Peter Troast, founder of Energy Circle, a company that sells energy-saving products, has created a new energy-monitoring system that sends his home's energy usage stats to Twitter. Inspired by the open source power monitoring kit from Tweet-a-Watt, Troast's system also sends his home's energy data to the web, but it's not in the form of once-a-day tweets like Tweet-a-Watt provides. Instead, his system uses a monitoring device called TED (The Energy Dectective) to create charts which are annotated by family members then tweeted for everyone to see. If you want to do the same for your home, we've got the info.
Google Analytics, Google's tool for generating detailed visitor stats for web sites, just launched an API, which will finally allow developers to create desktop and online tools that can use and mash up data from Google Analytics with other data on the Internet. This API will also allow developers to create mobile interfaces for Google Analytics for Android or the iPhone, for example.
Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey, is visiting Iraq to bring the microblogging service into government and civil society there. In an interview with CNN's American Morning (embedded below) Dorsey says he hopes Twitter can help make the new Iraqi government more accessible and help spread good news from Iraq out to the rest of the world. Dorsey is traveling with a State Department delegation hoping that new social media will facilitate greater social stability in Iraq.
You'll see in the video below that CNN Anchor, Kiran Chetry, asks silly questions about terrorists using Twitter (it is available on cell phones, which terrorist have used) and about Oprah on Twitter. There's a reason why traditional media is being so effectively challenged by emerging media - the latter is more interesting and in many cases acts more like a meritocracy.
NPR has a great site to find its line-up of podcasts, but until now, PBS only featured videos from its TV shows on their respective homepages. Now, however, viewers will be able to turn to just one site, PBS Video, to find all of their favorite public television shows like 'Nova' or 'Antiques Roadshow.' Even though PBS is a non-profit organization, it faces some of the same challenges as its commercial brethren like Hulu or YouTube, as local stations don't want to lose viewers to the net, and as production companies don't want to give up control over their content.
Dusty Reagan, who runs the Twitter app FriendOrFollow, recently launched a new Twitter ad network called FeaturedUsers. Before you moan and groan about how Twitter is becoming too commercialized, listen up: this ad network isn't about splicing ads into your Twitter stream. Instead, it takes a page from Twitter's own "Recommended Users" section which is shown to new users upon sign-up. The difference is that the FeaturedUsers ad network serves up recommendations across Twitter's ecosystem of affiliate applications, including of course FriendOrFollow, but also on nearly twenty other sites like Twitdom, TwtBase, FollowCost, DoesFollow, and more. And more apps are waiting to sign up because FeaturedUsers is actually helping Twitter app developers make money.
As a technology news writer, you get pretty good at sizing up the potential of a new project or product pretty quickly. It is easy to get a little jaded, quickly cubby-holing something new just because it acts like something already out there. I admit to doing just that when I first visited the 3deep web site.
Luckily, I was invited to talk with CEO, Gary Griffiths, of LiteScape Technologies, and Director of Product Marketing, Henry 'Hank' Nothhaft Jr. (Twitter), developers of the 3deep product. For the next hour, I was able to get a really good idea about their innovative new product. And although it isn't out in beta to play with yet, it is definitely worth learning about.
According to Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, there are too many Indians and not enough Chiefs in the world of Web 2.0 marketing today. "There is a lot of advice about how brands should be interacting [online]," he said in a keynote presentation at Ad:Tech San Francisco today. "But, unless your brand is information dense, this highly interactive marketing is both expensive and useless."
The good news however, is that communities offer the best bang for your buck in this miserable economy and Wales sees return on investment (ROI) as an "incredible steal right now," when it comes to consumer generated media.
Google me? I'll Google you! Google has become the de facto public record these days but most people remain in relative obscurity there and/or fear of what past indiscretions Google will expose to people who search for them.
Today Google released a product, called Google Me, that aims to change all of that. For a price - though not a monetary one.
Oprah's well publicized first tweet on Friday was definitely a boon for Twitter. According to Hitwise, 37% of all visits to Twitter last Friday were from new visitors, and Twitter's overall share of U.S. Internet visits increased 24% on Friday. It is important to note, though, that Twitter, being the new and growing service that it is, usually gets about 32% new visitors every day, which definitely puts these numbers into perspective. Hitwise, however, also notes that Facebook's ratio of new visitors was only 8% in March.
Windows Live received a major makeover last November, and part of this makeover included the ability to aggregate updates from third-party services like Flickr, Pandora, or Twitter. Today, Microsoft announced that its users will now also be able to import their updates from 20 additional partners, including Digg, Last.fm, SmugMug, and Facebook. In addition, users will soon be able to invite their friends on MySpace, Hi5, and Tagged to join their Windows Live network. In Europe, Microsoft Live has also teamed up with a number of popular local services like Hyves, Dailymotion.com, and Dada.
