Twitter | blending the mix

Twitterfountain - more Twitter API goodness

16-06-2008

I just had to point to this amazing piece of work as found by Coolia Julia from here. she makes a great point about how this may add a bit of spice to Friendfeed (which is what we have all been thinking!).

That said, Plurk’s main USP, a timeline which displays posts along a horizontal orientation looks much better on mobile (as does friendfeed) where the timeline is NOT visible, so so maybe this is just another gimmick. It does though, provoke some interesting discussion about how timelines are now being presented.

Interview with the Twitter founders

By: paul.fabretti

31-05-2008

Twitter

Thanks to @Techn0tic (Dave K) for the find.

Great Qik video of Robert interviewing the founders of Twitter, trying to explain the reasons behind the recent/frequent/constant Twitter downtime. Given Twitter’s subsequent claiming that the users are to blame and Robert’s recent public concerns over Twitter this is a VERY interesting watch.

Here’s my thoughts though. If Twitter claim that there is too much burden on its system due to the number of API calls being made by the different applications (such as Friendfeed which is seeing huge growth thanks to the Twitter problems!) then why not restrict/charge/control the API?

The application developers are clearly making money (albeit adsense in most cases) off you so Twitter, why not charge these people for the use? You have already said you don’t think there is a good reason to charge heavy users, so why not charge the people/companies that draw FROM the service than the people who contribute TO the service - or at the very least, more strictly control the API (like Facebook do) to ensure that any growth is managed proactively rather than in response to an outage?

The single most useful thing for Twitter

By: paul.fabretti

13-02-2008

Twitter

After reading about Ryan’s departure from Yahoo on Twitter (Ryan, been there twice in 2 years, so I know how it feels), I began to consider commercial use of Twitter.

We already have BreakingNewsOn which does as good a job as any on reporting news the INSTANT it happens and the Guardian does a decent job of publicising its recent news but Commuterfeed is as good an example of how best to use Twitter.

For me, it works because:

1) News is posted in real-time
2) News is localised (and relevant)
3) News can be consumed (or not) on the go
4) It uses nothing more than Twitter’s @ prefix and combines common identifiers for locations.

The potential to use Twitter to generate real-time conversations around shared-interests (that clever people then create search tools for) was something that Jeff Jarvis touched on a few weeks ago and Commuterfeed is the best example I have seen of this yet.

There should be no reason now why the example that commuterfeed have set, we couldn’t apply this to movies, sporting events or more…

…anybody else got thoughts on how else we can apply this type of system to real-time events?

(note that in getting the links for this post, I see that Guardian also have a live twitter football account too)

Seesmic - 4 invitations, 4 days

By: paul.fabretti

02-01-2008

Twitter

Thanks to Loic Le Meur, I have 4 invitations to Seesmic to give away.

I will give one invite away each day, for the next 4 days, starting tomorrow to the person leaving the best suggestion as to what the most exciting technological development of 2008 will be.

(Seesmic is in pre-Alpha or pre-Beta Alpha or something like that so invites are like rocking-horse doo-doo).

What’s Seesmic? The best way I can explain it is Twitter with Video.

What’s Twitter? Jesus, where have you been this year?!!

Quite simply it is all about short, sharp messages.

Like the Facebook status (if you have to ask what that is, the please leave now!), it lets friends know what you are doing, what you are thinking, or quite simply chip in to other people’s conversations with something useful (or useless).

Seesmic is new in that it allows short, sharp conversations to take place using video and is backed (financially) by Michael Arrington amongst others and totally supported by heavy-duty bloggers such as Hugh MacLeod, Dennis Howlett and the man himself, Robert Scoble. It is as close to having a conversation online as current short-messaging systems allow.

Technorati Tags: seesmic,loiclemeur,facebook,twitter,scoble,gapoingvoid,macleod,howlett

Facebook fun…numbers to make you think!

By: paul.fabretti

27-07-2007

Facebook, Internet, Twitter

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MarketingVox reports some interesting details about facebook’s recent growth.

Maybe the money isn’t in the kids after all…

More than half of Facebook users are not currently enrolled in a university or college.
The fastest-growing demographic is the 25+ age group.
Facebook is the sixth-most trafficked site in the United States.
Users spend an average of 20 minutes on the site daily.
The site is the No. 1 photo-sharing application on the web.
Photo application draws more than twice as much traffic as the next three sites combined.
Canada, with more than 3 million active users, has the most users outside of the US.
The UK has the third-largest user-base, with more than 2 million active users.
Over 1,800 applications have been built on the Facebook Platform.
More than 75 percent of Facebook users have used at least one Facebook application.

A natural shift in demographics from a wider user base or a sign of things to come for social networks?

One question - I wonder if the Twitter demographics work the other way around? Older founder members, getting younger…but aren’t the kids using IM?

— blending the mix

Twitterfountain - more Twitter API goodness

Interview with the Twitter founders

The single most useful thing for Twitter

Seesmic - 4 invitations, 4 days

Facebook fun…numbers to make you think!

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