Twitter desktop client TweetDeck holds "Hack Days" that are opportunities for their developers to break their normal routines and create a new project. TweetDeck held a Hack Day May 11 and their programmers were hard at work creating some innovative new designs that have the opportunity to make it into production.
Entries included "Quick Send Tweet" that allows you to email tweets to yourself for later browsing, a Gmail notification box and a cool Android hack called "Tweet-As-You-Go" that uses a smartphone camera to view a live background on the compose tweet screen. Check out the entries after the jump and vote for them on TweetDeck's blog.
If you use Twitter a lot, sometimes it seems like your stream is feast or famine. During the day you tweet about what is happening, have conversations on various topics or report on your surroundings. Yet, during the evenings or weekends, you hardly tweet at all. Smart professionals, brands and media organizations schedule tweets throughout the day to maintain the façade of an "always on" Internet presence.
A new application has been launched by a couple of young men in England that tries to make scheduling tweets as painless as possible. Buffer App is a clean and simple freemium tool that allows users to load tweets into the "buffer" and have them sent out at pre-scheduled times, determined by the app.
When Twitter warned developers last March against building Twitter clients, it used one word repeatedly in its announcement: "consistent".
"We need to ensure that tweets, and tweet actions, are rendered in a consistent way so that people have the same experience with tweets no matter where they are," wrote Twitter platform lead Ryan Sarver.
Twitter photo-sharing service TwitPic has updated its terms of service to clear up any misunderstanding of who owns the pictures uploaded to the service. There have been controversies in the past year about media organizations using photos posted on TwitPic and not giving proper attribution or compensation to the original photographer.
TwitPic's new terms of service should clear up that confusion. In it TwitPic explicitly states that content uploaded by a user is the copyright of the respective owner. It is not part of the public domain and is subject to how the user, not media organizations, chooses to have it disseminated.
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...
Last month, rumors hit the Web that TweetDeck, the multi-columned, much-preferred desktop client of hardcore users, had been acquired by Twitter. Today, TechCrunch is reporting that the deal has gone through, with Twitter snapping up the company for $40 to $50 million.
While we don't want to be melodramatic, we're afraid that this deal could be the beginning of the end and here's why.
Trying to search for old tweets can be a pain. Twitter's own search engine brings back limited results and the top search engines like Google and Bing are so focused on real-time that trying to get something older than a couple of days is almost impossible. Often times you will find yourself scrolling through your timeline looking for that one tweet you sent months ago. If you tweet a lot, that is a giant hassle.
PostPo.st thinks that it has come up with the solution. When you sign up for the service PostPost will determine 200 of your most relevant follows and index up to 400 tweets for each user. If some of the people you follow are also PostPost users then nearly all of their tweets will indexed. PostPo.st attempts to be as comprehensive a Twitter search engine that exists today.
The number of people who have registered accounts on Twitter has now surpassed 200 million, a representative of the company said publicly yesterday. Katie Stanton, Twitter's VP of International Strategy, said at the Guardian Activate conference in New York that there are now more than 200 million Twitter accounts worldwide and more than 70% of all Twitter's traffic comes from outside the U.S. That means Stanton's job is very important and whatever her International Strategy is, it seems to be working. Roughly 25% of all tweets come from Japan alone, she said.
Twitter said last month that it was adding just under a half million new accounts per day and its business-facing page says there are 175 million registered users.
Twitter has taken to redesigning the OAuth screen - the screen you see whenever you decide to login to an application using your Twitter account - in an attempt to better show what you are agreeing to when you hit the "Allow," err, "Authorize app" button.
Twitter developer advocate Matt Harris announced on the developer Google group this afternoon that they were working on refreshing the screen to offer "better clarity about what an application can see and do with an account." Though it might be better than before, it's still missing one key thing - the fact that the app can access your DMs.
Tomorrow, Friday, April 29, the penultimate space shuttle mission launches and a 30 year shuttle program draws to a close. Mark Kelley, NASA Commander of Space Shuttle Endeavor's final flight, aka mission STS-134, will take questions live on May 2.
Kelley and his crew will take questions via YouTube and Twitter and their responses will be broadcast live over the PBS News Hour's YouTube channel. Miles O'Brien, a space reporter with decades of experience in broadcasting, will moderate.
