Born to be Wireless

From Twitter blog:

"We’re excited to announce that Twitter has acquired Summize—an extraordinary search tool and an amazing group of engineers. All five Summize engineers will move to San Francisco, CA and take jobs at Twitter, Inc. This is an important step forward in the evolution of Twitter as a service and as a company.
Summize is a popular service for searching Twitter and keeping up with emerging trends in real-time. Like Twitter, Summize offers an API so other products and services can filter the constant queue of updates in a variety of ways. The Summize service and API will be merged with our own and integrated under the Twitter brand."

Labels: twitter

Andrew Baron, joined Twitter a year ago and, as the co-founder of the pioneering online video series Rocketboom, he quickly had 1,400 people sign up to get his postings, one of the biggest crowds of followers on the service.

He put his Twitter account up for sale (on eBay) mostly because he was feeling bored with it and ambivalent about the technology. Most "twitterings" are deadly dull. And Baron readily admits he struggled to find worthy items to share with his many followers. "Every time I would go to Twitter, I would think really hard and try to come up with something important to say. I'd also try to talk about things I was doing, like going out to have a drink, or I would try to be poetic," says Baron. "It wasn't working for me."

After all wide-ranging debate that was created on his move, I think he gave up selling. At least, his eBay auction was over due "The seller ended this listing early because the item is no longer available for sale".

Source: BusinessWeek

Labels: twitter

Most eyes in the tech world are currently on the Steve Jobs keynote at Macworld (detailed live updates here for you Apple fans). For those of us not in attendance, Twitter was presumed to be a good outlet to find out what’s going on and discuss each twist and turn with our community. Alas, Twitter has once again crashed under a presumed official surge in traffic from Macworld, and has been largely inaccessible.

Downtime has become par for the course for Twitter during big news events (especially those pertaining to the tech industry, which makes up a sizable portion of the Twitter userbase), with the company having nearly 6 days of downtime in 2007 according to a recent report from Pingdom.

Users have flocked back to Twitter after every outage so far, and there is no reason to think it will be any different this time. But versus other companies that have been hit by notable outages in the past year like Salesforce.com and Yahoo’s small business services on Black Friday, the technical barriers to entry for Twitter competitors are almost nil. Many companies have tried to imitate Twitter so far with little success, but with data portability on the horizon (aka - import your friends into the service of your choice), it wouldn’t take a whole lot to unseat them from their current dominance of the microblogging niche.

Labels: twitter

On the blog of Internet consultancy CenterNetworks, their CEO Allen Stern offers what he terms “Five Quick Suggestions To Improve Twitter.”

Labels: twitter

Twitter has landed an undisclosed amount of venture funding from Union Square Ventures and now it can proceed with its to-do list: Grab more users, develop its platform and find a business model.

That last point is likely to get some attention today, but a snazzy business model isn’t required–at least on the first round of funding. Twitter has potential and needs some dough to figure out how to reach it. Apparently, Union Square Ventures, Charles River Ventures and a who’s who list of angel investors will help Twitter figure things out.

Saying Twitter doesn’t need a profit making scheme yet falls into the “I can’t believe I’m writing this” department, but what Paul Kedrosky says about not worrying about business models early on makes a lot of sense.

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures says “after Facebook, I think Twitter is the most interesting API that people are building to these days.” He acknowledges Twitter doesn’t have a business model. But then again Delicious didn’t either and that worked out pretty well.

Wilson says the money will go toward making Twitter “a better, more reliable and robust service. That’s what the focus needs to be right now. We’ll have plenty of time to figure out the business model and there are many options to choose from.”

Labels: twitter, VC

Fring has fully integrated twitter so now all you twitters can stay in touch with your twitting friends wherever you are and without paying for all those SMSs!

If you’ve been sleeping for the last few months and don’t know what twitter is, click here

So how can I become a fringing twitter?

The fun part about this integration is that you don’t have to do anything to get it. Just open fring on your handset –> go to ‘Settings’ –> ‘Configure services’ –> (scroll down) ‘twitter’ should be there waiting and ready to go.

Once you’ve entered your Twitter credentials, you should have a new twitter contact added to your fring contact list. You can then update your followers and get updates from the people you follow directly from fring.

Source: Fring Blog

Labels: fring, twitter

Labels: mobile, sms, social, twitter