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Twitter is Down! (I forgot how much I miss typing that)
Twitter is down. Super down. The status blog is silent on the issue, although the error message untruthfully says the site is down for database maintenance. If it was maintenance, it would be noted on the status blog. This is maintenance in the same way open heart surgery after a heart attack is maintenance.
We’ll know soon enough what happened. But for now it’s just nice to remember the good ‘ol days when we celebrated entire days going by without Twitter going down. The site has been far too stable lately, and I was beginning to get suspicious.
Update: Ok, it’s back. That was fun while it lasted.
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Tag The World—One Tweet, Yelp, and Flickr At A Time
We all know how tagging makes the Web a richer place (by tapping into people’s desire to categorize things and share those categories, ad-hoc though they may be, with the everyone else). Tagging brings a bottoms-up order to the Web by making information more searchable and thus easier to find. Now it is time to start tagging the world. The real world.
In fact, millions of people are already doing so every time they upload a geo-coded photo to Flickr, add a review to Yelp, Tweet about a specific place, or use any of the dozens of geo-aware social apps springing up all over the place. They are not just tagging the world with keywords, they are commenting on it and annotating it in tiny little bursts. To get a sense of what some of this activity looks like, check out Twittervision or Flickrvision, which show Tweets and Flickr photos, respectively, on a map as they are posted to the Web.
Services such as Plazes (now owned by Nokia), Brightkite, and Nokia’s new Friend View app all combine social communications and location information, making them visible on a map.
Most mobile social networks, on GPS phones at least, put geo-labels on everything you do. FriendFeed just recently started adding Google maps for any messages that contain location information, and Yahoo’s Fire Eagle makes it easy for other services to add their own geo-location layer.
Geo-coded communications are becoming more and more common, and this is just the start. I like to complain about the increased noise level that lifestreaming services are bringing into our lives. While that continues to be a growing problem on an individual basis for people who want to tune in and use these services (”You’re at the bus stop? Great. Keep those Tweets coming.”), on an aggregate level all the seemingly useless drivel has the potential to become useful meta-data.
And this is not limited to GPS-enabled services. You can tag Tweets, for instance, with hashmark codes that act as tags for places and things (”#bus-stop”, “#centralpark”). All of these messages get dumped into databases on the Web, which are then searchable. And that is where things get interesting. Chris Brogan explains in a post titled “Secrets of the Annotated World”:
Services like Twitter and FriendFeed and Flickr and Facebook and LinkedIn and more are hosting conversations around you that might be of value to you. . . . If you’re not using services like Yelp and BrightKite, (and you could name several others), you’re missing some of the glyphs and warnings we’re leaving on the landscape to tell you about the way things are versus the way things are marketed. You’re missing chance encounters. You’re missing stray opportunities.
Again, you don’t have to get involved. It’s just that we are, and we’re passing many more notes than you can imagine.
I am glad there are people out there like Chris who are obsessive about geo-coding everything they do. They are like the early taggers, the two percent or so of people on Flickr, Delicious, and other services who did all the heavy lifting of organizing and categorizing all the data that was dumped into them. The more that data can be sliced and diced, the more useful it becomes. And location data is particularly valuable because it relates to places, people, and events in the real world.
Every geo-coded Tweet, Flickr photo, or restaurant review is adding a tag or comment to the world that is then searchable by others. It is what will make visions like Tonchidot’s Sekai Camera a reality. It is why Fotonauts, an upcoming photo app that launched at TC50, makes it easy to geo-tag every photo in an album via Google Maps or Wikipedia. Everything in the world will be tagged. But it is such a huge task that the only way to do it is if we all pitch in. (Or at least if Chris and his friends pitch in—the rest of us can freeload).
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Twitter Launches Groups (In Japan)
Everything awesome always happens in Japan first. Even, it seems, when it involves an American startup. Digital Garage, Twitter’s partner with Twitter Japan, launched Twicco, a site that lets Twitter users create groups and then subscribe to them.
Loic Le Meur got a demo, and the video is below. Twicco is available now in Japanese only, other languages will be available later.
This isn’t much different, at first glance, to Friendfeed Rooms. It’s odd that Twitter will do this via a separate site instead of just treating Rooms as resources that you can subscribe to directly on Twitter. Or maybe they are. It’s all Japanese to me (I’m sure our Japanese readers will be able to clear up the details for us).
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iList Debuts Social Classifieds Across Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, And Pownce
The road to a better Craigslist is littered with the bodies of startups that could never make it past the first few mile markers. But iList, which launched today out of stealth mode, thinks it can defy the odds by making classified listings more social. The service includes a standalone site, but every listing can be cross-posted to Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Pownce, and even Craigslist itself. (See screenshots).
In addition to Craigslist, iList faces competition from Facebook, which runs its own Marketplace app, and other classifieds apps on Facebook such as ShopIt. But iList gets a lot right that other social classifieds don’t.
To start with, it makes each listing very easy to find. When you list an item or service, you start on the iList site which prompts you to fill in standardized data that varies according to the item. If you are listing a car, for instance, it will ask for the year, make, mileage, color, and condition. All of this metadata makes the listings more search-engine friendly than simply putting in a title and description.
But iList is not counting on search engines alone to find your listing. It makes it easy for you to promote your listings to your friends and contacts on Facebook and other social communication services. When you are done publishing a listing, you just click the services where you want the listing to be pushed out to. The listing then appears in your activity stream in those services. You can also automatically create a Craigslist listing.
The Facebook app has some extra bells and whistles. Messages can go back and forth within Facebook, and friends looking at your listing can promote it by re-posting it to their activity feed. Back on iList, you can keep track of who is helping you promote your listings. The more items you list or promote, the more “Karma points” you get, which eventually will be redeemable for rewards.
The San Francisco startup has a 25-year-old CEO, Chris Abad. And one of his co-founders and chief designer, Eston Bond, previously worked at Facebook as a product designer. They raised $1.5 million in August from Veoh founder Dmitry Shapiro, Goowy founder Alex Bard, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
The screenshots below show how the listing for the Acura on iList above shows up on Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, and Pownce:
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OMG Britney! On Twitter!
This is perhaps the most exciting news since the May launch of TomCruise.com: I’d like to welcome Britney Spears to our world. She (or rather her people) have launched both a Twitter account and a bloggy sort of site with near constant updates on her fascinating life.
Her new song Womanizer also jumped from no. 96 to no. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It’s not for me, I’m more of a Disturbia fan myself.
The blog doesn’t appear to have any original content from Britney, other than the teleprompted videos like the one below. It’s also music free, which sort of seems to remove the point of visiting. She should embed some music from Imeem or iLike and get paid for all those streams. And link to Amazon or iTunes for downloads. Maybe a few less of the site visitors would use BitTorrent for all their music needs.
I’ll say this, though. This is solid gold for Twitter. A few more of these and it will be hard to argue that it isn’t going mainstream.
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Major Shakeup At Twitter
We’re still trying to get exact details, but there is some kind of major shakeup happening at Twitter. May be a leadership change and/or layoffs. We’ll update here shortly.
Update: CEO Jack Dorsey steps down, Chairman Ev Williams takes over.
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CEO Change At Twitter: Ev Williams Back At The Helm
We knew something was up. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey (pictured left) has stepped down, and co-founder Evan Williams moves from the Chairman role to CEO.
Williams talks about the change in a blog post: “While the board of directors and the company have nothing but praise for where Jack has taken us, we also agree that the best way forward is for Jack to step into the role Chairman, and for me to become CEO. Jack will remain on the board and be closely consulted for all strategic decisions”
Williams also praises Dorsey for growing the company to its current state, noting that the original idea for Twitter was his.
Twitter came at a time when the company’s first product, Odeo (a podcast service), was sort of going sideways, and was eventually sold off in mid 2007. Twitter quite literally saved the day for the company.
But Twitter has had more than its fair share of operational issues. And competitors like FriendFeed have evolved their services much more quickly that Twitter has been able to do.
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Can Twitter Authors Capture The Magic Of LonelyGirl15?
Last year we ran a post introducing the idea of Twitter as a conduit for fiction when we wrote about Twittories, a series of crowdsourced stories comprised of 140 Twitter messages from up to 140 different people.
Now it seems that some individual authors are exploring using Twitter as an alternative to the traditional novel. Professional author and freelance writer Nikki Katz has launched her own story called MyLifeIn140 - the tale of a “sixteen-year-old fictional character who learns that she can change her world around her, all by editing photos in her Yearbook room.”
The story takes the form of frequently updated tweets, which relate the main character’s thoughts and the events around her. Because the story only started a few days ago most of the tweets are related to character development and could have come from any angsty teenager, but the seeds of a story have been planted.
To be honest, there’s no way I’d ever want to follow MyLifeIn140 for any length of time, especially with tweets like:
“Doing the layout of the page with Caleb’s pic. Swoon. He looks hot! White shirt sets off his tan and his green eyes pop. And that hair…”.
But I’m not the target audience. I could see MyLifeIn140 and similar stories taking off at high schools, with the same kind of virality seen by the fictional LonelyGirl15 video series that managed to amass a huge following and spawned several spinoffs. And periodically updated text stories have been very popular abroad, where a significant number of best selling books were written from mobile phones.
That said, Twitter may wind up being too restrictive to tell an engrossing story - it’s far easier to identify and feel for characters when you can see them expressing their thoughts. And the barrier to entry to starting a new Twitter story is very low, which could well lead to a flood of knockoffs that may lead people to write off the format entirely.
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QikCom Adds Its Own Twist To Enterprise Twitter: The TabStore (Invites)
We now have a horse race for who will become the enterprise version of Twitter. Today marks the beta launch of QikCom, which is aimed at companies that want their employees to communicate with each other privately in a Twitter-like fashion. QikCom joins Yammer (winner of this year’s TechCrunch50), and Present.ly. We have exclusive invites for TechCrunch readers (sign up here with a company email address).
All three are micro-messaging services that ask: “What are you working on?” Employees update each other in 140-character bursts. (You can read our writeups of Yammer here, and Present.ly here). But QikCom out of Austin, Texas, has a few twists of its own. For instance, it lets you delete a message after you’ve sent it and you can set up an org chart.
But the biggest twist is QikCom’s TabStore. It is modeled on Apple’s App Store for the iPhone. QikCom will keep adding features as new tabs, and allow other developers to do the same. At launch there are three free tabs in the TabStore that anyone can add: a To-Do list manager, a place to keep frequent numbers used across a company, and, my favorite, a competition tab.
The competition tab lets you add the name of any competitor or product. QikCom then goes out to look for feeds from that competitor and populates that tab with the feed appropriate feed entries. Each entry has a rating slider that lets everyone on QikCom rate the threat level of each item. I tried it by typing in some blogs and news sites and it fetched the feeds instantly. It also finds mentions of competitors in news articles. Right now you can only rate each item, you can’t comment on them. And you can only see the competition feed in the competition tab. But commenting is coming soon, as is the option to make the competition feed show up on the home page. (It is in beta).
The TabStore is also how QikCom hopes to make money. Any employee can use the service for free. And, unlike Yammer, which charges companies to gain administrative control of their corporate Yammer networks, QikCom also gives admin control away for free. It plans to charge a monthly subscription fee for new tabs it will create in the future, and take a share of revenues from tabs made by other developers, which will also be available in the tab store.
Yammer doesn’t have a TabStore, but it does a better job on basic messaging features such as the ability to send an update by SMS. You cannot do that yet with QikCom. (It is working on a a way to email in your updates, though). Yammer is also further along in creating an API
that will allow it to get its messages out to other services. QikCom is working on its own API for Twitter-compatible services.
If you were working at Yammer, how would you rate QikCom’s threat level?
QikCom
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Fight Spam With A Direct Message To Twitter
There doesn’t appear to have been an official announcement, but Twitter has begun soliciting spam reports to a “spam” user account via direct messages.
Are you a victim of Twitter spam? Just begin following @spam and send it a direct message with the username of your spammer. As the following email autoresponse to spam reporters instructs, you can send these direct messages from your mobile phone or opt for a public tweet as well:
Howdy!
Thanks for reporting spam- we’re working really hard on getting rid of it! Did you know: you can now easily report spam directly from your Twitter account? Visit:
http://twitter.com/spam
and follow the account. You can then send:
* a direct message to @spam: @moneybagsnow is a spammer!
* a direct message from your phone using d+ username + message: d spam @carmoney, @cashnow is spam!
* a reply to @spam like so: @spam this is a spam account: @bigmoney5and we’ll take care of it. You can send as many spam user names as will fit in one direct message or @reply as long as they are designated like this: @crystal.
Note: it’s better to send a direct message over an @reply. Direct messaging keeps @replies reporting spam out of your followers’ time lines. Sending direct messages also keeps the spam account’s user name out of all search results. Because the message is private, you prevent them from benefitting from publicity. Thanks again for helping us track down spammers!
Twitter Support Team
So far 213 members have begun following @spam, which oddly has decided to follow 179 members itself. It will have to gain a much larger following to make a dent in Twitter’s spam problem. The Twitter Blacklist, a website that tracked all banned Twitter accounts before its owner lost faith in the service, lists 561 blacklisted users as of July 12th.
Read more about Twitter’s spam efforts here.
[Thanks for the tip, Rafa]
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Socialmedian Launches New ‘Replize’ Feature to Help Communication
Just off its first major upgrade, socialmedian, a service that lets users find and share news from within their social networks, announced today that it’s offering a new feature called “replize,” which enables sociamedian users to interact with each other using @username short codes, much like Twitter. But according to the company, its @username functionality is one of the most advanced in the space and aims at enhancing the overall experience. That’s debatable.
Much like Twitter, sending a replize requires the @username to be anywhere in the comments field. Unlike Twitter, once the “reply” link next to the person’s comment is clicked, it’ll automatically pre-populate the text input field with the user’s @username. Once the replize is sent, it’s highlighted for the recipient and they can choose to receive a notification via email whenever they receive a replize.
To enhance the functionality of the page, socialmedian has added a “Replize” tab to the homepage to make it easier for users to view all the discussions between themselves and others. Perhaps most useful for those who are addicted to Twitter, socialmedian will soon let its users send tweets via replize.
socialmedian also announced that users can now connect their Flickr accounts to their socialmedian accounts. Users can choose to add every Flickr photo in their library, as well as favorites or only those matching assigned keywords.
All of the new socialmedian features (except for Twitter integration) are available now.
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Twittermoms Shows Why Twitter Needs Groups
This is why Twitter needs groups. After only 15 days, mothers are signing up at an astounding rate to Twittermoms.com. According to its founder, the site’s growth has been unexpectedly strong, and about 39 percent of its 5,000-or-so daily users are considered “addicts” based on Quantcast figures.
So what gives?
Twittermoms is not what you think. It isn’t a Twitter clone for mothers. Instead, it’s a site where moms who Twitter can come together and talk about being mothers. It is a perfect demographic for Twitter, filled with people who have lots of real opinions based on experience and like to share them. The site features discussion forums for those that want to chat about “The NEW Twitter” or “Pet Peeves” and offers groups based on interests. For example, some mothers choose to join the “Being Moms” group, while others joined the “Twins!” group.
Much like Twitter, the service has a timeline to show the site’s latest action and users can becomes friends with others, thus allowing them to get updates about the forum posts their friends have made, as well as the groups they’ve joined. (Update: It should be noted that all of the features that Twittermoms offers comes from Ning, an online service that specializes in helping companies create social networks.)
At its core, Twittermoms is basically a group for mothers who Twitter. Because of that, it highlights an interesting point: why hasn’t Twitter addressed its need for groups? Present.ly, an enterprise micro-blogging tool we profiled yesterday offers group segmentation on its platform and the feature has proven to be one of the most useful on the service. And considering groups like Twittermoms are cropping up to bring like-minded Twitter users together, Twitter itself may want to start offering groups sooner rather than later.
If you’re a mom and you want to try out Twittermoms, the site is ready to bring you aboard.
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Summizer: Twitter search made easy on the iPhone
Hidden on Twitter amongst the chatter about today’s lunch menu and the best spots for happy hour lays a mound of up-to-the-minute user generated commentary on just about any major topic. While Twitter Search helps you wade through this endless torrent of tweets from within the browser, Mustache Inc’s iPhone application Summizer aims to squeeze that functionality into a package more friendly with on-the-go use.
Once you’ve punched in the topic of interest, Summizer uses the Twitter Search API to dig through the database for related tweets. If you’ve got a topic that you search for more often, you can save that search for later use for the sake of sparing your thumbs. Summizer also automatically pulls down the latest trending topics from Twitter, giving you a quick and easy way to see what’s on the collective mind at any given moment. It’s currently focused solely on searching and trend watching, so it doesn’t offer any means of logging in, tweeting, or following users.
While the application currently sits at version 1.0, an update was submitted for Apple’s approval just last night. Version 1.1 introduces automatic updates, link viewing without leaving the application, and the ability to view more tweets from any user you come across. I’ve been playing with the update throughout the evening, and everything seems to work well.
At $4.99, the price may be a bit steep for the general Twitterer. However, if work, research, or just plain old addiction have you digging through Twitter regularly, the time you’ll save with the native interface and saved search features might make it plenty worth the cost of admission. Personally, I’d love to see Mustache Inc. partner up with the folks behind Twinkle (Tapulous) or Twitterific (The Iconfactory) to get this functionality integrated into one of the popular iPhone Twitter posting/following applications.
Check it out in the App Store >>
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Gospelr: Twitter For Christians
“First things first: Praise God.” That’s how Gospelr starts out its announcement that the company’s microblogging service is officially ready for users to sign up and “spread the word.”
It was bound to happen sooner or later.
Gospelr is quick to point out that it’s not “just another Twitter.” Instead, the site prides itself on being the world’s first “Ministry Microblogging” tool for those that want to share thoughts, ideas, words of encouragement, prayer requests, daily scripture readings, and oh so much more.
The company’s founder wants it to be more than a Christian Twitter, though. Beyond being a place where people can chat it up about ol’ JC, the company wants to be the place to “share the Gospel with those that have already heard the Good News (because we all could use a good reminder… daily!) and those that have not.”
Gospelr tries to change the way people interact on the service too. A normal “tweet” is colored in brown, while replies are green, and imported tweets from services like Twitter are colored in blue. That coloring scheme will make it easier to identify what’s being said and who is saying it.
The service can also let users upload and share files like Pownce, and most importantly, it auto-refreshes the page so you don’t have to.
Gospelr gained Twitter API source parameter approval, so whenever you tweet something in the service, you’ll notice an update on Twitter saying “from Gospelr.com” and it will also work with TweetDeck and other applications that let you syndicate material to Twitter.
Gospelr is available now for those that are looking to try it out.
I’m sure you’re wondering what is my favorite feature of Gospelr. Is it the chance to tell the world what I read in the Bible today? Nah. Is it the ability to hear others tell me about JC? Nope. It’s the RSS button. Check it out. Awesome, huh?
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I ♥ TwitterKeys
TwitterKeys is a browser bookmarket that pulls up expressive characters for easy copy & paste of all those crazy unicode symbols that people love to include in their emails and blog posts. Both Mac and Windows give access to these characters in their operating systems (Character Pallette on Mac, Character Map on Windows), but TwitterKeys is an even easier way to find them.
The guys at The Next Web created TwitterKeys as a bookmarklet specifically so they could find characters fast for quick Twitter messages. If you want to add it, just drag this link to TwitterKeys up to your bookmark bar.
☮
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Present.ly Takes On TC50 Winner Yammer
At the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City this week, a new service called Present.ly launched, which takes aim at Yammer by allowing businesses to quickly create a microblog tool that lets employees send short updates to each other in a manner that’s practically identical to Twitter.
Yammer, the TechCrunch50 victor, performs the same basic functions as Present.ly, but the latter adds a few extras that may entice some companies to switch.
According to the company, Present.ly supports file attachments so employees can send important documents back and forth without using email, and it lets companies segment groups so management can have its own portion of the site and others can have their section.
Present.ly doesn’t require all users to have the same email domain, which is one of the major issues users are complaining about in Yammer.
Present.ly also lets companies deploy the service on existing IT infrastructure if the organization is concerned with security. That said, it’s not available in all versions of Present.ly, which could prove troublesome to the company if its users are only looking for a free solution. And unfortunately, that free solution isn’t too useful for major companies.
Present.ly has five basic offerings that the company claims, will appeal to any size organization, but I’m not so sure that’s true.
Present.ly is free for up to five users. In order to increase the number of users to 15, companies will need to pay $14 per month and 100 users will cost $99 per month. Additional users on lower plans will cost $1 per user per month if companies don’t need to jump to the next plan.
Only the top plan, Enterprise, will offer all the features Present.ly has to offer. Aside from a mobile interface, Twitter API, and group integration, which is available on all plans, the Enterprise level adds internal deployment, enterprise integration, and full support. The price for the Enterprise plan is currently listed as “on request” and the media sharing capacity is set to “pay-as-you-go.” Present.ly is offering a 60-day free trial for those companies that are interested though.
From a feature perspective, Present.ly is more capable than Yammer on paper and offers some of the elements that Yammer users have been asking for since its launch. But companies will have to pay for those extra features. All in all, Yammer still offers a more painless way for employees to get started on their own and will be adding new, requested features over time. Since Yammer’s launch last week, 50,000 people have signed up. The new competition should mean better features for both services as they race to outshine each other. Which one would you rather use?
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Has Twitter Solved Its Uptime Issues?
One of my favorite pastimes over the last year or so has been to tear Twitter apart over uptime issues. See, for example, Twitter Suffers Minor Period Of Uptime (my personal favorite), Twitter: Something Is Technically Wrong and Amateur Hour Over At Twitter?.
Twitter has been mostly stable for the last month or so, though. And today cofounder Biz Stone wrote an email to Twitter users that says they’ve had 99.9% uptime over the last couple of months:
Reliability Update
Twitter has been making great progress in terms of uptime and reliability. Fail Whale sightings are far less frequent these days thanks to our efforts but we still have a long journey ahead. Last month we saw 99.88% uptime and so far this month we are at 99.96%. Our engineering and operations teams have been taking a very methodical approach to improving Twitter. We’re using the word “craftsmanship” to characterize our work here at the office. Reliability and dependability continue to be top on or list of key goals.
I’d say the email is tempting fate a little, but I’ve called Twitter on that same issue before and they failed to fail. Perhaps the worst of Twitter’s scalability issues are behind them (knocks on wood).
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Ads For Twits On Twitter (TwittAd Launches)
Do you have 53 followers on Twitter? Shouldn’t you be making money off of them somehow, selling their attention to the highest bidder? Well, now you can with TwittAd. You list how many followers you have and for how much you are willing to sell an ad on your Twitter page, and TwittAd will match you with advertisers. Then the ad sits on the empty left-hand column of your Twitter page. The ads appear on any individual message page for standalone Tweets as well.
Something like this was bound to happen. If you’ve got an audience, no matter how small, advertisers will figure out a way to reach them. The ads themselves are actually not so bad, and relatively unobtrusive. At least TwittAd is not plastering the entire background with blaring ads—although, that would get my attention. Sort of a Nascar look. Robert Scoble could make a killing, except that his Twitter page is already plastered with ads of himself.
Selling space on your Twitter page obviously will bring more money the more followers you have. (TwittAd lets you set your own price, but market forces set a price per follower soon enough). We’ve already seen semi-famous Twitterers try to auction off their entire accounts. Keeping the account and selling the ad space makes more sense, because those followers are not going to stick around once they start getting Tweets from Pepsi.
The problem with placing ads on your Twitter page, though, is that ultimately you may just be advertising to yourself. I rarely go to the Twitter pages of people I follow. Their Tweets appear on my Twitter page (and my FriendFeed page, and my Thwirl client, and my Twinkle app on my iPhone). That’s why I follow people, so I can get their Tweets pushed to me. The only way ads are going to work on Twitter is if they are blended into the message stream and sent out as Tweets. But that would be annoying.
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Jaiku Uncaps Invites, Migrates to Google Infrastructure
Things have been quiet over at Jaiku since its acquisition by Google last Fall. People worried that Google may have ruined Twitter’s most formidable competitor by requiring the Finnish startup to labor away for months integrating its service into Google’s technology stack instead of rolling out new features. All the while, new signups have been disabled and invitations limited, which has cut the service off from a healthy stream of new users.
But now we’re seeing some signs of life. Jaiku has moved its software over to a Google data center and has given its existing users an unlimited number of invites to send their friends.
The new data center isn’t Jaiku’s final resting place, merely a step towards running things on Google App Engine. However, it’s an important one for a company that appears to be preparing itself first and foremost for scalability (a problem that notoriously has plagued Twitter).
As VentureBeat points out, Jaiku has also introduced a new terms of service and privacy policy, so it’s getting its legal house in order as well.
Are you a Jaiku member? Share some of your unlimited invitations with outsiders over at InviteShare.
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3Jam Offers Refuge For Abandoned Twitter Users
Last week Twitter announced that it had disabled outbound SMS updates for nearly all of its international users because it has been unable to negotiate favorable deals with cellular carriers. Up until this point, Twitter has allowed users to receive incoming SMS messages free of charge, footing a bill that it says amounted to up to $1000 per user, per year. The service will continue operating in the US, India, and Canada (where Twitter has forged deals with carriers), but many international users are being left in the cold.
3Jam, a company that offers a number of SMS-related services, is looking to mimic Twitter’s lost functionality. The site has launched a new Twitter service that will deliver direct messages to users as SMS messages. Note: The link doesn’t work yet, but the company says it will go live some time tonight. At launch, the site will also offer local numbers for users in Australia, Sweden and Germany to respond to.
Unfortunately, the service has a few drawbacks. In order to take advantage of it, users will need to establish 3Jam accounts and maintain a positive balance on the site - you’re paying a small fee to restore something that used to be free. Twitter has considered offering a similar for-pay option to help offset its steep costs, but says it is currently uncomfortable offering a paid service that is notoriously unreliable.
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Twitter Ends SMS Support In UK; Says Costs Up To $1,000/user/year
Twitter says they’ve stopped sending SMS updates to Twitter users in the UK because of the high cost of sending those messages. US, Canada and Indian users can still opt to receive messages via SMS.
Twitter says that a single user, capped at 250 received SMS messages per week still costs them $1,000 per year in SMS fees. They don’t have that problem in the US and some other countries because they’ve been able to negotiate service fees that max out after a certain point.
“We’ve arrived at a point where the responsible thing to do is slow our costs and take a different approach” they said in the blog post.
Next up: a revenue model.
UPDATE: See TechCrunch UK for more UK reactions to this move - it’s not pretty…
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Barack Obama Overtakes Kevin Rose On Twitter. McCain Is Nowhere In Sight.
Up until last night, the person with the most followers on the micro-messaging service was Digg founder and Web celeb Kevin Rose, with 56,482 other people following his every public mind burp. It took none other than Barack Obama (or, rather, Obama’s campaign machine) to take the Twitter crown away from Rose. Obama can now finally stand tall knowing that 56,791 people subscribe to his campaign Tweets.
How do the two top dogs on Twitter differ? While Obama auto-follows everyone who follows him and more:59,474 people in total. I’m sure he reads every Tweet (no 2000-person limit for Presidential candidates). Rose is more stingy with whom he follows. Only 97 people—but one of them is BarackObama!.
While Rose likes to tell everyone what he’s drinking (nice unicorn background image, Kevin), Obama invites his followers to sign up so they can be the first to find out who his VP pick is going to be. How about Rose? He knows how to get the vote out and seems ready for a new gig.
Note to the Obama campaign: you might want to change the background image from your nondescript campaign button to a picture of Obama.
And John McCain? He’s not in the top 100. In fact, he’s nowhere in sight on the Twittersphere (it’s not exactly his constituency). Or at least, I can’t find him. There’s this unofficial account, JohnMcCain2008, which has attracted 1485 followers. But then, McCain doesn’t even use a computer, so you cannot very well expect him Twitter.
Not that it matters. This may be the Internet election, but Twitter still won’t be a factor until at least 2012. Or will it prove to be a more powerful influencer in the elections than its early-adopter pedigree would suggest?
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If You Are A TechCrunch Reader Outside of California, Raise Your Hand.
Which map above is a better representation of regional interest in TechCrunch?
Before you answer that, first some background. Some blogs are putting up posts today based on maps and data generated by Google Insights for Search, a service that was launched a week ago. Just like with Google Trends, you can put in any keyword and Google Insights gives you a deep dive into search activity around that term around the world. For instance, Pingdom used it to generate global popularity maps for different social networks based on how often people search for them in different regions. And Andrew Chen created U.S. popularity maps for Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Netvibes, Skype, Techcrunch, Twitter, and YouTube. You can see Chen’s maps in a post he wrote titled, “Early adopters vs the Mainstream: Google Insights points out websites only used by Silicon Valley nerds.”
Now back to the maps above. Some of the sites Chen created maps for show a very limited appeal. For instance, Twitter only registers in a handful of large states, and the only people searching for Netvibes or TechCrunch seem to be in California. Or at least, that’s what you’d think by looking at his maps. The TechCrunch data made me do a double take. I know that we are not a mainstream site (and we don’t try to be). But I also know that we have a lot of readers all over the world.
So I went to Google Insights and generated my own maps, which looked quite different. The first map above is Chen’s TechCrunch map. But the second one is the map I came up with when I searched for “techcrunch” on Google Insights.
It shows that California is indeed our strongest market, but it’s not the only market. People in Washington, Massachussets, New York, Texas, and other markets are also searching for us. That seemed more reasonable.
Then I tried Twitter. Here’s Chen’s map showing very limited interest in Twitter in the U.S.”
But here’s what comes up when you search for “Twitter” on Google Insights:
Based on this data, there actually seems to be pretty broad-based interest in Twitter across the U.S.—with the possible exception of Wyoming. So what gives? It turns out that Chen included the “.com” at the end of each site’s name when he created his maps (”techcrunch.com,” “twitter.com,” etc.). I can see why he might have done that— to filter out any searches that were not for the sites themselves. But I think that method also cuts out a lot of relevant searches as well. Only nerds add the “.com” in the search box when they are looking for a site.
The point of all of this is that insights only come out from actually playing with data. I’m glad Chen put up his post (and I like his blog, in general) because it forced me to do my own digging. And it confirmed for me that interest in TechCrunch is actually global (we are real popular in India, it seems). And more to the point, as you would expect, it is centered around large metropolitan centers. And that makes sense, because a TechCrunch reader in San Francisco probably has more in common with a TechCrunch reader in Delhi or Paris than with someone in Laramie, Wyoming.
Update: Here are some maps of the geographical distribution of TechCrunch readers based on actual traffic over the past 30 days (from our internal Google Analytics). For this example, the search trends captured by Google Insights point in the right direction, but they don’t show the whole picture in as much detail as the real data.
