An Interview With TweetDeck Founder Iain Dodsworth
A small startup company called InfoChimps released for sale yesterday three very large sets of data extracted from 500 million Twitter messages. Included in the offering are the senders and recipients of 1 billion @ messages, Retweets and Favorites. We wrote in-depth about the release late last night. This morning we interviewed Iain Dodsworth, creator of the most popular Twitter client, TweetDeck, about the value he might find in that data and the direction he's aiming to take TweetDeck in the future.
Google has just announced that it is working on a new protocol that will minimize latency and speed up the Web experience for users. SPDY (pronounced "speedy") is not meant to replace HTTP, the protocol that allows Web servers and browsers to talk to each other today, but it does augment HTTP. The new protocol incorporates features like multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression. Google has already developed a prototype Web server and a version of Google Chrome with built-in SPDY support.
Boxee just announced that it plans to release a dedicated Boxee hardware device in partnership with an undisclosed consumer entertainment company. This is a big step for Boxee. The software, which aggregates Internet video content from a wide variety of sources, is already designed to run on home entertainment PCs that are connected to TVs. The market for these devices is still very small, but if Boxee manages to get its software on a large number of connected TVs, set-top boxes and BluRay players, the company could easily establish itself as the standard interface for bringing Internet content to the living room. Boxee will share more details about the device on December 7.
If you're not one of the fortunate few to have gotten your hands on a Google Wave invite, then you probably don't have too much use for Waveboard, an iPhone-ready interface for Google's new real-time collaboration system. However, if you've recently become a member of the Google Wave cult, you may have already forked over the 99 cents for this mobile app so that you could create, browse and respond to "waves" while on the go.
While some early testers of the Waveboard app complained that it didn't do anything more than what the iPhone optimized website already offered, the next release of Waveboard may have those naysayers changing their mind. Waveboard 2.0 has a few new features, but the one that will grab everyone's attention is its ability to offer "push" notifications on the iPhone.
When Google announced its plans for a new cloud-based operating system built around the Web browser, there was some concern about the OS' capabilities. Although a lot of our computing can now be done in the Web browser these days thanks to online applications and services, quite a few operations still need to take place on the hard drive - running iTunes, for example, or importing photos from a digital camera. How would a Web-based operating system handle these sorts of tasks? Based on what we knew of Google Chrome OS, it seemed like the OS just wouldn't be able to do them.
But a new discovery in the Google Chrome OS browser code base points to a "mount library" that monitors devices inserted in the computer. Would Chrome OS be able to see your iPod? Your camera? And what would it do then?
Clicker, which aims to be the TV Guide for Internet television, just launched. We first reviewed Clicker last week when it was still in private beta. The version that went live today features a number of significant improvements to the private beta version. Clicker now indexes 33% more shows than before and indexes over 400,000 full episodes from 7,000 shows. Clicker also now features an improved DVR-like playlist, integration with Facebook Connect and improved search. In addition, Clicker users can now also comment on shows and use a wiki-like feature to contribute information about a given show or episode.
In August we reviewed Demand Media, one of the largest producers of content on the Web
today. Wired Magazine recently compared Demand Media's content business to Henry Ford's production line for cars. Demand Media currently produces 4,000 new pieces of content a day. What's more, it's increasingly syndicating this content to media sites outside of its own network of vertical websites. In other words, Demand Media is becoming a very large content production factory for third party sites such as Yahoo.
In this follow-up post, we dive deeper into Demand Media's content production model - and ask questions about the quality of the output.
Data extracted from 500 million Twitter messages was released today by a tiny Texas startup company that forward-looking geeks have been watching for a year. Austin-based Infochimps announced this afternoon that it is now selling two important and very large sets of Twitter data. Limited samples of the data are available for free and a third, most important, set of data still won't be ready for a few more hours.
"What we want is to see people use this to build web apps," Infochimps co-founder Flip Kromer told us today. "You take this data, mash it up with any other very large corpus of data with timestamps - and you've got a web app."
The OpenID Foundation has announced nominations and upcoming elections for six open community board seats.
This year marks the Foundation's second election; last year, Snorri Giorgetti, Nat Sakimura, Chris Messina, David Recordon, Eric Sachs, Scott Kveton and Brian Kissel were elected. Of the current community board members, Messina and Sakimura were elected to two-year terms. Kveton has indicated he will not serve another term.
Shopping is horror. The prices. The lines. The hordes of clamoring consumers. The thought of holiday shopping is, in itself, enough to make us wish for simpler days when putting coal in someone's sock was a legitimate option.
But, whether we like it or not, we can't Grinch out; so we'd better start thinking about the gift-giving season now and get it over with. And since your friends at ReadWriteWeb are huge geeks, we thought we'd amuse you with a few Internet-enabled oddities that might actually make your obligatory retail purgatory a little more bearable.
