Tag Archives | Twitter

Will Xbox Live Be a Hangout?

Posted by Jared Newman on June 1, 2009 at 4:30 pm

xboxlivecardMicrosoft wasn’t shy about its intentions during today’s E3 press event: It’s trying to branch out beyond the typical gamer set. Project Natal is one piece of the puzzle, and so is Xbox Live, for which the company revealed five significant additions and improvements.

Let’s make this nice and easy with a list:

Social Networking: Come this fall, Facebook and Twitter will be accessible through Xbox Live. A demonstration showed the usual features, such as status updates and friend lists, presented in the New Xbox Experience’s distinct windows. One feature allows Facebook friends to find each others’ Xbox 360 Gamertags.

“Live Party”: Friends on Xbox Live can watch videos or listen to music together over the Internet. In a brief demonstration, avatars gathered in front of a television (within a television, of course), watching and reacting to the content.

Zune Marketplace: As we heard when Microsoft announced the Zune HD, Xbox Live’s video service will become Zune-branded, but it’ll get at least one substantive change in the form of 1080p streaming videos.

Last.fm: Xbox Live Gold members around the world will have access to millions of songs through Last.fm, simple as that.

Netflix Improvements: My biggest gripe with the Xbox’ 360s Netflix service was the inability to select movies or manage playlists directly on the console. Fortunately, that will change, so a PC is no longer required.

While the Zune and Netflix developments are just tweaks to existing services, the other three announcements go in a different direction. Microsoft wants the Xbox 360 to be a hangout. I can almost sense this ideal of families or friends crowded around the tube, getting a dose of interactive entertainment.

But will people get into it? Live Party didn’t get an enthusiastic response at the press event, and the social networking seems a little clunky for everyday use (especially without a keyboard). I’m reluctant to make a bold prediction either way, but I’m curious to see how this effort pans out.

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Twitter Not A Big Hit Among Young Adults

Posted by Ed Oswald on June 1, 2009 at 11:11 am

TwitterWhile the 18-24 year old demographic is almost entirely on one social network or another according to a study by the Participatory Media Network — 99 percent to be exact — only a little over a fifth of this group is using Twitter.

The study was released at TWTRCON ’09 in San Francisco, which if you didn’t know (and why didn’t you!) Technologizer’s own Harry McCracken was the “official Twitterer.”

Of this group, 85 percent follow their friends, 54 percent follow celebrities, and 29 percent follow both family and companies. PMN says that this highlights that there is room to grow Twitter as a “marketing vehicle,” but as Caroline McCarthy at Cnet seems to argue on the flipside companies have already been using the microblogging service for marketing purposes for quite awhile.

She seems to say that this isn’t the best news for these folks, and I’d tend to agree. Maybe companies have overestimated the desire for a deeper connection to their customers, and the demand isn’t there. In any case, its all still fairly new so it might be too early to judge just yet.

Regardless, Twitter seems to have quite the untapped potential customer base in this ever increasingly connected demographic. It will be interesting to see what this means for its future. It’s clear the company is going to have to continue to invest in infrastructure as these folks come online — it also could mean Mr. Failwhale may become an ever more increasing visitor to us already dealing with Twitter’s not-so-stellar record of uptime.

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See You at TWTRCON–or on Twitter

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 29, 2009 at 12:06 pm

TWTRCONI’m looking forward to spending my Sunday at TWTRCON, the Twitter for business conference which I came up with and which Modern Media has done a spectacular job of running with. I know that some of you will be there. But if you’re not coming to the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco, you can still participate: I’m going to be tweeting the day’s proceedings at @TWTRCON. I’m thinking it’ll be akin to doing a radio broadcast of a baseball game–listening in won’t be as good as being there in person, but it’ll have pleasures of its own. And I’m going to help relay questions from twitterers to the impressive lineup of speakers at the conference.

It should be a fun experiment–and one way or another, I hope to see you on Sunday.

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A Search Engine Based on Retweets

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 27, 2009 at 2:36 pm

(Topsy LogoOver at TechCrunch, Michael Arrington has a good review of Topsy, a new search engine that bases its relevance rankings on retweets–the action, on Twitter, of repeating a tweet from another Twitterer to share it with your followers. The idea makes sense–in theory, at least, an item on the Web that lots of folks retweet should be more interesting than one that nobody retweets (or nobody tweeted in the first place). And Topsy gives more value to retweets that come from particularly influential Twitterers. Which is logical for a number of reasons, not the least among them that it helps prevent people from gaming the system.

In its current form, Topsy still feels more like a good idea than one that’s been absolutely nailed–when you perform a search, it comes back with a ton of stuff, and it’s not always sure what’s what. (For instance, in this egosearch for my @harrymccracken twittername, I’m not entirely clear what the organizing principle is behind the list of Twitterers on the right-hand side of the page.) But the potential is huge. Like much of Twitter, retweets are a useful but crude crutch invented by Twitter users, and I suspect that Twitter will replace retweets as we know them with something more elegant. (FriendFeed already has far more sophisticated mechanisms for sharing information and expressing your approval of it.) If Google and other general-purpose search engines aren’t figuring out how to incorporate retweets and other retwe

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Twitter Inspires a TV Show. A Revolutionary One!

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 25, 2009 at 10:32 am

You've Got MailVariety reports that Twitter has inspired an upcoming TV show:

The San Francisco-based web phenom has partnered with Reveille and Brillstein Entertainment to develop an unscripted TV skein described as “putting ordinary people on the trail of celebrities in a revolutionary competitive format.”

I don’t wanna judge a series I haven’t seen–and, come to think of it, probably won’t make time for even if it’s a smash. But Twitter’s celebration of celeb-watching (as seen in its recommendation that you follow Britney Spears and Kim Kardashian) makes me nervous. I have nothing against following the rich and famous via Twitter, but it’s not the thing I’d be proudest of if I’d invented Twitter.

Side note: The Twitter TV series was created by Amy Ephron, whose sisters Nora and Delia came up with 1998’s AOL-inspired You’ve Got Mail–an earlier attempt by Hollywood to cash in on an online trend. It was the first thing that jumped to mind when I read about the Twitter show, even before the Ephron connection dawned on me. Wasn’t 1998 about the time that AOL jumped the shark?

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Eight Days to TWTRCON

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 23, 2009 at 9:44 am

TWTRCONShameless plug: TWTRCON–the conference on how businesses can make the most of Twitter that I’m happy to say was my idea–is now just over a week away. It’ll be held at Hotel Nikko in San Francisco on Sunday, May 31st; the folks at conference organizer Modern Media have rounded up a terrific group of speakers, including industry luminaries such as MC Hammer, Shel Israel, Guy Kawasaki, Dave McClure, Jeremiah Owyang, and Steve Rubel, plus folks from major companies including Cisco, eBay, Comcast, Intuit, the Phoenix Suns, Wells Fargo, and more.

I’ll be twittering the whole thing, and hope to meet some of you there. And if you’re considering coming, here’s an incentive to seal the deal: Members of the Technologizer community get a 20 percent discount. Just register to attend at the TWTRCON site and use code TM02 at checkout to get the discount.

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Don’t Believe Everything You Read on Twitter

Posted by David Worthington on May 15, 2009 at 6:27 pm

twitterlogoSomeone caused a bit of a kerfuffle on Twitter today after he or she tweeted that California’s controversial Proposition 8 had been overturned by the State Supreme Court, crediting @LATimes. Slight problem–it wasn’t true.

The court has taken the constitutionality of the amendment under its consideration, so it wasn’t unreasonable to believe that the LA Times somehow gotten the scoop on its decision. That is what just one one careless person came to believe.

The culprit tweeter linked a story written dated May 16, 2008, when the court overturned a law barring same-sex marriage, because it violated the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee.

Any “followers” who clicked the link and examined the date on the story would have discovered that, but many chose to not take the extra step to verify what they read, and reflexively re-tweeted the “news.” Word inevitably made it way back to the LA Times’ own Twitter feed where its 19,700-plus followers began to see it– a perfect storm of misinformation.

There is a degree of trust built into the social mesh of Twitter, because people select who they want to follow. That trus does not substitute the fact that most people that blog about news on Twitter are not journalists, and do not have editors verifying their work. Twitter is place to find news, but it is not a news source.

Another root cause is the at-a-glance, all-the-world in 140 characters, aspect of it all. People consume information rapidly, and can react to something that they see on Twitter without thinking. Even friends make mistakes, and in this case, friends of friends propagated that mistake.

There are consequences when just anyone can post something online –consequences that could affect people’s lives, reputations, and even their livelihood. That is why print publications have editors, and television networks have guards placed outside of newsrooms. People’s emotions and legal rights were needlessly toyed with today.

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