Posts tagged as:

Microblog

Google Not Buying Twitter. But Here’s How It’d Look

by Jason Wilk on April 3, 2009

Last night, supposed sources including TechCrunch reported that Google is in the late stages of an acquisition to buy Twitter. The news is far from the truth. Google and Twitter [according to Marissa Mayer] have been meeting, however only to figure out better ways to crawl the real-time updates coming out of the popular Micro-blog service. Twitter is largely thought to be valuable due its ‘real-time’ search prowess that Google can’t compete with at the moment. Everytime there are so-called important events, such as an earthquake in San Francisco, Twitter traffic goes wild due to those checking it to see what others have said. It would take Google far longer to crawl a news story about the earthquake and then index it in its Google News section. (The above image would most likely be how the two companies would fit together)

by Jason Wilk on March 20, 2009

Twitter founders, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey, have officially been casted as finalists for Time Magazine’s 2009 Most Influential People award. The micro-blog platform hit the mainstream last year when news stations were astounded by the real-time documenting of major events (the attacks on Mumbai, the Flight 1549 landing). Time is doing something a bit different this year by letting users weigh in on who the winner should be. Their audience isn’t giving Twitter too much love, with only a 33% average influence rate at the moment. Let’s help change that. The guys are up against some stiff competition including Steve Jobs, Prsident Obama, Sarah Palin(?), and more…

by Jason Wilk on January 14, 2009

Private Equity blogger, Dan Primack has discovered something interesting in an SEC filing names eBay founder Pierre Omidyar as an executive of a new stealth startup called Ginx. The service, which is currently available for invite-only participants is said to be a micro-blog management service that recomends news, images, and other items to users based on their interests.
Ginx is alreay being used as a URL shortener on Twitter by a handful of people including Omidyar, similar to Bit.ly and tinyURL. Could the eBay king really be getting back in the game for a venture in an industry that has valuations of pennies compared to his previous ventures and acquisitions? Check out this link, to see a sample of what the service does and see for yourself if this is something worthy of an eBay founder.
Hopefully with this venture, the same mistake that eBay made won’t arise. Here’s 10 Reasons Why eBay Died.

by Jason Wilk on November 7, 2008

Friend View is Nokia’s experimental mobile location and micro-blogging service that also works via standard web.
The application uses the built-in GPS, network triangulation, or manual updates to decide where you are.
Once logged-in, it pinpoints you as well as all your friends who are on the service.
Instead of Twitter’s ‘What Are You Doing’ question, Nokia asks ‘What’s Up’.
I’m guessing this will roll out in Japan first as a test.
With Nokia as the smart phone leader, and also having the power to move this app onto every deck they manufacture, will this become an immediate threat to mobile social networks like Loopt and ever-growing Twitter?

by Jason Wilk on November 6, 2008

Despite Barack Obama joining Twitter for the final weeks of the election, Twitter achieved some other astounding achievements:
- Updates increased 46% from previous Tuesday
- 7p-9p PST updates up 200% compared to same time last week
- Signups on Tuesday were up 40.3%
- Between 7p-9p PST signups were up 96.5% compared to same time last week
- Messages per second peaked almost 3x compared to first debate
- The site didn’t go down once.
Will we see Barack sending out Twitter messages to keep us posted with what he is up to? It’s about time we had a blogging President.