In the wake of today's confirmed acquisition of Skype by Microsoft Corp., tech press, analysts and armchair quarterbacks alike have been busy speculating why Microsoft would buy Skype (and why it spent $8.5 billion to do so). While we can't address the price of the deal, we do know as of this morning, exactly what Microsoft plans to do with Skype...at least in part.
Skype, the company states, will be coming to Xbox and Kinect, Windows Phone, Lync and Outlook, plus other Windows devices and communities.
TweetDeck, the leading third party Twitter client, has been acquired by Twitter - according to Techcrunch. As of writing, neither Twitter or TweetDeck have confirmed the deal. If it does go through, it will spell the end of TweetDeck's grand plan to become the central hub for social networks. In other words, the Holy Grail of the social Web. While it started out as just a third party Twitter client, for most of its nearly 3 year existence TweetDeck has been building itself up to be a "a new browser for the real-time Web."
Since it added Facebook support in March 2009, TweetDeck has aimed to be a central app from which people can interact with all of their social networks. That's a potentially massive commercial opportunity for a startup. Imagine being able to control your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn and other social services using the one interface. That's precisely what TweetDeck does right now, only it's not quite fully functional yet and people haven't gotten used to the concept. Unfortunately, the acquisition by Twitter will put an end to TweetDeck's ambition and we'll have to wait for another startup to chase that Holy Grail. Here's how this all played out and our guess at what will happen next...
If you're familiar with Twitter (or even Facebook these days), then you might recognize the new feature just released by real-time comment system Disqus: @mentions.
Originally started on Twitter, the @ symbol has quickly become the character of choice for directing comments toward a certain recipient. Now, the symbol has made its way to the popular commenting service, allowing users to mention others in the conversation and even pull other people into the conversation.
Real-time commenting system Disqus came out this morning with a bunch of numbers, including "10 million" (how many dollars it just secured). The battle for commenting solutions on the Web has clearly not died just because Facebook jumped in the ring.
As a matter of fact, Disqus co-founder and CEO Daniel Ha says the company has grown immensely over recent years and he has the numbers to back it up...Facebook comments, be damned.
Twitter has no doubt changed how we think about real-time messaging. Twitter has given users a new platform upon which to "chat" - through posting messages, through targeted, but public @-messages and through private DMs. But "chat" doesn't quite describe what people do on Twitter. And no doubt, Twitter doesn't quite work seamlessly as a traditional chat client.
There's the character limitation, of course. There're the restrictions on DMing those who don't follow you. And if you have email notifications set up, there's the annoying influx in your inbox when you try to hold a conversation via direct message.
A new service launching today aims to leverage your Twitter network in order to build a better instant messaging platform. Joint lets you chat with those in your Twitter network - but it doesn't use Twitter to do so.
If you've ever used craigslist before then you know, it's just not very good. That's not to say you can't find what you need on there. The site is full of amazing deals and goods and services of all kinds, but navigating it involves opening new browser tab after browser tab, going back and forth and generally losing your way.
For those of you who are tired of the craigslist user experience from circa 1996, head on over to craiggers, the site that lets you interact with Craigslist the way you ought to.
Ever since Google launched its instantaneous search product last fall, I've noticed something - everywhere I go on the Web, I enter search terms and and pause for a second, only to remember that not everything has yet gone instant.
Today, Yahoo has announced that it too has gone instant, but with a slight twist on Google's solution to providing an ever faster real-time Web. Yahoo says it will offer "answers, not links".
The Y-Combinator-backed startup Convore launches today, boasting one of the easiest ways to handle group-chat.
Convore is a real-time communication tool, but unlike many other apps that offer group chat, Convore runs in your browser and doesn't require a download or chat client. "Basically, it's a contemporary version of IRC," says co-founder Leah Culver.
Khris Loux and his company, Echo, have always had a tentative relationship with the lowly blog comment. Echo launched in 2009, described as a "blog commenting platform" much like Disqus. Right from the beginning, however, Echo went beyond the comment and aggregated all sorts of real-time data from around the Web to pull into the section normally reserved for comments. Now, Echo has gone beyond declaring the death of the comment and re-launched as a "real-time as a service" platform.
At its re-launch event today, the company brought out the big guns to show off just how useful it thinks its new incarnation will be. We got a chance to talk with them beforehand to go beneath a bit of the flashiness and we got a glimpse of a service that adds a new building block onto the Web and could bring the real-time Web to previously untouched corners of the Internet.
For the past two years we've been keeping an eye on real-time search engine Collecta, watching as it's inked some big deals, widgetized its real-time feeds and raised some funding. Today, however, it looks like the company has decided to change directions. Collecta announced to developers today that "Collecta is changing over the coming months" and that the API will be unavailable as of February 11.
The home page, once the home of a series of trending topics, now features a real-time feed of images from the likes of Flickr and TwitPic, in an overt hint at the company's likely next move.
