Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’
Many of the people behind the mobile and desktop clients more people use to access Twitter than Twitter.com itself are very angry with Twitter management right now.
They are so angry, in fact, that some of them are trying to figure out a way to do their business without Twitter itself.
They are upset because last week, Twitter’s top investor Fred Wilson called many of their applications product “hole-fillers” that make things for Twitter that Twitter would be better off making for itself.
Then, Twitter announced an “official” BlackBerry app. Then it acquired Atebits, the maker of Twitter app for the iPhone, Tweetie.
These developers and investors feel like Twitter is as popular as it is today thanks to their work, and that instead of supporting them, Twitter now plans to use its popularity to crush them. They are angry because they are alarmed.
And we’ve heard a growing group of them plan to do something about it.
Two sources deeply involved in the Twitter app world tell us that before Twitter holds its first ever developers conference this week, many developers attend secret meetings where they will discuss an “an open alternative” to Twitter.
“Discussion is not whether to launch an open federated standard,” says one source, “but when.”
This source tells us these meetings have a code name: Project Shark. “Angry sharks eat big fat #fail whales,” he explains.
Another source confirmed plans for these meetings, and told us their purpose is to…
- Get a little more coordinated as the opposition.
- Talk about things they want from Twitter — mostly more transparency and better access to the API.
- To talk about an open alternative.
Google is launching a new product today that will allow users to find recently updated public online postings by a person’s network of friends, colleagues or media sources.
The goal of “Social Search,” available starting this afternoon at www.google.com/experimental, is to find relevant postings on Twitter, in blogs or other public web content published by a user’s circle of online colleagues.
Social Search would highlight content posted by those people every time a user does a Google search.
“We want to return a lot more relevant results to users, results that are either offered or linked by their social circle,” said Google Fellow Amit Singhal.
A Social Search query for “Bridge School Benefit,” Neil Young’s annual acoustic fundraiser in Mountain View, wouldn’t just produce the home page for the concert. It would also highlight any tweets, blog postings or newspaper reviews produced by a user’s designated network of friends or media souces.
Google considers today’s launch an experiment and is asking users for feedback. But the company says the results it had using Social Search internally were “exciting” because they allow web users to save time by finding content posted by the people or sources they are most interested in.
Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president for search products and user experience, demonstrated a version of Social Search at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco last week. “I think it demonstrates our commitment to innovating in search,” Mayer said last week.The new product, executives said, is “completely separate” from the agreement Google announced last week to make available up-to-the-minute search results of Twitter postings. However, content available through that Twitter deal could be used to improve Social Search down the road.
Source:
As if Twitter wasn’t already addictive enough, now the folks at Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, have figured out a way to make it even more mesmerizing. The site is called BingTweets, and it… well, you can probably guess what it does. It presents you with a combined view of the search engine, the current list of Trending Topics, and a live feed of current tweets that match the Bing search criteria you enter in the “Search Bing & Twitter” field.
I’m not much of a Twitter hound myself, but I admit to becoming somewhat enraptured by the synergy between the search results and the tweet feed. By searching for “PCMag,” for example, I received not only handful of useful (and official) links, but also commentary about some of the recent stories we’ve covered. If I entered an even more well-traveled topic, such as Harry Potter (the sixth movie was released today, after all), the feed spun almost as wildly as a malfunctioning slot machine.
BingTweets struck me as an efficient and enjoyable way to get sources of established and of-the-minute opinion at the same time, in the same window–a real convenience and patience saver. The most significant drawback I noted with it was the generally impersonal experience it offered. Because you can’t log in to the service, you have no access to what your friends are saying (unless they just happen to be discussing whatever search term you enter). As Twitter is as much about maintaining close (140-character) relationships as forging new ones, this limits BingTweets’s usefulness on a personal level. (A “Share This” feature in the upper-right corner lets you tweet, e-mail, text, or post to various social networking sites your BingTweets results, which at least is a nice to way to hopefully engage your friends.)
The service compensates somewhat for this shortcoming with an expanded, and highly useful, Trending Topics box. Expanding on what’s available on the Twitter site itself, you have instant access to not just the hottest overall topics, but specific people, places, and products–just click one of the tabs in the box to narrow down your Topic search to those areas. It, like the rest of BingTweets, is a handy feature that makes Twitter–at least for the casual user–easier and a bit more fun.
Source:
ABOUT
My name is Kyle Kazak and I am the CEO and President of Kazak Media, a local Internet marketing firm that specializes in web design, local SEO, and pay per click management. We are located in Petaluma, CA, USA.