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Archives for May 2008
Controversy brews over Twitter harassment policy
A controversy surrounding Twitter’s terms of service erupted after popular blogger Ariel Waldman wrote that she had been harassed via Twitter for over a year and the company did nothing to stop it. According to Ars Technica, Twitter did remove some offending posts from the public timeline last year after Waldman complained. However, more recent tweets and the offending user’s account were not removed.
In a post to the official company blog co-founder Biz Stone responded saying that “Twitter is a communication utility, not a mediator of content.” Waldman contends that Twitter’s terms of service, which were borrowed from Flickr, place an obligation on the company to police what she feels is an online community. Twitter announce it is reviewing its terms.
On the legal front, internet lawyer John Dozier Jr. told Wired that “Twitter may have risked its immunity under the Communications Decency Act the moment it ‘edited’ or altered content on the site.” However, Denise Howell, also an internet lawyer, blogger, and podcaster, writes that Twitter has done nothing to forfeit its protection under the law.
Twitter: ‘We’re not sure what’s happening’
In an untitled and verbose blog post yesterday, Twitter admitted it does not know what is causing its frequent service outages and asked for patience from users. “We’ve gone through our various databases, caches, web servers, daemons, and despite some increased traffic activity across the board, all systems are running nominally. The truth is we’re not sure what’s happening.”
CNet’s Dave Rosenberg (@daveofdoom) warns Twitter that if it can’t keep its service up, it will suffer the fate of Friendster.
Twitter raises $15 million in new funding round
GigaOm reports that Twitter has completed a new round of venture capital funding. “The update is that Twitter reached an agreement with investors today to raise $15 million in funding at around $80 million pre-money valuation.” TechCrunch speculates that the VC firm in question is Spark Capital.
Twitter outage spurs rebuke from bloggers, contest
Twitter suffered another serious outage yesterday sparking a strong wave of criticism from bloggers.
One frequent complaint was Twitter’s lack of communications with users during outages. “[H]ow about just having enough respect for your users to let us know what’s going on, asked TechCrunch. Meanwhile VentureBeat noted that during major outages the official blog is rarely updated and it’s unclear to users where else to look for official information. Twitter finally posted a terse note on its blog taking responsibility for the outage.
Meanwhile, CNET’s Molly Wood (@mollywood) launched a contest to build a Twitter competitor. “I have had it with this Twitter situation,” she wrote. After consulting with software engineers, Wood is convinced that a better-scaling Twitter analog can be built in hours. To entice someone to build it, she offered some incentives:
I will go there, for a test period of not more than 30 days, and I will beg all of my followers to join me for this test period (as of this writing, a nice round 6,700). My colleague, Tom Merritt, says he’ll go there, too, and hopefully bring his followers along for the scalability test. I’ll ask everyone else I know on Twitter to come along (I’m talking to you, Leo Laporte), and we’ll see if it’s really as hard as all that to build a Twitter that can stand up to the awesome pressure of being Twitter.
The prize also includes other random gifts including a windbreaker.
TweetCube adds filesharing to Twitter
ZDNet points us to TweetCube, a new service that allows users to share files on Twitter. “Log-in to your Twitter account via TweetCube’s site (user names and passwords aren’t stored), then upload the file you want to share: images, videos, music, PDFs and more. Next, add a message and hit publish. The result shows up on your Twitter stream with a shortened URL linking to a page hosting the file on TweetCube.” The service allows Twitter to replicate some of the functionality of Pownce, although files are limited to 10MB and are stored for only 30 days.
Boycott of Twitter scheduled for tomorrow
Disgruntled Twitter users are planning a boycott of the service tomorrow, May 21st. According to one of the organizers, Andrew Dobrow (@anjrued), he and others have been frustrated with Twitter’s frequent outages. “As a result, a bunch of us Twitter power users were using FriendFeed to discuss a way to hit Twitter where it hurts in order to send a message to the powers that be.” Some like Jennifer Leggio (@mediaphyter) believe the boycott will be self-defeating. “We get what we pay for. Unless those boycotting have made significant financial contributions to the server upkeep of Twitter I really don’t want to hear it from them.” Do you think a boycott of Twitter is constructive or not?
Control your lights with Twitter
The official Twitter blog points us to a hack by Justin Wickett (@jwickett) that allows a user to turn their home’s lights on and off by sending a text message to Twitter. Here’s a video demonstration:
Other Twitter-connected devices include the Botanicalls Twitter, a sensor you can add to your plants that will send a tweet if they need water.
When Obama wins Twitter will implode
In what has become an all-too-common occurrence, Twitter was down again yesterday. LAist and Mashable speculated that the outage was caused by heavy traffic following John Edward’s endorsement of Barrack Obama. In a post to its official blog, Twitter said the interruption was “not entirely to do with the Democrats, Space Aliens, Mysterious Men in Black, or Arugula.” Whatever the case, the Industry Standard writes that the schtick is getting old.
Press release distribution service for Twitter, seriously
Journalism.co.uk has launched a new service to distribute press releases to mobile devises via Twitter. Seriously. The service aims to “target journalists and bloggers on the move by sending alerts to their mobile devices.” “Journalists can sign up to receive free SMS alerts to their mobile telephone whenever a press release relevant to their subject area is published on Journalism.co.uk.” Is it just us, or are journalists not really going to go for this? Read the story.
Summize ties itself to Twitter, introduces local search
Search engine Summize has officially refocused its business model on Twitter search, according to Masahable. It has also just introduced local search. “For example, search for ‘McCain near:’phonix az’ and you can see what people in the GOP’s Presidential Candidate’s home state are tweeting about him. You can also access the local search via the Advanced Options page of Summize so you don’t have to memorize the syntax.” Does it make good business sense to tie your business model to Twitter? Read the story.
What is Twitter in 140 seconds video contest
Video sharing site Seesmic and others are sponsoring the “What is Twitter in 140 seconds video contest.” As the title implies, entrants must create a video explaining Twitter running under 140 seconds—a reference to Twitter’s 140 character limit. Top prize is a new iPhone. Judges include Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur (@loiclemeur) and Twitter institution Wayne Sutton (@waynesutton).
Entries can be submitted via any video sharing site but must be tagged “whatistwitter.” Read the story.
Twitter ex-chief architect speaks out
Silicon Alley Insider reports that Blaine Cook, Twitter’s recently departed (ousted?) chief architect has written his first blog post since leaving Twitter. The topic: Why Twitter can’t scale. “For all those who don’t get it, languages don’t scale, architectures do.” This is a reference to the suggestion by some that Twitter’s scaling problems result from its choice of the Ruby on Rails programming platform. Read the story.
Do you like Twitter polls? Yes or no?
Online polling tool Strawpoll now allows individual users to create their own polls on Twitter, according to Mashable. Simply enter your question and the multiple choice answers and they will be sent to your followers as a tweet. As the respond, their answers are graphed. Writes GeekMommy (@geekmommy): “It’s either a great tool - or going to be one of the more annoying things to pop up in the twitter stream. I’m already over the Qik video-streaming-come-chat notices, the Bright-kite-says-I’m-at-1234-main-street, and the dozen other add-on autoscripts out there.” What do you think? Do Twitter apps add or detract from the experience? Read the story.
Another earthquake, another Twitter scoop
Once again, Twitter breaks news of an earthquake before the mainstream media. Last week it was the DC area tremor. This time it was the 7.8 magnitude quake that hit western China. According to Venture Beat: “Before it was on CNN, before MSNBC, before the BBC, even before the USGS (the United States Geological Survey, which handles earthquake data) had the information, Twitter was on it. … While the mainstream media scrambled to put up their ‘breaking news’ headlines, on Twitter we had pictures, maps, videos all being sent in real-time.” Read the story.
Study reveals top five words on Twitter, interesting trends
New media blog ReadWriteWeb teamed up with search engine Summize to study who exactly is on Twitter and what they tweet. One interesting finding: Five percent of all tweets are produced by the top 100 active accounts, and many of these are not people, but rather feed bots, like the one we use at Twitter Gossip.
The top five words people send on twitter? “Test,” “lol,” “working,” a smiley emoticon, and “sleeping.” They also found “that there are three main types of conversations going on.” First are status messages like “going to sleep.” Second there are short-term memes like an episode of a TV show or the death of a celebrity. Finally are long-term memes like the presidential race. Read the story.
Twitter Gossip is a daily round-up of the latest news and opinion about Twitter compiled by