GigaOM posted today that Twitter is may be going "fremium" asking for a payment if your followers count go over 2000. However Evan Williams (one of Twitter's co-founders) replied that this is not true.
In various interviews Twitter co-founders shared that they explore the possibilities of taking the money for twitting from corporate users, however I am sure that it would aply more to some specific brands and some extra services.
3 days ago I started using our alfa-version of twitter client. I personally prefer to use the web-based version, as I don't really need to be alerted about new messages instantly. It doesn't have a skin (design) on yet and lacks some features but the alerts and groups work and show how many new twitts each person has.
I have updated the page about the alfa-version. If you are already following me, d-msg me and I'll give you a link to try it.
I now follow 158 people on Twitter and some time ago I started to notice that I use Twitter less and less frequently 'cause I get tons of Twitts that are really worthless to me. But after I've set alerts for the 14 people which twitts I don't want to miss twitter got it's permanent place in one of my tabs.
What I also noticed is that people that twitt less usually twitt about some important things in their life or about the world around them and these twitts are really interesting. Of course there are some exeptions. So before pushing that send button next time take a second and think if your Twitt is interesting for the people that follow you, newsworthy or funny.
That is my personal notice, I would love to hear your thoughts about that.
This is a very short list :)
It's just the tools I use personally.
In a techcrunch post Michael Arrington breaks the news that Gnip now gets the full Twitter PubSub Feed and all developers can access it via Gnip's API.
Twitter's top managers stated earlier that they are worried about if it's safe to give away the full feed and in the Twitter Development Talk group they Alex mentioned that if the XMPP feed would be given to anybody it would require an additional contract that would prohibit resyndicatíon of this content. Currently only a few sites were given access to to this feed including FriendFeed that is actually building a competitor to Twitter on top of this feed.
I really think it's a great move as Twitter actually keeps the control over the feed as it can still cut any site from using it and it can cut Gnip in case it wouldn't be able to block the sites that abuse the feed usage.
For all the developers it's simply great, because that would allow us to provide updates to users in real time handling all the communication with the end-user from own servers without pushing the API calls to their limits. The Twitter API would serve to get the additional protected information.
I still didn't see a company that did the work with 3d party developers right. Google's i-home is a tutorial on how the work with developers shouldn't be done, Facebook lets crappy apps win the popularity race without supporting the apps that create user value and Twitter is navigating the waters that has high storm risk. And I really think Twitter should help some small apps and bots get some popularity advertising them inside Twitter. I know some absoultelly great Twitter aps that will never get very popular, but are really valuable and need some help in promotion.
stevekinney: Twitter – who makes no money – just paid for a service that made no money (Summize). Maybe everything I thought is wrong.
Great news for all Twitter developers: Twitter will extend the possibilities of the current API with search functionality from summize. Summize.com now redirects to search.twitter.com and as I understand we will soon see a change in the Twitter UI also.
If you need detailed info Alex Payne answers some questions about the acquisition in this post.
Why is this important?
Some applications were already using Summize API, but it's really tricky to count on a 3d party API as it can shut doors or change rules any time it wants. As it is now the part of Twitter developers can count on it and use it, so expect a lot of interesting search and tracking apps to appear in the future.
Threaded @conversations?
Summize can currently locate and display dialogs. The real question that I think is important for most of the Twitter community is if summize will offer this feature to 3d party developers via API. Normal conversation tracking is the #1 feature that Twitter really needs. After Twitter has shut the "PubSub" for most of developers it is impossible to make something like quotably.com without a special "yes" for Twitter, so the search API is the only hope to get this done.
Michael Arrington's interview with Evan Williams:
you can read the full post at techcrunch.
The news about a man getting out from jail helped twitter to get to it's peak of 0.14% reach on the 3d of June. However it has fallen back to 0.06 right now and that's even lower then it was before the news. The fact is that Twitter can't keep the acquired mainstream traffic because it lacks some features that are vital for such a service. Even a simple HTML page with tips whom to follow could make a difference. There are tons of interesting bots and bloggers on twitter but it's really hard to find them.
As for other competitors - they won't see any light anyway.
You can see the Alexa's traffic graph here.
As Alex Payne stated here:
We're attempting to get back to 70 requests per hour this week. We've just now raised the limit to 40 per hour and things are holding steady. If all continues to go well, we should be back to 70 today or tomorrow. We'll try to keep it there barring special events that are announced ahead of time.
Everthing Twitter is a new site that lists lots of interesting tools for twitter. It's a really nice collection with additional descriptions.
You can also find a nice small collection at TwitterHolics
As twitter started to gain traction lots of services popped up that were cloning it. The latest and one of the most successful was plurk but all of them don't really have a chance until they have the start traffic that would beat twitter in user-base amounts right upstart.
Twitter doesn't have a viral loop strong enough to grow by itself. It wasn't designed the way to fully exploit this. The dynamics of jaiku and pownce clearly show that too. However twitter grows... but why? The answer is really simple. Media loves twitter getting news out from it. If media loves you, they will write about you even if you are not newsworthy, but they definitely won't write about a smaller service as it won't be important to them. And as I already wrote twitters viral loop isn't strong enough to grow the service all by itself without the help of the media. So all microblogging services that appear that would attract less users then twitter from start are doomed as they won't get any press coverage.
Well google actually thought it's a great idea to buy jaiku that's in fact is just a twitter clone and to be "clean" and launch a service they have stolen bought. However it can take years till they finally go out from their closed beta as it always happen with google's acquisitions, but it could also be earlier leaving twitter with less time to prepare for real competition. If google launches it inside it's gmail using the chat status messages twitter would be dead.
Earlier in this post i wrote that twitter doesn't have a viral loop that is strong enough to grow the service by itself. It's actually half true... If microblogging ever reaches the point where 20% of Internet users actually use it actively or passively a madness will start. When you have one friend using some service you won't join, if 5 of your friends tell you about it - you would.
Just watched the movie "Untraceable". Well a bit late for a movie review of course, but I want to post about would it possible to repeat something similar? Let's leave the killing thing aside, my post is about marketing and not about committing crimes :-)
So let's try to repeat the creation of the bot-net and make the site intended to kill people go viral.
The guy that has built the site in the film is a true genius. You can be good in marketing or tech or at killing people, but being perfect at everything is a rear composition. You need a A-class team to repeat what he did.
The movie is actually well done in tech-terms. It seems that the authors consulted some professionals and know how Internet works in general.
Hosting a site on a bot-net is possible, however no one in the world now controls a bot-net of this size. The most successful hackers get around 100.000 installations a day, but that are already teams of at least 5 people. Creating installs cost money. Yes, hacking is not only illegal but also requires money. To create a bot-net of this size the guy would have needed around $1,5M in raw tech costs, 6 Month of time and a great team.
Taking the site down. Well it's a movie :-) The register of the domain would have blocked it instantly. But let's assume it was some .island domain and FBI couldn't reach the register. Cable providers would block the site really fast and there are also the updates of browsers that could have been used for that. The possibilities of how to take a site down are endless, no site can survive if anybody with money or influence wants it down.
Some people tend to think that it is enough to have great content to make your site go viral. However it's not. A site that kills victims in real time has good viral potential, but there are tons of sites that list similar recorded media. Each viral promotional loop has it's borders. Starting with one person it usually stops somewhere hitting the users that don't tend to share everything with their friends. Imagine that viral growths is a tree - some branches have lots of branches and leaves, but the leaves are the dead-end where the viral promotion stops. So you have to seed a lot of trees to get the scale.
How could this guy seed some trees from his cellar? On the second video he has hit the 6.000.000 visitors within an hour. As we know he had a huge bot-net and he had access to user's social network accounts. He could use them to post the link to the site. However passing on usually requires entering the captcha images and it also costs money. Theoretically having HUGE technical possibilities and money it is possible to make it happen, but I haven't heard of anybody capable of reaching that amounts of users in such a short time.
I know there are some really smart people reading this post. Is any of you capable to reach 6.000.000 visitors in 2 hours of time? Due to my calculations making this happen would require something like $2M investments and around 8 month of preparation and I am still not sure if I could repeat it. Well... may be I am just not smart enough.
When a new person gets inside Twitter he usually faces a problem that he doesn't actually know anybody out there. That's actually a huge problem for Twitter going mainstream. When you join Facebook you actually can just upload your photos and tell your friends you have a new album there or if somebody is already registered you can write a mail and the person will be notified, or you can just join some groups, see the photos of people you don't quite know add some apps. The point is that a person joining Twitter feels lonely with 0 followers and doesn't really have much to do. Due to some stats Twitter has something like 10.000.000 people registered but less then 10% ever come back.
What is vital for Twitter is to make use of your own contacts so your friends can be notified on what you write. Plaxo made exactly the same thing, the only difference is they were sending too much emails without people actually knowing all of their contacts get spammed. If it's a weekly or daily e-mail - it's a service, if you get a notification on everything without a chance to easily change settings it's spam.
But lets get back to the question of getting your friends use Twitter. Even if you make them register it won't help. A couple of services are still needed to make this work and I'll add the needed ones. At first give them your RSS feed to integrate as a live-bookmark or in their news-reader. Then explain that they can generate such a feed and can just update Twitter via IM, e-mail, SMS. The right way to get real friends inside Twitter is actually not to force them, but let them watch you and reply to you without changing their habits and the way of life they are used to.
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