Brands have typically used Twitter as a somewhat indirect broadcast platform, listing items for sale, but only doing so in a way that is intended to lure customers away from Twitter to their own websites and eCommerce platforms. (Facebook has also struggled to keep commerce and transactions happening on its platform, rather than suffering from redirection to retailers’ homepages.)
But Chris Teso sees a big opportunity for direct eCommerce on Twitter, which is why, in July, he launched Sell Simply — a simple way to enable consumers and brands to buy, sell, and transact on Twitter. Essentially, Sell Simply turns Twitter into a direct eMarketplace, allowing users to buy and sell anything over Twitter by replying “buy” to any listing Tweet. → Read More
Last year, Twitter held the first Chirp, a large developer conference in San Francisco akin to Facebook’s f8, Google’s I/O, and Apple’s WWDC. Everyone assumed this would become an annual thing. Then they decided not to do one this year. And that’s too bad, because this may be the most important year to have one as much of ecosystem is questioning Twitter’s intentions for their platform.
But the lack of an official conference isn’t stopping some developers. They’ve decided to organize their own developers conference for the Twitter ecosystem. The Twitter Developers Summit will take place this July 26, in San Francisco, an invite informs us. → Read More
Attention, geocachers! Garmin has a new device that may be worth your while. It’s called the chirp (yup, lowercase “c”), and it works in conjunction with Garmin phones to ensure a “more interactive and enjoyable geocaching experience.” Sounds fun. Not that I’ve ever been geocaching, but it seems like a swell way to spend an afternoon. It certainly beats trolling message boards all day long. → Read More
Earlier this year, Twitter got into the event business for the first time with Chirp, a developers conference they put on in San Francisco with the help of Carsonified. Obviously, they’ll be doing another one of those next year. But has the one event caused an itch around Twitter that only more events can scratch? A mockup of a new site indicates that may be the case, but Twitter says no.
Mark Otto is one of Twitter’s UI designers. He’s very good. How do I know? Because he shares some of his work on Dribble. Something that he shared about two weeks ago is particularly interesting. It’s a portion of a new site he’s working on for Twitter that looks like it is based around some sort of event, or series of events. → Read More
There’s a lot of excitement about Twitter’s first conference, Chirp, which takes place next month in San Francisco. In fact, the tickets for the event, despite their $469 price, have been selling out quickly (they’ve been releasing them in waves). And today brings great news for those still clamoring to go: there is a new type of ticket, and they’re significantly cheaper.
Today, Twitter is putting on sale tickets for the second day of the conference for only $140 (yes, 140, like Twitter’s character limit). To be clear, this is just for the second day of the conference, but for those on a budget, it’s a much better deal to be able to take part in the event. The second day is the hack-a-thon event taking place at Fort Mason in the city. And it actually begins at 7 PM PT at the end of day one of the event, when Twitter buses people over from the Palace of Fine Arts, where the day one events (including the major keynotes from Twitter execs) take place. → Read More
Back in December at Le Web, Twitter announced that it would hold its first-ever conference, Chirp, in San Francisco, in 2010. About a month later, they gave out the details, including that it would be taking place exactly a week before Facebook’s big conference, f8. Seeing as both are geared towards developers, it’s pretty clear they’re gunning for one another. But it seemed that f8 would have one large advantage: ticket price. But now it appears that may not be such an advantage.
The ticket page for f8 was briefly online earlier today at this URL. It appears that Facebook has since put it under password protection. But guess who was able to grab a screenshot? This guy. Notably, it appears that regular f8 tickets will be $325 this year. While that’s still about $140 cheaper (140, get it?) than Chirp, it’s not drastically cheaper, as many had been thinking. In the past, Facebook has sold tickets for $250, or even $150 if you signed up early. But, f8 still has one major price point advantage: tickets for students are only $50. → Read More
The tickets for Twitter’s first official conference, Chirp, are selling quickly — despite the $469 price. Twitter is planning to release about 800 tickets for the event total but is putting them up for sale in waves. The first batch, about 1/3rd of the tickets, went on sale last month and sold out “within hours,” we’re told. Today, Twitter has just released another batch.
Like the first, this batch contains another 1/3rd of the total tickets. You can probably expect this batch to sell out within hours too. The final 1/3rd of tickets will be sold next month, and Twitter also plans to announce more details about the event at that time — likely other speakers and musical guests, etc. The event itself takes place on April 14 and 15 in San Francisco — probably not coincidentally one week before Facebook’s big annual developer event, f8. → Read More
Back in December at Le Web, Twitter Director of Platform Ryan Sarver announced that Twitter would be holding the first conference of their own in 2010. Today, they’ve unveiled the details. Called Chirp, the conference will take place April 14 and 15 in San Francisco. Notably, this is exactly one week before Facebook’s big developer conference, f8, which will be April 21 and 22.
Day 1 of the Twitter conference will take place at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater. This day will contain the meat of the schedule. Highlighted talking points include OAuth, streaming, geolocation, business strategies, mobile integration, and the product roadmap. Right now, the only highlighted speakers include Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone as well as COO Dick Costolo and Sarver, but you can expect more to be added. Day 2 will see the event move to the Herbst Pavilion in Fort Mason for a 24-hour “Hack Day” for Twitter third-party developers. Naturally, there will also be a big party after the conference with “free beer, food and music all night long.” No word on any performers yet, but you can be sure that much like f8, Twitter will bring in some big names to make their community happy. → Read More
Earlier this afternoon, six startups had five minutes each to present their wares onstage to a panel of VCs and an audience at the Web 2.0 Expo Launch Pad. Panelists gave feedback to the companies in real-time, and depending on how well they did, had the option to “offer these applicants non-binding term sheets for financing”. In the end, Triggit was named as the people’s choice for best startup of Launch Pad. You can read about each contender below. Acquia – Acquia intends to provide products that improve on the open source Drupal social publishing system. Projects in development include Spokes, a notification system, and Caliper, a spam and content monitoring service. Chirp – Chirp’s flagship product, chirpscreen, streams media and information from top social networking and media sites to your desktop. Information can be presented as part of either a desktop application or a screensaver, and content is aggregated from top sites including Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and eBay. Oortle – We covered Oortle’s upcoming new product videophlow earlier today, but here’s a recap: Oortle provides products that bring the community aspect back to sharing media. Their current release is photophlow (currently in invite-only beta), which provides an interactive flickr experience. JobScore – The job hunt can be just as tough on employers as it is on prospective applicants. JobScore aims to provide a comprehensive solution to help facilitate the process. Employers can easily publish ads to all of the top career sites, and JobScore rates candidates by relevant criteria. Employers can also refer candidates to other members of the site (for a price, if they wish), further expediting the process. TradeVibes – This site provides a community for people interested in startups, allowing users to share opinions, ratings, and discussions about them. Its profiles include brief overviews and other relevant information about companies. (Disclaimer: This site is a direct rip-off of CrunchBase). Triggit – With a single line of JavaScript, Triggit lets website publishers easily add advertising to their sites with a simple WYSIWYG editor. Ads can be pulled from sites including Shopping.com and the Amazon affiliate program. Users can also easily add content from YouTube and Flickr. The software is especially appealing to publishers in the long tail who might not otherwise have the savvy to monetize their sites. Today Trigit announced support for integration with Google AdSense to widespread applause. CrunchBase Information Acquia Chirp Oortle JobScore TradeVibes → Read More
Today, Chirp is launching in public beta. Chirp is a screen saver, previously covered here, that lets you bring social feeds from Flickr and Facebook onto your desktop. Other social Websites will be added in the future. “Our purpose is to enable you to stay up to date with your friends without the hassle of logging into multiple websites,” says CEO Eve Phillips. Chirp will let you subscribe to a friend’s photo feed so that it can decorate your screen. Click on a photo and Chirp will take you to the corresponding Flickr page to find out more. This reminds me of the Slide Desktop application, except that it brings in photos and data from other Websites. It basically brings social widgets outside the browser, something we’ve also seen with desktop applications from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. The Sidebar in Windows Vista, for instance, lets you bring all sorts of widgets to the desktop, including online photos albums. Maybe I’m missing something, though, because there is some smart money in the seed round. Greylock Partners, Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC and angel investors Reid Hoffman (Chairman and founder of LinkedIn), Jay Adelson (CEO of Digg), and Dave Samuel (founder of Spinner.com and Grouper). CTO David Bill is formerly of Spinner. I guess Chirp’s focus on turning social feeds into a screen saver might give it more mass appeal than just a bunch of desktop widgets. Phillips explains the difference between Chirpscreen and widgets in the following way: We’re designed to take over your screen and turn your computer into a display of the social content of your choosing, automatically updated with content from your friends – your friend channel. Taking a step back, if you separate out what we do into three areas: content aggregation; filtering; and display, most of those desktop widgets aggregate and then do a limited display. We’re focused on having highly relevant filtering and a really engaging, interactive display of that content, as opposed to a desktop widget which is designed to be a companion to your desktop activities (browsing, email, etc.). What do readers think? Try the beta and tell me in comments. CrunchBase Information Chirp Slide Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
One of my earliest memories of the internet comes from elementary school where I remember seeing PointCast shown on our classroom computers. PointCast was a screensaver popular in the mid-90s that displayed news stories pulled in from over the internet. This hot Web 1.0 service died off in large part due to bandwidth limitations and the company’s inability to transition away from proprietary software and to the standardized Web. Anyhow, I was reminded of PointCast when I checked out a new application called Chirpscreen that pulls content from Facebook and displays it in a Flash-based screensaver. Chirpscreen is basically PointCast but with personalized content (currently, only your friends’ photos and status updates, and your Facebook notifications). The enthusiasm for PointCast may have waned because people realized how much better the web browser was for discovering news content online. Chirpscreen may succeed where PointCast failed in this respect, because the amount of online personalized content (i.e. content that relates directly to you or your friends/family members/etc.) is fairly limited, at least for now. Chirpscreen plans on incorporating more content into the screensaver, such as your favorite RSS feeds and social graph info from other social networks (I’m sure they’re eagerly looking forward to the impending launch of MySpace’s developer platform). Chirpscreen will also be adding more interactivity and user controls that allow you to put more weight on the display of different types of content, as with the Facebook News Feed. Chirpscreen is currently in private beta, but you can check out the program showcased as an application within Facebook here (warning: they’re still working out the bugs so it might crash your browser; it did for me a few times). If you want early access to the actual screensaver, submit your email to the invitation box on their website. I’ve got to admit – I’m generally not very keen on Facebook applications, but I may just have to install Chirpscreen if the public beta works without hitches. → Read More
