VentureBeat

When talking about the micro-messaging service Twitter, a lot of people recently have gotten hung up on its mainstream appeal — or lack thereof. I’ve argued that if current trends continue, this will come eventually (though I’ve also argued it doesn’t really matter for the service to be useful). Today, some data from Compete suggests the same thing.

For U.S. visitors, traffic has almost doubled from February to April alone. The service is now pulling in nearly 1.2 million people per month. Twitter is growing very fast, and just as we’ve noted, Compete believes Twitter’s recent coverage in the mainstream press (for events like helping the American student get out of jail in Egypt and coverage of the China earthquake) is helping to fuel this growth.

Some other interesting notes from Compete’s report:

• Time on Twitter versus time online overall has more than quadrupled in that short span.
• A lot more users use Twitter during weekdays then weekend (hence the valleys in the graph above.)
• Almost one quarter of Twitter users are considered “heavy” (6+ visits a month — which really doesn’t seem all that heavy, for me at least.)
• Twitter users are 10% more likely to be male than the average Internet user.
• Twitter usage is definitely highest in the college/twenty-something age group.

If this kind of growth keeps up, at what point do we consider Twitter mainstream? Of course, Twitter has to stay up long enough for this to happen.

update: A Max from Compete notes in a comment below, they tweaked their “heavy usage” definition because many heavy users use different apps/sites to use Twitter (which Compete doesn’t track). That is very true, I think I’m in the minority as a heavy user who uses the main site almost exclusively.

Dear Twitter,

We need to talk. I build you up with these post about how great you are in situations like the recent earthquake in China. I write long rants defending your value and eventual viability. And then you let me down — with your constant downtime. I feel like people are so close to understanding your value, but it really is important that you be up for them to be able to.

What can I do? Help me help you. I repeat, help me, help you. Do you need more servers? Can you not find anyone to help scale the service? Do you maybe need more funding? We know some people in that field.

I know you’re going to say, “it’s not you, it’s me” — and that is true, but really, we need to work through this together.

It’s been an hour. I miss you.

- Your most favorite Twitter user from VentureBeat

[Note: Yes, Twitter is and has been down once again for much of the day. I've emailed Twitter asking for a comment. I'll update if I hear back.]

update: I see a new Twitter error message (screencap below), so that is something at least.

[photo: flickr/feverblue]

Tonight, a lot of us who are regular users of the micro-messaging service Twitter witnessed something pretty amazing. A 7.8 magnitude struck China and the news unfolded before our eyes on Twitter. Before it was on CNN, before MSNBC, before the BBC, even before the United States Geological Survey (which handles earthquake data) had the information, Twitter was on it. How? Its users.

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.

Twitter first responder (and sometimes blogger), Robert Scoble was on the news into the early hours of the morning, transferring news from the 21,185 people he follows to the 23,200 people following him. In turn, many of those folks would re-tweet (the term used to describe a message being re-sent out) the news to their followers. Information spread like wildfire on the service.

A quick glance at the truly awesome Twitter search site Summize (pictured below) with a query of the term “earthquake” was even more interesting and informative.

We’ve seen this before. Last year, several smaller earthquakes were reported first on Twitter. The mainstream media largely ignored this fact, but it happened nonetheless. Now, with so many people thinking about Twitter valuations, and whining about Twitter not being mainstream, the service is starting to garner attention for the wrong reasons. At the end of the day, what difference does it make if it’s mainstream or not? It’s very useful for situations like this, and it’s actually helping people. We saw that during the San Diego fires last year as well.

Today’s event are already causing some in the mainstream media to reconsider their stances on the service. Rory Cellan-Jones with the BBC, writes today:

I was beginning to think Twitter - the micro-blogging service that’s all the rage amongst the technorati - was just another fad for people who want to share too much of their rather dull lives. Until this morning.

This event along with news such as the American student who was arrested in Egypt but set free thanks to Twitter, are propelling the service into the spotlight. Whether that in turn propels it into mainstream usage, we’ll see. But again, does that really matter? Twitter will continue to be useful with or without the approval of the masses.

You can find me on Twitter here along with fellow VentureBeat writers Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha and Chris Morrison. Oh, and we have a VentureBeat account (for our posts) as well.

updated
We’re at the point that when either of the two social networking giants, MySpace and Facebook, does something, the other has to respond. Yesterday, MySpace unveiled its “Data Availability” initiative, allowing other sites around the Internet to utilize its users’ data to update profiles, photos, videos and other attributes. Today, according to a TechCrunch scoop, Facebook is following that up with “Facebook Connect”. Which does, wait for it — the exact same thing.

As Mike Arrington points out, Facebook Connect is basically an updated version of Facebook’s API for third party sites. These sites will now be able to use Facebook’s trusted identification methods, profile information (including pictures, videos, events and the like), friend lists and privacy settings. Just as with MySpace’s announcement, the idea is to make Facebook a central hub of users’ web experience.

Lest you think this wasn’t a game of one-upmanship: whereas MySpace announced Twitter as a launch partner for its initiative yesterday, Facebook is launching with Digg as a partner. The social news voting site is quite a bit larger than the micro-messaging Twitter.

Facebook Connect’s formal launch won’t happen for a couple of weeks. We’ll update when we know more.

update: Dave Morin, Facebook’s senior platform manager has posted on the Facebook Developers Blog with more details about Facebook Connect. Some of the details:

Today we are announcing Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect is the next iteration of Facebook Platform that allows users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site. This will now enable third party websites to implement and offer even more features of Facebook Platform off of Facebook – similar to features available to third party applications today on Facebook.

Here are just a few of the coming features of Facebook Connect:

Read the rest of this entry »

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 just other Pownce users. These files can now be up to 100 megabytes in size (up from 10 MB) for free account holders and up to 250 MB for ‘Pro’ accounts.

I sometimes use Pownce — when Twitter is down, which as you may know is quite a bit, despite reports to the contrary. However, Pownce is actually quite a useful service. It has features such embeddable photos, videos and mp3 music file sharing that make it much more dynamic than Twitter’s text-only route. It also handles the sharing of links much better than Twitter as it has a separate box in which to put them (on Twitter, links are included in your 140 character limit).

Posting events is another strength of the service. And of course, sharing files. Here is a test one that I uploaded (one of the new songs that Nine Inch Nails recently gave away for free on the Internet).

Pownce also has a native mobile interface that runs circles around Twitter’s native mobile version (as I’ve complained about before). There are certainly reasons to use Pownce even if you use Twitter, public file sharing just gives you another.

The San Francisco-based Pownce is the brainchild of Digg founder Kevin Rose, Leah Culver, Daniel Burka, and Shawn Allen. Pownce has a more direct rival for sharing media files in Fyreball, a service we recently profiled here.

You can find me on Pownce here - warning: I like to share the occasional 80s music video

While perusing the internet recently, I stumbled upon a cool new site called Plurk. The site, launched January 23 by user interface specialist Alvin Woon, looks a tiny bit familiar. That’s because it combines features from micro-blogging service Twitter, with a touch of Friendfeed, the social conversation aggregator, and privacy features that closely mirror Facebook to put “your life on the line.”

The service, still in private beta, is pretty straightforward. After selecting a username and password upon registration, users are then directed to a page mostly filled with a timeline news feed (see screenshot below), or “plurks,” that other users have posted. Featured below the timeline are the top, recently joined, and random plurkers.

I’ve complained for quite a bit about the less than stellar user interface on Twitter, which could be a barrier to entry to mainstream adoption, or at least the HSTG (high school teenage girls) audience which Plurk’s Woon is targeting.

Plurk, for the most part with its threaded conversations, timelines, and easy-to-find buttons and features tackles the UI problem pretty effectively.

Skipping on over to your personal Plurk page, you’ll be able to check your stats — users get karma depending on the quantity and frequency of their posting — friends and fans, as well as see all threaded conversations in the timeline, and of course, a big fat message box for posting 140 character messages.

One twist to Plurk that may help us grammar nuts: users have options on which verb to use for the message. Choose between loves, hates, likes, shares, gives, wants, wishes, has, wills, asks, was, thinks, says, and of course — is and freestyle (blank).

A button in the bottom right hand corner allows you to toggle between just your plurks and your friends’ as well.

A timeline could potentially be annoying, with the burden of scrolling back and forth between days, and then returning to the current time, but as you hover over either far side of the screen, you can return to start.

Click on the plurk on the screen, and you can see the threaded conversations, viewing and responding to all the plurks, and in a hat tip to Friendfeed and Facebook, you can watch content (screenshot below) directly in the plurk.

Privacy settings will be familiar to Facebook users — you can allow the whole word to see your plurks, friends of friends, just friends, and lastly your lonesome self.

Finally, the service is integrated with AOL Instant Messaging, so you can send and receive plurks directly from your chat client. It also has an embeddable widget, which Woon has posted on his blog.

All in all the service is pretty nifty for a one-man creation, and the Twitter team should look at hiring one Mr. Woon to help solve their user interface issues, even if he can’t help them scale.

Twitter has been the subject of a lot of discussion recently on this site and others. One thing people don’t talk about however is how bad the native mobile version is. It would seem that going forward, mobile is going to be one of the keys to Twitter’s success and for me, and plenty of others I’ve talked to, its native m.twitter.com site just doesn’t cut it. Sure, there are other 3rd party sites and apps out there that work just fine, but one would think Twitter itself would put a little more work into building a killer mobile interface.

Updated

Well, this puts a bit of a damper on all those good vibes around Ruby on Rails — Twitter may soon dump the application framework in favor of Java or PHP, according to TechCrunch.

With its popularity among the tech crowd, Twitter has been struggling with scaling issues. The group messaging site’s once-frequent problems with downtime have lessened, but it still experienced a caching problem a week ago that made the service virtually useless for an entire weekend. The company may have decided that if it wants to continue growing — without risking further outages that would hurt said growth — Rails wasn’t going to cut it.

These rumors come little more than a week after Twitter announced the departure of its chief architect Blaine Cook, a big Rails fan. For example, here’s a video of Cook giving a presentation on how “Rails Scales” (looks like others in the company may not have agreed).

If this news turns out to be true, it may slow the momentum that Rails development has been building. In the last few months, Benchmark Capital announced investments in Engine Yard and New Relic, two companies related to Rails application deployment and management, and a similar service called Heroku has also gotten a positive response. There are major sites running on Rails too, including Scribd and Hulu. What I’ve been hearing is that Rails has a lot of the excitement of a new technology, but a lot of the uncertainty as well.

Update 1: Interestingly enough, eWeek published an article today about Twitter proving Ruby on Rails’ resilience. Maybe we spoke too soon, or maybe it’s just a case of really, really bad timing …

Update 2: Evan Williams, founder of Obvious (which owns Twitter), says “Twitter currently has no plans to abandon RoR.”

[Image:Free Games News]

Updated with Twitter’s “real” traffic numbers, below the original post.

Web analytics service Hitwise has just released more data on web traffic to group messaging service Twitter, confirming what many blogs have anecdotally observed. Which is that the service is growing fast: It has received eight times more Internet visits now versus a year ago, Hitwise claims.

We’ve already spent a lot of time explaining how Twitter’s simple means of communicating short messages between friends has won over many former haters, so now lets focus on the numbers.

While Hitwise says that Twitter now accounts for 0.0016 percent of all US internet visits, its actual amount of traffic is certainly much greater. Internet visits comprise only a portion of Twitters total traffic, as you can use it through third party desktop applications like Twhirl or third-party web applications like Friendfeed. The company has also seen significant growth abroad, including Japan, and Hitwise doesn’t measure international traffic.

Growth also appears to be accelerating now. Visits have more than doubled in the last three months, and have gone up 60 percent in the past month. Hitwise thinks the causes of the growth have been widespread coverage of Twitter in a news events: Specifically, Its role in helping an American reporter get out of an Egyptian jail as well as public debate about its rumored funding (Twitter is a poster child for web companies that focus on growth, rather than revenue — it has only just started experimenting with ads).

Hitwise concludes that Twitter is still small, but frankly, I haven’t seen just a couple stories that may have caused its traffic to spike. I’ve seen many news events where Twitter has been used, where Twitter has itself garnered nice chunks of publicity (or has even been the central mainstream news story). For example, when the Olympic torch came through San Francisco last month and got met by protestors, many people used Twitter to provide up-to-the-minute shorthand reports on what was happening.

My own anecdote here is that I wrote an article about Twitter’s use in the San Francisco torch protest, and saw traffic come to my story when it appeared on Google news, then an increase in my number of Twitter followers. While some of those followers were certainly existing Twitter users, others were pretty clearly new people who had found out about Twitter through trying to find out about the Olympic torch protests. Correspondingly, Hitwise says that a large portion of new users come to it through search engines.

Meanwhile, Twitter’s traffic appears to be solidifying, with new users quickly converting to constant users, according to Hitwise.

I expect Twitter to keep going more and more mainstream, especially driven by journalists and others who use it to keep their audiences informed.

For VentureBeat readers who use Twitter, you can follow us here: Dean Takahashi (@deantak), Anthony Ha (@anthonyha), Chris Morrison (@chrismorrison), MG Siegler (@parislemon) and myself (@eldon). You can also follow VentureBeat’s feed of new stories (@venturebeat).

Update: Arrington has a source with what he says are the real Twitter traffic numbers. From the post:

March 2008
Total Users: 1 million
Total Active Users: 200,000 per week
Total Twitter Messages: 3 million/day

Those stats have roughly doubled just since January, when Twitter had just 100,000 active weekly users. Previously it took nine months to double in size - In April 2007 the service had 50,000 active weekly users. What’s most interesting is the rabid Twitter usage by active users - they send an average of 15 Twitter message per day.

There is a lot of talk today on the topic of no one caring about the short-form message service, Twitter, outside of a select group of insider tech people. Actually, this conversation has been going on for the better part of a year now. Some use it to argue why Twitter will not stick around long term, some use it as backup for why a high multi-million valuation of the company is ridiculous, other just use it to try and quiet those of us who incessantly talk about and use Twitter.

Kara Swisher of All Things Digital kicked off the latest round of discussions (which I lovingly refer to as a “Bitchmeme“, a play-on-words on the tech news aggregator, Techmeme, where such conversations explode), by talking about a recent trip to a wedding — where no one knew about Twitter. This is significant, she concludes, because it was outside of the tech sphere, and thus is probably a more true indication about how the whole rest of the world views Twitter. Swisher made sure to note that these people were at least somewhat tech savvy and knew about other hot Internet properties, such as Facebook.

Many of us who are within the tech sphere probably have similar stories. (I actually brought up this exact point on Friday as point three of my post on Twitter’s value.) But such stories downplay a few key elements in the larger picture.

First, Twitter is still a very young service. As Mathew Ingram points out, Facebook (again, one of Swisher’s examples of a known service) was not always so well known. In fact, hardly anyone outside of college campuses knew about it until arguably last year. Ingram also gives the example of online instant messaging. Something which Dan Farber of CNET mentions as well as a parallel for the future of Twitter.

To expect a service to go from zero to mainstream in a year’s time is unrealistic. That does not mean that it won’t. Which leads to point two. Read the rest of this entry »

More reports are coming in about Twitter, the micro-messaging service, raising a new round of funding. Twitter has signed a term sheet for either $15 or $20 million, CNET is reporting. This is in line with earlier reports that the company was attempting to raise a new series C round.

A $15 million round is thought to put the company’s total value in the $60 to $75 million range. This is well below the $150 million valuation it was said to be looking for, but still a hefty sum.

One can only assume the money would be used to expand infrastructure and make the service more scalable as it continues to grow. We’ve contacted Twitter about the funding rumor and will update if we hear back.

update: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone got back to us that they have nothing to share on the rumor.

I was having a conversation last night with a person who wasn’t on Twitter. He just didn’t understand it, he said. Myself and the others I was with attempted to explain it to him, but when he constantly saw all of us with our noses buried in our phones checking the service, that was probably all he needed to know. By the end of the night he had a Twitter account.

Twitter is looking to raise a new Series C round of funding, according to Silicon Alley Insider. Their sources say it is seeking a number that could puts its value as high as $150 million. That may sound absurd, but this is a world were just last week the social network creation company, Ning, saw a post-money valuation of $560 million.

The actual value of Twitter will probably come in far below that. Silicon Alley Insider cuts it in half, to $75 million post-money. For those who do not understand and do not use Twitter, that will still seem way too high. For those who do, that may sound about right provided Twitter can answer some fundamental question marks about its service.

The first and foremost is monetization. This has been talked about a lot over the past year. Twitter currently does not advertise on its main Twitter.com domain, but you can bet its coming, despite denials. Earlier this week, Twitter rolled out the Japanese version of the site. It had two key differences. One, it was in Japanese. Two, it had advertisements.

The second, and perhaps more problematic question surround Twitter, is its reliability. Twitter exploded onto the scene following SXSW (the South By Southwest festival in Austin, TX) in 2007, but for much of the year Twitter was marred by downtime and sluggishness. All seemed to be corrected this year as the service made it through SXSW 2008 and events like the Super Bowl without any major hiccups, but then last weekend the service broke down. While it was technically still up, users were not getting the majority of updates from their friends and followers for over three days.

Shortly afterwards, it was revealed that Twitter’s chief architect, Blaine Cook, had left the company. A few days later, a VP of engineering and operations which Twitter had just recently hired, was gone as well. While it is not entirely clear yet why either left the company, speculation is swirling that the downtime and scaling issues were to blame.

The third issue is usage outside of the tech sphere. Assuming you have friends outside of the tech world, or, God forbid, you are not in the tech world yourself, you probably know a lot of people who have simply never heard of Twitter. While I can’t go anywhere in the Bay Area without running into someone I know through Twitter, others, like the guy last night, didn’t know anyone using the service.

There are signs that could change relatively quickly however. I’ve already mentioned that Twitter rolled out in Japan, where usage has been huge, but we’re also starting to see Twitter pop up in world news stories. Maybe you heard about James Carl Buck, the college student who was traveling in Egypt when he found himself thrown in jail. He tweeted (the term for a Twitter message) one word to his friends and followers: “Arrested.”

Buck continued to give updates on Twitter via his cell phone throughout the ordeal. People back in the United States were watching. In less than 24 hours, Buck was free. This is the power of Twitter.

Twitter has proven itself useful in a variety of other complicated events as well such as a few different earthquakes and the forest fires in San Diego. World news stories like these are nothing but good, free publicity. I had another friend who doesn’t understand what Twitter is, email me the Buck story today. Twitter can expand beyond its early-adopter user base.

If I had to guess, I would say the end game for Twitter would be a sale to one of the big boys: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams has done this a few times before, notably selling Blogger to Google in 2003. Until then, a new round of money and a valuation around $75 million doesn’t seem too unreasonable. The people who know the service well find it hard to live without when its down. The upside for the company is when the rest of the world catches on.

Here’s the latest action:

More earnings info — While we wrote earlier about Microsoft’s earnings, plenty of other companies are posting theirs, too. Motorola disclosed that its market share is down to 9.5 percent, while Qualcomm’s profit is up. Amazon’s Q1 profits rose 30 percent, Nintendo profits hit a record high on strong Wii and DS sales, and Juniper Network’s profits leaped 66 percent over last year’s.

Greenhouse gas emissions are accelerating — The rise in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide has gone from one part per million each year in the 1960s, to 1.5ppm in the 1980s, to 2ppm in 2000. Now emissions appear to have picked up even more sharply, with the latest numbers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showing an increase of 2.4ppm last year. Overall levels are rapidly approaching 400ppm; an atmospheric concentration of 450ppm is widely held as a point of serious danger.

Russia looking into Internet censorship — While the Russian media is kept under tight control, Internet access in the country has so far remained unfettered. That may be set to change, as Ars Technica reports.

CNET and Yahoo to ink editorial / ad deal – Yahoo has agreed to run much of CNET’s content on its site, as well as selling remnant advertising from the company, according to Kara Swisher.

Another Twitter engineer flitters away — Lee Mighdoll, a VP of engineering and operations added to the Twitter team back in January, has left the company. That follows the departure of chief architect Blaine Cook, for reasons still not entirely clear. Twitter has come under a lot of criticism this past year for its downtime issues, perhaps having some heads roll will help shore things up. The company also may also be preparing to raise a new Series C round, according to Silicon Alley Insider.

Ooma lowers prices in bid to compete — Ooma, as you’ll recall, is a startup selling $400 units that allow people to make free calls, for life, over a broadband internet connection. Following a rumor from Valleywag that the company is struggling, it has rolled out a new scheme to sell units for $249, with an optional monthly service plan for “enhanced telephony services”.

Google’s $70M restaurant bill — Even for Google’s famous free lunch, somebody pays: The company itself. The bill comes to $70 million, according to the Silicon Alley Insider. My question: Who gets the tip?

Okay, my headline’s a bit facetious. While Twitter chief architect Blaine Cook’s departure probably had nothing to do with the caching issue that rendered the service useless this weekend, his absence certainly did not help the team resolve the issue as quickly as they might have liked.

Cook tells Silicon Alley Insider that he left Twitter, the short-form messaging service, just over two weeks ago, but called it an “amicable change.” Mike Arrington of TechCrunch speculates that it might not have been so amicable given the issues with scaling Twitter has had over the past several months, but Cook notes that he is likely to stay on as an advisor to the service.

Twitter comes under a lot of scrutiny because it is so beloved — especially in the tech crowd. Frequent downtime causes frustration in some (this guy) who have come to use the service as a vital means of communication. There are larger ramifications as well when Twitter has issues. Many services and business are starting to use Twitter as a key component of what they do. When Twitter goes down, it hurts them.

Beyond this, Twitter is useful for spreading news about breaking stories and events (such as earthquakes), can be instrumental during times of crisis (such as the San Diego fires) and can be a great tool to meet up with people if you’re in a city or area that you don’t live in.

With the issues from this past weekend resolved, Twitter launched a special version of the service for Japan last night. That version will have advertisements, in a likely test of what is to come in this country.

We’ve contacted Twitter for a comment on Cook’s departure and its effect on this past weekend and will update if we hear back.

So much for the denials after the latest “ads on Twitter” debate, which seems to flare up every few weeks. Ads are here — if you happen to live in Japan.

Twitter felt compelled to launch a Japanese-specific version of the site tonight after seeing a large percentage of Japanese users on the United States-based service. If you are in Japan, you can find the site at http://twitter.jp — otherwise that link will forward you to the English version.

The real story here is that Twitter Japan will feature advertising right from the get-go, CNET learned while talking with Joi Ito of Digital Garage (which Twitter used for some Japanese localization), who is the chief executive of Creative Commons and a VC. “Ads are important,” Ito said. “It’s always harder to add ads later. So we’re launching with them in Japan.”

Toyota will be one of the first official Twitter advertisers. It will be featured in ads that run on the site as well as set up its own Twitter feed, which will presumably advertise its product too. (Though I would like to know a car’s mundane thoughts from time to time.)

So ads are now on Twitter in Japan, can they really be far behind in the United States? Frankly, just as long as the site is working again after being useless most of the past four days, I’m happy.

“We’re not putting ads on Twitter.com,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told Silicon Alley Insider last week. No, you’re putting them on Twitter.jp — for now.

update: Joi Ito has a screenshot of Twitter Japan complete with a Toyota ad. It doesn’t look all that bad (see below).

Twitter was still “this year’s Twitter” at SXSW (the South by Southwest festival in Austin, TX), but another online app was almost equally as useful to me, Sched. For those in the Bay Area this week for the Web 2.0 Expo, Sched is back with a WEB2.0EXPO calendar.

Sched is an online scheduling application that makes organizing big events or multi-day conferences like SXSW and Web 2.0 simple. By grouping together events that are taking place at the same time in large time slots, it is easy to pick and choose which events you are going to go to. If you find one you like, you just check its box to save it, as well as let other Sched users know you are going.

Different types of events are represented by different color boxes. For example, for Web 2.0, keynotes are in pink, panels are in green, workshops are in blue and parties are in orange. Hovering over any event will give you more details about it such as venue, tags, panelists and any relevant links.

Sched makes it easy to print, search and share your personal calendar. You can also send updates to Sched about what you are doing straight from the social messaging application Twitter.

To me, it’s the ease-of-use and clean visual organizational elements that set Sched apart from a service like Yahoo’s Upcoming. Often that service will have too much going on within a page, profile icons, maps, notes, which really all I want is a coordinated calendar. Sched is also a more tailored experience, creating seperate calendars based around big events (they take suggestions for ones to do as well).

Sched is the brain-child of Taylor McKnight and Chirag Mehta, the team that is also behind the Internet video browser, Chime.TV. McKnight tells us that Sched is self-funded, but hints that could change.

Over the weekend we wrote about some of the parties going on for Web 2.0. You can find a list of the popular ones according to Sched here. Ogilvy PR’s Adriana Gascoigne’s list is also worth checking out if you’re into that kind of thing.

Here’s the latest action:

EBay’s Q1 is good but not great — The company’s net income grew 22 percent to $562 million compared to the same period a year ago, and its revenue climbed 24 percent to $2.19 billion. However, user growth has slowed, and the operating margin fell, largely because eBay’s growth is in its sites with low-profit like Skype and PayPal. EBay is trying to hold it own against Amazon’s auction features; John Donahue took over as the company’s chief executive in March, and has already instituted changes to the site’s fee system. Now the market turns its attention to Google’s earnings, which will be announced this afternoon and could provide more evidence that the Internet economy is slowing.

Diggers don’t dig tech stories — Tech stories’ presence on Digg has fallen from 76 percent to 20 percent, according to ReadWriteWeb. The site (with help from blogger and developer Richard Cunningmham) compared Digg’s front page during the first week of March in 2006, 2007 and 2008. Twenty percent is still a significant chunk of news, but the decline seems to indicate Digg’s shift away from tech and toward becoming a more mainstream news site.

Twitter message helps Berkeley student get out of jail — Egyptian police reportedly arrested journalism graduate student James Karl Buck while he was photographing a protest. Buck then sent out a short Twitter message on his cell phone: “ARRESTED.” His friends called Berkeley and the American Embassy, and the next day Buck was a free man. The San Jose Mercury News has more.

Google Maps predicts traffic — Not only does the site offer live traffic information, it can also predict conditions based on past coverage. Google says it has comprehensive traffic data in 30 major metropolitan areas, with partial coverage in others. I, for one, am grateful: This should be a huge help in deciding when to navigate the fearsome stretch of Highway 101 between San Francisco and VentureBeat’s office in Redwood City.

Chip maker Phiar goes out of business — The Boulder, Colo. company had trouble raising a second round of funding after recapitalizing and raising $9 million last October. GigaOM has the scoop, and says chief executive Bob Goodman hasn’t confirmed yet.

Londoners give passwords away to good-looking women — A study found that 21 percent of 576 London office workers were willing to give their computer passwords away to women offering them a chocolate bar in exchange. This sounds crazy to me (Who would do such a thing? Who would design a study like this, anyway?) but the Wall Street Journal says it’s true.

Ad network AdRoll now open to the public – AdRoll’s goal is to sell ads for community-specific networks of small web publishers. Silicon Valley Watcher says the startup’s “blend of social networking tools and marketing technologies” could be competitive against larger, existing networks like Federated Media.

updated
Reports are popping up that users of Twitter, the short-form social messaging service, saw advertisements in their conversation streams briefly tonight. This may have been a quick placement test signaling an impending roll-out, TechCrunch speculates.

Facetious title aside, sooner or later we all know this is coming. Quite frankly, it’s surprising that Twitter has been able to go this long without monetizing the site in any meaningful way. In fact, this has been a topic of debate multiple times in the blogosphere, which loves to talk about both Twitter and money.

Fred Wilson believes it’s just a question of waiting until you have an audience large enough. Given the influx of friend requests multiple users (including myself) have seen over the past couple days, perhaps that time is nearing.

Twitter inserting ads into a user’s stream of tweets (Twitter messages) is the advertising monetization idea thought most likely to happen. After all, third-party services like Twitterific already do this (on the free version). Facebook’s News Feed is another example of a stream with interlaced ads. As long as it is not every other tweet or putting out multiple ads in a row, most people are unlikely to have a problem with such an idea.

CenterNetworks recently laid out some other monetization ideas as well.

Twitter has greatly improved its service uptime in the past few months after multiple mishaps (our coverage). Now, if it could only figure out that pesky search functionality.

update: “We’re not putting ads on Twitter.com. As far as I can tell, a customized background image had some folks confused and speculating,” Twitter’s Biz Stone told Silicon Alley Insider.

While certainly it’s possible and perhaps even likely that a few users were confused into thinking something was an ad when it wasn’t (as I tried to convey in the title and opening paragraph) - Stone’s flat out denial of ads going on Twitter.com is interestingly phrased.

He mentions only Twitter.com, which makes sense given the glimpse of ads on the mobile version. Also, one would have to assume that he means that they aren’t putting ads on the web-based version right now (as in today), but that they will still do so at some point in the future.

Seesmic, the messaging service that’s often called the Twitter of video, has reinforced that comparison by acquiring the Twitter application Twhirl, which lets people read and post to Twitter directly from their desktop.

Twhirl, which is made with Adobe AIR, has the look and feel of an instant messaging client, and Seesmic will use that characteristic to its advantage, making it easier for people to shoot video comments and replies back and forth to each other.

The company didn’t disclose the acquisition price, but it certainly wasn’t much. Twhirl, although it has been downloaded some 100,000 times, is an unfunded one-man startup begun as a hobby, and Seesmic has only taken $6 million and is similarly cash-flow free. The founder of Twhirl, Marco Kaiser, is joining Seesmic to work on the application full-time.

Seesmic itself has yet to be proven; some users love the ability to post short, video-form updates and comments, while ot