Thursday, September 2, 2010

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Um, Where's Twitter For Android On Twitter's Top 10 Apps? Top
This evening Twitter CEO Evan Williams put up an interesting post about Twitter mobile usage. By just about every measurable metric, it seems to be skyrocketing. He also included a graph of the top 10 ways people are now using Twitter. This includes both Twitter’s own apps and third-party clients, but notably, Twitter for Android is nowhere to be seen. I’ve confirmed with Twitter that this isn’t a mistake. It seems that Twitter for Android is in fact not in the top 10 ways people interact with the service. That’s incredible considering that Twitter for iPhone is number 4 and Twitter for Blackberry is number 5. Both of those were built by the Twitter team, just as the Android app was. Even crazier, it’s behind third party clients TwitPic, TweetDeck, Echofon, UberTwitter, and even Google Friend Connect! Obviously, Twitter downplays that in the post (and by downplays, I mean, doesn’t mention it), and instead only mentions Twitter for Android in the intro to say that it “launched a new version this week.” Remember, “new” is the best tactic to get people to try something. So why is next to no one using Twitter for Android? Twitter won’t say. But I suspect it may have to do with the awful experience of trying to find apps in Google’s Android Market. Twitter for Android is by far and away the best client for the platform — but you’ll note that none of the other popular Android Twitter clients made the cut either. So perhaps Android users just don’t like using Twitter? That’s probably not the case. Remember too that a lot of the newer Android phones come with custom skins that often include Twitter functionality without the need for a separate app. Still, for browsing tweets, Twitter for Android is much, much better. People should be using it, but they’re apparently not. CrunchBase Information Twitter Android Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Record Numbers Pinging Ping.fm Thanks To Apple's Ping Top
An interesting beneficiary of Apple’s launch of music-oriented social network Ping —social status updater Ping.fm. According to Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur, Ping.fm saw a record number of accounts created yesterday (Seesmic acquired Ping.fm earlier this year). Could it be a coincidence? Definitely, not. When you Google “Ping, ” Ping.fm is the second result under the golf equipment site PING (this doesn’t include News results). Apple’s Ping is actually the fourth result (not including Video results). On Bing, Ping.fm is the third result, behind the golf company and the Wikipedia page for Ping. Clearly, as people starting becoming curious about Apple’s Ping yesterday on search portals, they also found Ping.fm in results. Le Meur declined to reveal the exact number of accounts created but he did say that the number of accounts created was three times the normal rate in a given day. Apple actually licensed the name Ping from the golf company, as PING owns the trademark. CrunchBase Information Ping.fm Seesmic Apple Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Reddit Diggs Traffic Surge, Prepares For Expansion Top
It’s all hands on deck at Reddit this week. In the wake of Digg’s bungled redesign, its rival is enjoying a surge in traffic and a jump in ad and subscription sales. Since Monday, the site has been averaging 900,000 uniques per day— a 50% increase from Reddit’s pre-”Digg 4″ average, according to senior programmer, Chris Slowe. The six-member team does not openly celebrate the technical woes of its competitor but there is a certain giddiness in the air at Reddit’s SF headquarters (a small room, tucked in the corner of Wired’s expansive office). The Conde Nast owned startup is having a moment, and they know it. However, there’s no time to bask in glory, as the number of page views rises and the press rolls out headlines like, “Backlash Continues For Digg as Reddit Steps in and Reaps the Benefits,” “Report: Reddit Ready To Defeat Digg‎,” and “New Digg Sucks? Reddit All Over Digg FrontPage Now!” No, for the four-person engineer team, it’s time to roll-up their sleeves and crank away, to keep the site afloat (no easy task) and create the next whizz-bang features to keep Reddit’s enlarged user base happy. On Thursday, we dropped by their offices for a pulse check. While programmer David King’s eyes were glued to his monitor— tweaking a feature that will hopefully improve the site’s scalability— senior programmer Chris Slowe was available to take our questions, video above. Highlights: -Slowe says they first noticed a spike in traffic on Sunday night, as activity increased in Australia. By the close of Monday, Reddit saw 850,000 unique visitors, that number increased on Tuesday, with 900,000. Traffic has continued to hover around this level, with roughly 13 to 14 million total page views per day. -Self-serve ads are up 30% since Digg 4′s launch. Overall ad sales have been growing roughly 5% per month, Slowe expects monthly sales to increase 5 to 10% for the remainder of this year. Subscriptions are also up, currently Reddit has 10,000 subscribers. -Their prayer for more resources is finally being answered. They are currently in the process of hiring one new employee, but hope to have enough cash on hand to hire two full-time employees by year’s end. -On Digg’s fumble, Slowe says: “I think the biggest complaint from their community has been that they feel marginalized…The only advice I would really give them…they haven’t been as communicative as they could be…Our only currency really is trust and candor and so if you treat your community like adults they’ll behave like adults.” -On that whole Proposition 19 debacle: “Once the dust settled everything was just fine nobody’s been fired, everyone is perfectly happy. The main problem was that it was all happening very fast. It went from a blog post from the Prop 19 guys to a full blown community revolt on Reddit in about an hour… One of the problems with trying to be candid at all times, is that sometimes private political arguments end up public…we could have been a little bit more graceful in the handling of that. -On the next feature for Reddit: “Our UI is not particularly friendly…we’d like to work on some tools to make it more friendly…another thing that’s been big is that its not necessarily clear off the bat that Reddit is customizable we have a whole bunch of communities and they all have different bends and you can subscribe to different communities…I think that’s not necessarily clear from a first look.” CrunchBase Information Reddit Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Ustream Snags Former Palm PR VP Lynn Fox Top
We hear that former Palm Vice President of Public Relations Lynn Fox has given up on her "Consult Until-I-Find-Another-Job Consulting” plans and landed  a permanent gig at video streaming service Ustream. Her formal title will be VP of Corporate Communications and she will be reporting to Ustream CEO John Ham. Sources say that Fox is the first in a series of new hires at Ustream, hires which should be announced formally in the next couple of weeks. Fox’s first day will be Tuesday, Sept. 7 and her primary duties will be leading all things related to PR, Events and Social Media. It looks like Ustream is taking advantage of its $75m round of funding from Softbank and other investors earlier this year in order to ramp up their recruiting efforts and attract major talent like Fox. Prior to Ustream, Fox had to honor of working in the upper echleons of communications departments at both Google and Apple. She left Palm shortly before the HP acquisition in June. CrunchBase Information Ustream Lynn Fox Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Facebook Wants To Be In A Relationship With The Big Boys — They Want To Be Just Friends Top
Yesterday, Apple launched iTunes Ping, their new music social network. Part of that launch was a very basic implementation of Facebook Connect, simply to hook in and find out which of your Facebook friends were also using Ping. I tried it yesterday and it worked fine. But this morning the option vanished and everyone was left wondering what happened? Well, it vanished because Facebook started blocking iTunes Ping from accessing their API, we’ve heard (just as AllThingsD and New York Times have as well). Obviously, there’s no point in having a feature that doesn’t work — so Apple simply removed it. Apple won’t respond to requests for comment and Facebook will only give the vague canned response, " We're working with Apple to resolve this issue. We've worked together successfully in the past, and we look forward to doing so in the future " But yes, Facebook blocked access and so Apple removed Connect. But wait, I’ve heard that canned statement before. When was it? Oh, that’s right, just about two months ago, when Facebook blocked Twitter from accessing the same API. “W e are working with Twitter resolve the issue,” we were told at the time. Deja vu. So what’s Facebook’s problem? Well, from what we’re hearing, size matters. Facebook is happy to let big companies like Apple and Twitter access their Connect API, but they want a structured, formal agreement in place so they have some control over it. That’s understandable given how large those sites are and how much strain they likely put on the API. In both cases, from what we’ve heard, Twitter and Apple simply hooked up Connect without giving Facebook much (if any) of a warning. They were able to do this because they were using the same public APIs that anyone else who wants to hook into Connect uses. Of course, most of those other companies don’t have hundreds of millions — or even millions — of users. So Facebook feels there should be different rules in place for those companies. Again, that’s an understandable position. But the problem is that in Twitter’s case, after months of talking, the two sides got absolutely nowhere. A week ago, Twitter simply removed the Connect feature altogether from their Facebook app. I suspect things might be a bit different with Apple, as it would be beneficial branding, if nothing else, to have the Facebook Connect button inside of iTunes. But if Apple won’t agree to some sort of formal agreement, it will still likely be a no-go. Of course, given some of the identity issues Ping is already facing , Apple may soon be happy to work with Facebook on the “issue” Facebook says they’re working on. [image: New Line Cinemas] CrunchBase Information Facebook Apple Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase
 
This Spam Infographic About Spam Infographics Makes My Head Hurt Top
Buzzfeed , the Huffington Post of Internet memes, wins the “more meta than thou” award for making “An Infographic Backlash Infographic” inspired by the tragic tale of a guy whose job it was to game Digg back when Digg had enough traffic to make it worth gaming. Okay Buzzfeed, just because you understand recursion, doesn’t mean you have to rub it in our face all the time. Aside from the Greyhat SEO tricks, your anti-infographic infographic and the post that inspired it are actually just describing successful web-writing and content creation . It’s like…there’s a reason people are clicking on it. From the Digg gamer’s playbook, which is really interesting if you care at all about how people used to build website traffic. “Spam other sites with it too for bonus points. Email large blogs, etc. to try to get them to run with it too.” From the Buzzfeed “community manager,” in our Tips inbox today: Thought this might be up your alley - a couple of days ago someone posted on Reddit about how he been paid to game Digg and other influential sites by creating infographics (those goofy, badly designed images with stats and pie charts called “everything you ever wanted to know about boobs” that keep turning up on content-sharing sites) and then loading them with keyword-spam embed tags once they start spreading. today, we posted an infographic about how the system works: http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/the-truth-about-infographics and within a few minutes, dozens of new fake accounts were created on our site to defend the practice. the whole thing is pretty fascinating! Well I do find it fascinating … But wait, didn’t you guys just tell me I shouldn’t link to infographics? Fortunately the spam infographic has some helpful suggestions for what to do when you’re in this kind of a situation. “If you do include a link to a spam infographic include a no follow tag in the html.” Which is exactly what we did. Thanks guys! Hi Jonah ;)
 

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