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The War For the Web
By Tim O'ReillyNovember 16, 2009
On Friday, my latest tweet was automatically posted to my Facebook news feed, as always. But this time, Tom Scoville noticed a difference: the link in the posting was no longer active. It turns out that a lot of other people had noticed this too. Mashable wrote about the problem on Saturday morning: Facebook Unlinks Your Twitter Links. if you’re...
Posterous: The Copy-and-Post Revolution in (Micro) Blogging
By Mark SigalNovember 4, 2009
A friend of mine, who has achieved repeated success in high-tech startup land, said that if you want to be successful, focus on segments where <10% of the crowd currently adopts the solution, and by virtue of dramatically simplifying the approach, you can toggle adoption rates to closer to 90%. Enter Posterous, a micro-blogging tool (it's free) that does a few things really well.
The Emerging Twitter List Arms Race
By Mark DrapeauOctober 30, 2009
I use Twitter a lot, but I was not among the very first to see the new Lists feature. I can now, though. And what I find much more interesting than actually using the feature myself is the fact that I woke up this morning to find that I was on dozens of other people's lists. (In fact, while I...
Twitter Users Most Followed by the Web 2.0 Summit Crowd
By Ben LoricaOctober 28, 2009
I took the set of users† who posted tweets containing the hashtag #w2s and determined who those users followed. Unlike the list of the most followed users in all of Twitter, the list isn't dominated by celebrities. (A few coders landed in the top 50.) Regular Radar readers will be familiar with many of the users listed below: over 20...
Why Google and Bing's Twitter Announcement is Big News
By James TurnerOctober 21, 2009
Lurking innocently on Google's blog this afternoon, like many of their big announcements, was the bombshell that they have reached an agreement with Twitter to make all tweets searchable. This followed an earlier announcement at the Web 2.0 conference by Microsoft that Bing has also arranged to make tweets searchable.
Four short links: 20 October 2009
By Nat TorkingtonOctober 20, 2009
Poles, Politeness, and Politics in the Age of Twitter (Stephen Fry) -- begins with a discussion of a UK storm but rapidly turns into a discussion of fame in the age of Twitter, modern political discourse, the "deadwood press", and The Commons in Twitter Assembled. There is an energy abroad in the kingdom, one that yearns for a new...
Wolfram|Alpha API to be released later today
By Mike LoukidesOctober 15, 2009
We've just been told that the public API for Wolfram Alpha will be made available later today. The API documentation will be available at http://products.wolframalpha.com/api . As of noon, PDT, that page only redirects to the Alpha home page, but they've promised it will be available sometime this afternoon....
Four short links: 18 September 2009
By Nat TorkingtonSeptember 18, 2009
Echofon -- novel take on Twitter apps: sync your unread list between phone, browser, and (ultimately, they promise) desktop Twitter app. (via auchmill on Twitter) GLAM Tech (MP3) -- Radio New Zealand new technology slot about the use of technology in the Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) sector. For links, see the programme page. Man With Miniature Radio...
RSS never blocks you or goes down: why social networks need to be decentralized
By Andy OramSeptember 13, 2009
We may have been willing to build our virtual houses on shaky foundations might when they were temporary beach huts; but now we need to examine the ground on which many are proposing to build our virtual shopping malls and even our virtual federal offices. The next generation of social networking increasingly appears to require a decentralized, peer-to-peer infrastructure.
Four short links: 11 September 2009
By Nat TorkingtonSeptember 10, 2009
Healthspottr Fellow -- outstanding entrepreneurs will be awarded prizes of up to $250,000 to accelerate their innovative endeavours. Think MacArthur Genius Grant for healthcare. (via Gov 2.0 Summit) jsMath -- Javascript for embedding Math in web pages. (via Hacker News) Google's Undocumented Embeddable PDF Viewer -- Google Docs offers an undocumented feature that lets you embed PDF files and...
Four short links: 21 August 2009
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 20, 2009
TwitterMood -- using Twitter as a giant mood sensor for the world (see also temporal correlations, via kellan on delicious). What Will Remain of Us -- The sea that brought trade to Dunwich was not entirely benevolent. The town was losing ground as early as 1086 when the Domesday Book, a survey of all holdings in England, was published;...
Four short links: 17 August 2009
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 16, 2009
How Twitter Works in Theory (Kevin Marks) -- very nice summary about the conceptual properties of Twitter that let it work. Both Google and Twitter have little boxes for you to type into, but on Google you're looking for information, and expecting a machine response, whereas on Twitter you're declaring an emotion and expecting a human response. This is...
Four short links: 14 August 2009
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 13, 2009
Page2Pub -- harvest wiki content and turn it into EPub and PDF. See also Sony dropping its proprietary format and moving to EPub. Open standards rock. (via oreillylabs on Twitter) SQL Pie Chart -- an ASCII pie chart, drawn by SQL code. Horrifying and yet inspiring. Compare to PostgreSQL code to produce ASCII Mandelbrot set. (via jdub on Twitter...
Four short links: 7 August 2009
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 6, 2009
Defragging the Stimulus -- each [recovery] site has its own silo of data, and no site is complete. What we need is a unified point of access to all sources of information: firsthand reports from Recovery.gov and state portals, commentary from StimulusWatch and MetaCarta, and more. Suggests that Recovery.gov should be the hub for this presently-decentralised pile of recovery...
John Adams on Fixing Twitter: Improving the Performance and Scalability of the World's Most Popular Micro-blogging Site
By Jesse RobbinsAugust 6, 2009
Twitter is suffering outages today as they fend off a Denial of Service attack, and so I thought it would be helpful to post John Adams’ exceptional Velocity session about Operations at Twitter. Good luck today John & team… I know it’s going to be a long day!...
The Productivity Myth: Step Away From the Twitter - Get Back to Work
By Joshua-Michele RossJuly 31, 2009
Ever since I posted a how-to on establishing guidelines for social media in the workplace, the issue that has generated the most energy concerns productivity. Employers it seems are very worried about lost productivity due to social media usage (Facebook, Twitter etc.). I can’t really get my arms around it because I don’t think these tools bring out any really...
The Government Blocks Twitter No It Doesn't
By Mark DrapeauJuly 27, 2009
In a recent CSPAN interview, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs noted that, “for some reason, Twitter is blocked on White House computers,” which created a minor frenzy among tech-savvy journalists ranging from UPI to The Hill. Later, news upstart Mediaite uncovered that the New Media team in the Old Executive Office Building could indeed access Twitter, but other people working...
Four short links: 24 July 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 24, 2009
Are Tweets Copyright-Protected (WIPO) -- According to an Internet posting on blogherald.com by Jonathan Bailey, every time a new communication technology emerges, it shifts the copyright landscape, and new copyright issues that do not fit existing intellectual property (IP) standards arise. With Twitter, for example, while its terms of service clearly state that tweeters own anything they post on...
Bantamweight Publishing in an Easily Plagiarised World
By Mark DrapeauJuly 15, 2009
Even professional writers are prone to infrequent accidental plagiarism. But in the world of novels, newspapers, and college exams, there are rules about bootlegging others’ work that are well-established - most everyone agrees on what behaviors are unacceptable and what the consequences are. In bantamweight publishing, however, the rules are not so clear. In order for the British Army to...
Ten Commandments of Power Account Submitters
By Sara PeytonJuly 14, 2009
Social media expert Tamar Weinberg cuts through the hype and jargon to give you intelligent advice and strategies for positioning your business on the social web in her new book from O'Reilly, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web
Four short links: 13 July 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 9, 2009
IDEO's Human Centered Design Toolkit -- methodology and toolkit for inspiring new solutions to difficult challenges within communities of need. Full PDF of manual and cards available for free download. Bentham and the Privacy of the Grave -- [M]uch of what Bentham meant to address in the context of his Panoptic structures we now take for granted. In Bentham’s...
Four short links: 10 July 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 9, 2009
Ceph -- open source distributed filesystem from UCSC. Ceph is built from the ground up to seamlessly and gracefully scale from gigabytes to petabytes and beyond. Scalability is considered in terms of workload as well as total storage. Ceph is designed to handle workloads in which tens thousands of clients or more simultaneously access the same file, or write...
Freemium Services and the Economics of Social Networking
By George ReeseJuly 5, 2009
Social networking sites face a unique economic challenge when it comes to monetizing the value they create. Any attempt to capture a piece of the value they create inevitably damages that value.
Four short links: 3 July 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 2, 2009
OECD Factbook -- Flash-built impressive data explorer from OECD. Go to Indicators > Load and, in the words of Ben Goldacre, "prepare for nerdgasm". (via bengoldacre on Twitter) James Boyle is on Twitter -- author of the book The Public Domain. Sewers and Startups (Pete Warden) -- designing to last, reminds me of Saul Griffith's heirloom design riff. When...
Four short links: 26 June 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJune 25, 2009
Size vs Growth vs Acceleration (Rowan Simpson) -- you can tell how well a company is doing by the basis on which they report their progress. Engineers Are The Best Deal, So Stock Up On Them (TechCrunch) -- Software engineers today are about 200-400% more productive than software engineers were 10 years ago because of open source software, better...
Four short links: 25 June 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJune 25, 2009
How an Indie Musician Can Make $19,000 in 10 Hours Using Twitter -- as Zoe Keating pointed out: "cash made by @amandapalmer in one month on Twitter = $19,000; cash made by @amandapalmer from 30,000 record sales = $0". The Nike Experiment: How the Shoe Giant Unleashed the Power of Personal Metrics (Wired) -- And not only can we...
Twitter Boot Camp Slides
By Mac SlocumJune 23, 2009
Presenters at O'Reilly's Twitter Boot Camp, held June 15 in New York, offered a variety of best practices and case studies revolving around Twitter's business, marketing, branding and advertising opportunities. Slides from the day's presentations are available below (click the...
Sarah Milstein on Iranian Protests and Twitter
By Timothy M. O'BrienJune 18, 2009
In this 10 minute interview, Sarah Milstein, co-author of the Twitter Book, discusses Twitter's impact on the Iranian protests, the emerging relationship between Twitter and breaking news stories, and she addressed the fear of inadvertent transparency within immediate social messaging communications media.
Interesting Questions Raised by Iranian Twitter Activism
By Timothy M. O'BrienJune 16, 2009
Development (4:10 PM CST): The State Department has been in contact with Twitter to make sure that the service remained available for protestors in Iran. (reuters) Last Friday, Twitter started to digest the Iranian election results, and the tool became a powerful vehicle for protest and coordination for student protestors within Iran and interested parties outside the country. American Twitterers...
Twitter is Not a Conversational Platform
By Mark DrapeauJune 9, 2009
Perhaps the most common reason given for joining the microsharing site Twitter is "participating in the conversation" or some version of that. I myself am guilty of using this explanation. But is Twitter truly a conversational platform? Here I argue that the underlying mechanics of Twitter more closely resemble the knowledge co-creation seen in wikis than the dynamics seen with...
Twitter Approval Matrix
By Mike HendricksonJune 9, 2009
This matrix shows four quadrants used to describe tastes found on Twitter, or related sites such as hashtag.org, tweestats.com, etc. The Y-axis is partly analytical and shows popularity (mostly through scraped numbers) or perceived popularity (in the future nominated by you). The other part of the grid is more curated and subjective. The X-axis has been plotted based on my personal opinion.
Four short links: 4 June 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJune 3, 2009
Wave Robot Ruby Client -- Sam Ruby ported the Wave Robot Python Client library to Ruby. He found that the wire protocol is full of Java classnames, and says, Overall, I feel that this Google Wave could benefit from earlier and wider reviews. In the comments, a Google employee replies The Java API was implemented first... We are working...
Four short links: 1 June 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJune 1, 2009
Spymaster -- a faux-spy game on Twitter: Each player becomes a master of a spy ring based upon their Twitter followers list. The more people that follow you and are playing characters in Spymaster, the more powerful your network will be. As a spymaster, you can perform tasks or attack other spymasters on Twitter. With each successful attempt, you...
Four short links: 28 May 2009
By Nat TorkingtonMay 28, 2009
Viral Epidemics Poised to go Mobile -- Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (author of Linked: How Everything Is Connected To Everything Else) modelled mobile phone virus epidemiology for NSF and concluded that (in accordance with experience) no single OS has critical mass for viruses to break-out. I wonder: will Android or iPhone reach that point first? (via ACM TechNews) Socrata -- formerly...
Chapter 4. Meet the Twitter API - Twitter API: Up and Running
By Kevin MakiceMay 27, 2009
This excerpt is from Twitter API: Up and Running. This groundbreaking book provides you with the skills and resources you need to build web applications for Twitter. Perfect for new and casual programmers intrigued by the microblogging, Twitter API:...
Chapter 1. Hello Twitter - Twitter API: Up and Running
By Kevin MakiceMay 27, 2009
This excerpt is from Twitter API: Up and Running. This groundbreaking book provides you with the skills and resources you need to build web applications for Twitter. Perfect for new and casual programmers intrigued by the microblogging, Twitter API:...
Four short links: 27 May 2009
By Nat TorkingtonMay 27, 2009
uzbl -- lightweight WebKit-based web browser controlled with vim-like keystrokes, controllable through a FIFO for scripting, and all the "features" (bookmarking, history, changing URL) happen through external scripts. For the hardcore. (via joshua on delicious) A Conversation With Eric Rodenbeck About Usefully Cool Design and Engineering (Jon Udell) -- if we could only distil Stamen down to their barest...
Amazon's Physical vs. Digital Dissonance
By Andrew SavikasMay 18, 2009
In March of 2008, I wrote about the frustrating experience of trying to get this blog added to Kindle. Fourteen months later, apparently that "rather large ingestion queue" is still...
Being a Suggested User Leads to Thousands of Twitter Followers
By Ben LoricaMay 17, 2009
Ever since Twitter started suggesting accounts to new users, it was clear that those on the suggested users list were gaining thousands of followers. Setting aside the fact that number of followers is a poor gauge of influence (see our Twitter report for details), I wanted to know how many followers a suggested account gains by appearing on the list....
Four short links: 12 May 2009
By Nat TorkingtonMay 12, 2009
Lacie 10TB Storage -- for what used to be the price of a good computer, you can now buy 10TB of storage. Storage on sale goes for less than $100 a terabyte. This obviously promotes collecting, hoarding, packratting, and the search technology necessary to find what you've stashed away. Analogies to be drawn between McMansions full of Chinese-made crap...
Twitter Boot Camp Coming June 15 in New York
By Mac SlocumMay 12, 2009
Twitter seems simple on the surface, but it takes practice to harness Twitter's audience development power. That's why we're hosting a one-day Twitter Boot Camp in New York City...
Goodreads vs Twitter: The Benefits of Asymmetric Follow
By Tim O'ReillyMay 10, 2009
I am never more painfully reminded of the limits of symmetric “friend”-based social networks than I am when I post a book review on Goodreads. I love books, and I love spreading the word about ones I enjoy (as well as ones I expected to enjoy, but didn’t quite). Most of the time, my reviews go out quietly to a...
Tim O'Reilly - Why Twitter Matters for News
By James TurnerMay 7, 2009
Twitter has been used for a lot of different purposes, and one has been to report breaking news. But there's been some criticism of how Twitter deals with news, such as the Swine Flu outbreak. With that in mind, O'Reilly Week in Review talked to Tim O'Reilly himself, co-author of the new Twitter Book, about the role of Twitter in...
Velocity Preview - Keeping Twitter Tweeting
By James TurnerMay 7, 2009
If there's a site that exemplifies explosive growth, it has to be Twitter. It seems like everywhere you look, someone is Tweeting, or talking about Tweeting, or Tweeting about Tweeting. Keeping the site responsive under that type of increase is no easy job, but it's one that John Adams has to deal with every day, working in Twitter Operations. He'll...
O'Reilly Week in Review for May 4th, 2009
By James TurnerMay 6, 2009
This week, we talk to Tim O'Reilly about how Twitter has dealt with the Swine Flu panic, Make publisher Dale Dougherty about the new interest in the Maker culture, and our usual podcast quiz question....
Sarah Milstein and The Twitter Book featured on The Agenda - Canada's Top Current Affairs Show Talks about Twitter and Its Impact on Journalism
By Sara PeytonMay 5, 2009
Hosted by award-winning journalist Steve Paiken, The Agenda explored Twitter and it's impact on how we get and share the news in last night's show. Twitter expert and coauthor of The Twitter Book, Sarah Milstein, joined the Toronto based show from a studio in San Francisco. Jay Rosen, professor with the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, Amber MacArthur, new media journalist and web strategist, Mathew Ingram, the communities editor at The Globe and Mail, and David Cohn is the founder of Spot.us--a nonprofit project to pioneer community funded reporting--also joined the discussion. Take a look.
NiN's Rob Sheridan on iPhone Application Rejection
By Timothy M. O'BrienMay 5, 2009
In this interview with Rob Sheridan (@rob_sheridan), Nine Inch Nails' Artistic Director, Rob discusses the experience of getting the rejection letter from Apple, and what effect it has on the band's plans to build community applications on the iPhone platform. You'll hear Sheridan express an uneasiness that Apple can act as judge and jury without providing any transparency into the approval process.
Reinventing the Book in the Age of the Web
By Tim O'ReillyApril 28, 2009
There's a lot of excitement about ebooks these days, and rightly so. While Amazon doesn't release sales figures for the Kindle, there's no question that it represents a turning point in the public perception of ebook devices. And of course, there's Stanza, an open ebook platform for the iPhone, which has been downloaded more than a million times (and now...
News Industry on Twitter: Full of Crazies, Not Reliable
By Timothy M. O'BrienApril 28, 2009
There's a Twitter "backlash" at the moment as news organizations like CNN start to react to the way people are communicating about the Swine Flu on Twitter. What is behind this reaction, and is it valid? Is Twitter a "petri dish" for hysteria and insanity? Or, is it a useful tool for the distirbution of public health information?
Trying to Track Swine Flu Across Cities in Realtime
By John GeraciApril 27, 2009
John Geraci is a guest blogger and heads up the DIY City movement. He will be speaking about DIY City at Where 2.0 in San Jose on 5/20. Since early last friday, when I got a tip about swine flu in Mexico City from a health researcher, the team that does SickCity has been working to make the system something...
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