Twingly launches microblog search — Twitter search with a sprinkle of Jaiku and a dash of Identi.ca
Blog search tool Twingly’s new microblog search, as a concept, makes a lot of sense. You enter a keyword in one search box and get results from services like Twitter, Jaiku and Identi.ca. But in practice there’s a problem — and it’s not Twingly’s problem — it’s every service besides Twitter’s problem: Twitter overwhelms the results.
You see, Twitter is much more popular than any of the other services being indexed, so if I do a… Continue Reading
Six Apart acquires and shuts down Pownce
Blogging company Six Apart has acquired micro-blogging startup Pownce for undisclosed financial terms. It looks like one of those acquisitions where the buyer was more interested in the people than the product — the Pownce service will shut down in two weeks.
The San Francisco startup was the brainchild of Digg founder Kevin Rose, Leah Culver and Daniel Burka (also a Digg employee). It’s a micro-blogging service kind of like Twitter, but it allowed users to… Continue Reading
A Fail French Bulldog sighting: Pownce goes down
Twitter recently touted the fact that there were no Fail Whale sightings all throughout its massive spike in usage during the U.S. presidential elections. Another micro-blogging site, Pownce hasn’t been so lucky today. The service has been down most of the morning.
The cause of the problems is apparently a slave database corruption issue which was followed by a failure of the backup database, according to the blog post. It was a “freak accident,” Pownce cofounder… Continue Reading
Once again, Twitter’s death is laid out. Once again, users will fail to notice
In a post on its developer blog a couple days ago, Twitter API lead developer Alex Payne outlined what the service is doing with the vast amount of data it’s receiving everyday. Payne discussed the service’s use of application programming interfaces (APIs), feeds and pinging services to give third parties and users the information they want from Twitter. He also revealed that Twitter is now staffing a project (including Payne himself) to come up with… Continue Reading
Geolocation makes its home in Firefox with 3.1 beta 1. Companies start taking advantage of it
Well it didn’t take long for Mozilla to build support for geolocation directly in to the Firefox web browser. Just a week after it officially launched the Geode plug-in for Firefox 3.0, Mozilla today launched Firefox 3.1 beta 1, which eliminates the need for the plug-in. I had a chance to talk with one company that is particularly excited about this functionality, Outside.in, makers of the location-based news and information service Radar.
Up until recently, Radar… Continue Reading
Yahoo pushes its location platform Fire Eagle out of the nest so it can spread its wings
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Location, location, location. As computing continues to go mobile it’s an increasingly important feature for many web services.
Knowing that, Yahoo has built a developer platform around location called Fire Eagle. Today, Yahoo is officially letting it spread it wings to the public.
The service began closed alpha testing in November of last year and it was formally unveiled the beta in March of this year. Since that time… Continue Reading
Twitter refugees find a new home (at least for this week): Identi.ca
First everyone was going to leave Twitter for Jaiku. Then everyone was going to leave Twitter for Pownce. Then everyone was going to leave Twitter for Plurk. Then everyone was going to leave Twitter for FriendFeed. There’s just one problem. Everyone is still on Twitter.
A new service lauded as the latest Twitter destroyer launched today, Identi.ca. It has everything you could want in a Twitter-clone — namely, it looks a lot like Twitter and, at… Continue Reading
Twitter may have more serious issues than its downtime
While we crack a lot of jokes about Twitter’s uptime and go on about its potential valuation, it’s easy to forget that as with many communication tools, there is the potential for real, troubling issues. One of those came to light today when Twitter user Ariel Waldman spoke out the harassment she is receiving from other users of the service.
The harassment, while horrible, isn’t the real story here. The story is Twitter’s complete and utter… Continue Reading
Pownce opens file sharing to the public with larger sizes to boot
We talk about Twitter here a lot, but don’t often talk about one of its micro-messaging rivals, Pownce. That is quite simply because Pownce is not as popular as Twitter. Tonight however the service has rolled out two significant updates that may not close the popularity gap, but will make Pownce more useful: public file sharing and increased file sizes.
You can now use your Pownce account to share files with anyone on the Internet, not… Continue Reading
Google buys Jaiku, Twitter losing ground
Jaiku, the popular service that lets you blast short blog updates to friends about you’re doing, has been snapped up by Google for an undisclosed amount.
Jaiku, based in Helsinki, Finland, has been a fierce rival to Twitter, a San Francisco company that is a favorite among the Silicon Valley digerati. During the summer, Jaiku picked up users almost as quickly as Twitter lost them, leaving the latter with only a marginal lead over Jaiku, according… Continue Reading