Category: Microblogging

Twitter has been teasing users with an analytics service for some time, a way to track the vital statistics about your tweets and the responses they get. Well, Twitter Analytics has entered a small invitation-only test phase, and the first screenshots are starting to dribble out. Mashable has two screenshots, one showing a "timeline activity" page, with your follows and unfollows over time, ...

Twitter has finally introduced instant notifications for @mentions, starting with SMS users and the Twitter iPhone app. By default, push notifications from the iPhone app will only work when you get a mention from someone you're following. You can change your settings in the iPhone app to receive notifications for all mentions. To do the same for SMS, text "set mentions all" to Twitter. Instant ...

Twitter has just announced an update to its official app for Android. The main focus of this update is making the app faster, more polished, and easier to use. Several new features have been added to reach these goals. Let's take them one by one. A new 'tweet details page' is available by simply tapping on a tweet. This page makes it easier to click on links or reply, retweet, favorite or share ...

Hey, Twitter fans! It's another Twitter Tuesday, and there's one piece of Twitter news that's on everybody's mind: ads are here! Some folks see in-stream advertising as the end of Twitter as we know it, and we're about to find out whether that's true. Twitter's much-discussed Promoted Tweets -- paid Twitter ads that will be injected directly into your Twitter stream -- have started to roll out. ...

Twitter has just reached 300 full-time employees! It seems like not so very long ago that we were celebrating Ev, Biz and co. for employing more people than the number of characters in a tweet, but now they've more than doubled that. In fact, word is that the growing Twitter flock is looking for a new nest ... I mean, office. Twitter wouldn't comment to TechCrunch about the new digs, but chances ...

It was a huge week for Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. He starred in a new ad for Stolichnaya vodka, and he had a piece published in The Atlantic. The vodka commercial is below, but let's dig into Biz's Atlantic editorial a little bit. It's a response to Malcolm Gladwell's recent New Yorker attack on Twitter as a tool for activism. In response to Gladwell's assertion that the American civil ...

A Twitter for Web video is an interesting concept, but short vids don't seem to catch on the way short text does. 12seconds.tv, probably the best-known quick video service, apparently didn't have much luck making the concept profitable, because they're shutting down on October 22nd. 12seconds says traffic to the service hasn't grown much since it launched 18 months ago. Seesmic tried a similar ...

In a big personnel move at Twitter, co-founder Evan Williams is stepping down as CEO. @ev has been one of the faces of Twitter, along with Biz Stone, but he's ready to focus more on product development and hand the reins of Twitter over to COO Dick Costolo. The change makes a lot of sense: Ev didn't get into Twitter to monetize, he got into Twitter to build something cool. Costolo has done a ...

Twitter is one of those build-a-great-service then figure-out-how-to-make-money-later startups. We've seen many companies try this strategy lately, with some succeeding and some failing. Evan Williams, one of Twitter's three co-founders (with Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone), has been its CEO for the last two years since Jack Dorsey stepped aside to take up a role at e-commerce startup Square. Dick ...

It's been a busy week for Twitter itself, so I'll (mostly) lay off the third-party Twitter client news in this edition of Twitter Tuesday. Hit the jump for all the latest updates from Twitter -- including some hope for those of you who don't have access to the shiny new Twitter web interface yet. ...

So, we've seen Twitter for iPhone, Twitter for iPad, and a new Twitter Web interface. Where's our Tweetie for Mac update? Twitter is finally releasing some details about what developer Loren Brichter -- hired by the big T to revamp Tweetie into Twitter for iPhone and create the official iPad app-- is doing with Tweetie for Mac. Here's the deal: Tweetie for Mac won't become an official Twitter ...

All this time, we've been referring to Twitter as a social network, and all this time, we've been wrong. That's if you believe Twitter VP Kevin Thau, who presented at Nokia World 2010 today. Thau focused on Twitter's potential as a news source (and all the traffic it gets from people who don't even have Twitter accounts) and threw up a slide that said "not a social network." Huh? Well, my mind is ...

It's certainly not a good week to be a Twitter app developer (unless you work for Twitter, that is). Tweet honcho Evan Williams just revealed on the Twitter blog that third-party apps make up a teeny-tiny percentage of all Twitter traffic, with the Twitter website and official apps pulling the bulk of the weight. Ev stopped short of saying, "You think we need you, but we don't," but that seemed ...

Big changes for third-party apps on Twitter today: they can no longer require you to log in with your Twitter password. Twitter's mandatory switch to OAuth authentication has finally happened, which means you have more control over which apps can access your account. In case you've never signed into a Twitter app with OAuth, here's how it works: you click to sign in, and get redirected to ...

Twitter is finally getting on board the bookmarklet bus, about a million years after every other Web service and URL shortener in the megaverse. You can now add a button to your browser's bookmarks bar that allows you to quickly shorten a URL using the little-hyped t.co shortener. Gee, I wish bit.ly would have thought of that ... oh, wait, they already did. I'm perplexed by the little ways in ...