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 David Speiser, and Bono.
The syntax for a describing a list in conversation is like this: @paulboutin/entourage. The URL for a list looks like this: twitter.com/paulboutin/entourage. Open that URL, and you’ll see only… Continue Reading
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 way home. Driver hit and run. Jwz got the plate and sfpd know. EMT checked me out, I am ok”
Both BoingBoing and SFist picked up the story. The friend Adams… Continue Reading
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 $5 from every bottle to San Francisco’s Room to Read.
From what we hear, Twitter employees are avid wine connoisseurs, well-versed in vintages and varietals at company parties. In fact, the… Continue Reading
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 of Microsoft’s backup system for Sidekick customers’ data.
But it’s too late to undo a lot of the reputational damage. T-Mobile has stopped selling the phones, and lawsuits have already been… Continue Reading
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 where the only web connection a user may ever know is through their phone.
Twitter just closed a deal with India’s largest mobile operator, Bharti Airtel, to let people send tweets… Continue Reading
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 Twitter’s trending topics by sending tweets using popular tags to end up in search results.
Twitter has tried to fight back every time by suspending accounts with strange activity. But it’s… Continue Reading
¿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 has only been available in English and Japanese thus far.
Facebook also used a similar strategy in rolling its site out to non-English speaking audiences by relying on volunteer translators. It… Continue Reading
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 Partners. Benchmark Capital, Spark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners topped up their investments, while Union Square Ventures and Charles River Ventures sat out.
Below is a table summarizing Twitter’s investment history… Continue Reading
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 a statement:
“We are currently investigating a problem causing many users’ timelines to be delayed. We will update with status here shortly.”
The problem happened across Twitter’s main sites plus any sites… Continue Reading
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 early stage investments. Participating in a high-valuation round means too large a share of the fund goes to too few companies, said George Zachary (pictured), a partner at the firm.
The… Continue Reading
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 change and evolve. Twitter’s doing limited testing on the function for now, then will expand it out to the entire site later.
One plus of the new feature is that it… Continue Reading
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. (The sync only works with the Echofon’s $4.99 Pro version for the iPhone. However, the company behind the app, Naan Studio, said it’ll make the sync available to the free,… Continue Reading
Yes, you may tweet from the North Pole
Twitter’s uses get stranger and stranger as people outfit hardware to tweet on the social network.
There’s a device that that will tweet when bread is ready out of a baker’s oven and Kickbee’s a product that tweets whenever a baby kicks inside its pregnant mother. Now there’s a crew of explorers navigating through the quickly-opening Northwest Passage that have outfitted their ship to tweet its coordinates from far beyond where mobile carriers can reach.
The Northwest… Continue Reading
Sorry Morgan Stanley, Twitter forgot to mention you
When Twitter announced its latest round of funding on Friday, it oddly left out one investor: Morgan Stanley.
The investment bank put less than $10 million into the financing round that reportedly valued the company at $1 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. (Twitter later added the investment bank’s name to the roster of investors in its blog post).
Guess this means Morgan Stanley didn’t put too much stock in the “Teens don’t tweet” report its… Continue Reading
Twitter confirms its latest round; no word on size
Twitter confirmed its latest round of funding, reportedly valuing it at $1 billion. The new investors are Insight Venture Partners and T. Rowe Price. Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital and Benchmark Capital raised their existing investments in the microblogging network.
The company didn’t release any info about how much it raised. It’s fairly standard for start-ups not to talk about their valuations, however many do make note of the round size. The company raised as much… Continue Reading
Trendsmap gives us a look at Twitter’s location API possibilities
While Twitter gears up to release a way to let users share their exact coordinates every time they tweet, Australian developers have given us a hint of such a service’s possibilities with Trendsmap.
Developers at Melbourne, Australia-based Stateless Systems have taken latitudinal and longitudinal data from users’ profiles and compiled their tweets into word clouds that rest above a map. (Stateless says they’ll start incorporating the new geodata from Twitter’s upcoming application programming interface for location-sharing… Continue Reading
Report: Twitter may close $100 million round today
Twitter, the microblogging upstart, is close to raising as much as $100 million in new funding today, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The previously unreported new investor is T. Rowe Price. New York-based Insight Venture Partners is the other new player, as previously reported, while Spark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners will top up their previous investments. For comparison, this round is nearly double the $55 million Twitter has raised altogether so far.
Twitter is on… Continue Reading
MySpace adds two-way Twitter connection
Social network site MySpace is jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. It’s letting users sync their status updates with Twitter, adding another social networking service to the list of companies integrating with the fast-growing microblogging network. (See right for an example.)
The News Corp.-owned property is using OAuth to share limited data with Twitter. Tweets originating from MySpace will include a link to drive traffic back to the social network.
The move comes as other services have moved… Continue Reading
How accurate are BAM Investor’s stock predictions? Check Twitter
BAM Investor, a company that provides stock market predictions to hedge funds, boasts that it has an “uncanny” record of predicting crucial market shifts. Of course, unless you’re one of the institutional investors buying predictions from BAM, it’s hard to know whether to take those claims seriously. But now the company is making its predictions public — on microblogging service Twitter.
BAM Investor says it will use its Twitter account to tweet all of its market… Continue Reading
One billion users, $1 billion: how did Twitter get the numbers?
A company valued by its private investors at $1 billion, with nary any revenue in sight?
Color most traditional investors incredulous.
But the company — and its investors — must have justified its value somehow. Earlier this summer, leaked company documents showed Twitter was gunning for 1 billion users in 2013 — a user base that would make it the largest site in the world.
That was the result of a thought exercise, co-founder Biz Stone told us in… Continue Reading