Twitter Articles

Microblogging is one of the fastest forms of social interaction online today. And sites like Twitter are at the top of the traffic ladder according to Alexa. Now you can get your own. Shout‘Em is releasing its first public beta trial of the system some are calling the “Ning of Twitter”.

Social Media moves so fast, it’s hard to keep up. Here are the week’s top stories, in scan-friendly format.

This Week:

• How Obama Won the Online War
• Web 2.0 Summit Updates: Zuckerburg and Yang
• Happy 5th Birthday Delicious!
• Health 2.0 You Say?
• How Will Twitter Make Money #1,000,123
• Following the Election on Twitter Sucked

How Barack Obama Won the Online War

We all know that the President-elect has changed the game in terms of how elections are run, embracing the youth vote through the social tools which they use to communicate and raising millions in campaign funds through omnipresent widgets. No serious electoral candidate in future will go to war without having a serious social media strategy, and without thinking seriously about how to coin it from online contributions.

As you settle in tomorrow evening with your bucket of chicken and foamy six-pack, you’ll want to know which Social Web destinations you should go to to augment your traditional TV viewing enjoyment. In rough order, these are the essential sites and hubs you’ve got to keep an eye on to get the full election picture.

Twitter Election Channel

If you’re the kind of news junkie who just has to know breaking stories before everyone else, here’s the place to come. Twitter obliterates TV, radio, blogs, news websites and everyone else when it comes to getting breaking news out fast. If someone pulls down Barack’s pants backstage, to reveal that the great man wears hammer & sickle boxer shorts, you’ll hear it here first. If John and Sarah get caught making out in the campaign bus en route to Arkansas, the Twitterati will be posting it ahead of anyone else.

Social Media moves so fast, it’s hard to keep up. Here’s the week’s big news from the space, in scan-friendly format.

This Week:

• Kevin Rose says forget Web 2.0 or 3.0 — make your startup Web 2.5
• New MySpace Drag’n’Drop Interface
• Twitter a terrorist tool?
• Gilbane Conference on Social Media Meets CMS
• Forrester Report says Social Web Went Mainstream in ‘08

Kevin Rose says forget Web 2.0 or 3.0 — make your startup Web 2.5

When Digg supremo Kevin Rose isn’t playing the beer-swilling buffoon on DiggNation, he’s capable of putting in a shift as an extremely thoughtful business-evangelist type.

Never more so than in a recent Seesmic blog post , in which he takes a Paul Graham post on “Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy” and runs with it, concluding that once the boulder really got rolling, nearly all web 2.0 start-ups simply got lost in the noise and couldn’t gain any traction.

Digg, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace and most of the services which we associate with the Web 2.0 tag all launched before that tag even made any sense. If you could apply the label “Web 2.0” to a new web startup, chances are it sank without trace (some obvious exceptions like Twitter aside).

Rose also talks about the early days of Digg (it’s only 4 years old??), recounting that it was a ‘scappy startup’, that he kept the day-job and pumped in a couple of thousand dollars here and a couple thousand there, and that he only went after Angel funding when he ran out of money. While doing things on the cheap may be anathema to the current brood of Web entrepeneurs, Rose reckons it’s by no means a bad thing for your startup if you can’t get money for your ‘back-of-the-envelope’ idea, and if you have to hold onto the day-job for a while.

Social Media moves so fast, it’s hard to keep up. Here’s the week’s big stories from the Social scene, in scan-friendly format.

This Week:

• MySpace to Trounce Facebook With US$1 Billion ‘08 Sales
• Jobs Cut at Seesmic, but Digg is Hiring
• Twitter Gets New CEO
• Yahoo! Launches New Profiles, Social Strategy
• Browser Wars 1: New FireFox Beta 3.1 has Geolocation API
• Browser Wars 2: Flock Upgrade
• Twitter-Watch: Joe the Plumber

TweetDeck, a Twitter desktop application built using Adobe AIR technology, has released version 0.19b of its popular Twitter desktop client with the hopes to recapture those who shied away from the previous releases.

This latest version adds new quality features that just might be able to recapture those users who have moved on.

Social Media moves so fast, it’s hard to keep up. Here’s the weeks’ SM news in scan-friendly format.

This Week:

• Google Chrome, (because yes, it IS a social media story).
• Twitter hits 99.x% Uptime
• The Scandalous Shock of Disgraceful Digg’s Bribery Scandal
• Socialmedian does Newsstreaming as Lifestreaming
• Shozu Social App hit iPhone
• Socialcast 3.0: Social Networking in the Enterprise

Google Chrome

Google launched a new browser this week. You may have heard something about it. It’s great, far as we can tell (here’s our take on Chrome), and is tailor-made for running rich web applications, because it runs RIAs in seperate tabs in their own environment, or something. Which FireFox and IE do not. Which is why FF 3 crashes like a mutha and why IE usually runs like a 3-legged dog.

It’s back - yes it is. Jaiku has arisen from the depths of Google and is now offering unlimited invites to all. Google acquired the microblogging service back in the October of last year and we’ve heard very little about it since then. Perhaps now that school is back in, Google sees an opportunity to grab a market away from Twitter.

Political National Conventions are the unlikeliest of venues to find anything noteworthy or novel, but the Democrats’ party this time around comes with a new and quite interesting entertainment. The addition of a bunch of ‘grass-roots mobile bloggers’ will post video, pictures, opinion and coverage direct from the Convention floor to a central hub at Zannel.com called the PoliticsBlue channel. Not a groundbreaking idea, really. More an inevitable and welcome addition to the modern media landscape. But potentially a watershed event which will herald new media adoption among the technophobe proles.

No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, most everyone can agree that how politics is covered online has changed dramatically from four years ago. With political convention season within days of peaking, the impact that online media has on coverage is hard to overlook.

As it turns out, political conventions have very little to do with television anymore.

Social Media moves so fast, its hard to keep up. Here’s the week’s top stories from around the blogosphere, in scan-friendly format.

This Week:

• Twitter Cuts SMS Access
• Movable Type Goes Social
• AOL to Acquire Socialthing
• ReplyFeed.com : Social Media Conversation Management
• Google’s Failed Acquisitions in Social Media
• Facebook Launches New Social Ad Unit, and Gets Sued… Again

Social Media moves so fast, it’s hard to keep up. Here are the week’s top stories, in scan-friendly format.

This week:

• Delicious 2.0 Here at Last
• Lessons Learned from Cuil: How Not to Launch
• ClearStep: Social Media in the Enterprise
• Mobile Web Viruses Alert
• Twitter Displays its Power in Breaking News

Pringo provides a white label online community platform. But their solution isn’t hosted. It’s a open source product that you implement in-house. They’ve recently announced some interesting new functionality for their next release and we’ve got the goods for you.

Social Media moves so fast, it’s hard to keep up. Have a look at the big stories over the past week (…and a bit), in scan-friendly format.

The 4th Annual Social Networking Conference started today in beautiful San Francisco and naturally, this blog’s Bay Area correspondent was there to take in some panels on my favorite topic — social networking for the enterprise. The show was also running a concurrent track on the ever growing world of mobile social networking.

News moves so fast on the social media field, everyone needs a hand keeping up. Except for us of course, because we are like so on the ball. Yeah…ahem…right.

On that note here are the top social media stories from the past few days, distilled into a minute’s worth of scanning.

San Francisco based micro-blogging site Twitter has managed to secure US $15 million dollars in VC funding as reported by tech blog GigaOm, leaving them with a valuation of US $80 million dollars. This comes at an interesting time for the site, which has spent the past few days in a constant struggle to stay up and running.

Just curious, but do you think even though they are competitors, the top guns at MySpace, Facebook and Google spend all their time on Gmail chatting about when and how they’ll release the news of their latest endeavors to move towards data portability?

Or maybe they have spies in each other’s camps sending smoke signals home at night spilling the beans of latest plans to take over your data profile? Flashbacks to Pinky and Brain cartoons spill over into my daytime routine.

In either case, it’s been a busy couple of weeks with Facebook announcing Facebook Connect, then last night Google previewed Friend Connect. Now we read all about MySpace’s “Data Availability” initiative – not to be confused with Data Portability – which allows MySpace members to share their public profile with websites of their choice.

Is this the year of the “User Identity Battle”?

After having discussed the basics of microblogging, we here at CMSWire decided it would be a good idea to cover some general practices that will enhance your microblogging experience, increase your results, and create more enjoyment for you.

Not only will these practices aid you in your quest for followers and friends, they will help make your microblog into a marketing tool that is usable in a variety of ways.

Blogging has been around for some time now, but there is a new aspect of blogging that is on the rise across the web. That aspect is microblogging. Much like the advent of text messaging, microblogging is taking the idea of being connected to the next level and sweeping the world over.

Do you spend the better part of your days twittering with your friends? Are you hooked on Twitter but find it frustrating that you can’t share photos, videos and files with your friends? Good news for you…

At Le Web 3 conference in Paris this morning, we were tuned into Evan Williams, the founder of Twitter. The topic of his mini keynote was Persistent Communication, but he really didn’t say much about that actually. And I must say I wasn’t too disappointed — I happen to think we’re all twittering a bit too much these days, and I don’t much care what you had for breakfast, nor if you’re stuck in traffic on 101 Northbound. Sorry!

What was interesting about Evan’s talk was his focus on simplicity, a concept increasingly noodled upon these days, and one close to our hearts.

Amazon has just published a white paper about its latest project Dynamo, which focuses on distributed storage.

Dynamo isn’t an operating system; rather, it works on a series of hundreds of commodity PCs running Linux, all hooked up to an internal network. And while the company has no plans to sell the service to the public, Dynamo plays an integral role in a number of Amazon’s existing offerings, including its shopping cart, product catalog and S3 — Amazon’s online web app storage solution.

Everybody was keyed-up, waiting for Blaine Cook of Twitter to talk, and he finally did. It wasn’t quite what we expected (well, what were we expecting?), but it was nonetheless educational and really sort of surprising.

Cook took advantage of a long list of Twitter’s mistakes and weaknesses to introduce us to Starling, his response to platforms based on Erlang and other technologies — which he asserts would have been a general nightmare.

For people who have friends they’d love keeping in touch with but can’t actually be bothered to pick up the phone, and people who’d love to be worldly but aren’t always inclined to check a slew of news sites catering to their interests, the answer is like so Obvious.

Or brought to you by Obvious, anyway: enter Twitter, a messaging platform that keeps users informed and in touch and all with a minimum of those precious mouse clicks.