The latest from TechCrunch
- Twitter Begins User Streams Testing. Realtime Tech Should Help Ease API Strain
- Could This Be the Eve Of the Kindle 3?
- Facebook To Pay $10 Million Cash For Hot Potato, Says Source
- Looks Like Even Google Forgot Knol Existed
- RIM Buys "BlackPad.com", Presumably As A Home For The BlackBerry Tablet
- Google Rolls Out Android's New Anti-Piracy Mechanism
- Facebook Q&A Service 'Questions' Begins Rolling Out, Could Be Massive
- More People, And Inevitably Scammers, Are Using Twitter
| Twitter Begins User Streams Testing. Realtime Tech Should Help Ease API Strain | Top |
| For some time now, Twitter has been working on a new API: the Twitter Streaming API. The idea behind it is to allow third-party Twitter clients to receive continuous tweet updates in realtime. As developer advocate Taylor Singletary notes today on the Twitter Development Talk Google Group, limited testing of this new feature (also called “User Streams”) for desktop clients has now begun. Currently, TweetDeck and Echofon, two popular Twitter desktop clients, have access to the new API for testing. Singletary notes that not all users of these clients will see this new tech in action at first. Instead, there will be a more gradual roll-out with each app. Once that occurs, Twitter will start opening up the Streaming API to other clients as well. Twitter first started talking about this new API this past April at their Chirp conference . Others have already been internally testing it for some time as Twitter is also testing out its new Annotations feature through the API . While the feature is very cool and makes third-party clients much more interesting, the Streaming API also helps Twitter significantly. As Singletary notes, “ The transition to User Streams should return considerable capacity to the REST and Search APIs, increasing stability for Twitter users & developers alike. ” With their recent scaling problems , one of the aspects hurt the most by limits Twitter had to impose is the API . Services like TweetDeck and Seesmic rely heavily on the Search API for their various windows — so obviously, this was a problem. The Streaming API should alleviate that quite a bit. And there’s more. Singletary notes that: Additionally, several interesting new event types are available: Favoriting, retweeting, following, and list additions are also streamed along with direct messages, mentions, the user timeline and the home timeline. Again, all of this should help ease strain on the rest of Twitter’s APIs. The only question is: how long will it take to roll-out in a meaningful way? Twitter says that an open beta is tentatively scheduled for Q3 or Q4 of 2010. At the end of the message, Singletary also hints at a new API product called Site Streams: Application developers needing to consume multiple, simultaneous user streams will be served by an upcoming Streaming API product called Site Streams. Stay tuned for more information on that when we’re ready. [thanks Richard] CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Could This Be the Eve Of the Kindle 3? | Top |
| It seems that all Kindle orders have been frozen and, it seems, that Jeff Bezos is hanging around New York right now and will speak on Charlie Rose tonight. While I seriously doubt that Bezos will whip out the Kindle 3 on the Charlie Rose show (he’ll probably talk about ebooks outselling hardbacks) it seems there is definitely something afoot. Read more… | |
| Facebook To Pay $10 Million Cash For Hot Potato, Says Source | Top |
| We broke the news yesterday on Facebook’s most recent acquisition – social activity service Hot Potato. Like most of Facebook’s acquisitions, this deal looks to be mostly about getting a great team of engineers on board, not about the product. And like many of these acquisitions, investors in the acquired company don’t stand to make much money. Facebook is paying around $10 million in cash for Hot Potato, we’ve heard from a source with knowledge of the deal. Employees will also be getting stock options which could prove to be very lucrative down the road. But investors aren’t getting any stock in Facebook. This is very similar to Facebook’s very first acquisition , Parakey, back in 2007. That deal gave shareholders just $4 million or so in cash to split – giving them their initial investment back plus a small return. All the stock went to employees. Hot Potato raised around $1.4 million in a single round of financing prior to the acquisition. Most investors won’t balk publicly at deals like this, they’re way too concerned that they’re seen as entrepreneur-friendly so that they can get access to future deals. But privately they gripe. Putting money to work for only a 1x or 2x return is a great way to go out of business for startup investors, when so many of their deals never pay anything back at all. In fact some of these deals could theoretically be a violation of various corporate and securities laws that require shareholders of a given class to be treated equally in an acquisition. But without investors actually complaining, it’s unlikely any lawyers will ever get involved. Also, stock options are clearly being granted for future services of the acquired employees, not for past work done at the acquired startup. Another way investors can “complain” is by simply scuttling the deal – they usually have veto rights over an acquisition baked into their deal agreements when they invest. But that, again, would be seen as completely anti-entrepreneur and would kill future deal flow. So for now investors will simply grin and bear it. But as these types of deals become more and more common we may see changes to various state corporate laws in the future that put limits on how much consideration might be given in cash to investors in an acquisition v. how much is given to active employees in stock options on an acquisition. CrunchBase Information Hot Potato Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Looks Like Even Google Forgot Knol Existed | Top |
| Knol, Google's platform for sharing articles about specific topics, appears to have been shutdown. It’s unclear if this is a temporary or permanent situation. We’ve reached out to Google for comment. We’ve long been speculating as to when Google will shut down Knol. The knowledge-sharing site has essentially been reduced to a “Craigslist wannabe.” The original idea behind Knol was that people could collaboratively write definitive articles about any topic they like and get rewarded by earning a share of the AdSense revenues for each page they author. Unfortunately, no one seems to be reading anything on Knol and the product never really panned out. Eventhough this outage may be temporary, it may be time to put Knol out of its misery. Google has previously shutdown other under-performing projects such as Lively and Google Notebooks . CrunchBase Information Knol Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| RIM Buys "BlackPad.com", Presumably As A Home For The BlackBerry Tablet | Top |
| Unless someone at Research In Motion is taking the time to screw with all of us, it looks like we might have an official name for their long-rumored BlackBerry tablet project : BlackPad. Word of the name comes not from a disgruntled employee, nor from a prototype left at a bar; this one’s straight out of a good ol’ fashion WHOIS lookup on a domain. According to registration records, RIM purchased BlackPad.com just days ago. Read the rest at MobileCrunch >> | |
| Google Rolls Out Android's New Anti-Piracy Mechanism | Top |
| If we’re hearing any one thing from developers that is scaring’em away from Android, it’s that Android apps are just way, way too easy to pirate. Hell, you don’t even have to go through shady third party download sites; just buy an app, copy it to the sd card, and refund the application. Ta-da! (Read: Don’t do that.) Google’s been talking for some time about a new, considerably more secure system for protecting applications from pirates and dishonest refunders. Today, that system goes live. Read the rest at MobileCrunch >> | |
| Facebook Q&A Service 'Questions' Begins Rolling Out, Could Be Massive | Top |
| Facebook’s worst-kept secret is finally ready for its closeup: the company is starting to roll out Facebook Questions, a Q&A service that allows users to poll all of Facebook. Facebook has been inviting users to apply to join a sneak peek of Questions for months now , so we’ve seen much of this before, but this marks the first time that it will begin rolling out to users who didn’t apply for the beta program. Facebook says that this is intiitally rolling out to 3-5 million users, with plans for a broader rollout down the line. The motivations behind the launch are clear: millions of people already use Facebook status updates to poll their friends — it’s only natural that the site would offer a dedicated mechanism to do this (and it’s also likely to be a boon for page views, especially once Questions are syndicated to search engines). But if you were hoping the new product would incorporate Facebook’s extensive privacy settings, you’ll be disappointed: everything in Questions is shared with everyone else on Facebook, and every question you ask is tied to your real name; likewise, anyone who answers will have their response tied to their account. Of course, having all questions set to public does have one nice side effect: you’ll be able to poll from Facebook’s massive audience of 500 million users. Facebook obviously isn’t going to ask your question to everyone else on Facebook; instead, its system is going to try to analyze a user’s interests to determine who would be best able to answer your question. The service will also show the question to some of your friends, so ideally you’ll receive answers from a healthy mix of friends and experts (we’ll see how well it actually works). You’ll be able to ask a question from a few places: the Questions tab that appears in the site’s left navigation area, the publisher that appears at the top of the page (where you typically post things like status updates), and, most interestingly, the search box. When you start typing a question into Facebook’s search box, the site will start displaying a list of similar questions that have already been asked on the site. If yours doesn’t pop up, or you really want to re-ask the same thing, you can ask it directly from the search field. Questions can include photos and polls, and you can also tag questions with topics. If you come across someone else’s question that you’d also like to know the answer to, you can opt to follow it. And the site also supports keyboard shortcuts, which should make the soon-to-be Questions addicts happy. This could be a big, big deal for the site. Given its size, it won’t take long for Facebook to build up a massive amount of data — if that data is consistently reliable, Questions could turn into a viable alternative to Google for many queries. Facebook will also be integrating Questions and their answers into the Community Pages that launched in April, which already include content from Wikipedia and Facebook user status updates. Finally, this is a big SEO opportunity for the site, though a Facebook spokeswoman said that there are no plans to include the content in search engines yet. Of course, some of this success will lie in how well Facebook’s matching algorithms work, and how good typical answers are — I’m not going to use this at all if the quality is on par with Yahoo Answers. Facebook will be competing on this front with Quora , a Q&A service that was cofounded by Facebook’s former longtime CTO, and has been widely praised for the quality of its content (though whether or not it can maintain that quality as the site scales remains to be seen). Still, even if the quality isn’t quite up to par, the massive built-in userbase means Facebook Questions will be a success regardless. One other thing to note: Facebook does not offer any way to ask a question anonymously (remember, everything is tied to your name). While I see the benefit in forcing responses to include a user name (you can better tell if the person answering knows what they’re talking about), I’m less sure that this is a good policy to enforce on the people asking the question. There may well be times when you may have a question that might appear a bit less than professional (“Best place to get my friend hammered for his bachelor’s party?”), or perhaps a little embarrassing to admit to your peers (“Why does my microwave popcorn always start smoking?”). | |
| More People, And Inevitably Scammers, Are Using Twitter | Top |
| 2010 thus far has been a year of milestones in terms of online population, with Facebook hitting 500 million active users and Twitter reaching 100 million users. This growth explosion is not without its dark side; a rising tide lifts all boats, even the more miscreant ones. According to a report by Barracuda Labs , both general and questionable activity is increasing on Twitter, due primarily to the company’s open API and easy account set-up. With more than 50 million tweets per day, and 600 million search queries per day, user activity is at an all time high: Nielsen posits unique visits to the site have grown at a rate of 45% compared to last year. Highlights from the report: - Only 28.87% of Twitter users have tweeted more than 10 times, have more than 10 followers and more than 10 friends. - One in every eight Twitter users has at least 10 times more followers than they are following. - Only one in 10 users is following more than 100 users, and almost half are following less than five. - Half of Twitter users tweet less than once a day, yet one in 10 users tweet five or more times a day. - 30 percent of Twitter accounts have never tweeted. - 15.8% of Twitter users have no followers, 47% decrease from June 2009 when it was 30%. - 33% have 10+ followers, a 65% increase from June 2009 when it was 20%. “True Twitter Users”, which Barracuda defines as people who have tweeted at least 10 times, who have at least 10 followers and in turn follow at least 10 people, have increased to 29%, up from 21% in January 2010. Less people now have zero followers (15.8% of all users) and more people have 10+ followers (65% of all users) than in June 2009. These new levels of user interaction are inevitably punctuated by an increase in “Twitter Crime”, or the percentage of accounts created per month that are eventually suspended by Twitter. According to the data, this rate is now at 2.38% vs. 1.08% in February 2010, which could mean simply that Twitter is ramping up deletions. The average rate of account suspension for the first half of 2010 was 1.67% of all accounts. June 2010′s numbers are comparable to the high crime rate during Twitter’s “Red Carpet” era in January 2010 (i.e. the @aplusk celebrity dogpile) where a similar growth explosion lead to a 2.20% account suspension rate. Just like in real life, when populations become more dense, malicious activity tends to follow suit by increasing. According to Barracuda Labs, some strong indicators of illegitimate account growth are a low Followers (people who follow you) minus Friends (people who you follow) number and a low Followers/Friends ratio – presumably because no one wants to follow a SPAM account – as well as a high volume of tweets. Data also shows that a high volume of tweets and a low volume of followers are directly correlated (basically, STFU if you want to increase followers). Both scammers and legitimate users are engaging on Twitter more, as in tweeting and gaining followers. While illegitimate account deletions do seem to be increasing, perhaps this is because of better policing on Twitter’s part. By paying attention to patterns in scammer behavior such as the correlation between the Followers/Friends ratio, Follower – Friend delta and frequency of tweets, Twitter could perhaps enact measures that would lower the possibility that your next Twitter follower is @sexyfreeipod. CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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