Sarah Perez over at ReadWriteWeb has a interesting piece on what exactly compromises a tweet from the backend. While it looks complicated already, it will get even moreso when Twitter debuts “annotations” later this year. That’s because for the first time a tweet will be able to contain even more data than just your standard 140 characters of text.
Now you know how much coding it takes for someone to tweet what they had for lunch this afternoon…
I’m still at Twitter’s Chirp conference, where Cofounder Ev Williams told a questioner In the audience that there will be an official Twitter client for phones based on Google’s Android operating system. He wouldn’t say if the company I’d building a new or will acquire an existing app. But he said they’d hoped to have been ready to announce the details at Chirp but fell short, so I assume it’s not too far off.
And I know what I think Twitter should do: it should bring Tweetie–er, Twitter for iPhone–to Android. The application which Twitter bought last week has just about everything about doing Twitter on a phone figured out perfectly. Why build or buy something else for Android that almost certainly wouldn’t be nearly as good? Shouldn’t the mobile Twitter experience be consistent across all phone platforms?
Good grief, more Twitter-Google news from the Chirp conference! Google has launched something called Google Follow Finder, a tool designed to help you identify Twitter users you might enjoy following. Enter your Twitter handle, and it’ll list people who tend to be followed by followers of people you follow–I think I have that wording right–as well as people who follow the same people you do.
Unfortunately, Google Follow Finder may be too good at identifying folks you should be following. I’m not sure if my experience was typical, but when I tried it, it looked as if it made no attempt to determine whether I was already following anyone it mentioned. Consequently, the vast majority of recommendations it made were for accounts that already rank among my favorites (actually, eighty percent or so were personal friends, colleagues, and acquaintances).
As Google’s blog post on Follow Finder notes, you can also enter names of Twitter users besides yourself–ones you already know you like–and find new people to follow that way. But the venerable Mr. Tweet, which has a similar mission, seems to be much better at analyzing your own Twitter data and telling you about people you don’t already know you like.
If you try the service and have better results than I did, let me know…
I’m at Twitter’s Chirp conference at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts, in an auditorium crammed to the rafters with Twitter developers and other interested parties. The mood seems slightly subdued–maybe folks are concerned over Twitter’s encroachment into areas traditionally left to third-party companies–but there’s lots of news. Such as…
The Library of Congress is archiving every tweet ever tweeted. As much as I love Twitter, my impulse was to be jokey and dimissive–“what’s next, YouTube comments?”–but as I think it over, I’m glad it’s doing so. There’s an awful lot of our digital heritage that’s already gone, and it’s better to err on the side of saving everything than to let interesting stuff (like the most significant tweets) slip away. (The announcement doesn’t, however, explain precisely how people will be able to get access to these tweets, or find the ones that anyone will care about in, say, 2047.)
For what seems like eons, people have been asking Twitter how and when it’s going to start making money, and the company’s executives have always said that they’ll move to monetize the site only when they can do it right. Today, Twitter is announcing its first big money-making idea. It’s a form of advertising called Promoted Tweets, and it’s no big whoop–basically, brands with presences on Twitter will be able to pay to put (clearly-labeled) tweets about their products at the top of search results. I can’t imagine anyone but the most adphobic among us hating the idea, but it also seems unlikely that Promoted Tweets alone will pay to keep Twitter free forever. They’re clearly a first step rather than the final answer.
Twitter will talk more about Promoted Tweets–and the future of Twitter in general–tomorrow at Chirp, the first official Twitter conference. I’ll be there, and will let you know what we learn…
Rumor had it that Twitter was going to unveil its advertising strategy and platform at cofounder Ev Williams’ keynote yesterday at the South by Southwest conference in Austin. Wrong! Instead, Williams announced something called @anywhere. The Twiter blog post on @anywhere isn’t terribly explicit about what it is, but it’s at least a rough equivalent of Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect–a way for third-party sites to hook themselves into Twitter so that folks’ Twitter identities follow them across the Web.
@anywhere disperses the Twitter experience via Hovercards–the mini user profiles that pop up on Twitter itself–and site proprietors will be able to add it easily via JavaScript rather than through a more complex API. Williams didn’t mention when it would debut, but the blog post says “soon” and lists some impressive launch partners: Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube.
More on this as Twitter discloses more details. I’m intrigued, at least–both as a Twitter user and as a publisher who might be interested in adding @anywhere to my site…
Good news: Twitter has announced that it’s using anti-phishing technology to detect dangerous short URLs submitted in direct messages and Tweets. I proposed that it do so last September. And given how many fake direct messages I get with short URLs that lead to sites that try to swipe my personal information, it’s pretty obvious that some form of short-url safeguards were way overdue…
Looks like Twitter may get ads soon, and may talk about it at next month’s South by Southwest conference.
I’m sorry, but I just can’t resist any news story involving Commodore’s fabulously feeble early home PC, the VIC-20. The Personal Computer Museum in Brantford, Ontario plans to celebrate its fifth anniversary this Saturday by using Twitter from one. And no, it’s not a VIC-20 that’s been modded for the purpose–it’s a stock unit with a whopping 5KB of RAM and a tape drive.
The VIC will Tweet using TweetVER, a software platform which the Museum hopes to port to other classic computers. (Me, I’ll be even more excited when it becomes available for the TRS-80 Model I, or at least the Atari 400.)
It’s not the first time that PC enthusiasts have used a very old machine for a very new purpose–here, for instance, is an Apple II browsing the Web. But there’s something particularly appropriate about Twitter being the subject of this stunt.
It’s one of the few popular modern services that really doesn’t need to be dumbed down for the VIC: The machine’s display shows 23 rows of 22 characters apiece, so up to three 140-character Tweets could fit on it at one time. And the system’s crummy graphics–176 by 184 with 16 colors–aren’t really an issue, because, hey, Twitter doesn’t let you post images. Twitter can be Twitter on a computer that’s nearly thirty years old; that just wouldn’t be true of Facebook, YouTube, or Gmail. Probably not World of Warcraft, either.
I’ve always said that Twitter isn’t that much different from the BBSs I was dialing into back when the VIC-20 was new. This is proof. I predict that there’s at least a fifteen percent chance that the VIC-20 will perform like a champ but that something will go wrong with Twitter itself during the experiment…
Wow: Bill Gates started using Twitter earlier today, and already has almost 18,000 followers.
