Valleywag
your privacy is an illusion
Posts Tagged “twitter
”
your privacy is an illusion
caption contest
An impromptu "Tweetup" at Medjool from the online shoe salesfolk at Zappos lured reporter Sarah Lacy out to Medjool. The promise: free booze if you promoted the website with a backhanded mention. Can you suggest a better caption? Do so in the comments. Yesterday's winner: "This picture brought to you by Seagate" by Duncan. (Photo by Scott Beale)
Handvertising is the new banner ad
An impromptu "Tweetup" at Medjool from the online shoe salesfolk at Zappos lured reporter Sarah Lacy out to Medjool. The promise: free booze if you promoted the website with a backhanded mention. Can you suggest a better caption? Do so in the comments. Yesterday's winner: "This picture brought to you by Seagate" by Duncan. (Photo by Scott Beale)
data portability
MySpace to eBay, Twitter, and Yahoo: Thanks for the add!
Who are these people? That's the problem I've long had with sites like Twitter and eBay, which offer anonymous user names and little else to go by. And that's been the charm of Facebook, which aims to tie online identities with real ones by asking for work and school information, which is harder to fudge than a screen name. Had eBay and Twitter announce a partnership to share data with Facebook, I'd be impressed. Instead, they, as well as Yahoo, have partnered with MySpace instead to share profile data. Buffoonish technopundits are hailing this as an "advance in data portability." But what does it really mean? Now, in addition to a login like "awesomeguy1980," I'll get to see drunken party snapshots of someone before I reject their Twitter follower request.
the chart
MySpace's technical triumph
The conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley is that MySpace, based in Los Angeles, is a tech nightmare, blaring songs through a user's speakers while crashing all the time. Skilled engineers are in short supply down south, so the website must be falling over all the time, right? Not so. Pingdom, a website-monitoring service, has tracked how often some of the top social networks have gone offline. Twitter, based in Web-savvy San Francisco, has been down for 37 hours from January through April. MySpace has been up 99.96 percent of the time. That's 33 percent less downtime than Yahoo 360, and 60 percent less than Google's Orkut. Score one for the LA crowd. The chart: More »
silicon valley users guide
10 things Twitter users should not do
The best way to use Twitter is to text "off" to 40404, the service's SMS shortcut number. But failing that, as more and more of us seem to do, here's a list of 10 things Twitter users should not do, inspired by a set of tips at SheGeeks.net. Mostly, since annoying Twitter users are easy to ignore, these rules are for your own safety and sanity. Ignore them at your peril. More »
friendfeed
Why Silicon Valley just won't shut up about FriendFeed
"Cathy Brooks is a typically unapologetic Silicon Valley Web addict," writes Brad Stone in the New York Times. "Last week alone, she produced more than 40 pithy updates on the text messaging service Twitter, uploaded two dozen videos to various video sharing sites, posted seven photographs on the Yahoo image service Flickr and one item to the online community calendar Upcoming." Usually, when one identifies a friend as an addict, an intervention is in order. But Stone, who seems to have spent so much time in San Francisco's tech circles that he's gone native, suggests more technology instead: Specifically, FriendFeed, which gathers all of this online activity in one place, making it marginally easier for Brooks's benighted friends to keep up with her online logorrhea. More »
9:20 AM on Mon May 5 2008
By Owen Thomas
2,451 views,
11 comments
Latest by Figaro: Friendfeed is for people on ADD/ADHD. Even if you have few friends, the amount of useless data that it gives you is enormous! Stay clear of that tool! It's just an RSS reader with a "social" feel to it. more »
we read twitter so you don't have to
Here comes the cableknit sweater crowd: Ira Glass, Diablo Cody join Twitter
Somebody tell Biz Stone and Evan Williams to get the zin and gruyere ready, because here comes the NPR set. This American Life host Ira Glass and Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody just joined Twitter. Glass's first reports need more dramatic music: "I already have 4 followers and I haven't told a soul that I've created a twitter account. This is fun!" Cody seems more comfortable. " My Dog is Currently: showing a dehydrated cow penis who's boss," she writes. Meanwhile, Hitwise reports that Twitter ranked #439 among social networks and forums last week, and #4,309 among all websites. So, despite growing eightfold in the last year, the site remains quite small. Expect it to remain so. That is, until it's featured on Things White People Like.
IBM researcher plugs house into Twitter for energy usage updates
It's only a matter of time before the inanimate home of inventor Andy Stanford-Clark somehow pisses off TechCrunch publisher Michael Arrington and feels the wrath of "@andy_house blocked." [Earth2Tech]
journalist math
ABC News grossly overestimates Twitter's reach
ABC News's thesis that "Everyone Is 'Tweeting'" is quickly disproven — in the latest article on Twitter from ABC News. It begins with the obligatory anecdote about James Buck, the Berkeley student briefly jailed in Egypt:[W]ith help from the Egyptian bloggers who received the message and alerted his university and the U.S. Embassy, Buck walked out of the police station a free man. His translator Mohammad was left behind.Mohammed Maree, who made the mistake of getting anywhere near a protest with a cocksure Berkeley J-schooler, is still in jail. And I doubt Buck's continued tweets will be much help in freeing him. Because hardly anyone outside San Francisco's self-involved startup circles uses Twitter, and an email or text message would have been just as effective at saving Buck while leaving Maree stuck in a cell. (Photo by James Buck)
Who needs users when you have PR?
A Forbes article estimates the number of Twitter users at 80,000. The story does not note the number of news articles mentioning Twitter in Google's database: 10,800. [Forbes]
A Forbes article estimates the number of Twitter users at 80,000. The story does not note the number of news articles mentioning Twitter in Google's database: 10,800. [Forbes]
nerdfight
Sarah Lacy's Twitter snit
Having made her name on a cover story about Digg's Kevin Rose and a $60 million fortune he has yet to make, tech columnist Sarah Lacy has paused to sniff dismissively at (questionably accurate) reports that Twitter has raised $20 million in venture capital. Lacy has a point: It should not surprise anyone that Twitter is raising venture capital; there are few obvious companies which can use the money, and Twitter, whose microblogging service is growing in popularity but not, measurably, in revenues, is one of them. More »
we read twitter so you don't have to
VC takes Twitter founders out to lunch
Someone carefully let it be known today that Twitter cofounders Evan Williams and Biz Stone are looking for $15 million in venture-capital funding. We emailed existing Fred Wilson, a partner at Twitter investor Union Square Ventures, to ask if Twitter's been in touch, looking for a re-up. Wilson's unresponsive answer: "Yes, Union Square Ventures is an existing investor in Twitter." Lucky for us, Wilson's colleague Albert Wenger isn't nearly as discreet. He Twittered about his destination for lunch: Twitter headquarters.
venture capital
Twitter seeks $60 million valuation first, business model later
Twitter, a communications tool for marketers, self-promoters and journalists, is trying to raise a third round of venture capital Silicon Alley Insider reports cofounders Evan Williams and Biz Stone are looking for $15 million, valuing the company at $60 million. Current investors include Union Square Ventures and Charles River Ventures. SAI guesses Stone and Williams have pitched Spark Capital, too. Twitter raised $5 million for a $20 million valuation last summer. The company still hasn't found a business model, mostly because users, by and large, view Twitter messages on cell phones or third-party desktop applications, not the Twitter.com website. We find this endless groping embarrassing. Twitter limits messages to 140 characters. Why not shorten it to 120 and slap "Sponsored by Coke" to the end of each message? That seems easier.
exits
Twitter cans another engineer
When Twitter hired Lee Mighdoll as VP of engineering and operations in January, cofounder Biz Stone called him the "perfect match" for the company. Not anymore. Mighdoll is out after just three months of the job. "The match was not perfect," Stone told SAI in an email. Mighdoll is the second engineer reported to have left Twitter in the last two days; architect Blaine Cook fled the country yesterday. Neither was able to fix Twitter's oft-reported propensity to crash. We hear the final straw to break Biz Stone's back was not the breakdown yesterday that TechCrunch described as a "privacy disaster". Makes sense, because isn't that Twitter's raison d'être?
online advertising
Twitter launches in Japan with ads
Twitter cofounder Biz Stone once said, "There will never be ads on Twitter.com." Note that Stone never said anything about Twitter.jp. News.com reports that Twitter has launched in Japan, with ads. "Ads are important," Twitter backer Joi Ito said. "It's always harder to add ads later. So we're launching with them in Japan." What a tiresome PR game: Are ads any less important in the U.S.? If Stone wants to add them to Twitter.com, he and cofounder Evan Williams should go ahead. The ads in Japan actually link to the advertiser's Twitter feed. WIth that kind of arrangement, Robert Scoble and Jason Calacanis will surely sign up as charter sponsors.
exits
Lead architect quits Twitter, wisely flees the country
Lead architect Blaine Cook helped build Twitter into the downtime-prone morass it is today. Now, as the service grows ever more popular, and ever more unreliable, he's out. In an email to Silicon Alley Insider, Cook says he left Twitter over two weeks ago and plans to move to the U.K. with his partner. "We're Canadian and her visa makes it impossible for her to work in the U.S.," Cook explains. SAI's Peter Kafka wonders if Cook actually got the boot due to Twitter's many outages. We think it's more likely that, as close to Twitter's groundswell as he is, Cook has seen what Twitter hath wrought and is wisely fleeing the country before Robert Scoble tests the limits of how many Twitters one human — or other creature — can send in a day.
we read twitter so you don't have to
Geeks on Twitter act like rabbis debating arcane points of the Talmud
Former Yahoo Personals exec Susan Mernit recently returned from a conference in Tel Aviv, Israel. The trip inspired an analogy: She compares the insular community of hyperconnected techies to the shtetls formed by Jews of the European diaspora to protect their community from the ignorance and prejudice of illiterate gentiles. Except they speak Nerdic instead of Yiddish.
we read twitter so you don't have to
