Last week at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit, our COO Sean Ammirati spoke to Betaworks CEO John Borthwick. Betaworks has funded and incubated a number of companies in the real-time Web market, such as TweetDeck, Bit.ly and Chartbeat.
The fundamental methods journalists use to find stories and engage with sources is changing. On the cusp of the media revolution is National Public Radio senior strategist Andy Carvin and his use of social media and crowd sourcing to tell the story of turmoil in the Middle East ... from 5000 miles away.
Carvin used Twitter to build a network that now keeps him on top of the news that comes out of the Middle East and in doing so has shown the media industry a new way to be a reporter. The question becomes: is the future of the news industry tied to the technology or is technology an enabler to creating human networks that spread information?
Two startups aimed at tackling the problem of excessive noise on Twitter are combining forces. Twitter-powered new reader StrawberryJ.am is partnering with tweet-scheduler Buffer to surface the top stories in your social stream each day and tweet them at regular intervals.
Think of StrawberryJ.am as an automated curator of stories in your social stream. Its algorithm finds what the people you are following are tweeting about them presents them to the user in a manner reminiscent of Reddit or Digg, though combined with the social graph, the way XYDO does. You can then load those stories into your Buffer queue and they will be tweeted throughout the day. StrawberryJ.am is offering beta invites to ReadWriteWeb readers. Check after the jump for information.
Twitter has been developing a lot of new core products recently that used to be filled through third-party applications. Yesterday, the company introduced a new feature to Twitter.com - automatic link shortening.
If you wanted to shorten a link within Twitter.com before, you had to use a link shortening service like Bit.ly or TinyURL and paste the link into the "New Tweet" field. Twitter will now truncate URLs that are longer than 13 characters and give them a t.co ID (Twitter's URL shortening handle) while keeping the original URL intact so you know where the link originated.
Twitter is getting into the photo-sharing business. This is a natural extension to the Twitter product and its stated goal of giving users a consistent user experience across all of its clients. But how will this affect other photo sharing services that have dominated the space in the Twitter ecosystem?
Social media research company Sysomos looked at all the tweets from May 30 to see what services people were using. Of all tweets that day, Sysomos found that 1.25% of tweets contained a link to a photo sharing service, or about 1/12th of all links shared. That translates into 2.125 million tweets that were pictures from third-party services. It is just one day of Twitter, but it's probably indicative of day-to-day trends. What third party services were the most popular?
Twitter has just announced some photo news, as rumors circulating over the Memorial Day holiday weekend hinted it would. The big reveal isn't exactly a new photo-sharing or photo-storage service - Twitter will not be hosting the photos you Tweet now. But that doesn't mean that today's announcement is irrelevant or unimportant.
Today's announcement actually has two part: one dealing with search and one dealing with photos. It also involves two new partners for the company: Firefox and Photobucket.
We know that Twitter has been growing astronomically. At the same time, Twitter is still an emerging service, growing beyond from its early adopter base to the Internet as a whole. Pew Research reports that from November 2010 to May 2011 overall Twitter use grew 5% and U.S. adult Internet users jumped from 8% to 13%.
Pew says that 95% of all Twitter users own a mobile phone and 54% of those users access Twitter via mobile. Black (25%) and Hispanic (19%) people tend to use Twitter more than white people (9%). Twitter use has seen a rise in all age demographics. The biggest jump has come in the 25- to 34-year-old age bracket, up 10% with 19% of people in that group now using Twitter.
Rumors surfaced over the holiday weekend that Twitter was in talks to acquire AdGrok, and the startup has just confirmed the news on its blog.
A Y Combinator alum, AdGrok offers a platform to help businesses manage their Google Adwords. The company built a number of tools to make the process easier for businesses to be able to gauge the performance of the keywords they're buying, with a breakdown of the impressions, clicks, and conversion rates.
Earlier this month, entrepreneur and blogger Jesse Stay noticed that both Facebook and Twitter had completely removed support for RSS from of their websites. After much outcry from the tech community, Facebook relented and re-added an RSS link to Facebook Pages once again. Twitter, however, did nothing.
But now, one developer has taken it upon himself to build a tool that uses Twitter's API (application programming interface) to create RSS feeds. The code, called "Twitter API 2 RSS," is now available on GitHub here.
In British law, a "superinjunction" is a gag order on the press that extends even to reporting on the fact that there is a gag order on the press. In U.K. courts, these superinjunctions are apparently handed out like popcorn on behalf of any strutting boob with enough pounds sterling or screen time to get the judge's attention. This can hardly be surprising for a country whose libel laws are so biased that they have given birth to "libel tourism."
Now, the Twitterverse has no such law. I think you can figure out what happened next. Although newspapers have been fighting against superinjunctions for some time, with one, the Sun, even kicking at the boundaries, one Twitter user just up and pegged it right in the gear.
