Archive for the 'Twitter' Category
Participating in hackathons is nothing new in certain parts of the world, especially Silicon Valley. Once in a blue moon, a small team of people create something exciting that generates buzz, potentially selling to a larger company. One developer took on 80 competitors at a hackathon called “TVnext,” the winner came up with a solution to save you from reading spoilers on Twitter with an app called Twivo. I often don’t pay attention to my feed during Saturday Night Live, as all of the people on the other coast ruin it for me.
The developer has nabbed an internship at the company which whom she built the hack on top of, Twitter.
This particular developer’s story took on a life of its own, not just because the app was really cool, but because Jen Lamere is a female developer who was up against an all-male group of hackers. She was 17 at the time. An attendee discussed the scene with Mother Jones, explaining: “the only other females in attendance, that I saw anyway, were an organizer, two camerawomen, a caterer, three judges, and a participant’s wife.”
The news of Lamere’s summer internship, which looks it will be with the Crashyltics team specifically, came via Twitter, naturally:
Super excited to intern at @twitter @crashlytics this summer!—
Jen Lamere (@jenniee_l) May 16, 2013
There’s no word on what she’ll be doing specifically, but the experience that she’ll get will be incredibly useful.
Whether you want to take this news as a win for female developers, teenagers or technology as a whole, the story is a great one. At its very core, you have someone who is fascinated enough with tech to take the step and build something without a team, present it publicly at a hackathon and then take it to the next level by pursuing an internship…and that’s inspiring.
While not every hackathon project will lead to some type of fundraising or exit, or even an actual startup, this is a nice lesson to learn that the networking and experience gained at an event like this can go a long way. It’s also nice to see Twitter, a company that is preparing for an eventual IPO, give chances to younger coders. Investor, Chamath Palihapitiya, told the audience at Disrupt NYC that “everyone should learn how to code,” and this story is a perfect example of that line of thinking.
Imagine if instead of a spelling bee in junior high, you had entered a hacking competition? Boy, how different the world would be.
Since we have nothing much to go on other than a static landing page for Twitter #music, some folks didfurther inspection within the CSS on the login page, and certain features and integrations became apparent.
We’ve reached out to Twitter to confirm what we’ve seen, and we’ll update our story once we hear back.
Until then, here’s what can be taken from the styling code itself, picked up on by desginer Youssef Sarhan:
- Both web interface and separate downloadable app
- Pull in Tracks from iTunes, Spotify, Soundcloud and Rdio
- YouTube and Vevo integration
- We Are Hunted’s charts feature
- Turn playing tracks on/off
- Track purchasing
- Tweet a track
.iconmusic-spotify-connect-btn{background-position:-4431px -0px;height:32px;width:179px}
.iconmusic-player-source-rdio{background-position:-2801px -0px;height:19px;width:30px}
.iconmusic-player-source-itunes{background-position:-2751px -0px;height:19px;width:30px}
.iconmusic-player-source-soundcloud{background-position:- 2851px -0px;height:14px;width:92px}
.iconmusic-player-source-vevo{background-position:-2963px -0px;height:9px;width:53px}
.youtube-vid player{position:absolute;padding:10px;height:200px}
While this is in no way a finalized “feature set” for the Twitter #Music app, it is more information than we had before and confirmation of what we’ve seen others testing out on Twitter, which are basically embedded music players in Twitter Cards. And of course, since this is a Twitter-owned page, so the code speaks for itself.
Here’s a look at what the player will look like, again referenced in the CSS for the page:
Here’s that on/off switch for playing tracks:
These are some random graphical elements that point to what services will be included as well:
In addition to all of this, it looks like Twitter will be bringing in bios of musicians, perhaps from their Twitter profiles. All of this integration makes complete sense and perhaps the selling of music will be controlled by the artist themselves. If you’re listening to a track that someone shared from Spotify and want to purchase it immediately, it doesn’t matter which service Twitter hooks into, there’s a good chance that you’re going to follow through with your purchase. This could mean big bucks for Twitter as it marches towards going public, perhaps as early as next year.
This all gives us more of a sense of what the #Music service itself might look like, even though we have no screenshots to prove it. Much in the way that Twitter set up “hashtag pages” for brands such as NASCAR, Twitter is taking all of the data that it’s currently collecting and just showing it off in a different, more consumable way. If #Music becomes a full-featured service that artists can use to sell music, there’s a whole host of distribution metrics that Twitter is sitting on, which also means big bucks.
Twitter Music will reportedly launch on Friday, reports AllThingsD citing sources familiar with the matter. Earlier today, music discovery service We Are Hunted confirmed that it had been acquired by Twitter, while Ryan Seacrest tweeted that he’d been playing around with Twitter’s new music app.
AllThingsD says that Twitter’s standalone music app will suggest tracks based on data gleaned from users’ accounts, including the accounts that they follow. The app will allow users to listen to music using third-party services like iTunes and Soundcloud, or watch music videos provided by Vevo.
Its acquisition of We Are Hunted and upcoming music app are the latest signs, along with Vine and its own photo filters, that Twitter is building itself out as an all-inclusive media platform. We’ve contacted Twitter for more information.
A launch this weekend would coincide with the massive Coachella Music Festival outside of Los Angeles, CA. The festival carries heavy sponsorships and in the past Facebook has shown off check-in kiosks and other technology companies have attempted product launches there.
Our writer Josh Constine has attended the last nine Coachellas and will be there this weekend. He’s not sure the launch of a music discovery app would work so well at the intense festival.
Constine explains “Twitter launching a music app at Coachella is risky. The festival is chaotic, there’s poor mobile signal, people try to conserve battery life, and there’s a ton of distraction. Amongst the seven stages and wild crowds of 75,000 attendees, it may be difficult to find time to download and use a music discovery app. There would be no way to hear new music or watch music videos with all the noise there. The festival could be useful for raising awareness of the app, and if it was more of a music moment capturing and sharing app similar to Soundtracking it could see use at Coachellla. But the festival is so overwhelming, inebriating, and exhausting that people might forget about Twitter music app posters seen between sets and might fail to download the app.”
We’ll be on the ground at Coachella tomorrow to let you know if Twitter tries anything.
In Valparaiso, Chile, they’re excited that English Premier League soccer club Tottenham lost a semifinal, mostly because home-grown striker Marcelo Diaz scored for the rival club. And in Mombasa, Kenya, the buzz is all about Uhuru.
(That is not a Star Trek reference, by the way. It’s the new Kenyan president, Uhuru Kenyatta.)
I know all this, because Twitter brought Twitter Trends to 160 new locations today.
Twitter Trends gives anyone the ability to see what people are talking about right now — anywhere in the world. Anywhere, that is, that Twitter has introduced the feature.
After bringing Twitter Trends to 100 new cities in December of last year, Twitter has now introduced Trends in 160 new locations, including Belgium, Greece, Kenya, Norway, Poland, Portugal, and Ukraine … plus an additional 130 new cities.
That brings the total number of Twitter Trend countries to 42. Most of them have also tailored trends for individual cities — 62 U.S. cities are included.
And the 140-character social network is not finished yet. Twitter software engineer Royce Cheng-Yue writes:
To make Trends more convenient and relevant for people around the world, we’re constantly working to bring Trends to more locations –– be on the lookout for even more in the future.
photo credit: hownowdesign via photopin cc
Filed under: Business, Media, Social, VentureBeat
     |
[This story has been updated with additional reporting]
Microsoft game director Adam Orth, who insulted fans on Twitter when they voiced concerns about rumors the next Xbox will require an always-on Internet connection, has left the company.
Apparently, he said the wrong things on Twitter and it spiraled out of control, resulting in a major embarassment for Microsoft. We hear that he voluntarily resigned and deeply regrets what happened. His comments set off a storm of criticism about Microsoft and what its intentions on its next game console might be.
“Sorry, I don’t get the drama around having an ‘always on’ console,” Orth wrote on Twitter. “Every device now is ‘always on.’ That’s the world we live in.”
Orth was reportedly in the midst of a discussion with a friend of his, Manveer Heir, a senior game designer at BioWare, when he made the public comments. Orth and Manveer are close friends who were evidently making fun of each, but the observers didn’t catch on that the conversation had a lot of sarcasm in it. Orth then got in a flame war with gamers over his opinion and dissed small towns such as Janesville, WI and Blacksburg, VA, asking “why on earth would I live there?”
We don’t know what conversations took place after that with his employer, but Orth is apparently no longer with Microsoft. Orth was a game director at Microsoft Game Studios, but he was not working on the next-generation Xbox, according to our sources.
Microsoft issued a statement last week about the comments, which referred to him rather coldly as “this person.”
“We apologize for the inappropriate comments made by an employee on Twitter yesterday. This person is not a spokesperson for Microsoft, and his personal views do not reflect the customer centric approach we take to our products or how we would communicate directly with our loyal consumers. We are very sorry if this offended anyone, however we have not made any announcements about our product roadmap, and have no further comment on this matter.”
Orth may have commented on this development on Twitter, but it’s impossible to tell unless you’re a confirmed follower of his: He has locked the account, and it is no longer available. In the same breath, apparently, he deleted his LinkedIn account. We hear that he had to do this because he received numerous death threats. That part is quite regretable.
I guess he has learned the value of discretion on social media. But, as it often is, the lesson appears to have been learned the hard way.
Dean Takahashi contributed to the reporting for this report.
Filed under: Business, Gadgets, Games, Media, Social, Top stories, VentureBeat
| |
Twitter rolled out sweeping updates to all of its mobile properties this week, mostly to support the new Twitter Cards, but unfortunately, those who are using the service on Android aren’t so happy.
The app has always been a bit buggy on the Android platform, but the issues that are being reported are more than just a little problematic. Users have experienced not being able to open the “Me” tab which allows you to access your DMs and switch accounts, important parts of the service. I’ve experienced this bug from the second that the update was released, and I’ve heard that Twitter is working on the issue. It’s not affecting all devices, but this tweet search shows it as being pretty widespread.
You’re presented with a blank screen and a small spinner, with no information or message that says that the service is having any problems. At first, I thought that I just had a poor connection, but after using the app with WiFi turned on, it became clear that this was a big ol’ bug:
Since Twitter has been streamlining all of its apps, and site, it’s a glaring issue when one of the four tabs don’t work.
@Support I downloaded the new official Twitter app for Android and now the tab w/ my profile incl. DM, favorites etc. won't load :-( Help!
—
Malene Bisgaard (@Mumi79) April 06, 2013This new Twitter for Android won't load my DM page. That's nice. #Sarcasm
—
Raihan Hussain (@RaihanSays) April 06, 2013Well @twitter your new Android app has a bug and its cheesing me off my account info goes blank quite often
—
Shaun Bignell (@Shaun_Biggs) April 06, 2013Attn @twitter the new android app won't load my me page and I can't look at all the dm's thousands of cute girls are sending me.
—
ƳЦПǤ Ɖ乇₳ｲђ ƎяΞƆ₮เ๏ภ (@hell_dad) April 06, 2013While no timeframe is being offered, and Twitter hasn’t made an official statement on the issue, it’s safe to say that the beautiful redesign that the Android app received is overshadowed by these issues. If you’re having the same issue, you might have to revert to using the mobile version of the site, as I’ve done. Or, you could search for yourself and get to your profile that way.
The nice part about Google Play is that as soon as Twitter updates the app with a new build, it will go live for everyone to grab without any submission process like Apple’s.
Hurry up, Twitter, people are cheesed off about not being able to get their DMs from cute girls and stuff.
[Photo credit: Flickr]
The big Wall Street banks are among the last Twitterless bastions of the American workplace. But even their high walls are crumbling thanks to a new Bloomberg terminal product — and perhaps a recent U.S. Securities and Exchange decision on Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.
Today, Bloomberg announced that it will be the first financial information platform to integrate real-time Twitter feeds directly into investors’ data workflows. Two days ago, the SEC had said that, yes, Reed Hastings could communicate to the public via social media after staff at the securities watchdog had recommended he be charged for revealing material company information via Facebook.
With new capabilities come new requirements, Bloomberg says:
“When important news is shared on Twitter, traders and investors need to be able to access it, and validate its importance in order to incorporate that information into their decision making process,” Jean-Paul Zammitt, the head of sales and product development, said in a statement.
But it won’t just be a firehose of tweets in your Bloomberg terminal, the company says. Rather, tweets will be classified by company, asset class, person, and topic. And they’ll be integrated with Bloomberg’s existing financial services data stream, so there’s no switching views or checking different systems. Users can also create custom alerts to monitor “unusual bursts of social media chatter about a company.”
Whether this is helpful for notoriously rapid-fire day traders or harmful remains to be seen. But you can bet that legendary long-term value investor Warren Buffet won’t be checking the tweetstream before making his investments.
At least some are sold.
“It is extremely valuable to our business to be able to access this information on the Bloomberg Professional service in the same manner we use it for other market related applications and analytics,” said Karl Braasch, a fund manager and cofounder of Bristlecone Capital Partners.
photo credit: Christopher Chan via photopin cc
Filed under: Business, Enterprise, Media, Social, VentureBeat
| |
Twitter is making a move to become the jumping off point for discovering, browsing and accessing the mobile app ecosystem, the company announced yesterday, in a somewhat understated event only developers were invited to attend. The event, due to its nature, was filled with geekier terminology like “footer tags,” “deep linking,” and “URL schemes,” making summaries of its announcements hard to parse by the everyday Twitter user who isn’t as familiar with what some of these things may mean.
So let’s clarify: Twitter wants to connect its users with content found in the broader mobile app universe, including products for sale from e-commerce companies, the mobile applications themselves, as well as other media, such as photos, videos, article snippets, and soon music, too.
This a major step forward for a service which begin life as a way to post brief, 140-character text-based thoughts, inspired by SMS.
just setting up my twttr
— Jack Dorsey (@jack) March 21, 2006
With Twitter Cards, tweets are no longer boring status updates like the above, but are rich, perhaps even interactive elements, which will not only help to increase users’ time spent using Twitter and viewing content on its service, but that can also help send increased traffic to mobile applications.
There are two critical pieces to what Twitter announced: a way to increase e-commerce conversions via mobile apps, and a way to boost discovery and app installs for any mobile developer.
Twitter To Impact E-Commerce Conversions
Addressing the first item, the way this works is that Twitter will allow tweets to link to other applications. This is what Twitter refers to as “deep linking.” For e-commerce applications, being able to seamlessly move from a tweet to an app users already have installed on their devices – which already contains their account info (name, address, credit card, etc.) – will go a long way to increase e-commerce conversions versus sending those same clicks to the mobile web.
Fred Wilson, of Union Square Ventures, remarks on his blog that while Twitter’s phrasing of the announcement “might not seem like much,” it’s actually “a big deal” for e-commerce apps. “For many e-commerce and marketplace businesses, this will be a huge help in delivering transactions instead of page views,” he says.
E-commerce conversions are a big challenge, with typical conversion rates (the ratio of a site’s sales to a site’s visits) around 2 or 3 percent. On mobile, it’s even more difficult because of the tediousness of typing onto smartphones’ small screens. By instead pointing a Twitter user interested in a particular product to an app that already contains users’ payment info, there’s a better chance for serendipity and impulse purchases.
Twitter’s early partners on Twitter Cards include e-commerce players like (Wilson’s firm’s) portfolio company Etsy, as well as Gumroad, Storenvy, and Wine Library. Other partners, like Jawbone and Angry Birds’ maker Rovio, also sell physical goods, though not only via the web in the traditional e-commerce sense. Still, they too could take advantage of the simplified app-to-app flow to increase sales of their own items, if they choose.
Boosting App Discovery And Installs
But it’s not only e-commerce players who will benefit from the deep app linking. Also benefitting is any mobile app developer looking to increase their app’s discoverability – and then, hopefully, decrease the cost associated with acquiring users through other channels like pay-per-install schemes, for instance.
Developers can now include “footer tags” on their app’s tweets which are just links that appear below the tweet which point users to the appropriate mobile app store (iPhone, iPad, or Google Play for Android devices), encouraging users to download the app whose content they’re viewing.
For example, social messaging platform Path, Flickr, Foursquare, and Twitter’s own video app Vine, will be among the first to adopt this new Cards feature.
As users tweet from the apps, their Twitter followers will have only to click on a link to download the app their friend is using if they want to check it out, too. It’s closing a loop of sorts – before, users would connect their mobile apps to Twitter, share content from the app, and people would click links and tweets to view that content. But that would be the end of it. If users then wanted to try the app, and hadn’t yet downloaded it, they would have to manually do a search in the app store to install it.
The alternative was moving Twitter users to web, and then from web to app. On iOS, Apple only recently (in iOS 6) added this connectivity in the form of “Smart Banners” which allow a web page to display a pop-up banner suggesting the link to download that app from the App Store, or opening the web content within the app. (There’s a similar plugin for Android).
But Twitter’s newly announced “deep app linking” goes a step further. Instead of taking a user from mobile web to app, it takes the user from app to app. That is, Twitter’s app to the developers’ app.
Genius, right? After all, a lot of the activity taking place on today’s “mobile web” is actually happening within apps. And unlike on the desktop Internet, these apps have not been hyperlinked to enable easy navigation between them. Instead, they’ve been standalone, isolated pockets of content, requiring users switch between them themselves. That’s been a problem for a number of reasons, but notably for app developers, because people only have so much mental bandwidth when it comes to accumulating and then remembering to launch and use the applications they download.
Twitter, which has long since transitioned from text-based thoughts to a content discovery network, is ideal for pushing people around this web of apps. And for developers, the benefit is that they can use Twitter as the jumping off point to move people from viewing content to actual (revenue-generating) in-app activity.
Backing Up: But On Mobile, Facebook Is Still King Of Social
It’s a big leap for Twitter, of course, to enable these connections, but lets pull back for a minute from being overly enthusiastic here. For any of this to really matter, Twitter needs to find a foothold on mobile of a significant and meaningful size.
So far, it’s still dwarfed by Facebook, which Flurry just reported today comprises 18 percent of users’ on-device activity. Twitter, along with all other non-Facebook social networks, only accounts for 6 percent of user activity in comparison.
And Facebook, too, has been working on its own mechanisms for moving users from social network to mobile apps. It taps into Facebook’s social graph to make recommendations. Facebook’s App Center, available on both web and mobile, is visited by hundreds of millions of users per month. Twitter, meanwhile, as a whole, has over 200 million monthly active users, out of over double that who are registered on the service.
Facebook’s app install ads, a new business for Facebook’s mobile future, are doing well, too.
And Facebook has 680 mobile monthly actives, while 120 million Twitter users are mobile monthly actives (Twitter said this February that 60 percent of its 200 million monthly actives log on via mobile at least once per month.) Twitter touted this group as skewing younger, noting that those 52 percent of those 18-34 are more likely to login on mobile than other groups.
But being young and mobile isn’t only Twitter’s thing.
Facebook, despite anecdotal reports to the contrary, isn’t struggling to find traction with its youngest users. According to Pew Internet & American Life’s latest figures, 86 percent of Internet users 18 to 29 use Facebook today. The site is not in decline, and according to new data from J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth (via All Things D), Facebook is growing more than other mobile competitors like Twitter, Snapchat, Whatsapp and even its own property, Instagram.
So even as this next, new generation of web – or rather mobile web – users step in to engage with content on social services, it’s not necessarily Twitter which will serve as their main gateway to the app universe. That’s not to say that Twitter won’t be an important, and growing, channel to connect users to apps, but it might be more fair to dub it a window and not a doorway at this time.
Vowels aren’t really necessary in today’s digital age, are they? Twitter doesn’t think so, as it announced a new “two-tiered” service including its free model called “Twttr.” You can only tweet without vowels though. Want the vowels back? Pony up $5 a month. Seems like a pretty sweet deal to me.
Luckily, Twitter really cares about its users and will offer up the “sometimes Y” free of charge…forever. Also free are vowels in link URLs. Whew.
If you’ve seen the text messages from anyone under 25 years old, you know that vowels often get left out already. This is pretty forward-thinking of Twitter, as it attempts to monetize its older set of users who can still speak and write using a real language.
Here’s what Twitter had to say about the disruptive approach to scl ntwrkng:
We’re doing this because we believe that by eliminating vowels, we’ll encourage a more efficient and “dense” form of communication. We also see an opportunity to diversify our revenue stream.
Here’s a mockup, with a condensed version of the legendary Barack Obama re-election tweet:
Take that, Fcbk.
How did they come up with this amazing concept? Michael Sippey, Twitter’s VP of Product shared the brainery that went behind this genius move to beef up its revenue before next year’s IPO:
I was carpooling home after Twitter’s seventh birthday party with my head filled with images from our past, like our early logo where we spelled it TWTTR, in neon green toothpaste. And then Prince’s song “I would die 4 U” came on the radio. I felt like there was something there, but I wasn’t sure what or how to bring it to market.
Then later that night, I was watching “Wheel of Fortune” with @adambain, and a contestant yelled out ‘I wanna buy a vowel’. Everything just sort of clicked. Adam and I turned to each other and high-fived. It was one of those product moments that just felt like magic.
The company had some other revenue-producing ideas up its sleeve and will introduce extra characters, past 140, for a price:
In addition to our normal suite of Promoted Products for advertisers, we are now also offering a single character extension, expanding the length of a Tweet to 141 characters, for those moments when you need just one more character to finish your thought. The price of the extra character is based on a bidding system reflecting the popularity of the character you would like to add.
All of this will be rolling out slowly to a “small percentage of users” who actually believe things that are announced on April Fool’s Day. Twitter has some advice to get yourself prepared:
We recommend that you practice using only consonants (and “y”) with the hashtag #nvwls (or if you have paid for our premium service, use #icanhasvowels).
Go here to have a play.
Ws gng t typ ths ntr pst n MGHRD spk bt thr s n wy n hll tht y’d ctlly b bl t rd t. Thrfr, ths prgrph wll hv t d.
It’s kind of neat seeing the old Twttr name used for something again. As you know, it was the original name of the service.
