Twitter has announced the launch of a feature called embedded Tweets. This gives bloggers the chance to paste a short piece of flat-HTML into a post and BOOM - you have a clickable tweet right there on your site. It's going to make life a lot easier. So, smart idea, right? Well, maybe not! Google announced ...
I was reading this post on mashable earlier, from one of my favourite tech bloggers, Jennifer Van Grove. It’s about a new ‘tweet notification’ feature that Twitter are planning to add, for people who use the Twitter website to tweet.
Twitter business model to include advertising?
This got me thinking. In recent weeks, Twitter has made a number of significant improvements to the functionality of the main Twitter website. Most recently we saw the addition of the superb Twitter Lists feature, but Twitter are ALSO working on a new retweet feature too. These improvements have one thing in common; they render web-based apps like Tweetdeck and (my favourite) Seesmic Desktop less and less essential.
Here’s why this matters…
CNN’s poorly-advised coverage of the balloon boy hoax story, could mark a change in the way mainstream news is reported. By trying to take on services such as Twitter, by releasing ‘news’ super-fast, the reliability of stories is suffering. Here’s what I think is happening…
Once again, hundreds or maybe thousands of people, attending the SAME event at the SAME time are ‘live blogging’ the SAME content to (mostly) the SAME people. So-called ‘live blogging’ was once a useful practice, where a small number of people attending an event, would send key messages via Twitter, to their targeted followers.
However, today – when almost every attendee at these events is tweeting everything they hear, live blogging has become (at best) a nuisance for Twitter users.
When Matt Mullengweg announced that Wordpress.com was installing RSS Cloud on it’s 7.5 million blogs, something amazing happened!
All of a sudden, blogs on the Wordpress.com platform became almost real-time. In other words, posts will be broadcast almost immediately; allowing bloggers to both deliver real-time content to their RSS subscribers AND potentially share real-time comments with their readers. Here’s why I think this is such a big deal!
Blogging is experiencing (yet another) resurgence it seems. However, this time, it looks like the very sites that were accused of killing blogs, are now responsible for making them more popular than ever.
That’s right: Twitter, Facebook and co are actually making blogs more popular than ever before. Read on to find out why!
So, FaceBook has acquired FriendFeed – But why? It wasn’t for the platform and with a quarter of a billion users, FaceBook didn’t need to buy the relatively small FriendFeed user-base either.
However, by acquiring FriendFeed, FaceBook have bought something, which is of massively greater value to them as a company!
Twitter users seem to be a pretty serious bunch, according to research. Just 0.3% of Twitter users claim that they use Twitter for fun!
Rather worryingly, 41.6% claim to use Twiter to keep in touch with friends. So, how come they don’t have fun with their friends?
How’s this for timing? Today we decided to add the TweetMeme Twitter button to our blog & then, we end up writing about TweetMeme for the first time. That’s because they have just accused a app rival (called ReTweet) of copying their idea – Oh, and some of their code too!
As you will have heard, this week saw a Twitter employee’s Gmail account hacked, leading to the unauthorised publication of a number of “sensitive” Twitter company documents. Thankfully for Twitter, these documents were more embarrassing than damaging – but the fact they were compromised serves as an important lesson for us early adopters!
