Twitter has announced its long-awaited Web analytics dashboard. At last, website owners will be able to clearly see how Twitter drives attention to their content. The Twitter Web Analytics panel shows how content is shared across Twitter, how much traffic Twitter refers, and how much engagement a site generates with the integrated tweet button.
"Twitter Web Analytics will be rolled out this week to a small pilot group of partners, and will be made available to all website owners within the next few weeks," the announcement says. "We're also committed to releasing a Twitter Web Analytics API for developers interested in incorporating Twitter data in their products." Just like Google Analytics, Twitter's dashboard will be free for publishers.
There's no shortage of services that take content from the Twitter firehose and present it in a different way. But one caught my eye recently, because it's doing something I'd always hoped a really good RSS aggregator would do: track topics. Nobody ever built the RSS topic tracker that I'd dreamed about. It's not a technical problem, more of a demand one. As you all know, the Web has evolved over the past 5-10 years into a very social tool. People prefer to follow (= track) people, more so than follow topics.
However, perhaps the time for topic trackers has come - given the ever growing problem of information overload in the Social Web. Twylah is thinking along those lines and has served up a pretty good (beta) solution.
With mobile tech, Siemens helps torture a new generation, this time in Bahrain. Siemens was instrumental in bringing the Nazis to power and keeping them there as they murdered millions of Jews, along with Gypsies, trade unionists, leftists, homosexuals and others. Serving as one of its engines of genocide, Siemens provided the German Reich with, among other things, slave labor factories located next to concentration camps. Apparently, Siemens thinks that it has been good enough for long enough and that this Internet thing has made a sense of history a thing of the past.
Bloomberg reports that Siemens AG and its joint venture, Nokia Siemens Networks, has made it possible for Bahraini secret police to intercept and generate transcripts of text messages and other mobile communications made by protesters in that country's troubled version of the Arab Spring.
There are now 100 million people actively using Twitter, the company announced today.
If this news sounds vaguely familiar, it's because the five-year-old microblogging service reached 100 million user accounts awhile ago. These new numbers refer to active users, which CEO Dick Costolo defines as people that sign into Twitter and use the site at least once a month.
The press is one of the many casualties of Mexico's ongoing violence, in particular, the local media. Newspapers and TV stations are caught in a battle between censorship, control and threats from the drug cartels and the local governments. In some cities, people often witness shootings, grenade attacks and other violent events, but when they try to find out what happened, their local news has nothing to offer. Some newspapers have officially announced a policy of self-censorship when it comes to reporting drug war-related news.
The result for a lot of Mexicans is that local media is no longer a source of news. Some citizens claim that their local news sources are paid off by the local government in an effort to minimize the violence; others argue that it is the cartels who have bribed them; while others, especially the journalists, say they are being threatened to keep quiet. What is certain is that journalists are being murdered and their murders often go unpunished.
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has put out a call for comment to the platform's developers. In a note posted on Twitter's developer site he says; "I'd like to ask for your candid feedback. We want to know what additional materials you need from us to help you build products, boost distribution and expand your reach."
Dorsey goes on to express enthusiasm for the future of Twitter, especially concerning the upcoming deep integration into iOS 5. "Very soon, anywhere there's an iPhone or an iPad, you'll always find Twitter." Yet, Twitter's relationship with its developer ecosystem has not always been rosy. Is this an olive branch from the service as it prepares to grow?
Engineers at Twitter are busy plugging away at the microblogging service's latest outage, which appears to be preventing many users from seeing replies and mentions from others.
Twitter's support team confirmed the issue at 11:42am EST, but have not updated since, leaving many users frustrated and unsure of why they can't see replies. Among the flustered is American actress Felicia Day, whose tweet about the outage garnered a number of replies that she, ironically enough, cannot see.
On August 15, Twitter turned on its t.co link wrapper for all links longer than 19 characters. The t.co URL shortener was first announced in June of last year, and it was implemented on Twitter.com this June. Eventually, Twitter plans to wrap all links, regardless of length. Prior to that, it will increase the link length to 20 characters to accommodate the 's' that will be added as Twitter moves to secure HTTPS service by default.
From the user's perspective, t.co links appear as the first 19 characters of the real URL, without the HTTP or HTTPS visible, and they trail off into ellipses. When everything's working properly - unlike several periods of time today - users won't see an obscured t.co shortlink but rather the actual linked domain. One problem this aims to solve is the concealing of malicious links behind external URL shorteners. Twitter checks all shortened links against their list of malicious sites. But t.co also solves another less visible problem: it reveals Twitter's true influence as a referring traffic source.
Twitter has just announced the rollout of user galleries for tweeted images. Galleries will show images shared using all the major services supported by Twitter, including yFrog, TwitPic, Instagram and Twitter's new native images. Galleries can be found on the user's profile page through the Web interface. They will display up to 100 recent images in chronological order. They won't display video, nor will they show images tweeted before January 1, 2010.
Twitter profile pages will now display thumbnails of the user's four most recent tweeted photos on the right sidebar, right under their vital Twitter statistics, and clicking 'View All' opens the user's gallery in the current window. This is the first new feature Twitter has built upon its native image sharing, which launched this summer. Until that launch, third-party services handled image sharing on Twitter. The new user galleries will support those services, but the galleries themselves will only be available from Twitter's website.
Twitter announced this afternoon that it has added a new tab called Activities where all kinds of activities by the people you follow are made visible: when they follow new people, when they add people to lists, when they favorite a tweet and more. The same types of activities, when regarding your account, have been added to what was your Replies tab.
What does this mean? It means that many different streams of the most interesting data published by Twitter, always in public but never all in one place and never right in the center of attention, have been illuminated and put front and center. Some people are already complaining that it detracts from the clean simplicity that is Twitter's key differentiator - but as someone who has long paid attention to who is following whom and what is being favorited, I find it fascinating.
