Updates over Media, Marketing en Publishing
Today, VP of Product, Chris Cox discussed Facebook’s new-found focus on design consistency, something the company calls “mobile-inspired.” Today, with its News Feed and image redesign, you’ll notice consistency no matter what de…
Lees meerToday, Facebook has announced sweeping design changes to its News Feed, along with a total overhaul of its Photo experience. Photos are a huge part of what makes Facebook so engaging, and the company says that this new design is more “immersive.&…
Lees meerAccording to a report by Boston Business Journal, Facebook appears to be looking for office space in its old neighborhood of Cambridge, Mass. As we all know, Facebook was founded in Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room, and it would be appropriate…
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Twitter has updated its iOS and Android apps today to include more interesting content to keep you tapping and exploring as you perform searches. As we noted last month, Twitter has started to surface older tweets in its search results. Today, that experience will become more prevalent in Twitter’s mobile experience. In addition to tweets that might have some age to it, your search results will now include topics and user suggestions based on your query. Since Twitter is a real-time service, this is no easy task. A few video services have gotten the axe, and the app now has native support for traditional Chinese language. It’s nice to see Twitter combine some sweeping discovery updates with a maintenance release in time for SXSW. Here’s the full list of updates for Twitter for iOS and Android: • As you search you’ll see more topic and user suggestions for your query, based on what’s happening in real time. You’ll also see these suggestions when adding a hashtag or username as you compose a new Tweet. • Top Tweets from big moments in the past pop out when you search for a given term. For example, searching for “election” might highlight Tweets from several months ago. • When you open a web page you can now see the related Tweet for more context. Just pull the tray icon up or down to see or hide the Tweet. • It’s easier to see long conversations in the Tweet details view, which now shows all of the replies to any Tweet • When you block a user in the app, their Tweets will instantly disappear from the Connect tab in the app • Pull-to-refresh in Discover shows a new, smoother animation • Support for traditional Chinese • Logout support (iOS 6 only) • Uploading videos vie Mobypicture, Vodpod and Posterous is no longer supported • Additional bug fixes and improvements Here’s a look at what you might find when doing a search: The only old tweet I saw with the “election” search was a promoted one, hopefully that won’t be the case for all of your searches. As the discovery experience gets better, Twitter can hopefully trap those non-tweeters into clicking more links and following more people. I am enjoying the addition of the tweet staying visible when you click on a link for iOS, providing some context as you venture off of the
During my trip to India, one of the most interesting companies that I met with was ZipDial. In a really cool home-turned-office in Bangalore, a team of brilliant people have turned a phenomenon that is unique to the country into a booming business. That phenomenon is missed calls. While that might not sound like big business, once you realize why this is a prevalent behavior in India, it will make perfect sense. Basically, a lot of residents in the country use prepaid cellphones. Each connected call and sent text costs money; therefore the missed call was born. If you were to drop your friend off at their house and head home, you would call them and then hang up, as to signal that you’ve arrived safely. This way, nobody is charged for the call. It’s kind of like the behavior of paging someone with “911″ back in the day, as if to say “call me immediately.” While the pager behavior never turned into a business, the missed-call behavior most certainly has, and ZipDial owns the space. The service that the company provides is provisioning a phone number that advertisers and companies like Disney and Gillette can plaster on billboards and newspaper ads, allowing people to call the number and disconnect without getting charged. After that, the person is sent a text message with communication about deals, coupons or any other messages that the business wants to convey. This is important because incoming text messages are free for prepaid cellphone users. The telecom companies in India love it, because it’s creating traffic that never existed before. These companies can learn more about their “followers” by sending them surveys, which we’re told that many folks participate in. In many cases, these campaigns have outperformed those taking place on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The company has just announced reaching the milestone of 400 million missed calls, and I spoke with founder and CEO Valerie Wagoner to discuss how ZipDial has made waves in a market that didn’t exist before. TC: Why missed calls? What was interesting to you that screamed opportunity? Wagoner: Growth in mobile adoption has been astonishing over the last five years or so, shooting up to more than 700 million users. Around the 2009-2010 time frame, there were more than 20 million new, first-time mobile users added to the network every month. That’s the population of Australia joining the network every
Depending on who you ask, Foursquare could be in a great place as far as growth, or in a bad place. We’ve heard about potential acquisitions, difficulty fundraising and everything in between. One thing we do know is that Foursquare needs your che…
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It was just a matter of time before Twitter shut the blogging platform Posterous down, after acquiring the company last March. The team had already been folded into the flock, but this means that nobody has to worry about pesky service interruptions of keeping the service’s diminishing number of users happy. The site will be shutting down on April 30th, but it’s not a completely sad story. Have no fear, Posterous co-founder Garry Tan is coming to the rescue with a new site called Posthaven, which he promises will never shut down. Here’s what Tan had to say about the launch when we spoke to him: I’m teaming up with another cofounder of Posterous, Brett Gibson, and we are taking a pledge to keeping the URLs online forever. It’s $5 a month and will have all of the ease of use and power of Posterous. It’s just the two of us and we’re coding it in our bedrooms right now. Tan tells us that Posthaven will never accept funding and will be available to its users “forever.” Here’s what the Posterous/Twitter team had to say about the shutdown, along with instructions on how to get your data: Posterous launched in 2008. Our mission was to make it easier to share photos and connect with your social networks. Since joining Twitter almost one year ago, we’ve been able to continue that journey, building features to help you discover and share what’s happening in the world – on an even larger scale. On April 30th, we will turn off posterous.com and our mobile apps in order to focus 100% of our efforts on Twitter. This means that as of April 30, Posterous Spaces will no longer be available either to view or to edit. Right now and over the next couple months until April 30th, you can download all of your Posterous Spaces including your photos, videos, and documents. As Twitter delves into how to make discovery easier for its users, some of the findings learned by Posterous will most definitely come into play. On the other hand, it’s nice to know that there’s an easy way to move your information, with one of Posterous’ co-founders providing the service “from the heart.” Posthaven is currently taking reservations for its service, so grab your name. UPDATE: It looks like Posthaven is having difficulties managing all of the attention: [Photo credit: Flickr]
According to InsideSocialGames, Zynga and EA have settled their legal dispute over the former’s alleged copying of EA’s popular game “The Sims.” It was clear to many that once Zynga started teasing “The Ville,” it took some major elements from EA’s classic. A source has told TechCrunch that no money has exchanged hands as part of the settlement. At the time of the lawsuit, companies threw barbs back and forth with EA alleging that Zynga “doesn’t understand copyright.” Details as to what the terms of the settlement are haven’t been made available, but we’ve reached out to both companies, and people familiar with the case, for more information. At one point, Zynga countersued for “anti-competitive” practices, turning this into an online gaming bloodbath of epic proportions. Things quieted down since August, and today it appears that everything is resolved. At least legally. EA and Zynga spokespeople have issued the following statement on the matter, which is clearly a part of the settlement: EA and Zynga have resolved their respective claims and have reached a settlement of their litigation in the Northern District of California. Here is the copy of the proposal to dimiss the case, via AllThingsD: eavszynga This is developing. [Photo credit: Flickr]
Twitter and search sound like two peas in a pod, but it’s actually not the marriage made in heaven that you’d think it is. When you think of search, you think of a search engine, like Google, where the world’s information is seemingly at your fingertips. You feel confident that when you Google something, you won’t miss the important information. The secret is that it’s Google’s algorithm that makes search work, not the fact that it indexes everything in the world. In fact, most people don’t get past the second page of search results, so we’re not even utilizing all of the data that Google collects. When I speak to people about Twitter search, they seem to want the same thing: “access to every tweet ever tweeted.” That sounds fine on paper, but in actuality, you really don’t want access to every tweet — just the really good ones. That’s the issue that Twitter is tackling these days, figuring out which tweets to serve up when you search for a word, phrase topic or hashtag. If you were to search for “#grammys” on Twitter, you’d find a whole lot of junk and spam and your experience wouldn’t be a very good one. Sure, we all want to know what our buddies said five years ago when they were drunk, but that’s not how Twitter search works right now. Last week, the company announced that it would be introducing “older tweets” into search results, with not much more information than that. Here’s what the team said at the time: Previously, Twitter search results displayed Tweets going back about a week. We’ve developed a way to include older Tweets, so you can see content that goes beyond the more recent Tweets. Pretty vague, I’d say. But the crux of that statement is that Twitter is definitely looking backwards as far as the content that its accumulated since launching in 2006. There’s a lot of great information to be had from tweets that happened during events like the uprising in Egypt, political elections, the day that Michael Jackson died and just about every natural disaster that’s happened since Twitter launched. I sat down with Sam Luckenbill, an engineer on the Twitter search team, to discuss what the company has in mind for its search experience. Luckenbill joined Twitter after having been a Ruby on Rails consultant. When he joined the company full time
Bitcoin is the “underground” digital money system that’s fueling growth and disruption in the online payment space. Coinbase is a “bitcoin wallet and platform” that lets merchants and consumers make transactions easily using bitcoin. The company scored a huge partnership today, as social discovery and discussion site Reddit has just launched an integration that allows its users to pay for “Reddit Gold” using bitcoin with Coinbase’s system. By buying Reddit Gold, you can add features to your account like comment highlighting and shutting off ads. Additionally, Reddit will now start collecting credit card payments in the US and Canada thanks to Stripe, to go along with its PayPal and Google Wallet options. When it comes to why the move was made, Reddit’s Brian Simpson said “We’ve gotten some requests for additional payment methods so hopefully this brings us closer to reaching everyone who wants to buy gold.” I spoke with Brian Armstrong, Coinbase’s CEO, and this is what he shared about the launch: We’re pairing with Reddit to allow them to start accepting bitcoin payments for Reddit Gold. This is a large step forward for Bitcoin and for Coinbase, as Reddit is a top 100 site in the U.S. and top 200 site internationally. Reddit CEO Yishan Wong stopped by our offices about a month back because he wanted to learn more about how bitcoin worked and how they could start accepting it as a payment method. We had a number of other merchants start using our merchant tools recently, including 4Chan (they have a “pass” which is similar to Reddit Gold), web hosting companies, productivity app, and plenty of sites accepting donations. So this gave him the confidence that we were ready to handle traffic for a site the size of Reddit. While Reddit isn’t exactly a “mainstream” site yet, it is definitely the most widely used site to start accepting bitcoin that I can think of. The company sees this as just the tip of the iceberg, as people start using bitcoin on Reddit, they’ll want to take their wallets to other merchants. That build of demand will hopefully break bitcoin into the mainstream. The plusses to bitcoin are many, allowing secure global digital transactions that don’t transmit any personal information whatsoever, as I discovered while covering another player in the space, BitPay. The transaction fees for bitcoin purchases are also extremely low compared to other services, so it
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