After hiring a new VP of Communications, Twitter is adding key engineering staff. Chris Fry, a former exec at Salesforce, has joined Twitter as VP of Engineering.
According to Fry’s LinkedIn profile, he was previously the Senior Vice President of Development at Salesforce, where he was responsible for all development including Chatter, platform, applications and other core products. Fry joined Salesforce in 2005 as an engineering manager. Prior to his time at Salesforce, he was an engineer at BEA.
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A warning: You can only spam Twitter so much before it brings in the law. As Twitter grows — the company now claims to have 140 million active users — naturally, it’s become an attractive target for spammers, which have collectively made their drek a familiar part of the social network’s user experience. Now Twitter is officially putting its foot down and enlisting the help of the federal courts, filing a suit in San Francisco today against its five most aggressive spammers. In pursuing legal action, Twitter said in a statement on its blog, it believes it’s going “straight to the source”.
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Back in November, we reported that Sean Garrett, Twitter’s Head of Comms, would be stepping down from his post. As he tweeted at the time, for the first time in his career, he would be taking more than a two week break between jobs. Since Garrett stepped down, Karen Wickre, who was hired shortly before Garrett’s departure, has been filling in an interim role.
Today, Twitter moved to more officially fill the vacancy, as Gabriel Stricker, the Director of Global Communications & Public Affairs at Google, will become the new Head of Comms. Stricker tweeted the news on a seemingly brand new Twitter page. His official title will be VP of Communications.
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The state of Michigan is changing — a burgeoning startup scene has taken the stage, and what some may call a tech renaissance has swept across the state, namely in Detroit.
So it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that Twitter, one of the biggest names in tech, is opening an office in downtown Detroit. → Read More
Like that “pull-to-refresh” feature found in many popular iOS apps, including Twitter, Facebook, Tweetbot, Sparrow and others? Been wondering why Apple hasn’t implemented the same thing in its own apps, like Safari or Mail, for example, when such a thing would make for a dramatically improved user experience? As it turns out, the reason why the feature hasn’t made its way into Apple’s core iOS apps may have to do with a patent application titled “User Interface Mechanics” – an application which lists the inventor as Loren Brichter, creator of Tweetie. You know…Tweetie? The app Twitter acquired back in 2010, which later became the official iOS Twitter client?
Yep, Twitter is trying to patent “pull to refresh.” But the patent app doesn’t stop there – it goes after anything that issues a command on pulling down a menu. → Read More
TweetDeck, the Twitter client preferred by many of the social network’s power users, has rolled out a major update which brings more of the features that such an audience would require. With the new version, TweetDeck has added the ability for users to create and edit Twitter lists and has added new columns for “Interactions” as well as a stalker-worthy “Activity” feature that lets you track what actions your Twitter friends are taking, too.
Also new is support for inline media previews and an option to use “RT” instead of the previously available “Quote” tweet feature. (Hooray!)
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Discovr, the company behind what’s still one of my all-time favorite mobile app discovery tools, Discovr Apps, is out today with a new application for finding people. Not surprisingly, it’s called Discovr People. The startup, which also has apps in the Music and Movies verticals, is not trying to compete with the trendy “ambient location”/people-stalking apps hitting the scene as of late (like Highlight, Sonar, Glancee, Banjo, etc.), but instead is providing more of a Twitter-based people finder, not unlike the Berlin-based Flockofbirds app.
When you first launch Discovr People (iOS only for now), the app asks you if it can access your Twitter accounts. Say yes, and you’re off.
[Note to app developers: this is how social integrations should be done on iOS - stop asking for my Twitter username and password already.] → Read More
Today marks the sixth year since founder Jack Dorsey and Twitter’s first members started using the communications platform. And for its birthday, the company has posted a number of stats about its growth in usage. Twitter now has 140 million active users is seeing 340 million Tweets a day (more than double what it was last March). A year ago, Twitter was seeing 140 million Tweets per day.
Last year, Dorsey shared a number of details about how Twitter first emerged. On March 21, 2006, Dorsey sent Twitter’s (then Twttr) famous first (non-automated) tweet: “inviting coworkers”. → Read More
Stock photo site Fotolia’s founder, Thibaud Elziere, has just invested a small amount into a new company called mention, a social media monitoring service launching today. Elziere is also a co-founder at mention, which was developed by a European team of five, based in Paris and Brussels.
While clearly a crowded space, mention is somewhat different in that it’s targeting individual users and small businesses, as opposed to the enterprise. The business model is a freemium offering, with a certain number of “mentions” free per month, then low rates ranging from $5-$9/month for additional tracking. → Read More
With the world of apps no longer in its early days, we are starting to see the emergence of a lot more services that give developers more sophisticated ways of interacting with users, and monetizing what they create. One of the more popular has been the rise of real-time messaging within apps; and today, one player in that space, PubNub, has picked up $4.5 million in funding to expand that line of business even further.
The Series A round was led by mobile-specialist VC Relay Ventures, itself just launched today as the rebranded, $150-million fund formerly known as ATP Capital (the firm that runs JLA Ventures, Clairmont Capital, and BlackBerry Partners Fund. There was also participation from TiE Angels.
PubNub, which was founded in August 2010, has seen more recently a surge in activity on its platform, which provides push-based, real-time messaging both for mobile apps as well as online — either from a publisher to many subscribers, or from subscribers to each other (acting as the ‘publishers’ in the S and P diagram above). → Read More
A few weeks ago Twitter announced that it would be bringing additional “Promoted Products” to the iOS and Android mobile platform, specifically Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets. At the time, Promoted Tweets were only being served to a small number of users from brands they fellow. Today, Twitter is announcing a broader roll out with more targeting options for advertisers.
Promoted Tweets on mobile appear both in the timeline and within search. When in the timeline, the tweets show up like any other, are not “stuck” at the top of the screen like they do in search. As new tweets roll in, the Promoted Tweet will fall off the page. In search, the Promoted Tweet appears at the top of the screen. Users can also swipe to remove the Tweet.
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I often wonder what it’s like to be a customer service representative on Twitter. Lots of companies have them, especially the ones we cover here on TechCrunch which happen to be a bit more tech-savvy than your good ol’ brick-and-mortar small businesses, but it seems like a pretty rough gig. People become shockingly more bold, and angry, via Twitter and it takes a full-time worker to field all complaints and questions that flow in.
Luckily, TweetAngel is here to fix that problem. It’s a Twitter monitoring service that helps small businesses, particularly brick-and-mortar shops, better navigate the overwhelming world of Twitter. Here’s how it works: → Read More
With somewhat coincidental (?) timing, given this week’s Facebook Marketing Conference, a new article published today by Bloomberg Businessweek takes a deep dive into Twitter’s advertising’s business. Twitter is the other major social network after big brands’ ad dollars, and although its 100 million active members pale compared with Facebook’s 800 million+, there is the potential for a different kind of ad targeting arising on Twitter. The company is going after the “interest graph,” a concept we’ve covered in some detail before.
An interest graph is different than the social graph provided by Facebook, which looks at connections, likes, and detailed demographic data like hometown, age, education and more, in order to narrowly target specific groups with ads. Instead, the interest graph is about what you like, what you read, and, generally, what kind of person you are. But the question is, can Twitter get a better read on users’ interests and personalities than Facebook can?
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Twitter announced today an update which will impact its mobile applications on iPhone and Android: it’s bringing additional “Promoted Products” to the mobile platform, specifically Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets. The Promoted Products suite of advertising products, which includes Promoted Trends, Promoted Tweets (in search and in the timeline), and Promoted Accounts, have been available on the web for some time, including the mobile web interface at m.twitter.com. In select cases, they’ve also been available within the native applications.
However, with the recent app updates being launched today, Promoted Accounts will now be added to both Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android, with Promoted Tweets to soon follow. → Read More
Twitter says that 70 percent of its users come from outside the U.S. at the moment, and so it makes sense that this is where it is also investing more to grow the rest of its business. Today the company announced that it has appointed another sales executive to beef up its efforts outside its home market.
Stephen McIntyre, most recently of Google, will be overseeing Twitter’s international self-serve business, based out of Twitter’s European HQ in Dublin, which Twitter opened in September 2011.
McIntyre’s appointment comes about a week after reports emerged that Shailesh Rao, currently based in New Delhi, India, would be leaving Google to join Twitter. Rao is now Twitter’s new VP of international revenue. → Read More
Twitter has just launched a new app refresh for its mobile apps in Android and iOS, as well as expanded its offerings to the Kindle Fire and the Barnes & Noble NOOK and NOOK color.
Returning to the iOS and Android apps is the ability to swipe individual tweets to reveal tweet actions like ‘Reply,”Retweet,”Favorite’ and ‘Profile’ — a feature which was initially available in Tweetie, the app that eventually became Twitter for mobile, and then removed inexplicably. Another blast from the past is the ability to copy and paste text of tweets and user profiles, which I for one really missed. → Read More
A significant step for Twitter in its international growth: Yandex, Russia’s search giant, today announced that it will carry Twitter data in all of its search results.
The news also underscores one possible route to revenue generation for Twitter: Yandex describes this as a licensing deal. The terms of it were not disclosed but Microsoft reportedly paid Twitter $30 million for a similar search agreement. → Read More
At Apple’s WWDC event last June, Twitter made a new best friend: Apple. The tech giant announced that it would bake the social network into every single iOS device by way of the new iOS 5 software. This left many stunned for two reasons. 1) Apple rarely does such deep partnerships with third-parties. 2) It wasn’t Facebook.
It was all-around a huge win for Twitter. And a win for Apple as well, as it has been proven throughout the years that they don’t get social — a subject which was a topic of debate again yesterday coincidentally. Apple needs to build it’s own social network, Dan Frommer argued! No, they need to get their social platform right, argued TechCrunch editor Eric Eldon. Well, today they’re taking a big step: by doubling down on Twitter. → Read More
Confirmed: Apple can still surprise.
On July 20 of last year, Apple began a journey. With OS X Lion (aka OS X 10.7), the company started taking some of what they had learned from iOS, and the iPad specifically, and putting it in their more mature OS. Today, that transition continues with OS X Mountain Lion.
Yes, Apple is already ready to show off the next version of OS X — technically 10.8 — just seven months after the last version was released. → Read More
We first covered Sell Simp.ly in November last year, as it looked to capitalize on the increasing interest in social media as not only a place to advertise and build an online presence for brands, but as a platform for conducting social commerce. Most of that interest has surrounded Facebook, as a host of solutions and services have emerged that allow big brands and startups alike to create retail storefronts on Facebook, sell to customers, and to a certain extent, manage their transactions. → Read More
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