London's Metropolitan police told reporters they were delving into Twitter and other social media as part of their investigation into looting. For the past four days, many parts of London, centering on Tottenham, have erupted in fire and looting. Started as a response to the alleged shooting of a protestor, Mark Duggan, it seems to have taken a less salubrious turn as the days wore on. Now, police are looking at, among other things, tweeted pictures of looters' spoils. According to PCR, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Stephen Kavanagh told the media:
"Social media and other methods have been used to organise these levels of greed and criminality ... That investigation is already under way and that is exactly the sort of thing we are looking at."
Get Ready for a Twitter vs. Google Plus Fight for Developer Love
Like to hack on Twitter feeds, streams and APIs? Then there's good news for you this morning. Twitter has acquired a small startup company called Bagcheck, but the real score in the deal was bringing co-founder Sam Pullara onto the team. Pullara was previously the Chief Technologist at Yahoo where he lead many of the best programs at that beleaguered but technically awesome company.
Yahoo Pipes, Yahoo Query Language, Yahoo Search BOSS and other inspiring technologies that enabled hackers all around the web to roll out sophisticated mashups powered by Yahoo's backend were championed for years by Pullara. Not everyone liked him, but people who love to experiment with data have got to be excited about his coming to Twitter, the world's most promising stream of publicly available, semi-structured, real-time social data. Twitter's relationship with developers has been troubled at times, but Pullara's joining the team is the latest step the company has taken to make amends with its developer ecosystem.
I admit: it's taken me a while to warm up to Google Plus. Several of our team were early enthusiasts, one or two suggesting that it may even replace their use of Facebook or Twitter. That got me wondering: how many Google Plus users are spending less time on Facebook and/or Twitter? I surveyed people on Google Plus about it and also did a bit of unscientific research.
The feedback I received and results from my research show that Twitter usage is indeed decreasing amongst these early Google Plus users. Facebook seems at less immediate risk, because family and non-tech friends won't be abandoning Facebook for Google Plus any time soon. Interestingly, very few people said that Google Plus hadn't impacted their usage of Twitter and Facebook. In other words, Google Plus is clearly disrupting both Twitter and Facebook.
Document hosting and sharing site Scribd is venturing into the mobile space in order to give its publishers an opportunity to attract more readers. With a new mobile reader application called Float, Scribd aggregates content from news sites, magazines, blogs, and Scribd.com as well as from your social networks like Facebook and Twitter. You can also save items you find online to read later in Float, with the use of a specialized browser bookmarklet.
But what's most unique about this app is the way it reformats the text for the small screen. The "floating text" reading experience, which gives the app its name, reflows text originally formatted for the Web for better reading on mobile devices.
Want to sync your Google Plus updates to other social networks, without having to use a browser extension? There's a new way to do this, called "Agent G," which is actually a special Google Plus user account. Once configured, you can automatically share your Google Plus updates to the social networks of your choice, just by adding "Agent G" alongside the names of the Circles or friends you're sharing a post with on Google Plus.
Famously thrilling and troubled web app platform Twitter announced today that it now has 1 million apps developed on top of its microblogging streams, social graph and API. The company says that at this time last year there were only 150,000 apps built on top of Twitter.
A 6X expansion of apps built on top of Twitter between the company's 4th and 5th birthdays is truly remarkable. It's even more remarkable because it's been widely alleged that the developer community is unhappy with Twitter's leadership and feels disinclined to invest in building more apps. Happy or not, this is a huge jump in activity and I think the claim deserves a little investigation. Many people have guessed that the numbers aren't very solid, but there are a number of explanations that if combined could add up to this big, big jump.
Starting next week, SpongeBob SquarePants will come to Twitter with a story specially made for the micro-blogging platform. Here's the pitch from Nickelodeon: "The Ice Race Cometh: A Twitter-Tale, was conceived and developed for Twitter by the SpongeBob SquarePants writing team and will run from Tuesday, July 12, to Friday, July 15. The story will be told via multiple tweets and images throughout each day to set scenes and advance the action involving SpongeBob and his friends as they prepare for The Bikini Bottom Great Sleigh Race." Tune in, or retweet, or something.
OK, I realize that ReadWriteWeb is not your go-to site for SpongeBob SquarePants news. And normally, the notion of SpongeBob - on Twitter or elsewhere - is probably the sort of pitch that most tech bloggers would roll their eyes at and ignore or delete.
But with the flurry of interest over the last week-and-a-half over Google Plus and questions about its potential implications for Twitter and Facebook alike, I've been curious to see how some of the storytelling efforts we've seen on Twitter may or may not transfer to Google's new social network.
What sorts of storytelling forms will we see on Google Plus? Will they build on some of the wonderfully creative endeavors on Twitter? Will authors have a stronger voice on Twitter or on Google Plus? Will they be able to better engage with readers in one network or the other?
One of the most impressive parts of Google's beta rollout of Plus is the fact that Google had a fully functional Android application available in the Android Market the minute Plus went live.
As such, I have a unique introduction to Google Plus - mobile first. It is an interesting way to test an experimental new social network. The Plus Android app is polished and impressive. But, just as Plus is entering into the crowded social network space, so does the Android application against the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. How do the Android applications compare?
Twitter may start putting ads in user streams, according to a report from the Financial Times. "Promoted tweets" would appear in the main flow of tweets on the Twitter homepage, likely as an extension of the company's current "Promoted Products" format - trends and accounts.
Reporting from advertising conference Cannes Lions in France, The Financial Times says that Twitter executives have been meeting with ad executives "on the fringes" of the event this week. Other reported options Twitter could use to help monetize the service are Groupon-syle daily deals as well as instituting some type of "QuickBar" on its home page, much like the one that caused an uproar when the company put it in its mobile applications.
