While we nerds may best remember LeVar Burton as a VISOR-clad Starfleet officer, he also spent much of the 80s and 90s instilling in children an appreciation for reading. In fact, Burton is still stuck to the idea of encouraging childhood literacy — he launched a new company called RRKidz this past September that’s currently working on (among other things) a “disruptive” new iPad reading app.
But when the time came to set up the all-important Twitter account to provide “the latest info on the upcoming relaunch of [Reading Rainbow] as an app,” he found that someone had already laid claim to the @readingrainbow handle. What’s more the account owner hadn’t so much as made a peep in the last three years. → Read More
Twitter has posted a seriously awful/hilarious recruiting video to YouTube, which the company says was the product of last week’s “Hack Week.” During this time, employees were able to take time away from their day-to-day work to collaborate on new ideas. Although it was only posted on Friday, the video has already seen over 400,000 views at the time of writing. Why so viral? Because it’s parodying the entire genre of startup recruiting videos by purposefully being bad. Really, really bad. So bad it’s funny. Or at least that’s the hope.
The video has everything: amateurish effects, cheesy music, stilted speech, bad acting, poor production quality, and sayings like: “Man this is a sweet job. But working at Twitter isn’t just a sweet job, it’s a way of life – a way of life that’s like a sweet job.”
Yeah, you pretty much have to watch this one. → Read More
Twitter has taken fire in recent days from activists and bloggers who fear that the company’s new censorship policies will muffle online freedom. News reports recall the ways in which protestors have had made use of Twitter to oppose dictatorships, and dissidents express concern that their ability to communicate will be harmed. The more immediate issue, however, may lie elsewhere. Twitter’s new policies demonstrate vividly the complicated relationship between Internet freedom and democratic government. → Read More
Yesterday’s announcement that Twitter would be selectively censoring tweets based on country was not well-received. But part of that announcement was the assurance that the process would at least be transparent. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.
They also mentioned that they were working with Chilling Effects to make notices and orders sent to Twitter publicly available. At the time of the post yesterday, the site wasn’t up yet, but you can now browse it at chillingeffects.org/twitter. → Read More
Twitter has announced in a blog post a glorious new ability: “the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world.” At last!
There are two ways of looking at this new “ability,” one optimistic and one pessimistic. One is that Twitter is now more able to effectively tailor itself to the needs of certain countries. The other is that Twitter is now more able to effectively tailor itself to the needs of certain countries. → Read More
There’s no shortage of novel things you can strongarm Siri into doing for you these days, but sometimes it’s the little things that get me excited.
While not as innately flashy as being able to start a car, a new (and currently nameless) tweak from developer InfectionFX does something that Siri should have been able to do from the beginning: tweet for you. → Read More
In preparation for a ramp up of its monetization efforts and its first beta phase of self serve ads, Twitter has bought security startup Dasient, which specializes in malware and fighting spam. The team will be integrated into “revenue engineering,” a.k.a the ad product team under directors Kevin Weil and Alex Roetter.
From the Dasient blog:
“Since its inception, Dasient has been focused on solving web-scale security problems involving malware and other types of online abuse. In 2009, Dasient launched its web anti-malware platform, capable of scanning URLs and websites for the presence of harmful content. In 2010, Dasient launched the industry’s first anti-malvertising service to protect ad networks and publishers from the scourge of malicious ads. Over the last year, we have been very active in securing the ads and content of the some of the industry’s largest ad networks and web sites.”
Sometimes the nicest of people, when faced with the pressure of competition, make evil stupid decisions. That’s pretty much what happened to Google when it realized that Facebook was about to eat its lunch with regards to social data on the web — so it started doing dumb things, like building Google Buzz, Wave and most recently rolling out “Search Plus Your World” which to the rest of the world just looks like “Search Plus Google+.” → Read More
Japan-based UC Technology Corp. [JP] has developed a wireless sensor that can automatically post data like temperature, humidity, illuminance, or radiation levels to Twitter. The so-called “Tsubuyaku Sensor” [JP, PDF] is mainly designed for use in food warehouses, plants, or wine cellars.
The data can be checked remotely on Twitter (the account can be set to private or public). UC Technology says that the sensor has a battery life of a year when it posts data once per minute. → Read More
If Twitter continued to sell its firehose to Google, fewer searches would occur on Twitter’s internal search engine where the microblog platform can serve its own ads. That’s why sources familiar with the negotiations tell me Twitter wouldn’t renew the data access deal at any price, or at least set a ludicrously high price to sink the deal. Cash and increased visibility on Google Search was more valuable to Twitter in 2009 when it was still trying to gain serious traction. But by July 2011 Twitter was more established and ready to try monetizing without Google. A firehose deal would have impeded this, so it’s understandable why Twitter walked away. → Read More
The Republican Primaries are underway, with two states already in the rearview mirror. The second primary, New Hampshire, wrapped up last night. Mitt Romney took home the most votes from New Hampshire voters, winning just about every county and beating out Ron Paul, who came in second, followed by Jon Huntsman, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum, rounding out the pack.
With social media playing an increasingly important role in spreading political messages and news, Crimson Hexagon, a company that specializes in social media analytics, delved into the Twittersphere to find out which of the candidates is being discussed most positively online. → Read More
I love it when tech companies start acting like bickering exes. This morning Google announced that it was gasp going to start mixing its chocolate Google+ results into your peanut butter normal search results, optionally of course. Twitter wasn’t happy with this because Twitter and Google were totally dating for a year and nine months until they broke up last July. → Read More
This morning, Google began rolling out a major change to its core search engine that intertwines results from Google+ (and Picasa) with the ‘normal’ algorithmically-generated results we’ve come to expect. There have been plenty of critiques of the news, including John Battelle’s discussion on how this isn’t actually integrating ‘Your World’, as Google calls it, but rather just its own social network.
And now there’s another critic that’s coming out swinging: Twitter.
Earlier today the company’s General Counsel Alex Macgillivray, who was a top attorney at Google prior to making the jump to Twitter, called it “A bad day for the Internet”, and stated that some of his former colleagues were likely upset by the decision to “warp” Google’s results. And now Twitter itself has followed up with a statement denouncing the feature — and rather relying on the wishy-washy PR speak big companies are fond of, it’s very direct.
Here’s the full statement: → Read More
Twitter has just announced a new partnership with three music data services, The Echo Nest, Gracenote, and Rovi are, to help scale the distribution of Twitter account data for musicians for integration in consumer-facing apps. Via the pilot program, Twitter developers can now work with partners to integrate Verified Account @handles from thousands of musicians and Tweets into their music and entertainment services.
For example, the Echo Nest will connect Twitter Verified Accounts to its Rosetta Stone service to allow developers to integrate Tweets from musicians directly into their apps. The Rosetta Stone service helps music services “speak the same language” on a data level by translating unique identifiers across various services. The Echo Nest’s music intelligence platform offers over 5 billion data points on over 30 million songs and over 2 million artists. Over 220 music applications have been built on its platform to date. The startup actually powers Spotify Radio.
→ Read More
The nominations have been tabulated and the votes are in. Over 300,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2011′s best in technology. Voting begins now.
For 2011, we’ve added some new categories. Best Location App, Best Cloud Services and Biggest Social Impact join the Crunchies ranks this year. You’ll also find Best Social App (Google+ is up against Facebook Timeline, the New New Twitter, Instagram, and Path 2.0), the NYC-dominated category of Best Shopping App, Best New Startup and the year’s best VC’s and Angel Investors. Newcomers like Task Rabbit’s Leah Busque and Keith Rabois for his angel investments (Airbnb, LinkedIn, Yammer, Path, YouTube) made the list of finalists, as well as industry favorites such as Marc Andreessen, Jack Dorsey, Mark Pincus and Ron Conway.
In addition to today’s announcement of the Finalists, we are happy to release our next batch of tickets through Eventbrite. The release begins now, so act fast and get them while you can. → Read More
Following media mogul Rupert Murdoch‘s arrival on Twitter this week, wife Wendi Deng (@wendi_deng) showed up shortly afterwards, tweeting alongside her husband, flirting with comedian Ricky Gervais, politely declining to engage with the man who attacked Mr. Murdoch with a pie, pushing @rupertmurdoch to take down a questionable tweet (which he did), and generally being a spicy character worthy of a Twitter follow.
Only one problem: that wasn’t Wendi Deng Murdoch. → Read More
And that, friends, is what we call seizing the moment. (Meme-ment?) → Read More
In case you haven’t noticed, it’s a new, new Twitter world out there and we’re just living in it. The new Twitter interface is very, for lack of a better word, “appy” and although the desktop apps are abysmal, the website is pretty strong and interesting. This week Erick and I take a closer look at this improvement and assess its value in our lives.
→ Read More
We’re still working to confirm this, but it looks like someone has finagled their way into Lady Gaga’s insanely popular Twitter account. That, or the pop icon really did just offer free iPad 2s to all 17 million people that follower her (through the shadiest looking website in the world, no less.) → Read More
Twistory, which lets people save their tweet backlog to their favorite calendaring application, has finally come through with full support for popular Web-based calendaring service Google Calendar.
You can now subscribe to Twistory using your existing Twitter account and automatically view in Google Calendar when you’ve tweeted what. Up until now, compatibility with Google Calendar was a little flaky, but the team behind Twistory tells me it is now finally stable. → Read More
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