Tag Archives | Twitter

The Myth of Platform-Independent Applications

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 17, 2009 at 11:21 am

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 that can run outside the browser. (That’s a dumbed-down explanation of AIR, but enough to get the gist across, I hope.) One of the principal selling points of AIR is that it lets developers write one app that runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, as Seesmic Desktop does.

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Think Before You Tweet

Posted by David Worthington on October 28, 2009 at 12:29 am

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 facing libel suits for making defamatory statements about everything from apartments to clothing. In another case, an attorney that told a court that there was a death in her family was busted for playing hooky when the presiding judge saw Facebook status updates about weekend revelry.

Clients and attorneys alike also pose the risk of revealing personal or privileged information, Getnick wrote. A tweet made during court hearing could also be considered disruptive, he noted.

Outspoken Dallas Maverick owner Mark Cuban was fined $25,000 for criticizing the officiating during an NBA game. A job applicant tweeted his or herself out of a job. A UK officer worker cost herself her job by stating that her job was boring.

Getnick suggested that lawyers should always remember that anything that is posted in social media Web sites is permanent, searchable, and shareable. Getnick must be channeling my mother who always told me to “think before you speak.” The same thing goes online. Have you ever posted something that you later regretted?

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Sir Tim is on Twitter

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 23, 2009 at 2:17 pm

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

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 an honor to sit in the same ballroom as the guy yesterday as he appeared onstage as the final guest at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

As TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters noted, Sir Tim has joined Twitter–here’s his account–and started tweeting shortly before his Web.20 session began, Like nearly every new Twitter user, he started out by being somewhat confused, as he noted in his first tweet.

Tim Berners-Lee Twitter

Judging from Sir Tim’s third tweet, he’s already a user of the Twitter-like Identi.ca service–which makes sense, since (unlike Twitter) it’s an open-source project and therefore reflective of his dedication to openness on the Web.

Side note: Twitter’s recent introduction of a spam reporting feature is a boon, but there’s something jarring about the “report timberners_lee for spam” link at the right of his page. It’s a little as if George Washington suddenly showed up at the White House today, wanted to stop in for a visit, and was forced to walk through a metal detector…

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Google Previews Social Search, Talks Twitter

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 21, 2009 at 4:30 pm

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 you have a direct connection with via services such as Gmail and Twitter and people those people have a direction connection with. (It’s all opt in–folks must agree to participate.)

Conference cochair John Battelle also asked Mayer about Google’s deal to put items from Twitter into its search results. She clarified the company’s plans a bit, saying it sees Tweets as a useful way to get some information on breaking news into search results before the definitive news article or blog post on the subject has been written.

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Is Twitter Basically Broken?

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 21, 2009 at 3:36 pm

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 is no longer the constant companion of Twitter addicts that he was for awhile last year, he’s been rearing his head frequently this week. Ads the Twitter status page explains:

Twitter Status

twitterfailUm, sounds like scalability issues to me, even if they’re temporary!

I understand that 100 percent uptime is an impossible dream, that even the the folks who know more than anyone in the world about providing robust Web surfaces have their periodic issues, and even that there are far more important problems in the world than occasional Failwhale sightings. But I’m still trying to make sense of Ev Williams’ statement. I’m assuming he didn’t mean to suggest that Twitter thinks its current level of reliability is as good as it gets. I’d love to hear Ev Williams or others at the company talk about why Twitter still chokes as often as it does, and what it’s doing about it. (Maybe the status message’s references to changes it’s making for “the future growth of the product” are a good sign.)

This morning at the conference, Facebook VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer spoke about how how Facebook–which surely ranks among the most reliable major Web services-keeps on keeping on. Facebook’s a far larger company than Twitter, with more resources, more engineers, and more servers. But its predictability still makes for a striking contrast with Twitter. I choose to be an optimist: If Facebook can run like a top, so can Twitter. And maybe it will someday.

For the moment, I lump Twitter in with my cell-phone service–it works most of the time, but I’m not the least bit startled when it doesn’t….



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Yup, Google is Getting Twitter Search, Too

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 21, 2009 at 2:58 pm

Google TwitterDid 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 about what Twitter-within-Google might look like, but her post hints that Google may focus on weaving Twitter results into other results rather than isolating them, as Bing is doing:

We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.

For now, Bing has bragging rights to an interesting feature that Google lacks–but I like the idea that both search giants will get the opportunity to figure out how to make Tweets make sense within the context of traditional search. It’s not instantly obvious what the best way is to do it–but with two fierce competitors working at it in parallel, we’re more likely to get there, and get there reasonably quickly…

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Yup, Bing Gets Twitter Search

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 21, 2009 at 12:16 pm

bingtweetBack 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 Twitter search within Bing. We just saw a demo of the new features, which are supposed to be live at http://www.bing.com/twitter shortly. (I’m getting that home page, but an error when I try to search.)

(As Kara reported, Bing also has a deal in place to provide results from Facebook, but those tools won’t show up immediately. Given the face that Facebook is so much more private than Twitter, I’m curious to see how Microsoft makes Facebook-within-Bing make sense.)

It’s impossible to judge a search engine from a brief onstage demo, but Microsoft’s goals are worthy, at least. Basically, it sounds like it’s trying to provide the service that Twitter’s own search should be but isn’t: The results weed out duplicate retweets and pointless blather, try to determine the most worthy Twitter users and push their items to the top, and show where short URLs are going. It’s also got features to spotlight Tweets that contain useful links. And the home page you get before you do a search provides Tweets on hot topics grouped by subject matter–a little like what Google News might look like if it pointed to nothing but Tweets.

The service will be especially useful if it’s easier to find old-but-still-useful Tweets than it is at Twitter itself, but it’s not clear how far back its index goes. (Qi Lu, Microsoft’s head online honcho, wasn’t sure.)

If Bing’s Twitter search turns out to be good, one obvious question about it is this: Shouldn’t really good Twitter search be available at Twitter? We don’t know much about Twitter’s plans for its own search, but it’ll be a tad odd if the best way to find stuff on Twitter is to go elsewhere. (Then again, many of us go to Google to search within specific Web sites, since it usually does a better job than the search features within sites themselves.) Did Twitter help Bing with its search feature because it’s working on something even more advanced of its own? Might another shoe drop in the form of Bing’s Twitter search becoming Twitter’s own search feature? Will it let other search companies (no, I’m not thinking of anyone in particular) provide their own Twitter search features?

(Side note: Web 2.0 cohost John Battelle interviewed Twitter’s Ev Williams last night here at the conference. Unless I misheard, Williams said “Scalability today isn’t an issue for Twitter.” Which is an interesting take–I’ve repeatedly seen Mr. Failwhale and his “Too many Tweets!” message while Tweeting about the conference…)

Twitter

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Real-Time Tweets Headed to Bing?

Posted by Ed Oswald on October 21, 2009 at 9:11 am

Twitter on BingKara 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 negotiating with Google, although sources say the Bing deal is likely to be finished first.

If you think you may have heard this all before, you have (sorta). Back in July,  Hsrry reported that Bing had begun to integrate some tweets into search results. This mainly was just a test, and limited to certain prominent twitterers.

It appears however whatever is going on here might be more extensive. Tweets would be available in real time, and would probably be spread out across any search, rsther than just for searching specifically for the tweets of a certain person.

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Will the CIA Snoop on Social Networks?

Posted by David Worthington on October 19, 2009 at 8:58 pm

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 interest in its technology is obvious–the agency needs to keep pace with the latest communications technology.

Over 70 percent of Facebook’s users are located outside of the United States, in over 180 countries. “There are more than 200 non-U.S., non-English-language microblogging Twitter-clone sites today. If the intelligence community ignored that tsunami of real-time information, we’d call them incompetent,” Lewis Shepherd, the former senior technology officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, told Wired.

The advent of cloud computing raises more concern, because services store data among data centers all around the world. I recently wrote a detailed report about how laws that safeguard your privacy are not the same in every country. If messages pass through a server overseas, does that give the CIA the right to browse the content even if a user is a U.S. citizen?

The CIA is barred by law from domestic spying in the United States, but in the past, the agency has employed creative ways to bypass the law, to hide documents from Congressional review, and to set up an illegal dragnet of domestic communications services. In the last case, Congress gave telecommunications companies immunity from prosecution after it allegedly learned about the spying.

Of course, most folks’ Tweets are public, and even if you don’t share everything with the entire world on Facebook, it’s less private than a phone conversation. Does the notion of the government monitoring social network activity make you nervous?

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Twitter’s Non-Failwhale Fail

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 8, 2009 at 9:52 am

FailwhaleWhen 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 affecting my account: I follow more than 1250 people, so I’m usually pelted with tweets more or less continuously, but the site is claiming that nobody I follow has had anything to say in more than two hours:

Twitterfail

Checking again, I see that tweets are coming in–just very, very slowly. Twitter’s status page acknowledges the issue and says they’re working on it.

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