most of the best things about Twitter have been invented by its users. Such as the idea of addressing other people by using their @names and sharing their tweets by retweeting them. Little by little, Twitter formalizes these inventions as part of the service, and a new blog post by Twitter cofounder Biz Stone reports that retweeting is going to become a true feature.

Right now, you retweet by copying someone else’s tweet and affixing “RT” and that person’s twittername at the front. Sometime in the next few weeks, tweets will get a Retweet icon you can click which will insert the original tweet (along with a “retweeted by” tag) in your twitterstream, where your Twitter followers will see it even if they don’t follow the person who Tweeted it in the first place.

retweet

It sounds simpler and more elegant than the current, made-up-by-users approach. It also sounds like it’ll have some major implications for third-party Twitter clients and services. Twitter says it’ll work on communicating these implications to developers in the coming weeks.

Assuming Twitter pulls it off smoothly, it’ll be nice to see retweeting formalized. I wonder what Twitter’s users will come up with next?

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Tr.impending Doom

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 9, 2009 at 6:25 pm

trimTr.im, one of umpteen URL-shortening services used by Twitterfans and other people who needed to compress long URLs into as little space as possible, is now the first major player among those umpteen servers to call it quits–it’s being shuttered by parent company Nambu. The company says it couldn’t figure out how to make money with Tr.im, and couldn’t find anyone interested in taking it over–and that Bit.ly‘s stance as the default URL-shortener used by Twitter itself means that Tr.im would fail in the long run no matter what.

Tr.im was a worthy contender, but there are plenty of other perfectly good competitors out there, so its closure wouldn’t be a huge issue for new URLs that need to be shortened by Tr.im users. What’s worrisome is the status of existing Tr.immed URLs–of which there are scads all over the Web, and which people are continuing to create right now even though the service is closing. If Nambu shuts down the servers that forward the short URLs to the original long ones, the Tr.immed versions won’t work. The company doesn’t say what its long-term plans are for existing URLs, but it does A) guarantee that they’ll still work through the end of 2009; and B) say that running the servers is prohibitively expensive. I assume that’s a hint, at least, that Tr.immed URLs will likely stop working sometime next year. (Unless someone else steps in to save the service–which doesn’t seem unthinkable given the attention the shutdown is getting.)

If Tr.im does go away completely, it’s a wake-up call we all knew would come eventually, if we gave the matter any thought. Non-shortened URLs will work forever–as long as the page they’re in and the page they link to exists, they’re good. Shortened ones live and die at the discretion of the company that shortened them for you, assuming it doesn’t go out of business. And nearly everybody in the URL-shortening game is a very small company without a proven plan for economic sustainability.

All the information contained in millions of tweets with shortened URLs is tremendously valuable–but many of them simply don’t make sense if you can’t click through to the URL that’s been shortened. Sooner or later, Tr.im’s vanishing act is going to remove all the context from vast numbers of tweets, and the folks who suffer won’t be the people who shortened the URLs, but the ones who want to read those tweets.

I don’t have an inkling what Twitter’s long-term URL-shortening strategy is–hey, are there any clues in those stolen documents?–but I hope it intends to start squeezing down its own URLs. For one thing, I have more faith in Twitter being around for the long haul than I do in the viability of existing URL-shortening services. Also, if Twitter goes out of business, than all those tweets containing shortened URLs may disappear anyhow…

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