Twitter Expands Its Archive Function to 12 More Languages In International Push: Dutch, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish and Spanish
Today Twitter announced that it would be ramping up its archiving tool to cover people who use the service in 12 non-English languages: Dutch, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish and Spanish. The ability to access your own archive of tweets was first launched last year, in December, as a service only for those using Twitter in English.
OK, so maybe we said it would be hard for an app to break out at SXSW this year. But that isn’t stopping several startups from trying. One startup called Hangtime, from serial entrepreneur Karl Jacob, is looking to be the comprehensive Rolodex of events at SXSW and beyond. It pulls in events from Facebook that you have permission to see, ranks them by overall popularity, popularity among your friends and distance among other factors. When you open the app, you can use Facebook to find friends and pull in hundreds of events. You can say you’re “interested” in going to them by clicking a button in the app. The idea is to get people to interact without necessarily committing to going to something. “People don’t necessarily know what they are going to. Nobody likes to commit,” he said. “So we had to make it lightweight and make it super easy for people to share things with each other, but not commit.” In Hangtime, there’s a way to say you’re publicly interested in an event, and then there’s a way to privately share an event with a friend. “That creates this bifurcation,” he said. “It’s a lightweight way of saying that you’re interested in something — but behind the scenes.” Hangtime follows a long line of events-related startups like the now-defunct Plancast and another startup Sosh that try to help people figure out what to do on nights and weekends. Jacob says that other events startups might have just been too early on the market. “The biggest mistake in the past in the core event discovery space was that we had a data problem,” he said. But he said now that social platforms like Facebook have solidified, it’s become a nicely centralized source of data. In fact, the issue now is that there’s too much data and there needs to be better personalization and recommendations, he argues. “A hallmark of these mobile applications is that they shouldn’t require work,” Jacob said. “They shouldn’t require you to enter in things. You have to give people a good experience out of the box.” To get that, Jacob used a pretty ingenious seeding and testing strategy. The company bought ads on Facebook targeted at colleges in the Midwest, such as the University of Missouri-Columbia and others in Arizona, Nebraska and Alabama. They want to see if they could remotely seed an app on
The one night stand is proof that human beings, despite our 
Facebook’s no blogging platform, but Tumblr is and it’s eating the social network’s young. If Facebook wants to host our digital lives, it needs richer sharing. That’s Storylane’s specialty, so Facebook’s acqhire of its team sounds like a smart staff-up. The startup’s Chief Executive Story Teller Jonathan Gheller and crew could convince us to share our quick memes and long opinions on Facebook.
Facebook announced a number of new common actions today for Facebook activity, joining the “watch video” and other existing ones available to developers. These include actions in the Fitness, Books and Movies & TV categories that help users better express their interaction with media and their world. Of course, they also help developers mining the Open Graph for data get a more accurate picture of user intent and habits.
After initially missing the boat on mobile-photo sharing and then having to turn around and plunk down nearly $1 billion for Instagram, Facebook wasn’t going to let a hot app (and potential existential threat) emerge too quickly again. Although Facebook is more than 1 billion users strong, the company still has a paranoia and mortal fear that the next social network could emerge out of a distant dorm room. With promising engagement and growth metrics, Snapchat had quietly piqued some interest about a year ago before entering a hyper-growth phase with about 5 billion photos sent in a year plus $13.5 million in funding led by Benchmark Capital. By late last year, Snapchat was sending 50 million photos a day compared to 300 million photos posted on Facebook per day. Facebook responded much faster this time with an app called Poke, which it built in about 12 days. It had extras like the ability to send simple text messages, in addition to video and photos. It also allowed group conversations. But for many reasons, a Facebook clone does not a startup-killer make. Data on the active usage for both apps showed that Snapchat actually grew in market share from December to January after Facebook Poke’s launch. It then leveled off into February, while Facebook Poke has declined from a 2 percent market share down to less than 0.25 percent among iPhone users in the U.S. A Sequoia-backed startup called Onavo has a panel of a few million users that it samples active usage data for apps from. Because the company’s products track data compression, they can actually see the “market share” of different apps — or what percentage of iPhone owners in the U.S. used them in the last month. So as you can see below, their data suggests that 12 percent of U.S. iPhone users opened up Snapchat in February. Facebook has a mixed track record of competing against what it considers emerging threats. It has had successes like Messenger, which the company launched after buying Beluga. But on the other hand, it bought Instagram after it looked like a Facebook Camera app was going to come out too late in the market to be competitive. It shut down Quora-competitor Questions after about two years. It shut down a “Deals” product after exploring the super-competitive group-buying space, and Foursquare didn’t decline after Facebook launched its own “check-in” product. After very
Tired of seeing every inane detail of yours friends lives pop up in that annoying Facebook sidebar ? Well apparently Facebook was too as the redesign announced yesterday eliminates Ticker for some, and banishes it to the bottom of the left Chat sidebar as a one-story tall blip for others. The real-time Ticker feed launched 2011 that’s best known for outing your friends as Britney Spears fans.
Question: How do you attract a key youth, mobile-first demographic to your social network and get them to increase engagement? Answer: Partner with an OEM handset manufacturer to create a powerful yet reasonably priced branded device with all your software already on board. Facebook looks to be readying a follow-up to the HTC Status, a mid-market smartphone it released with a dedicated Facebook button in 2011, and a new leak shows off its specs.