Twitter cleans up trending topics to make search results more relevant

Twitter cleans up trending topics to make search results more relevant

Twitter is cleaning up trending topics by returning more relevant results when you look up popular keywords people are tweeting about.

One of the neatest little features that grew out of the Twitter phenomenon last year were these trending topics. The company adopted them after acquiring… Continue Reading

New retweet feature on Twitter begins limited roll-out

New retweet feature on Twitter begins limited roll-out

Retweets, a way of sharing content on Twitter, are coming into their own.

Twitter’s testing a new official retweet feature after announcing they were going to incorporate the informal practice earlier this year.

As you can see in mock-ups above, there will be a link to retweet… Continue Reading

5 O’Clock Roundup: Raytheon buys BBN, Verizon hot … and not, things built on Twitter

5 O’Clock Roundup: Raytheon buys BBN, Verizon hot … and not, things built on Twitter

Raytheon completes acquisition of BBN for $350M — Both companies do defense R&D and are packed with MIT grads. Raytheon works on military projects such as the Army Expeditionary Warrior Experiment. R&D company BBN makes cheery Internet publishing tool suite EveryZing, but the company also… Continue Reading

Startup School: Stone, Williams on how they co-founded Twitter

Startup School: Stone, Williams on how they co-founded Twitter

(I’m live-blogging from Startup School, a daylong program from startup incubator YCombinator held at Berkeley today.)

Twitter’s co-founders Biz Stone and Ev Williams are on-stage for a question-and-answer session. This is paraphrased, but I’ve embedded a video courtesy of Alexa Lee below, if you want to watch the… Continue Reading

Bing, you’re not alone: Google adds tweets to search too

Bing, you’re not alone: Google adds tweets to search too

Bing got much of the glory this morning at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, when it announced that it was incorporating Twitter’s public stream into its results. But a few hours later, Google crept in with its own announcement.

Google, it turns out, is… Continue Reading

Web 2.0: Testing out Bing’s Twitter-juiced search

Web 2.0: Testing out Bing’s Twitter-juiced search

Bing’s Twitter search just went live this morning. Here’s a side-by-side comparison against some of the more prominent start-ups in the real-time space.

A few notes – Bing’s results seem about two to six minutes behind other search engines. Like Tweetmeme and OneRiot, they put a… Continue Reading

Web 2.0: Microsoft details its new Bing-with-Twitter search engine

Web 2.0: Microsoft details its new Bing-with-Twitter search engine

Qi Lu, who left Yahoo after a decade to run Microsoft’s Online Services Division, is talking on-stage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today about Bing’s just-announced Twitter-search capability.

Here’s the core news:

Microsoft has a non-exclusive deal with Twitter to incorporate all the public… Continue Reading

Web 2.0: Twitter co-founder Williams wants to kill suggested users list; praises Facebook’s agility

Web 2.0: Twitter co-founder Williams wants to kill suggested users list; praises Facebook’s agility

Twitter co-founder Ev Williams is onstage right now at the Web 2.0 Summit talking with moderator John Battelle. Here’s a transcript of the conversation:

[Update: Now that I've finished live-blogging, here are some takeaways: because the company's rolling out lists, there's really no need for the... Continue Reading

Twitter finally adds user groups feature, calls them lists

Twitter finally adds user groups feature, calls them lists

Twitter’s new feature, which the company calls lists, allows users to group together curated collections from among the people they follow.

For example, the list @paulboutin/entourage merges status updates from my hand-chosen group of best friends ever: Facebook chantreusse Randi Zuckerberg, VentureBeat mobile maniac Matthäus Krzykowski, local publicist… Continue Reading

Twitter operations engineer hit by car, survives, tweets then DJs party

Twitter operations engineer hit by car, survives, tweets then DJs party

Twitter operations engineer John Adams, who was brought in to help stabilize the microblogging network last summer, was the apparent victim of a hit-and-run on Monday while riding his bicycle.

He tweeted on Monday evening:

“Was hit by a car on my bike this evening on the… Continue Reading

Twitter’s new, charitable wine foray has deep roots

Twitter’s new, charitable wine foray has deep roots

Twitter is launching a charitable side project and wine label to benefit child literacy in the developing world, underscoring the company culture’s deep appreciation for wine.

Called Fledgling Wine, this is Twitter’s first big non-profit campaign — they will sell Pinot Noir and Chardonnay and donate… Continue Reading

5 O’Clock Roundup: Sidekickers saved, e-books slashed, PCmover revisited

5 O’Clock Roundup: Sidekickers saved, e-books slashed, PCmover revisited

Microsoft recovers T-Mobile customers from the Sidekick Apocalypse – A blog post from Roz Ho at Microsoft, head of the company’s Premium Mobile Experiences group, promises that “we have recovered most, if not all, customer data” that had disappeared last week in an embarrassingly public failure… Continue Reading

Twitter pushes into the developing world with Airtel deal

Twitter pushes into the developing world with Airtel deal

With a service that was designed to work with older SMS technology, Twitter’s microblogging network is an ideal match for developing markets like India.

So it makes sense that the company, which is just fresh off launching a translation program, is hungry to break into countries… Continue Reading

Twitter ups the ante on spam with new reporting feature

Twitter ups the ante on spam with new reporting feature

Because of its public nature, Twitter has always been particularly vulnerable to spam.

In the beginning, there were accounts that instantaneously followed thousands of accounts upon inception. Then there were Twitter users who did nothing but share porn links. Then there were users who latched onto… Continue Reading

¿Cómo se dice ‘Tweet’ en español? Twitter moves into other languages

¿Cómo se dice ‘Tweet’ en español? Twitter moves into other languages

Twitter will crowdsource translations for its site in French, Italian, German and Spanish as it pushes for an audience outside the English-speaking world.

The company will ask a small group of volunteer translators to begin making suggestions and then widen it out to more people. Twitter… Continue Reading

Twitter’s Series E documents (in case you’re curious)

Twitter’s Series E documents (in case you’re curious)

One hundred million and six dollars at a $1 billion valuation is all in a day’s work for Twitter.

The company added some more established names to its fifth round of financing including Morgan Stanley and T. Rowe Price, along with private equity fund Insight Venture… Continue Reading

Twitter feeds slowly catching up after delays

Twitter feeds slowly catching up after delays

Twitter’s feeds are slowly catching up after falling behind this morning. At this point, they’re about 10 minutes behind after being delayed by as much as three hours earlier.

That means if you tried to check your feed, tweets were three hours stale.

The company said in… Continue Reading

Why Charles River Ventures sat out on Twitter’s latest round

Why Charles River Ventures sat out on Twitter’s latest round

When Twitter raised its most recent round of funding at $1 billion, a few players were conspicuously absent, including Union Square Ventures and Charles River Ventures.

Why did Charles River sit out? Size and strategy.

Charles River Ventures is focused on using a $325 million fund for… Continue Reading

Twitter will let users create, share lists of people to follow

Twitter will let users create, share lists of people to follow

Twitter just absorbed another useful feature generated from its community — it’s letting users curate and share lists of Twitter accounts to follow.

The lists will be linked from a user’s profile and they’ll be public by default. People can subscribe to the lists as they… Continue Reading

Echofon releases Mac version; never lets you lose a tweet

Echofon releases Mac version; never lets you lose a tweet

Echofon, the Twitter client formerly known as Twitterfon, just released a simple and compact desktop version for the Mac.

The big plus to Echofon is that you’ll never lose a tweet while monitoring your Twitter stream. Unread tweets stay in sync between your phone and computer…. Continue Reading