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
In an unexpected move, a member of the Saudi royal family has invested $300 million in social networking company Twitter.
This morning, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud, founder and CEO of Kingdom Holding Company and one of the wealthiest people on the planet, announced the investment, which was reported first by Bloomberg.
In a statement, Twitter’s newest equity holder says that the investment was the result of “several months of negotiations and comprehensive due diligence”. → Read More
You have a long flight coming up. You don’t want to get stuck sitting next to (fill in the blank here). What if you could use your social networks to select your seatmate, based on your friends or common interests? Would that make for a better flying experience?
Such a service is going to be launched next year. The developer is not some bootstrapped startup. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, founded in 1919 and now part of Air France KLM, confirms to TechCrunch the feature will launch next year. → Read More
In digging around trying to investigate rumors that KPCB VC John Doerr lost his “board observer”status at Twitter two weeks ago, I came across the information that almost all investors including Doerr were told to stop coming to board meetings in late August/September, when it was reported that Fred Wilson and Bijan Sabet had left.
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Twitter is starting to push out a significant redesign of its service that makes the interface simpler for all users across all of its platforms. The goal is to resolve complexity around concepts like the hashtag or the ‘at’ symbol. We’re about to get a closer look here at the press event, but in the meantime Twitter has a new page up about the changes (fly.twitter.com) and a video, below.
The four key elements are a new homepage timeline, an interface for easily finding context for hashtags, a better way to see anything related to you, and a slicker user profile (as well as a fuller-featured one for brands, apparently).
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At the Twitter news event today, the company revealed a number of compelling stats about its service, namely that its Apple iOS integration has boosted monthly signups by 25 percent globally.
Apple announced a deep integration with Twitter in iOS 5 earlier this year, which provided a single sign-on for Twitter use on the device, and with any app you download, it will just ask you for Twitter credentials and permission. → Read More
In October, AllThingsD reported that Twitter VP of engineering Mike Abbott was leaving the company to be an entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark Capital (Benchmark and Twitter both confirmed the move). It looks like that position only lasted a month, as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has just announced that Abbott has joined the firm as a partner on its digital team.
At Twitter, Abbott (who joined in April 2010) led the company’s engineering efforts and helped the team from 80 to more than 350 engineers. Abbott’s team mainly focused on rebuilding and solidifying Twitter’s infrastructure. → Read More
Automated Insights, the venture-backed digital media company formerly known as StatSheet, automatically transforms data into content – think interactive applications and things like data-driven news articles, charts and whatnot.
Lately, Automated Insights’s been making waves with its extensive network of sports-related websites. For an example, check out the StatSheet MLB website. → Read More
Good news people who are really curious about Quora growth! You might one day be reading an article like this about Quora …
Because Quora has hired a former Twitter and Facebook guy, Andy Johns, to focus on user growth and engagement. Johns, who tweets under the apropos username @ibringtraffic, spent a year and four months at Twitter, two years at Facebook and is now taking his speciality to the fancy Q&A startup.
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It’s possible new media will steal a page from the VCs and the economics of the Cloud, putting these streaming deals together on multiple networks (Facebook, YouTube, Ustream, iCloud) with talent owning the rights in return for low startup costs. Spotify could fight off the independents by offering contracts directly to the artists, and team with the streaming studios to live cast sessions and concerts over the federated network. Soundtrack compilations for stream network-owned series like House of Cards may be where music and gaming crossover first occurs.
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Twitter Communication exec Sean Garrett’s departure from the company last week was a shock to many in the press who had the pleasure of dealing with him and the Twitter Communications Team. Garrett loved and presumably still loves Twitter, as anyone who follows him on there knows.
That’s why I was doubly shocked when I heard the news this afternoon that new Twitter Communications Director Lynn Fox had left Twitter this morning. Fox, who I also follow on Twitter, had only been at the company only four months!
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DataSift, a big data business intelligence and analysis platform for Twitter, is finally opening its doors today to the U.S. public. DataSift was born out of Tweetmeme and was announced at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco a year ago. Founded by Nick Halstead, DatSift is one of two companies with rights to re-syndicate Twitter’s firehose of more than 250 million Tweets a day (the other one is Gnip).
Developers, businesses and organizations can essentially use DataSift to mine the Twitter firehose of social data. But what makes DataSift special (besides the premier access to Twitter data) is that it can then filter this social media data for demographic information, online influence and sentiment, either positive or negative.
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I just finished reading an interesting blog post by venture capitalist Bill Gurley about Twitter, a portfolio company of his firm Benchmark Capital. In it, he argues that there’s a misperception about Twitter in that people keep regarding it as a social network and pitting it against Facebook.
Gurley makes some good points, albeit ones that have been made in the past, about Twitter being an ‘information utility’, a ‘discovery engine’ and a ‘better RSS reader’ rather than a social network. Except I still think Twitter is a social network as well. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. → Read More
Twitter was recently successful in obtaining the domain name Twiter.com after filing a dispute with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and has apparently grown an appetite for more.
Last week, the company filed a complaint for the transfer of Twittter.com (with a extra ‘t’) and now we’ve noticed that they’re also gunning for Twittr.com.
You may remember Twitter was originally called Twttr, so it’s surprising to me that they didn’t already own the latter domain name, nor filed a complaint to obtain it in the past. → Read More
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
If you weren’t paying attention to anything but important news today you might not have noticed that Ashton Kutcher had turned over his tweeting privileges to the social media division of his company Katalyst Media. “But why?,” you ask, because it’s late and you’re wasting time on the Internet even though you’re super busy or should be sleeping.
Well because Kutcher, who has about eight million more followers than you or I ever will, tweeted out something without thinking last night and, because they’re a bunch of maladjusted ugly troll people, the media pounced on him — because he’s pretty. And more importantly because what he said was really really stupid; he wondered why Penn State coach Joe Paterno was fired, when the reason he was fired was like, everywhere on Twitter. Dude, where’s my excuse? → Read More
Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey took the stage at the GigaOm Roadmap conference to talk about his experience being well, basically a jack of all trades (rimshot).
Dorsey revealed that both his own and his family’s experiences with entrepreneurship were inspiration for his two current startups — both of which remove friction from human communication and industry, a process Dorsey described as “getting rid of the ‘conceptual debris’.” → Read More
Twitter Head of Communications Sean Garrett (@SG) has just announced that he’s leaving Twitter in a series of tweets — of course. When asked to confirm his departure, Twitter Communications representative Carolyn Penner said, “I think his tweets speak for themselves…”
Garrett also cryptically posted the Pavement song ‘Our Singer’ to his personal blog in conjunction with the “I’m leaving” tweets. → Read More
Twitter has just announced a key engineering hire today. Adam Messinger will be joining the company as Vice President of Infrastructure Engineering.
Messinger was previously Vice President Development at Oracle, where he was responsible for managing the Oracle Coherence, Oracle JRockit, Oracle WebLogic Operations Control, and other web tier products. Prior to joining Oracle, he worked as a venture capitalist at Smartforest Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.
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Last year, Twitter debuted a marketing campaign, called Twitter Tales, that showcased ways in which users interact with the microblogging platform. Today, the company is launching a similar campaign, called Twitter Stories, which seems to show interesting Tweets and ways the site’s users are communicating via the platform.
For example, Maureen Evans uses Twitter to share recipes with users. Aaron Durand was able to save his mother’s bookstore using Twitter. Well-known film critic Roger Ebert uses Twitter as voice after he lost his voice. → Read More
