Twitter Archive

Twitter COO Dick Costolo was intererviewed today at the real-time crunchup event and part of the discussion centered around how Twitter will (and does) generate revenue. Clearly they are earning revenue from Twitter’s deals with Bing and Google.

More importantly, Costolo noted that Twitter will launch an advertising model “soon”. He went on to say that soon means most likely early next year. He continued, “It (the advertising) will be fascinating, non-traditional, and people will love it.”

The final comment from Costolo noted that partners like TweetDeck will be able to partner in the advertising operation.

It seems like no matter who writes about Twitter and advertising, the concept is merging advertising inside the stream (even if it’s displayed separately) and that the ads should be targeted towards the content of the tweet.

I wonder what happens to the paid advertising programs (like the one Izea runs) once Twitter launches their own.

It seems the hot Twitter news of the day is that the service might be slowing in U.S. growth. You can read the Twitter stats story on Mashable and TheNextWeb. Earlier in the week the big news for the so-called social media experts was the on and off status of the new “retweet architecture system”. Twitter turned it on for many users (I was not one of them) but then turned it off so they could fix some bugs.

Apparently there are two camps when it comes to the new retweets…one camp likes the consolidated concept and the other camp hates it because they can’t add their 2-cents to the conversation. My guess is that 90% of re-sharing on Twitter is either direct sharing of something Mashable posted or the addition of “lol”.

This past summer I wrote about how Friendfeed could generate massive income and also reach the mainstream. Sadly that never happened because Friendfeed sold out to Facebook. While it looks like Facebook wasn’t reading, this morning I started to think that perhaps Twitter was. What really got me thinking was something I read on Patricia Handschiegel’s blog. While she discusses the way Twitter defined their service in the beginning, she uses the word forum throughout the column.

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Here are today’s startup and entrepreneurial updates (TGIF):

• Twitter gets $100 million in funding but wants people to work for free to translate the service – Mashable
• Bunch of new features added – MyFamily
• Brand new look for the Lite Messenger – eBuddy
• Major Email Provider Trends: Yahoo and Hotmail Tops, Gmail Catching – MailChimp
• What I’ve Earned (And Learned) From Writing “Beginning Ruby” – Peter Cooper
• The “WiFi At Conferences” Problem – Joel Spolsky
• Shark Eats Entrepreneur Alive – FairSoftware

Last night, Adaptive Blue hosted the “The Changing Role of PR in Publishing and Tech” meetup in NYC. The panelists were (from left to right in the video): Chantelle K from Yelp, Kristin M from Attention PR, Ami G. from Macmillan and Russ M from RussCommunications.

The panel discussion lasted an hour and I’ve split the video into 20-minute segments – you can view the videos below. Some notes from the panelists:

• Chantelle loads Tweetdeck the moment she hits the office to check Twitter and spends 30 minutes to 1 hour each day going through what her friends sent her
• Kristen discussed using the bit.ly URL shortener as a way to track ROI
• At about the 18 minutes mark in the first video, Chantelle explains how they went to market for their iPhone app using an exclusive with Robert Scoble. She notes that they saw great results by using Robert to get the word out about the app and were even able to get an exciting trending topic on Twitter. They didn’t give the news to the NYT or Newsweek. They met with Robert several times beforehand to build a relationship with Robert. Later on Chantelle noted that depending on the type of story they are trying to push, they will use different sources to work with.

There was a discussion about analytics in the second video although I found the analysis weak. There was no mention about real-value stats – just simple discussion about how many followers or fans a brand has. My guess is that in late 2010 ”followers and fans” will be the hits of 1995.

In the third video there is a discussion about whether to hire a PR firm or if you should look at bringing a person on-board internally.
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Twitter application TwitApps has announced on their blog that the service will be shutting down at the end of next week. TwitApps provided two services: Replies which sent you any replies via email and Follows which sent you an email of your new followers regularly instead of getting each follower individually emailed as Twitter does now. The followers function is something I’ve asked Twitter to provide for a while – a digest of daily activity.

TwitApps developer Stuart Dallas notes why he is shutting the service down:

I love Twitter and use it a lot, but I’m tired of developing for the API. It’s not that I don’t think the API team over there do a fantastic job, or that I think the API is bad, it’s a personal thing. It no longer excites me the way it once did, and this is part of the reason it’s taken a long time for me to get v2 finished, and it’s still not ready.

We’ve seen other developers say similar things regarding Twitter development. Dallas says the TwitApps Twitter application code will be open-sourced via their GitHub account next week.

When I head into Manhattan in the morning, I start nearly every day at a cafe where I get the same items each time. The clerk knows what I like and when they have no more of my items left, he tells me so I don’t need to wait on line and I can go elsewhere even though I enjoy their food and the locations (free wifi, lots of tables, etc). This morning he shouted to me, “sir we have no plain bagels today, I’m sorry.” While this rarely happens, it got me thinking about some of the interesting events over the past week and the blog posts discussing these events.

Last week the Gmail email service was down for a few hours. Our post about the outage received over 1,500 comments. One of the interesting posts I read came from a blogger who was outraged and mad that Gmail was down and that the company hadn’t posted reasons for the outage and a time for recovery. What was interesting about the post is that this same blogger allowed the customers of his startup (and investors) to go for months with no information about his service before it was shut down with no notice.

From my perspective, everything will go down or fail at some point. Last month ceiling tiles at a subway station in NYC fell and the station had to be closed for over a week. The MTA worked 24 hours a day to get things fixed and while it was a mess for people who needed to travel through that area, I saw very few complaints about how the MTA handled the incident. The truth is that when things fail, it’s important to consider how the company handles the issue and protects their users from the same issue in the future.

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The other day, Holden Page from Techgeist told me I needed to check out a new service called Brizzly. At this time, the service is still in private beta, requiring invitation codes to sign up. He sent me an invite and I signed up for the service. I’ve checked it out over the last few days, and have really come to enjoy it. There are, however, still a few more features I’d like to see added before I make the switch from Tweetdeck.

The Good

A screen shot of the brizzly service A screen shot of HootSuite in single-column mode

On the surface, the brizzly interface resembles HootSuite when you have it set up to show only one column. However, the inner workings of brizzly are actually quite different (for good and for bad) from HootSuite.

Following are some of the really nice features of brizzly:

1. brizzly automatically locates and displays photos and videos people link to in their tweets. For instance, Chris Brogan linked to a photograph of a broken mirror in one of his tweets. Rather than just seeing the link to YFrog, I get to see the photograph he uploaded. So far, I’ve confirmed that brizzly displays photos from YFrog and TwitPic and that it pulls in YouTube videos. I’m not sure what other services it pulls into your feed, yet.
2. brizzly also automatically resolves shortened URLs. Any time a shortened URL is posted on Twitter, brizzly automatically converts it back to the full version of the URL. For instance, Alex Wilhelm posted a link to his latest story on Techgeist within one of his tweets. On Twitter, he posted a shortened URL (http://bit.ly/LDbej), but brizzly shows me the full URL (http://techgeist.net/2009/09/retweetcom-hits-million/). Unfortunately, this feature seems to be a bit inconsistent at the moment. Sometimes the URLs are automatically resolved; other times just the shortened URLs appear.
3. You can “mute” specific users. If one of the tweeple you’re following starts tweeting a bit too much for your likes, you can mute the person, causing their updates not to show up in your timeline.
4. You can save drafts of tweets, in case you decide you’re not quite ready to post it, yet.
5. brizzly automatically shortens URLs for you using bit.ly. Simply paste a link into the tweet you’re preparing, and it automatically gets shortened when you submit the tweet. As with many of the other Twitter clients that use bit.ly to shorten URLs, though, there doesn’t seem to be any way to associate your shortened URLs with your own bit.ly account.

Other than those features, much of what you see in brizzly is very similar to what you’d find in many other Twitter clients. You can save specific searches on Twitter, you can follow/unfollow users when you view their updates, you can upload photos and post them on Twitter and more.
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