Link shortener Bitly today launched a major redesign and number of new features that all add up to what the company itself calls “a new Bitly.” Among these new features are ‘bitmarks,’ Bitly’s name for its new bookmarking features, the ability to search and find these bookmarks, a fast search functionality, as well as enhanced public profiles that give users more privacy control. Bitly is also rolling out new bookmarklets, a Chrome extension and its first iPhone app.

Ever since its launch in 2008, Bitly has been a major part of the social sharing ecosystem on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Bitly’s users currently save about 100 million links per day and the company tells us that over 25 billion Bitly links have been created thus far. The company registers about 300 million clicks on its links every day – that’s about 1% of all clicks on the Internet.

The focus of today’s launch is clearly on giving its users more curation features. The new “bitmarks” allow you to easily go back and look at the links you’ve shared on Facebook and Twitter. You can also, of course, still organize these links into bundles – a feature the company introduced in 2010. With this release, Bitly also made organizing these bundles more collaborative and now makes it more obvious “that you can invite people to collaborate and edit a bundle with you.”

Bitly now also features a network view that lets you see the links your friends are sharing publicly on Twitter and Facebook.

Bitly stresses that this update is meant to make the services” the single best place for you to save and share your links and to discover interesting things from your friends and the entire web.”

Starting today, developers will be able to use Bitly’s open API to add these “bitmarking functionality” to their apps as well.

Here is the full list of Bitly’s updates:

• Easily save, share and discover links — they’re called bitmarks, like bookmarks.
• Instantly search your saved bitmarks.
• Curate groups of bitmarks into bundles and collaborate on bundles with friends.
• Make any bitmark or bundle private or public.
• See what friends are sharing across multiple social networks, all in one place.
• Save and share links from anywhere with our new bitmarklet, Chrome extension and iPhone app.

The legend goes something like this: as a child, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s father would relentlessly hound him to “Get better”, so Jack eventually banned the phrase from being tweeted. Go ahead and try it, the tweet won’t go through. But the legend? It’s a hoax.

See, way back when, Twitter wasn’t a popular smart phone app, it was a way to publish up to 140 characters to the Internet via text message. To let people follow and unfollow each other, change their bio, and more straight from SMS, Twitter created a list of commands that when sent wouldn’t be tweeted, but would trigger actions instead.

So now when you tweet  ”get better”, “get [any single word]“, and several other phrases Twitter interprets them as SMS commands.

If you want more to try, there’s “Fav [username]” to favorite someone’s last tweet, and “Suggest” to receive recommendations of who to follow. Some of the commands still work from the web interface and smartphone apps. You can follow someone by tweeting “follow joshconstine” or just “f [username without the @]“. Others like the mysterious “get” command that spawned the rumor on StackExchange Skeptics which was busted by user DMI, don’t work outside of SMS.

There’s also no evidence Dorsey’s father ever told him to “get better” or aggressively pushed him to succeed. In fact, Mr. Dorsey senior sounds like a very cool dad who ran a pizza restaurant that inspired Jack’s entrepreneurship, and helped Jack ”build a model of a mass spectrometer out of Legos, ball bearings, and magnets when he was 11″ according to Fast Company.

That doesn’t mean the Twitter co-founder and Square CEO doesn’t want you to “get better”, though. When Jack won an award for encouraging others to start their own business, he told the crowd “Don’t just expect the unexpected—BE the unexpected.”

[Illustration by Wes Duvall for Fast Company]

Google got the chance to buy Twitter, but the search giant passed, says Michael Arrington. “Google hasn’t been interested in buying Twitter since they committed themselves to Google+” says Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures founder and former Twitter board member, in his fireside chat this morning with Arrington at the TechCrunch Disrupt New York conference. [Update: To clarify, I believe Google missed the boat on buying Twitter, while Wilson simply said Google wasn't interested in such a purchase since it committed to Google+. Wilson did not make a value judgement on Google not buying Twitter, nor did he confirm that acquisition discussions ever took place.]

Now Google+ is widely seen as a ghost town, and not buying Twitter could be a mistake that haunts Mountain View for years to come. Wilson has one of the most envied portfolios in venture capital, with Union Square Ventures getting in early on Twitter, Zynga, Etsy, and Tumblr. But the future might not be as bright. “I don’t think I’m going to be very good at investing in the next big thing. I don’t come from it. I didn’t work in it. The next thing isn’t going to be evolutionary. It’s going to be something completely different.”

Arrington poked Wilson about writing “Silicon Valley could become the next Detroit” in a recent AVC blog post. Wilson explains “I didn’t mean to say [that]. Silicon Valley is the center of the digital revolution. But if there’s another revolution, [like] the teleportation revolution, and teleportation is invented in Mumbai, Silicon Valley might not be the locus of the next big thing.”

Google Lost The Flock

On the war for the future of social, Arrington asked “Do you think Facebook is overvalued?” Despite the newly public company’s share price dropping over 10% from its Friday close price, Wilson defend Mark Zuckerberg’s creation. “Markets come and go, good companies survive. The price of Facebook stock is not that important. Mark built an incredible platform and organization. I don’t think it matters that much if it’s trading at $25 or $50.” But Arrington pressed “is it going to be a half-trillion dollar company?” Wilson admitted “They’re going to have to grow into that.”

Google had a big opportunity to compete with Facebook, but that’s passed. Arrington cites a rumor that Twitter CEO Dick Costolo took the company to Google saying it was raising this big a round at this valuation, and gave the search giant a chance to acquire Twitter, but  ”Google pooh-poohed it”. After the chat, Arrington told me this was when Twitter ended up raising $200 million at a $3.7 billion valuation, so the price Google would have had to pay could have been around there.

Wilson, who’s Twitter investment and former board seat must have made him familiar with the discussion, said Google decided to build social, and hasn’t considered buying something as big as Twitter in the space ever since. [Update: Wilson never confirmed Arrington's rumor, nor did he imply that not purchasing Twitter was the wrong move for Google] Google+ is off to a slow start, at least in terms of people actually using it, not just signing up. But Twitter might not have been the right fit. Google needed a social layer that could integrate into all its product, not just a micro-blogging platform. Still, Google is now a distant third in social, and Twitter’s off the table. Wilson says Twitter’s founders and board are now deadset on it staying independent.

Update: Google better hope it doesn’t end up like Yahoo, who famously reduced its bid to buy Facebook in 2006 and then lost the deal. Now Wilson says Yahoo’s former chief, the disgraced Scott Thompson “was a terrible CEO. The first thing he did was sue Facebook as a patent troll, proving he’s clueless about the way the world works. He was one of a terrible string of CEOs for that company.” There’s still a chance for Thompson to redeem himself, though. “Elliot Spitzer recovered” says Wilson, “I think people can rehabilitate themselves, but it’s definitely not a good thing to be lying on your resume.”

What’s The Value Of Angels?

“I’ve never seen angels being lazy” says Wilson , refuting Ben Horowitz’s claim that angel investors make too much money for too little work. Wilson released a flood of insights into Facebook’s valuation, and the future of Silicon Valley

“Venture capital is not the most risk-taking part of the equation. We wait until things are more developed” says Wilson. He trusts angels and the early legwork and diligence they do. “I don’t know where ‘lazy’ comes from. They’re probably the most important part of the capital stack because they believe in entrepreneurs before VCs do.”

[Image Credit: Joi Ito]

This is kind of handy – and just in time for TechCrunch Disrupt. The team at Lemon Labs just launched a new app called “Hashtag App,” which lets you follow Twitter hashtags on your iPhone or iPad. But there are a bunch of apps for that, including Twitter itself, you say? Very true. That’s why Hashtag App kicks things up a notch and supports Instagram hashtags as well. Fun!

The app was designed for events and conferences (like #tcdisrupt, of course). However, you can use it to follow any hashtag of interest – not just those related to an event. Another nice thing about the app is that you don’t have to log in to either Twitter or Instagram to use it. You just launch the app, enter a hashtag and go. The app uses the conventional “pull-to-refresh” feature, allowing you to update your hashtag-filled stream whenever you choose. It would be nice if there was a real-time option, like Streamboard, though. (Maybe in a later version?) When you want to change hashtags, you just click the “X” to head back to the homescreen. Nice. I’m going to give it a go today from Disrupt and see how it holds up.

The app creators are Lemon Labs, a self-described “funky app production house” working in startup mode from Vilnius, Lithuania, of all places. They presented the prototype last month at a tech startups conference for the most promising entrepreneurs of the Baltics and Scandinavia. The app’s creators include Monika Katkute, Mindaugas Kuprionis, Marius Kazemekaitis, and Jonas Lekevicius.

Katkute says they have not received outside funding, as the company has generated revenue from commercial projects they’ve done before. However, they’re currently talking to potential investors in the Nordics.

You can grab the app from iTunes here.

Another day, another example of a country making it harder for its people to use the web and some of its most effective channels of communication? There are reports coming in from Pakistan that it has become the latest country to ban the use of Twitter. Update: it’s now back up — new post explaining development here. Read below for full story.

According to the blog Dawn, the chairman of Pakistan’s telecommunications authority has today imposed the restriction because of blasphemous content: it reports that Chairman Mohammad Yaseen blocked the site today “because Twitter refused to remove material related to a competition on Facebook to post images of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.” Facebook, apparently, has complied with the request, says the blog. Others are now starting to report the same, and below the break we have a screenshot of how accessing the site looks from one of our readers in Lahore who says he “cannot access the site at all.”

Getting blocked in Pakistan, if true, is particularly ironic because the two, paired up, played a major role in one of the most important news events to be broken in recent history: the raid and demise of Osama bin Laden, which was tweeted by at least two people watching the raids as they happened in the mountains of the country.

This is a developing (and slightly confusing) story: just yesterday, about 12 hours ago, Senator Rehman Malik, of Pakistan’s People Party, tweeted that nothing was getting blocked: “Dear all, I assure u that Twitter and FB will continue in our country and it will not be blocked. Pl do not believe in rumors,” he wrote. We have contacted Twitter and Facebook for their responses to this story.

Update: More details coming in from Pakistan’s Express Tribune: The request to block the site was made by the Ministry of Information and Technology, it says, citing a drawing competition (more on that here). The ministry, apparently, made several requests to Twitter, which responded that it “cannot stop any individual doing anything of this nature on the website.”

Directives to block the site were sent to ISPs in several parts of the country, including PTCL Broadband and Wi-Tribe. It also reports that Twitter is still accessible by mobile using secure browsers like Opera, as well as proxies and VPNs like Vtunnel. [original report continues]

This is not the first time that Twitter has been blocked in the country: a similar ban took place in 2010, Dawn reports. That lasted for two weeks.

The move underscores how susceptible social networks remain to higher powers in government. And Pakistan is not the only country to pull something like this.

Sites like Facebook and Twitter  are still officially forbidden in China (although millions use it anyway using VPNs — virtual private networks), with the bans often having strong political overtones around people expressing contrary opinions. Developing countries with big populations represent some of the biggest potential growth opportunities for scale-oriented social networks — when they can get used.

Even developed countries like the UK have floated ideas about how to restrict the flow of information on social networks — this was something that came up last summer during the London riots and the role that some believed services like BlackBerry Messenger played in gangs getting organized to loot.

Update 2: One of our awesome readers in Lahore, Waqas Ali, sent us this screenshot:

Ali has also played a role in a past campaign in the country to keep Facebook from getting banned. He says that he cannot access Twitter at all right now but that a friend is able to use the Opera Mini browser to access the site.

Update 3: Here is a follow up post some back story on Prophet drawings, along with another theory: the blockage could be to do with Pakistan testing an image filtering service, which sounds even wider-ranging in its possibilities.

[Image: Farooq on Flickr]

Facebook’s IPO was obviously the single most discussed topic on Twitter today. The good folks over at social media data platform DataSift monitored what Twitter users were saying about the IPO throughout the day and came up with some interesting conclusions. Turns out, the ups and downs of how Twitter’s users felt about the stock pretty much mirrored the price of Facebook’s stock as the day progressed.

Basically, DataSift notes, every time the volume of negative chatter on Twitter increased, Facebook’s stock price dropped within 20 minutes. “So if people had traded based on signals today to buy/sell Facebook stock,” the company told us,”they might have done quite well.”

To create this graph, DataSift recorded 95,019 interactions from 58,665 authors over a period of 6 hours. Most interactions, of course, took place right during the early hours after Facebook’s stock started trading (and took an immediate dive from $42 closer to $38). The company also saw a second and much smaller uptick in interactions toward the end of the day as well.

For the most part, of course, this is just a fun exercise in tracking Twitter data. It’s worth noting, though, that quite a few recent studies that looked into the connection between Twitter posts and stock prices found that there is at least a slight correlation between Twitter sentiment and volume and stock prices.

You can find a bit more of DataSift’s data, which also takes a closer look at the total volume of posts about the Facebook IPO, here.

Twitter does a lot of things right, but it still hasn’t solved the problem of turning its noise into signal. After joining Twitter, it can take a lot of following and unfollowing scores of accounts before you’ve curated a stream that makes sense for you. With its platform growing fast, Twitter is looking to make the onboarding process a little easier (and more personalized) for new users, which is why it announced today via its blog that it will begin serving users tailored suggestions of who they should follow.

Twitter is calling its new personalization features “experiments,” (in other words, they’re in beta), which will manifest for users in several ways. The first being that it will show new users a list of recommended accounts, which will be accompanied by a timeline that features tweets from those recommended accounts. New users (who are part of the beta testing) will see the list as soon as they sign up, but will not be required to follow their suggestions.

For those of us already using The Twitters, if you’re a lucky winner, you’ll begin to see Twitter’s suggestions in the “Who To Follow” box on the left side of your homescreen. From what we can tell, the box won’t be altered from its current placement/design, but will instead just start showing more relevant suggestions. To see who Twitter will recommend for you, check out their preview page here.

So, how exactly is Twitter going about serving you these recommendations? The suggestions are “based on accounts followed by other Twitter users and visits to websites in the Twitter ecosystem,” meaning that Twitter is culling the data that it receives from other websites that are utilizing its buttons/widgets, identifying the accounts that are most followed by people who visit those sites, and recommending it to you based on similarities with those users in your own Twitter activity.

Twitter will be offering the ability to turn this functionality off. This comes with the context of the announcement earlier today that Twitter will be supporting Mozilla’s “Do Not Track” feature, which allows users to opt-out of those pesky third-party cookies, including … wait for it … those used in advertising.

This morning, that seemed just a symbolic gesture on Twitter’s part, because they weren’t really tracking you anyway. With the addition of their follow recommendation engine, now this move makes perfect sense, and is obviously timed perfectly. Now Twitter can just say that, hey, if you don’t like it tracking your activity, turn on Do Not Track. As to who’s supporting: Firefox, Safari and IE9 already have some form of Do Not Track features built-in, but it seems that only Firefox is really evangelizing. However, all three browsers should be compatible with DNT, and allow for opt-outs.

There is more information about Twitter’s integration with Do Not Track reflected in its privacy policy, so, as mentioned, if you’ve got it enabled in one of those browsers, you won’t see any tailored suggestions. With the heightened interest and concern over the way social networks (and beyond) are using our personal data, this is a smart move on Twitter’s part to ensure users that it’s taking transparency (and privacy) seriously.

The other important piece of this is that people who are new to Twitter will see an option to tailor their feeds based on the sites they’re visiting from twitter, accompanied by a “learn more” link, whereas current users will find a “personalization” section added to their account settings.

Users can disable personalization at any time, which prevents Twitter from collecting information on your activity, and as the blog post adds, “You can even choose to turn off tailored suggestions from the preview page (which shows some suggestions we’d make for you).”

What’s really interesting here is that this is the first sign of Twitter getting serious about building its own interest graph, as if you’d ever get tired of all this “graph” talk, right? But this is the social network’s first big move that shows it following in the footsteps of Facebook, as the more personal info they collect on your interests and activity on their platform, the more info there is to feed targeted advertising and tweets.

For more, check out Twitter’s blog post here, and current users can test out preview here. Do Not Track info here. Do Not Track info here.

Additional reporting from Frederic Lardinois

We first wrote about Balloonduck back in March. At the time, the social network was accepting invite requests prior to a full launch, so as to avoid empty room syndrome. But today is the big day: Balloonduck has hit 1,500 invite requests and is now officially live.

If you perchance haven’t heard about the service, it’s basically a Pinterest-style Twitter, but with questions being the main content. Users can post a question about anything really — it can extend as far as curiosity will allow — along with a picture, at which point other users can perhaps share their expertise with an answer.

Of course, this is yet another social network to deal with, but I don’t see it as a full-time obligation the way that Twitter and Facebook are. You can simply visit the site whenever you’re a curious cat, and (instead of dying) you’ll likely learn something new from another user.

But better than the idea itself is the user interface. It seems somewhat Pinterest-influenced in that images are large and center stage, despite the fact that most question and answer networks are text-based. This adds a new level of beauty to what could end up looking like a Quora.

Almost all scrolling is also horizontal, which distinguishes the site from other social networks that remain wholly vertical.

Since the beta launch, Balloonduck has also added user profiles, offering space for a picture and a couple lines about where you’re from, how old you are, your gender, and your profession.

Balloonduck is currently accepting invite requests, and will continue to release invites every few hours, so if you’re interested in asking some questions, head over to Balloonduck now and ask for an invite.

Mozilla’s Do Not Track feature, which allows users to tell websites that they would like to opt-out of being tracked by third parties, is starting to gain some traction among both users and publishers. According to new data shared by Mozilla today, 8.6% of Firefox desktop users and 19% of mobile users now turn this opt-in feature on. The latest company to announce that it will honor Do Not Track is Twitter.

As Do Not Track isn’t so much a technical solution that just blocks tracking cookies and more like a gentlemen’s agreement between sites and their users, its success completely depends on being supported by publishers and developers.

As for the major browser developers, Microsoft and Apple are already on board (and IE9, it is worth noting, already offers a somewhat more aggressive “tracking protection” tool). Google, too, plans to support Do Not Track later this year and Opera is building it into its upcoming Opera 12 release.

A number of major online companies, including our parent company AOL, as well as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have already pledged support for Do Not Track. For Twitter, which doesn’t rely on tracking and third-party advertising as much as other sites, pledging support for Do Not Track was probably not a very hard decision.

The Federal Trade Commission’s CTO, Ed Felten, just mentioned Twitter now supports Do Not Track. We applaud the FTC’s leadership on DNT.

— Twitter (@twitter) May 17, 2012

Twitter has just finalized a deal to hire the team and buy the technology of RestEngine, a personalized email marketing service, which could help Twitter deliver email digests of great tweets you’ve missed. The deal fits well with Twitter’s recent talent acquisition of Summify, which creates these kinds of personal news digests. RestEngine had been powering re-engagement emails for social game companies like Crowdstarthat enticed users to start playing again by telling them what their in-game friends had been achieving.

Three of four founders will be joining the flock, and the company’s technology will come along with them. RestEngine’s founder Joe Waltman called this is an acquisition since Twitter’s gaining both employees and tech, though Twitter views it as an acqui-hire. Co-founder Joe Waltman won’t be moving to Twitter as he tells me his entrepreneurial spirit is too strong and he’ll be working on new projects after a vacation.

It looks like Twitter’s got a plan to get more of its inactive users tweeting again.

Here’s the full-statement RestEngine is showing on its homepage:

“We’re very excited to announce that the RestEngine team is joining the Twitter flock! Just over two and half years ago we founded RestEngine to help social app publishers send targeted one-to-one emails based on a subscriber’s social graph. It’s been an incredible journey where we had the opportunity to work with some of the leading social app publishers. With our customers, we’ve iterated on our social marketing automation platform while defining a new set of best practices for this brand new world of outbound social marketing. We’re thrilled to now focus our email skills and marketing automation know-how on a much larger scale at Twitter.”

The note was signed by all four team members @jaberant (Josh Aberant, co-founder), @joewaltman (Joe Waltman, co-founder)  @Soren_Berg (Soren Berg, developer), and @mikelinca (Mike Lin, web/UI developer)

As for details of the deal, Waltman tells me it was signed two weeks ago but RestEngine just got confirmation that everyone who wanted to join Twitter would be hired. He wouldn’t tell me what Twitter paid for the boostrapped company, but these deals are typically structured to give anyone joining some cash but more equity in order to retain them, while paying out a mid-size lump of cash to founders who are going their own way. Waltman says his engineers are very excited about the move, especially because they hadn’t worked at a big company and are looking forward to the mentorship and advice Twitter will give them.

As I wrote when I first covered RestEngine back in July 2010, the company helped Facebook game companies in particular to deliver high open-rate emails. They’d include a recipient’s score, energy level, which friends were playing, and their next in-game tast to create a sense that a user was already invested in the game, and they’ll have plenty to enjoy when if they return. With time it expanded from serving game companies like Kaboom and RockYou to serve other web services like Ustream and SocialWeekend.

I’d heard Twitter was interested in surfacing the best content from a user’s network, but didn’t want to move away from the unsorted firehose stream it’s known for. Summify and RestEngine could help it accomplish this through the email medium rather than cluttering Twitter’s clean interface. Those emails could show the most retweeted, @replied, or favorited tweets by people you follow.

Until now, emails from Twitter have mostly been dry “this person followed you” alerts, but soon they could become something you actually want to open. Twitter now has over 140 million active users, but over 500 million registered accounts. RestEngine’s emails could bring some of those birds back to life.

Twitpic was once the de facto standard for photo sharing on Twitter. Before Instagram and Twitter’s own photo-sharing solution, the service worked a treat, allowing us to compress our photos and share them in the twinkle of an eye.

The app resided as sort of a symbiotic pilot fish near Twitter’s gaping maw. Now, however, it’s angling for center stage.

Sadly, it may be too late. With Facebook’s recent Instagram purchase and the rise of any number of alternative picture solutions, a standalone app just to tweet pictures sounds a little like overkill. Sure Twitpic is reaching 35 million consumers, but how long is it before those folks stop using the standard photo solutions made available in generic Twitter apps and discover the plethora of filter-adding photo editors out there already?

Twitpic isn’t hurting for cash and they’ve never taken funding. However, once a dedicated group of users who used Twitpic blindly by default notices there are other apps out there, is this really the one they’ll choose? Not likely, but stranger things have happened.

Product Page

Twitter just announced an update to its mobile site that is meant to bring it up to par with the new version of Twitter the company introduced in December. According to Twitter, the idea behind this update is to “give every person on the planet a consistent Twitter experience.” Because of this, the company says, the new version of the mobile site now uses one-third less bandwidth than the previous iteration and should work significantly better on feature phones, older browsers and low-bandwidth connections.

This new version will start rolling out today.

According to Twitter’s VP of Product Satya Patel, the company aims to “make Twitter the most accessible way to connect with the world, even with the weakest signals and the simplest devices.”

Given that feature phones still represent the majority of mobile phones in use today, it makes sense for the company to try to reach more of this market by optimizing its mobile site for these devices.

The updated version of the mobile site, says Patel, should feel just like a native app and gives users access to all the standard Twitter features, including @mentions in the Connect tab, direct messages and trending stories in the Discover tab.

Earlier today, GlobalGrind broke the news that Adam “MCA” Yauch, a founding member of New York’s pioneering hip-hop group the Beastie Boys, had died of cancer at the age of 47.

While the loss of Yauch will be felt for decades to come, the outpouring on Twitter shows just how big an impact the Beastie Boys and Yauch have had on social consciousness. Both Twitter’s global and local trends are currently dominated by tributes to the boys from Brooklyn.

He is survived by his wife and daughter.

RIP MCA.

H/T to Gizmodo for the image.

One of the core features of Twitter’s redesign last year was the addition of the Discover tab in the web and mobile interface. Today, the company is launching its first major update to this feature. The new and improved Discover tab, says Twitter, will now begin to surface more personalized content. Starting today, the algorithm that populates this feature with stories will put a stronger emphasis on the tweets that are popular among the people you follow and their friends. This should make for a more personalized experience and highlight content that is more relevant to the individual user.

When it first launched the Discover tab last year, its users’ reactions were somewhat mixed. As our own Eric Eldon noted at that time, the stories Twitter included in this section were often not that interesting and Twitter didn’t want to really talk about how it picked these stories in the first place. In January, though, Twitter acquired personalized social news startup Summify and it looks like at least some of that company’s expertise is now flowing into Twitter’s own products.

This updated design for the Discover Tab will now also highlight who tweeted a particular story. This, says Twitter, will help users understand why each story it highlights matters to them. This will also make it easier for users to join into their friends’ conversation, as the new Discover tab also lets you reply, retweet and favorite these tweets.

Twitter will start rolling out this update today and plans to bring it to Twitter.com and its iOS and Android apps in the “coming weeks.” The company promises that it “will continue to work to make discover on Twitter a magical experience that brings you instantly closer to the information that matters most to you at the right time, any time.”

This is a few days old but it’s well worth revisiting if you haven’t seen it yet. It’s by English rapper Dan Bull and it’s about everyone’s favorite time-waster, TheFacebook. The best part?

He also does a Twitter one. Give it a listen and then download it for free to help Bull hit the record books.

See, Bull is aiming to have the first torrented single in in the UK and global charts so he’s giving the tracks away on BitTorrent and asking for a small donation once you’re hooked. It’s a noble venture and the music, needless to say, is really good and it’s a wild proof-of-concept for future artists.

via BB

Twitter just announced the latest updates to its mobile apps for Android and iOS. With these updates, these apps get a number of much-needed new features, including an improved Discover tab, better support for search and support for push notifications for interactions. These new push notifications now let you know whenever somebody retweets you, favorites one of your tweets and when somebody new follows you. Until now, Twitter only sent push notifications for direct messages and mentions.

With this update, Twitter is apparently trying to address some of the criticism it faced when it launched its radically redesigned mobile apps last December. Last year’s redesign deemphasized many core features like direct messages, search and lists in favor of highlighting, among other things, follow recommendations and trending stories in the Discover tab.

Today, Twitter is making some much-needed changes to make the Discover tab more useful. You can now use this tab to browse an activity stream of “updates that shows which Tweets are favorited or retweeted by the people you follow and which accounts those people follow or add to lists.” This new stream will appear right under the Stories section in the Discover tab.

Twitter also made the search feature in its mobile apps easier to use with this update. The apps now offer “suggestions for different spellings and related terms for your queries. Finding the people you’re looking for is faster, too. In the Connect tab, you can start typing the first or last name or username of the person you’re looking for and the name will autocomplete for people that you follow.”

Quite a few power users moved away from the official Twitter apps after the redesign. It’s unlikely that this update will get them to switch back. Right after the launch of the redesign last December, TechCrunch’s MG Siegler asked Twitter’s Director of Platform Ryan Sarver about the company’s reasoning behind the changes. At the time, Sarver said that Twitter didn’t want to compete on features but wanted to “keep things simple.” Looks like that hasn’t changed with this update.

Twitter co-founder, and Square CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey sat down with Charlie Rose yesterday to talk about the two companies he’s developed as well as Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram and the “digital revolution.” The entire interview is just under 18 minutes, and is worth a watch, but here are some of the highlights:

Square

As Square revealed yesterday, the payments company is now processing $5 billion in annual payments (or around $416 million in payments per month), which is up from $4 billion in annual payments in March. Dorsey says that Square is moving fast, and this year will be expanding internationally, both to local shops and larger merchants. “We want to be the point of sale for every merchant,” he tells Rose.

He says that the best technologies disappear, and are relevant when you use them but get out of the way when you don’t. He believes Square falls into that category, especially with Pay With Square’s hands free payments experience.

Rose asked Dorsey which company has the biggest upside potential, Twitter or Square? Dorsey diplomatically answered that both companies did because of Twitter’s role in transforming communications and Square’s place in the exchange of value. “These are two foundational, essential things,” he added.

Twitter

Dorsey says that CEO Dick Costolo “is an amazing leader,” and doesn’t get enough credit for Twitter’s revenue products that were developed and driven very quickly. And he adds that the company’s revenue products (i.e. advertising) beat all of their goals last year. Dorsey also believes that Twitter can monetize and says that the company is seeing 3-5 percent engagement on promoted products.

“Twitter is more than where I wanted it to be…truly great companies reinvent themselves…our users are helping reinvent Twitter…,” he explains. As for how will Twitter change, Dorsey explains that the service will be more focused on discovery.

Instagram

Rose pointed out that Dorsey was an early investor in Instagram. Dorsey explains that co-founder Kevin Systrom was an intern at Odeo, where Dorsey initially developed Twitter. Dorsey, who says he taught Systrom javascript, recalls that even then, Systrom impressed him with his love for photography. Dorsey explains that it was this passion and pride in the craft to do it the right way that helped sell him on investing in Instagram. “Kevin is an amazing craftsman and I knew would build a company of craftspeople.”

On the whole Facebook acquisition, Dorsey said it made sense for Facebook to pick it up. In his opinion, this is because Facebook’s core competency is in photos. But Facebook is known for being in the past tense, he says. Instagram represented the present, the now, which are a lot of the ideas that Twitter brought into the world. His remarks are interesting, of course, considering the recent report that Dorsey and Twitter were interested in buying Instagram.

Dorsey is always a fascinating interview, so the video is worth a watch if you have the time.

When you think Twitter, you may think realtime news, or CRM, or brand marketing, or maybe even Justin Bieber, but “eCommerce”? Probably not. In the social network landscape, Facebook is generally seen as the most eCommerce-inclined, what with its “F-Commerce,” but up to this point, consumers really haven’t fallen in love with the idea of brands replicating their storefronts on Facebook. Meanwhile, Twitter’s priorities lie elsewhere, so, in spite of its growth, the social network has yet to leverage its own eCommerce potential. That’s why Portland-based Chirpify has developed a platform that transforms Twitter from a broadcast platform into a transactional one.

In February, Chirpify rebranded from SellSimp.ly and launched a Twitter commerce platform that allowed brands and consumers to buy, sell, donate and transact through tweets without leaving the comfort of Twitter. Since launch, Chirpify has seen growing traction, thanks in part to a promotional campaign launched at SXSW, called “Tweet-a-Beer,” which used the startup’s API to allow people to buy each other a pint over Twitter. The campaign resulted in a huge boost of traffic for Chirpify, with two new users signing up every second — activity that Chirpify Founder Chris Teso tells us continued for several weeks after SXSW. Although it’s slowed down a bit since, the campaign proved that direct commerce over Twitter was not only possible, it was so easy a tweet could do it.

Today, the startup’s direct sales model for Twitter is officially getting further validation — this time in the form of capital — as the startup announced that it has secured $1.3 million in series A financing. The new round of investment, which adds to the $50K in seed it raised from its incubator Upstart Labs, was led by Voyager Capital, with participation from Geoff Entress, BuddyTV CEO Andy Liu, former Facebook exec Rudy Gadre, Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes, and TiE Oregon Angels.

Just in case there’s any confusion in terms of how Chirpify works, put simply, when users sign up for Chirpify, they connect their Twitter and PayPal accounts to the platform. Merchants upload whatever they want to sell to their dashboard, and tweet the link. Consumers simply reply to the tweet and include “buy.” Boom, Chirpify sends you a secure download over DM, the cost is deducted from your PayPal account, the funds instantly transferred to the merchant’s account, at which point they get a receipt.

Anyone can sell, buy, or donate on Chirpify. Even if the process sounds complicated, it’s not. So, the more one considers the fact that the platform offers a simple way to turn tweets into transactions, and seeing as people already use Twitter to follow their favorite brands, musicians, and other people they care about, why not let users buy the latest product or download the latest song by tweet? Well, in addition to its funding announcement, Chirpify is today launching Twitter Commerce for Digital Content, which enables musicians to sell songs and concert tickets directly to fans on Twitter (with the by-product being increased control of their own distribution).

While Chirpify is working with musicians and music labels, at first, the goal Teso says is for this to work for any brand, event, product, or service. (Next, Chirpify plans to work with eBooks vendors, for example.) That’s because the cool thing about Chirpify is it that it works wherever Twitter is, on mobile, desktop, or tablets, and this direct commerce even applies to re-tweets — which has the potential for some serious amplification by allowing for-sale items to reach more streams and thus more eyeballs.

But what if your brand or band is already using a storefront to manage transactions? Chirpify also offers integration with existing eCommerce storefronts (like Magento, for example) so that brands can leverage back-end fulfillment, listing, and transaction management. Merchants just click the “list on Twitter” button when creating a listing for sale, either in their eCommerce or Chirpify dashboard, and can then set the price, quantity, shipping price, and shipping timing.

Chirpify’s solution starts off free, with the startup taking a 4 percent commission on each transaction, but for those merchants looking to conduct more frequent business using Chirpify, the platform offers an enterprise plan, which is priced on a case-by-case basis. The pricing generally starts at around $500 a month, but removes 4 percent Chirpify commission and adds eCommerce platform integration, priority support, co-branding, etc.

For now, Chirpify’s sole payment system is PayPal, but Teso says that they’ve had interest from just about every payment solution out there, and the team plans to add additional payment options in the near future.

But for now, Teso says that the company is focused on scaling and will be using its new capital to ramp up hiring, with additional specific forms of digital content (like eBooks) to come later. The solo founder has already had conversations with reps from Twitter, who are following the startup’s progress with interest. Although he wouldn’t comment on any specifics, if Chirpify can sign continue to sign on big brands (HP and Nestle are already using the platform) and get back to that two-new-users-a-second kind of traction, my guess is that those conversations with Twitter would change in tone. Hard not to see Chirpify as being serious acquisition bait down the line.

For more on Chirpify, check ‘em out at home here.

In late 2010, Sun Microsystems Co-founder Scott McNealy and finance veteran Scott Johnston, launched WayIn, a mobile Q&A and polling service designed to let individuals and brands quickly create and respond to polls on anything their hearts desire. Thanks to the managerial clout behind it, the Silicon Valley-based startup has gone on to raise $20 million in venture funding. Now WayIn is extending its functionality with a new service called Twitpolls, which enables users and brands to engage with (and gather) realtime feedback from their Twitter followers.

While there are plenty of websites and apps that allow content producers, brands, or individuals to take the pulse of their readers and customers (like Gopollgo, Quipol, Poll Authority, Poll Everywhere, Precision Polling, and CMSes like WordPress have their own polling functionality, thanks to startups like PollDaddy, for example), few have been able to build that much-coveted end-to-end platform that enables simple, direct polling inside the Twitter platform.

And that’s how WayIn believes that TwitPolls can differentiate — and succeed where others have come up short. You don’t have to use a another website or app, meaning that users don’t have to leave the comfort of their tweet streams to respond to polls, an experience that can be a deal killer on a mobile device. As to how it collects its poll data, TwitPolls uses Twitter’s public APIs, and WayIn CEO Tom Jessiman tells us that Twitter is very much aware of TwitPolls and is helping the team find the best ways to engage with its platform.

Naturally, this raises the question of why Twitter doesn’t build its own proprietary polling app, and whether the team sees its host as a potential threat down the road. But, as has been the case over the past few years, both Twitter and Facebook have focused on building platforms, allowing third-parties to build the applications and tools that best extend its service. This basically has allowed them to keep watch over the flock, acquiring or acqui-hiring the teams and apps that prove most successful — or would be best suited by integration.

While Jessiman doesn’t see Twitter building its own app as a real, near-term threat — or TwitPolls as an acquisition target (yet) — Twitter yesterday acquired stealth startup Hotspot.io, to beef up analytics tools for its advertising and publishing partners.

As we see ads infiltrate our tweet streams, some look back fondly on the time when the company didn’t have a business model. Yet, as the company continues to focus on ads as its main source of revenue, it’s looking to provide brands and publishers (advertisers) with more advanced targeting and segmentation tools. Advertisers want to optimize their branded content, and, in turn, they want to know how effective their campaigns are at reaching their intended audience, and whether or not they result in conversions.

TwitPolls doesn’t fit in neatly to Twitter’s advertising strategy, but there’s definitely overlap. Twitter is also increasingly being used by brands as a form of social CRM — for sentiment monitoring and realtime customer interaction. Brands can easily ask their followers how they like a new feature, for example, and see the results in realtime. If they find the response is 90 percent negative, probably time for some iteration, and they can react immediately.

What’s more, when it comes to live events, Twitter reigns, especially if you want to see that stream of consciousness from those outside your social network — why Twitter beats Facebook in this regard. TwitPolls can potentially make enjoying live events even better, because, instead of having to leave another app or website open while watching a sporting event, users can just look for the TwitPolls link in their tweet stream and reply directly. Responding to those hashtags counts as a vote, with TwitPolls utilizing Twitter’s APIs to wade through all the hashtag noise, funneling it into signal by directly linking responses to their original questions.

Obviously, for TwitPolls to really take off and offer significant value to everyday users, it’s essential that it encourage big-name brands and organizations to begin using its platform. If TwitPolls links can become regular citizens of your tweet stream, the more recognizable the name becomes as it starts to sound familiar to users (like TwitPic), and engagement increases as a result. The TwitPolls team tells us that, within 48 hours of launch, brands like the NFL, PGA, WebMd, UnderArmour, EMC, the Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche, Washington Redskins, Texas Christian University, and Liferay had begun using the platform to communicate with their followers.

In this regard, the TwitPolls team fancies its service as an enterprise product, designed for companies. Thus, while the platform is initially free for all to use, it’s employing a freemium model that offers a set of advanced features for a fee. In the next few months, it will begin offering leaderboards, games, and customized charts and graphs, making these features available for companies willing to pay a premium.

Considering that WayIn already exists as a product that brands can use to increase social engagement in standalone form, or by embedding into iterations on other websites, mobile apps, and Facebook pages — and has over 65,000 developers already in its fold — moving to Twitter is a natural evolution for the service. Twitter holds the most potential for the service, as it can become a smart B2B and consumer play, allowing anyone with more than a handful of followers to tap into the pulse of their network.

There’s a good chance that TwitPolls can succeed where other Twitter-based polling systems have fallen short, but time will tell.

What do you think?

For more on TwitPolls, check it out at home here, or find WayIn here.

Now this is a pretty nifty use of a corporate Twitter account. Smart Car’s Argentinian division has filled practically its entire Twitter stream — which is currently 456 tweets long — with ASCII art images that turn into a stop-action movie when you scroll through them.

Check it out for yourself: While on the @SmartArg Twitter page, hit the letter “J”, which is the hot key for scrolling to the next tweet. You’ll see a simple motion picture depicting a car driving down a street. You can also play it in reverse by pressing the “K” button. Most of the tweets were written in late March, but the account just seems to be catching some viral popularity right now. The ad was conceived by the Argentinian division of global ad agency BBDO, according to Fast Company.

In general, stop-action animation has enjoyed a moment in the sun on the web in recent days. Yesterday, Google’s homepage logo “doodle” was a low-fi animation of a horse, in honor of stop-action animal photography pioneer Eadweard Muybridge’s 182nd birthday.

It’s also worth noting that Twitter has become more friendly to corporate users in recent months with the addition of dedicated brand pages with extra perks such as new page design options and enhanced feed controls. The Smart Car Argentina account is certainly an ambitious example, but it is a good illustration (yuk yuk) of how brands can use Twitter to reach out to potential customers — and have a bit more fun doing it than they typically have with more traditional forms of media.