TechMeme Archive

Last night while winding down and watching Ask This Old House, I was alerted to an important post by MG Siegler (MG writes for Techcrunch). The post noted that Microsoft Corporation is now tweeting (that means they are posting up to 140 character messages on the Twitter service). This is huge news! Microsoft’s competitors like Google and Sun and Oracle and Zappos are already tweeting so it’s huge news that Redmond is now on their game too.

MG then went all Columbo on us by explaining the stats on the Microsoft official twitter account.  He notes that only 1,000 people were following the account but as of this morning it’s up to nearly 5,000! MG also found out who is behind the account. He notes, “The account is being run by its corporate communications team, consisting of four people.”

The big news here is that since the post, Microsoft’s 4-person twitter communications team has added a third tweet. That’s right…a company with two tweets makes big headlines (the story got a lead from Techmeme ) so I figured I’d watch the account as best I could and I setup a SMS alert when content is added. So I present now, the third tweet message from Microsoft Corporation:

USA Today on Bing v Google “For a search that sings you may want to Bing it” ^JR

CenterNetworks will continue to monitor the account and will report back of any further important developments.

Update: Microsoft has since added tweets 4 and 5 to their account. We can confirm they are now closing in on Oprah’s count.

So far in the days leading up to the Twitter HQ visit, we’ve talked about cupcake identification, whether cheesecake might be a better option and now the current video comes from my time in the Seattle airport. I was so excited as I walked around the airport that I thought I’d share some thoughts on video.

It’s amazing the vibe that you get for Twitter as soon as you exit the plane in San Francisco. One homeless guy outside the BART station didn’t ask me for change…he asked me to retweet his tweet! I am looking forward to shooting more videos tomorrow with others as I attempt to learn what being on the default list would mean to them.

DandyID describes their service as, “providing a set of tools that help you to collect, manage, and own your online identity.” We first met the DandyID team at SXSW and we filmed a video interview with the team. DandyID has over 300 services listed in their social database.  Today they are releasing Pro Accounts and service verification.

Service verification allows you to assure people that who you say you are is who you are on a specific service. DandyID is using oAuth along with other verification services including the Flickr Authentication API and Facebook Connect for the verification. What this means is that after you signup for a DandyID account, you can select to verify a variety of services they have listed.

The Pro Accounts service is available for $4.99 and includes the following services:

• Personal Stats: Track how people are connecting with your complete identity across the web
• Social Analytics: Learn where your contacts exist online and which social networks are most important to them
• Contact Updates: Get notified via RSS whenever one of your contacts adds a new service to DandyID
• Pro Mail: Send 5 messages per month to members who are not on your contacts list

Update: Ken Stewart has posted a good review of DandyId.

Online video host Brightcove has announced a new partnership with Germany-based Sevenload. Sevenload describes their service as, “professional social media network for modern internet television and User Generated Content.”  The partnership will allow Brightcove customers to distribute their content on the Sevenload network. The content can be monetized through additional online video advertising. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

From the release, “The partnership announced today will make it easy for any organization using the Brightcove platform to program and syndicate advertising-supported video content across the sevenload network. This integration will also enhance the online video experiences for sevenload users by making top-rated programming from Brightcove customers available for viewing and sharing with the wider sevenload community.”

German sports site SPOX is the first to distribute their content to Sevenload via this new partnership and Brightcove says more sites will be announced soon.

The big Techmeme news last month in the was that the site opened its doors to tippers. Techmeme founder, and one of BusinessWeek’s Top 25 most influential people on the Web, Gabe Rivera noted that now for the first time ever, humans could submit "tips" to the Techmeme engine. The idea with the tips is to help a news-breaking story get to the Techmeme page and process quicker than it would normally via the TM engine. It does look like the tips seem to work when you tip a popular Techmeme source while sites that rarely (or never) get leads, won’t get them even with a tip.

We’ve seen top tech bloggers sending in tips for their own stories. And many others have submitted tips here and there. But from what I can tell, it looks like one person has risen above the others in terms of a "tip to lead" (known hereunto as the TTL) ratio.

Atul Arora from Freemont, California is able to get more tips to turn into leads than any of the other tippers. Check out the screenshot below to see his tipping power – this shot comes from midday yesterday and shows the top 2 stories were both tipped via his account. Atul is a master networker with over 500+ contacts on LinkedIn. Check out Atul’s Friendfeed account with links to all of his social services. I have contacted Atul and hope to conduct a full interview with him soon. I’d like to learn more about how he determines which sites to tip and which stories to tip. I guess to some extent he is the MrBabyMan of Techmeme.

I wonder how far off we are from a Techmeme Tipper Leaderboard. The leaderboard would display the top 100 tippers, their "TTL" ratio, and which sites they have tipped. We could also see in the future a Techmeme Top Sites Tipped Leaderboard which would display the top sites that have received leads via a tip.

Related: The Semi-Human Techmeme: A Month Later

Update: Gabe replied in the comments including, "I can share some stats: to date 196 headlines hitting Techmeme were tipped prior to appearing, and 89 different people have tipped. There are dominant tippers, but the tail, naturally, is long."

A month ago Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera announced that he hired an editor, Megan McCarthy, to help create a more "edited" Techmeme. Gabe noted in his announcement, "an additional human editor will carry out changes explicitly to directly improve the mix of headlines on Techmeme. Though the implicit edits conveyed via algorithm outnumber the explicit edits perhaps by 1000 to 1 or more, the impact of the human editor is nonetheless pronounced".

The change I’ve noticed the most is that more stories are receiving "lead" status with no visible links. I am guessing this is where the editor plays the biggest role. She can make stories live immediately versus waiting for the algorithm to pick them up and do it’s magic of link association. Oh yea, bitchmemes (staged or real) are apparently an excellent way to boost a blog’s standings on the leaderboard.

Many seemed to believe that Michael Arrington, holder of the top slot (then and now), was nervous that the leaderboard would change based on a post he authored after the news was made public. Marshall Kirkpatrick discussed the Techmeme advertising model and the hiring of a woman as the first editor. Susan Mernit also looks at the revenue model and provides some Techmeme revenue estimates for 2008.

Several new sites are listed on the current leaderboard but weren’t on the list as of December 5th. They are: InternetNews, jkOnTheRun, TUAW, TheOpenRoad, InsideFacebook, Loic LeMeur Blog, Agence France Presse, Google Mobile Blog, Hardware 2.0, DSLReports, PE Hub Blog, Zero Day, Lifehacker, Gawker (probably took over for Valleywag), Fast Company, Inquirer, Apple, TmoNews, Tech Daily Dose, The Bivings Report, Scobleizer, Telegraph, Hitwise Intelligence, Louis Gray, and The Digital Home.

For reference here’s the Techmeme leaderboard as of December 5, 2008 and January 4, 2009:

Earlier this week Google Blogsearch relaunched with an aggregator of sorts. Immediately several sites including ReadWriteWeb claimed it was a "Techmeme killer". The truth is that Google Blogsearch won’t kill or injure Techmeme and I’ve created the video embedded below to outline the main reason why.

There are a variety of good posts on the Google Blogsearch/Techmeme killer topic including: Rob Diana, Steven Hodson, Duncan Riley, Josh Catone and Svetlana Gladkova. Sean Percival had a bit of fun with the topic noting that the only reason Techmeme will be killed is because Techcrunch didn’t make their lead payments on time.

Techmeme would be a much stronger asset to the community if there were topic pages (similar to Blogrunner) and the current hierarchy was removed. There would be a higher level of discovery and a nice dose of leveling would take place. I have been researching Techmeme for over six months and will eventually have a lengthy video about the overall news-aggregator topic and additional thoughts for improvement.