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Based on this rather self-explanatory tweet from the corporate Radio Shack account, it looks like you'll have an extra place to check for an iPhone 4 in case your local Apple, Best Buy, or AT&T stores are sold out: More »



RadioShack - IPhone - Apple - Handhelds - Smartphones

Twitter Advertises URL Shortener as Phish Poison —

Twitter's URL shortening service, t.co, is being advertised as a way to avoid stumbling into phishing scam. Shorteners make it easier to microblog, but they also make it easier for grifters to blind their online marks.

"A link converted by Twitter's link service is checked against a list of potentially dangerous sites. When there's a match, users can be warned before they continue."

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T.co, according to Twitter, will also enable metrics, to determine how many times a given link was clicked.

"Eventually, this information will become an important quality signal for our Resonance algorithm--the way we determine if a Tweet is relevant and interesting."

Users are free to continue to use their shortening services of choice but all links within Twitter will be wrapped in the t.co holster.

Out of the box, the service will available to developers. This summer the company plans to roll it out service-wide. Given that all links in Twitter will be auto-shortened, it could have a tangible effect on start-ups that provide this service.

Discuss

Links and Twitter: Length Shouldn’t Matter — Since early March, we have been routing links within Direct Messages through our link service to detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of malware, phishing, and other dangers. Any link shared in a Direct Message has been wrapped with a twt.tl URL. Links reported to us as malicious are blacklisted, and we present users with a page that warns them of potentially malicious content if they click blacklisted links. We want users to have this benefit on all tweets.

Additionally, as we mentioned at our Chirp developer conference in April, if you want to share a link through Twitter, there currently isn't a way to automatically shorten it and we want to fix this. It should be easy for people to share shortened links from the Tweet box on Twitter.com.

To meet both of these goals, we're taking small steps to expand the link service currently available in Direct Messages to links shared through all Tweets. We're testing this link service now with a few Twitter employee accounts.

User Experience, Safety, and Value

When this is rolled out more broadly to users this summer, all links shared on Twitter.com or third-party apps will be wrapped with a t.co URL. A really long link such as http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 might be wrapped as http://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMS, but it could be displayed to web or application users as amazon.com/Delivering- or as the whole URL or page title. Ultimately, we want to display links in a way that removes the obscurity of shortened link and lets you know where a link will take you.

In addition to a better user experience and increased safety, routing links through this service will eventually contribute to the metrics behind our Promoted Tweets platform and provide an important quality signal for our Resonance algorithm—the way we determine if a Tweet is relevant and interesting to users. We are also looking to provide services that make use of this data, an example would be analytics within our eventual commercial accounts service.

Early Developer Preview Comes First

As a first step, developers who create applications on the Twitter platform can now begin to prepare for this service. They will be able to choose how to display the wrapped links in a manner that is most useful, informative and appropriate for a given device or application. Our first step is a small one. We're rolling out wrapped links on a handful of accounts, including @TwitterAPI, @rsarver, and @raffi, to help developers test their code. Ultimately, every link on Twitter will be wrapped.

If you are already partial to a particular shortener when you tweet, you can continue to use it for link shortening and analytics as you normally would, and we'll wrap the shortened links you submit.

We’d like to thank our friends at .CO Internet SAS, the registry for the new .CO extension, for helping us secure t.co for use with this service. Links shared on Twitter will be safer, clearer, and more valuable.

How Twitpic Face Tagging Does & Does Not Work (Yet) —

Any of Facebook's over 400 million users will immediately recognize some new features on popular Twitter photo-sharing service Twitpic today as users can now tag people in their photos. In an blog post this morning, the two-year-old company announced it had passed the 10 million user mark that it sees 40 million unique visitors each month. The company says they are releasing their Face Tagging functionality "to show [their] thanks" to the community, but could it bring headaches and worries with it too?

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How It Works

Face Tagging literally works exactly like tagging photos on Facebook. While viewing a picture, the text "In this photo:" is displayed below it with a link to begin tagging the photo. By clicking the link, users can then pinpoint people's faces in the photo and a box will appear around the face, as well as a pop-up dialogue box in which to enter the person's name and Twitter handle. Once done, users hit the "Done Tagging" button to return to normal browsing functionality - just like Facebook.

Honestly, the only difference between tagging photos on Facebook and on Twitpic is that the "Done Tagging" button appears above photos on the former and below photos on the latter. While Twitpic's new functionality is a dead lift of Facebook's long-existing photo tagging feature, it is smart to copy the social networking giant. Why re-invent the wheel? Instead, Twitpic is giving users a familiar experience, making the process easy and intuitive.

How It Doesn't Work

When users tag a face in a photo, by default they can send a rather dry tweet announcing the tag and including the user name of the person tagged, effectively working as a notification. First of all, the inability to personalize this message is a bit of a downer, but you can always just uncheck the box and send out the tweet yourself. Secondly, by default it does this every time you tag a person in a photo. You thought Facebook notifications were bad? Just wait until someone tags a photo with ten people and unwittingly tweets the photo out ten times.

Additionally, the only way Twitpic alerts users that they have been tagged in a photo is via Twitter - so users could be tagged in hundreds of photos and not know it if the tagger chose not to tweet the tags. Users do have the ability to delete tags of themselves on other people's photos, but right now the only way of knowing of such photos is to be sent the tweet, which not everyone will choose to do.

In a phone interview today, Twitpic founder Noah Everett told ReadWriteWeb that additional features, like the ability to view photos you're tagged in, are in the works and should be out in a few weeks. The goal, he says, has been to launch the tagging feature and use user feedback to determine the next logical step.

What About Privacy?

That next logical step, for many users, may be privacy controls - something the new feature lacks. On Facebook, users have the ability to manage photos they have been tagged in and remove their association from a photo once-and-for-all. The only option related to photo tags for Twitpic users is the option to allow other people to tag their photos. Everett says they are looking into possible privacy controls, such as a blanket rule preventing anyone from tagging you, or specific user-based bans to avoid those "crazy ex-girlfriends", as he put it.

Personally, I use Twitpic mainly as a means to an end - I upload photos to the service for sharing on Twitter via a mobile application, which means I don't visit the Twitpic web interface too frequently. How am I supposed to know when I'm tagged in a photo if the user tagging me chooses not to tweet it? Even if I visit the Twitpic homepage, there is no way for me to view an aggregated list of photos I am tagged in and no system for notifying me of such photos.

Everett says they are looking into ways of notifying users, including email alterts, but hopes that eventually app developers will add the functionality using Twitpic's API. I guess the good thing is if someone decides to surreptitiously tag me in a photo, for now the general public has no real great way of finding it either.

An Impending Headache for Data Fans?

The other important thing to note from the launch of Twitpic's Face Tagging functionality is that it is a new stand-alone platform for a third-party application to another service. What that jumble of words means is that when other Twitter-based photo sharing apps add this functionality, it will be nearly impossible for users to effectively aggregate their tagged photos (and other meta-data) across platforms. With the low barrier of entry to Twitter applications, it seems likely that Twitpic's competitors would adopt similar features to keep up.

I spoke with Thomas Vander Wal, father of the phrase "folksonomy" which refers to collective tagging of meta-data, and he shared some interesting insights into this situation.

"Since others have done similar things on other platforms (Facebook, Flickr) the [intellectual property] is fuzzy and Twitpic can't claim it, so others are free to jump in," Vander Wal told ReadWriteWeb. "It would be in Twitter's best interest to build a central aggregation point for this."

This is exactly why Twitter is rolling out annotations, which have been testing recently and should be out soon. The annotations will create a standardized framework for third-party apps to build from, making interoperability between services much easier. Everett said he actually spoke with people from Twitter today about "coming together" and "rolling [tagging functionality] into annotations."

Strangely, however, Twitter mentioned in April that they planned on having "trending annotations" and letting developers battle for standardization. It would make sense that meta-data for tagged photos could be added to Twitter's annotations, and if the services adopted the standard, aggregation would be simple.

If not, then the entrepreneurial community, "somebody like PixelPipe" as Vander Wal suggested, would need to create another third-party Twitter service that would handle this aggregation - not an ideal solution going forward. We can't blame Twitpic for this fate: what they're doing is good in terms of pushing the platform forward. We can, however, bring up the privacy issues they've have raised with their new service and its apparent lack of controls, but then again, it is a brand new feature and more functionality is on the way soon.

Tagging photo courtesy of the LA Times

Discuss

Twitter now Boasts Nearly 200 Million Visitors —

Twitter now Boasts Nearly 200 Million Visitors is a post from Chris Pirillo

During the CM Summit today, Twitter COO Dick Costolo informed the gathered crowd that Twitter now has approximately 190 million visitors per month. Collectively, those people send out about 65 million tweets per day. Holy Twitter client – that’s a lot of updates. ““We’re laying down track as fast as we can in front of the train,” says Costolo. These numbers are up slightly from 180 million self-reported unique visitors per month back in April, and 50 million Tweets per day in February.”

The number of visitors to the site is not the same thing as the number of registered users. Costolo reminded us that most users never send out a single tweet (though I cannot imagine that!). Instead, they use the site to consume information and news. It’s also not clear how many of those 65 million tweets come from spam bots and the like.

Twitter is much more than just a place to update your friends and family. It’s honestly the fastest way to find out the latest news – usually while it is happening. For instance, my assistant Kat used Twitter two nights ago to track the deadly and destructive tornadoes that ripped through Illinois. She has family in and near the locations where the damage was the worst, and couldn’t reach them during the storms. She kept her eyes glued to Twitter, finding out information there far quicker than she did on any other source. The local newspaper website (and tv site) didn’t have ANY information about the storms until more than an hour after they happened. However, people living through the catastrophe were live tweeting every moment.

Social networking is about staying connected – with the world. When you open up your mind to the possibilities that are out there and learn to take advantage of them, you’ll find yourself learning new things every moment of every day.

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Back in December 2009, the number of tweets per month on Twitter reached 1 billion for the first time. Now in May, we reached yet another milestone: 2 billion tweets per month (or to be precise, 1.99 billion, which is close enough).

We actually called that this would happen at this exact point in time, based on a prediction we’d made for Twitter’s “tweet growth” in 2010 a while back.

Here’s a chart showing the number of tweets per month from December through May, i.e. the path from 1 to 2 billion tweets per month on Twitter:

Twitter saw the following numbers in May:

• 64 million tweets per day.
• 2.7 million tweets per hour.
• 44,481 tweets per minute.
• 741 tweets per second.

Maybe Twitter won’t quite be able to reach the almost 6 billion tweets per month we’ve predicted for the end of the year, but it’s clear that the Twitter platform is still growing at a healthy pace. Close to doubling the volume of monthly tweets in the last six months is no small feat.

Note: These numbers represent all tweets that pass through Twitter, including those using the Twitter API (i.e. from apps). For an explanation of how we are extracting the number of tweets, see the bottom of this post. It also shows the number of monthly tweets all the way back to July 2008.

Twitter COO Dick Cosotolo offered some updated stats at the Conversational Media Summit today in New York City. Twitter is now attracting 190 million visitors per month and generating 65 million Tweets a day. “We’re laying down track as fast as we can in front of the train,” says Costolo. These numbers are up slightly from 180 million self-reported unique visitors per month back in April, and 50 million Tweets per day in February.

The number of visitors to Twitter.com is not the same as the number of registered users. (ComScore, in contrsat, estimated 83.6 million worldwide unique visitors to Twitter.com in April and 23.8 million U.S. visitors in May, see chart below). Most users, says Costolo, don’t Tweet at all, but rather use Twitter as a consumption media. How many of those 65 million Tweets are automated spam is not clear.

Once again, Costolo reiterated Twitter’s stance that “We will not allow third parties to inject ads into the stream.” When Twitter rolls out its Promoted Tweets, it will control them 100 percent. Some brands doing early beta testing with Promoted Tweets are seeing, on average, 2.5 percent “engagement rates,” whatever that means. He also mentioned that Twitter will be rolling out an analytics dashboard for commercial customers and brands. Advertisers will be able to target messages by interest and topics, but not by individual users.

PostRank Activity Streams: FriendFeed for your content! —

Knowing how and where your readers are engaging with your content is critical to the success of any publisher today. With so much activity happening off the authors site, discovering the fragmented conversations, connecting with the audience, and growing your presence on all the social hubs has been an incredibly manual and a time-intensive task. That is, until today, because we are rolling out a new beta feature on PostRank Analytics: Activity Streams for your content!

Think of it as FriendFeed, but for your content. PostRank aggregates over 10 million daily activities from over 20 different social hubs, which means that we see every tweet, bookmark, vote, and comment about your stories. PostRank already knows about all the content you publish (zero setup, just specify your RSS feed), which means that we can scan the millions of activities, and pull out just the conversations and actions which mention your content! Nothing to setup, just login into your PostRank Analytics account and you’re ready to go. A picture is worth a thousand words:

Did someone just vote on your story on Reddit, or Digg? Did someone mention your story on Facebook or MySpace, or maybe they shared it with their friends on Google Reader? Well, now you can find answers to all of those questions by logging in, or signing up for a PostRank Analytics account.

Oh, and the beta part is there for a reason – we’re just getting started with the activity stream, so stay tuned!

Kehalim

In what could be their latest stroke of brilliance, Israeli start-up Wibiya has integrated Kehalim's cooperative affiliate marketing program into the popular blog and website tool bar.

Brief background.  I started using the Wibiya toolbar here when it first launched.  The response was instantaneous.  "Nice toolbar" ... even a tweet from Microsoft.

Microsoft later gave Wibiya a BizSpark award.

The company launched with a simple premise.  Help bloggers and webmasters reduce real estate while offering a variety of social and other options in a very non-invasive toolbar.

I loved the Twitter integration.  Since then Wibiya has added Google Buzz, Friendfeed and more.

It's time for the bucks?

Kehalim is a contextual and semantic affiliate marketing network partnered with many (if not most) of the major affiliate programs already in existence.  Google Affiliate, Commission Junction, LinkShare, Amazon, and many others are onboard.

Monetization - The new 'partnership' just makes it too easy and the Wibiya bar has already transcended many industries.  Factually, it's in use by some VERY high volume websites and growing in popularity.

This blog was never really intended to be monetized.  The Adsense ads at right have been turned on and off many times over the years simply as an experiment.  As part of this post, I have enabled the Kehalim / Wibiya feature as well so we can all see how it looks (and if it delivers?).

The 'magic' to Kehalim is that it makes it turnkey for bloggers to tap in to numerous affiliate programs simply and easily.  They've been at it for some time but the 'Express Ads' feature that launched in February was significant.  This parternership could literally take BOTH start-ups over the top .... (Just my humble opinion :)

So ... before Apple's WWDC no doubt takes over the tech headlines for a few days ... be sure and check this out!

Poll: Who’s Buying an iPhone or iPad Before AT&T’s New Rate Plan Kicks In? —

Perhaps the most polarizing news in these parts of late is around AT&T’s new smartphone data plan changes, which the carrier unveiled yesterday. Some customers are happy that they’ll be saving up to $15 a month with reduced plan pricing, while others aren’t thrilled to hear that unlimited data is going away in favor of 200 MB or 2 GB buckets with overage charges. Those in the latter camp might appreciate the facetious tweet of Rahul Sood, founder of VoodooPC: “Look on the bright side AT&T customers, your data is STILL unlimited, it’s your bill that was uncapped.”

But the new rate plans don’t take effect until June 7, so there’s still a wee bit of time for new customers to nab an iPhone or iPad under the current unlimited plan offerings. Considering the expectation of a possible front-facing video camera that’s sure to gobble up data on AT&T’s network, it just might make sense to buy a current iPhone 3GS to gain the unlimited data contract and hope you can return the old model for a new one next week. The newest iPhone hardware is widely expected to launch at Apple’s WWDC event next Monday, the same day the new AT&T tiered pricing plans kick in.

View This Poll survey software

Meanwhile iPad owners, which watch three times more video on their Apple device than on others, seem the most miffed, and with good reason. Apple announced an innovative, unlimited AT&T data plan specific to the iPad when it introduced the device in January, which goes by the wayside with this new data plan.

So who’s buying an iPhone or iPad between now and Monday?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d):

Will Metered Mobile Data Slow the App Markets Growth?

Setting the record straight — I don't know Josh Fraser, so I'm going to assume he's well-intentioned. But this tweet from him represents something all-too-common. People spin stuff to make it look like corporate-owned technology is something other than what it is.

Here's what actually happened when I decided to implement PubSubHubBub. At first I was enthusiastic, and said so -- until I saw that it had no support for RSS. It was all about managing realtime updates for Atom feeds. It said so in the spec, and there was no indication that they planned to change it. In fact, it said quite the opposite. The authors didn't see any reason to implement support for RSS.

At that point I knew I wasn't going to implement it, because I don't have any code that generates Atom feeds, and I don't plan to write any. I do have code that parses them. There's enough Atom-formatted content out there that you have to. So I do. But I have a choice in what I transmit, so I use RSS 2.0. I know that every aggregator supports it, so I'm on solid ground in that choice.

Am I wrong to think that PubSubHubBub comes from Google? Well, I'm sure there are other people writing stuff that works with it, people who don't work for Google. But if there were going to be a major change in direction in PSHB, it would have to come from Google. Conversely, if you and I got together and decided that PSHB should fully embrace RSS, we'd find ourselves discussing this with Google people. Whether it happened or not, that decision would be made by people who work at Google. You decide whether that means it comes from Google or not. I don't care to argue hair-splits.

I was going try to work with them. Vic Gundotra, who I know for many years, before he worked at Google -- was setting up a meeting with the two leads when news of a Google patent on RSS reading lists came out. That reminded me, in very stark terms, how this works. The patent was in an area where I had done a lot of unpatented work. You don't find out about patents for years after they're filed. Has Google filed patents around PSHB? Is the Pope Catholic? It's in Google's nature to claim supposedly "open" technologies as their property. It's much better to use unpatented tech that pre-dates all this stuff. Which is where the <cloud> element in RSS 2.0 comes in.

Everything that PSHB does can be done with stuff that is prior art for PSHB and therefore in the future will not be subject to control by Google. To me it's a no-brainer to use it. I don't see why anyone else would go differently, unless Google is paying them to, or they don't understand how patents work. Google's fanboys will call this FUD -- which means fear, uncertainty and doubt. It certainly is fear -- sometimes fear is the right thing. There's no uncertainty or doubt because Google does file patents. If they haven't filed any around their work in PSHB they should say so, clearly and unambiguously, in a legally binding way (i.e. a statement from an officer of the company, in writing). Then we can all relax about it. Until then I'm going to assume they have.

Anyway, I'm not nervous about "jumping into bed" with BigCo's, because I don't do it. Life is too short to waste time waiting for a tiger to shed its stripes or for the church to name a non-Catholic Pope. I stay with RSS because it's solid, it works, and no one can tell me I can't use it.

Looks like it’s happening again.  Reports across Twitter are talking about a password reset warning that is informing them of a needed password reset due to a phishing attack.

There have been a number of cases where phishers have targeted user accounts via DM sending them to a spoof login page that grabs passwords and then uses your account to propagate the phishing messages to more users.

This message is getting out pretty quick, however, due to a Tweet from Jason Pollock:

The notice from Twitter, as seen below, appears to be heading off the phishing attack before it becomes too widespread:

We may sound like a broken record on this, but TNW is urging you to please use an up-to-date browser that has integrated anti-phishing and anti-malware protection.  In the mean time, we’ve contacted Twitter, and we’ll fill you in with any information that we find.

Delicious Founder Joshua Schachter Leaves Google —

Shared by mangini
Esse título do post ficou gay, hein? :-)

Over a year after joining Google, Joshua Schachter, the founder of Delicious and a Yahoo exec until June 2008, is leaving the search giant, according to a Tweet he just sent out. Schachter sent out another Tweet shortly after the first message stating that he has “no clue what he’s doing next.” Schachter confirmed to us that he is in fact leaving Google.

When asked why he was leaving Google, Schachter told us that he “Felt like doing something new,” but apparently doesn’t know what that new project is. Yet. Schachter joined Google last January as an engineer and also continued his role as an independent angel investor. He tells us that he may slow down his investments in this next stage of his career.

Schachter of course is best known for founding bookmarking service Delicious, which was acquired by Yahoo in December of 2005. Schachter has been fairly vocal about his displeasure with the direction of Delicious and even launched his own threaded Twitter conversation application last Summer while at Google.

Schachter’s angel investments include Foursquare, SimpleGEO, Square, DailyBooth, Bump Technologies and most recently BlockChalk and 4chan founder Moot’s new startup Canvas Networks.

Would you keep a daily diary on Twitter? Or use it to decide what to wear? Or use it to bypass text-messages charges in international countries?

The possibilities for Twitter are about to get a lot richer with the ability to add annotations to any tweet. A handful of developers got the opportunity to play with the new application programming interface over the weekend at a company hackfest in San Francisco.

Annotations, which launched in April at Twitter’s first developer conference and will go live sometime later this year, are a way of marking up tweets with additional data. Instead of having a simple 140-character tweet, you could make a note that the tweet is about the weather or a movie. Other apps will be able to interpret this and display display or interpret the tweet in a different way. It has the potential to make the experience of the microblogging network feel a lot more media rich and powerful. (We suggested a few possibilities for “Annotations” here based on conversations with different Twitter developers.)

A dozen or so developers showed off a few works in progress at the company’s headquarters yesterday. (Note: These aren’t finished products, just ideas people have hacked together in a few days).

Fab or Drab, developed by engineers at San Francisco-based Crowdflower, helps people decide what to wear through an iPhone app. You take and upload pictures that friends can vote “Fab” or “Drab” on. (In typical fashion, Crowdflower, which specializes in farming out microtasks that computers can’t solve to thousands of people, says it can also pay strangers tiny amounts of money to judge your photos too.) Another app, Tazpic, brings some classic Facebook functionality to Twitter with photo tagging. 5Slices lets people keep a daily journal of their lives through Twitter by recording five words a day that describe how they’re feeling. Another developer built an Android to SMS gateway that basically lets people text each other in international countries without incurring expensive charges. You can see all of the projects here.

Twitter also revealed a few more details about “Annotations.” The biggest foreseeable problem with them was whether different developers would agree on a taxonomy or structure for the annotations. If one developer decided to mark up movies one way, and another developer decided to do it a different way, none of their respective features would work properly because other applications wouldn’t be able to interpret them.

So Twitter’s actually giving suggested structures for annotations. They include annotations for reviews, songs, movies, books, products, stocks and more. The full list is here. The new guidelines should prevent a huge mess from developers having different standards.

Watch live video from abrahamwilliams on Justin.tv

Tags: Annotations

Companies: Twitter

Annotated tweets

When you create a tweet, you can add one or more annotations to that tweet. These annotations represent structured metadata about the tweet. What that metadata contains is up to use. The feature simply provides a structure for how to specify the annotations and retrieve them along with the tweet.

A tweet can have one or more annotations. An annotation is a tuple whose first element is a 'type' and whose second element is one or more attribute names with values. Here are some examples of various annotations represented in JSON and in a simple custom format:

A single annotation of type 'type', with a single attribute named 'attribute' whose value is 'value':

  JSON:
  "annotations":%5B{"type":{"attribute":"value"}}%5D
 
  Simple format:
  type:attribute=value

A single annotationn of type 'type', with two attributes, one called 'attribute' and the other called 'another_attribute', both of whose values are 'value:
 
  JSON:
  "annotations":
    %5B{"type":{"another_attribute":"value", "attribute":"value"}}%5D
    
  Simple format:
  type:attribute=value&another_attribute=value
 
Two annotations, one of type 'type', the other of type 'another_type', each of which has two attributes:

  JSON:
  "annotations":
    %5B{"type":{"another_attribute":"value", "attribute":"value"}},
     {"another_type":{"another_attribute":"value", "attribute":"value"}}%5D
 
  Simple format:
  type:attribute=value&another_attribute=value,another_type:attribute=value&another_attribute=value
 
Two annotations, both of which happen to be of type 'type' (this is allowed), each of which have two attributes:

  JSON:
  "annotations":
    %5B{"type":{"another_attribute":"value", "attribute":"value"}},
     {"type":{"another_attribute":"value", "attribute":"value"}}%5D

  Simple format:
  type:attribute=value&another_attribute=value,type:attribute=value&another_attribute=value

To summarize:

•   a tweet can have one or more annotation
•   tweets can have more than one annotation of the same type
•   annotations of the same type are still separate annotations
•   the attribute names in a given annotation may only occur once in a given annotation (the same restrictions as a conventional hash map)

Limits:

• when you sum up all the bytes that make up all your annotation types, attribute names and attribute values, the total size of bytes must be no more than 512 bytes (we're hoping to increase this over time as capacity permits to something closer to 2K)

 

Creating a tweet with annotations:

Annotations are posted to /statuses/update.format with the "annotations" parameter. You can specify the annotations in JSON (as above) or using the simple custom format (as above).

On successful status creation, the status payload response will contain the annotations.

The annotation portion of a status payload will look like the following examples:

XML:
<annotations type="array">
  <annotation>
    <type>foo</type>
    <attributes>
      <attribute>
        <name>bar</name>
        <value>baz</value>
      </attribute>
    </attributes>
  </annotation>
</annotations>

JSON:
"annotations":%5B{"foo":{"bar":"baz"}}%5D

Error cases:

•   An annotations payload that is too large will return an error response.
•   JSON annotations submitted that are structured incorrectly will also return an error response.

Twitter: 15 Billion Tweets and Counting [PIC] —

Twitter has surpassed 15 billion tweets less than three months after it broke the 10 billion count.

The above tweet, sent minutes ago from @EGRK, is the 15 billionth tweet sent on the popular microblogging service. It is yet another milestone for the maturing company.

Tweet #15,000,000,000 is also proof that Twitter’s growth is accelerating. Twitter broke one billion tweets in November of 2008. It took nearly a year for it to reach 5 billion.

Tweet growth has been accelerating, though. Twitter surpassed 10 billion tweets on March 4th, 2010, growing by 5 billion tweets in just four months. Now it has jumped from 10 billion to 15 billion in less than three, showing that engagement is rising, not falling.

We want to note that tweet #15,000,000,000 may not correlate to the actual 15 billionth tweet, because the tweet IDs have been changed several times due to the Twitpocalypse. The count is artificially high, but it’s unclear by how much. Still, the engagement growth is a great indicator for the health of the Twitterverse.

Tags: tweet, twitter

A tweet from Foursquare yesterday revealed that the company is doing “10+ checkins per second.” We did the math and at 10 checkins per second, Foursquare is processing about 36,000 checkins per hour — putting the daily checkin total somewhere around 864,000.

In fact, once Foursquare hits 11.58 checkins per second — a milestone foreseeable in the very near future — it will be processing over 1 million checkins per day.

Foursquare is all the rage right now and has been growing at an astronomical rate of late. Earlier this month we learned that the location-sharing mobile game is adding around 15,000 users per day. The company has also seen the checkin rate shoot up from one per second in January to more than ten checkins per second today.

We can attribute the company’s strategic allegiance with media companies like Bravo and retail corporations like Starbucks as primary contributing factors to Foursquare’s growth. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Foursquare has become a media darling — garnering mainstream attention for popularizing the location-sharing trend — in much the same way that Twitter did last year.

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Reviews: Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter

Tags: checkins, foursquare

Google Buzz may have stumbled out of the gate with some features that users really didn’t like (such as auto-following all your email contacts whether you wanted it to or not), but to its credit it fixed those issues quickly and has been on a roll ever since, adding an average of a feature every week since it launched in February. The latest, which was made available today, is a “reshare” button similar to the one that blogging tools like Tumblr have. It’s also a little like the “retweet” function in Twitter, although Buzz has taken its sharing feature in a somewhat different direction, based on feedback from beta testers.

Google Buzz product manager Todd Jackson said in an interview that the ability to reshare someone else’s post has been one of the top user requests since launch, but has also been “probably the most debated feature on the Buzz team of any feature I can recall us doing,” because of all the various usability questions. Resharing may not seem like that complicated an idea, but it is. For example, there was the question of whether to “fork” the conversation when someone reshared something or not — in other words, whether to create a separate, new conversation starting with the item that was being reshared, or whether to connect it to the existing conversation that started with the original posting.

Twitter caused a minor storm of criticism among users when it made a similar decision about retweeting, an informally developed practice that involves the use of the letters RT before a tweet and then, in many cases, adding an additional comment to the original item. When it came up with its own retweet function, Twitter chose to not allow any comments to be added, and also showed the original tweet, along with the original poster’s avatar, to the followers of the person retweeting it, even if they didn’t also follow that person.

That led to complaints from users about tweets from random strangers suddenly appearing in their stream, something Jackson said he wanted to avoid. As a result, Buzz makes the reshared item a new item on its own, and only shows it to those who follow the re-sharer (although Jackson said that some users have asked for the alternate option, and Buzz may allow that in the future). The Buzz reshare function also allows users to add their own comments, and makes it clear that they are resharing it, with a link to the original Buzz user’s post. The original author sees a list of who reshared his or her item, something Jackson says he hopes will also act as a “discovery mechanism” for new users of the service to find other people worth following.

Jackson also said that the feature most users complained about the most when Buzz launched — the auto-following of email contacts — was an attempt to make it easier for new users to find people worth following, which he said is an issue that any new social network has. It turned out to be a bad idea, however, particularly for people who had contacts in their email address book they didn’t want to follow, or make public. The Google Buzz product manager admitted that this was a mistake, but says the intention was to make the service easier. “I wish we had gotten it right from the initial launch,” he said. “It was clearly the wrong idea. But we worked really hard to fix it.”

The number of active users of the site is growing rapidly, Jackson said, although he wouldn’t provide any figures (Google defines an active user as anyone who checks in more than once a week). He also said the number of users who check their Buzz more than 10 times a day is growing, a group he referred to as “hyper-active.” It’s this group that the Buzz team looks at most closely, he said, because they’re power users and the ones most likely to evangelize the service. Google also assumes that their behavior is going to become more mainstream over time.

Buzz also now has a group of several thousand volunteer beta testers who get access to new features before they’re rolled out across the service. Among the features that have been added since launch are a Buzz API (launched last week), Buzz sharing buttons, improved comment collapsing, a Buzz layer in Google Maps and the ability to get Buzz items in your inbox. And Jackson says he plans to stick to the schedule of at least one new feature a week.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Why New Net Companies Must Shoulder More Responsibility

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No matter the social service, a common key feature is the ability to reshare something. Facebook has “Share,” Tumblr has “Reblog,” and, of course, Twitter has “Retweet,” to name a few. The feature provides a simple way for users to do something social without having to do much themselves. And today, Google Buzz is gaining its own such feature — but don’t call it “Rebuzz,” instead, it’s called simply “Reshare.”

When added to Buzz’s current arsenal of “Comment” and “Like” (and Email), Reshare completes the social circle that most of its competitors have set up. It works exactly as you’d expect: if you see a Buzz post you like that you want to share with your followers, simply go to the bottom of the post and click the Reshare button. An input area will drop down and you’ll be able to add your own comment on top of whatever Buzz you’re resharing. This will then get injected back into your followers’ Buzz streams.

The key to this may be the ability to leave your own comment on top of anything you reshare. This makes the functionality more like a Tumblr Reblog than a Twitter Retweet. The inability to leave your own comment with a Twitter Retweet has been the subject of much controversy amongst Twitter users. Previously, Retweets were an organic thing done by the community, in which you shared something simply by copying and pasting a previous tweet led by “RT @username.” Twitter, in the hope of making this process more streamlined, baked it into the service, but left out the ability to add your own commentary. As a result, some people still do it the old, manual way (or use clients that do it the old way).

A few notes about Buzz Reshares:

• As you might expect, you can only reshare public Buzzes
• It’s a two-click process (“Reshare” then “Post). Google debated making it one-click, but decided having the option (in the drop-down) to reshare something with a limited group of people was important.
• Everyone who has reshared a post will show up (as a tiny icon) below your comment when you reshare something.
• The same content being reshared multiple times will be collapsed below the latest one in your feed.
• The reshare function forks the conversation to a new thread. Google thought a lot about this, but ultimately decided this was the best way for now. They’re thinking about a non-forking option too though.
• Liking a shared post only “likes” the reshared version, not the original share.

So, about the name. I asked Google why they chose to go with Reshare rather than the obvious “Rebuzz.” They pointed me to the picture below. Apparently, Rebuzz was being considering but was ultimately killed because it “sounds kinda lame.” That’s somewhat true, but for branding purposes, I think it may have been the right call. And I suspect people may call it this anyway. They also considered “Repost” but wanted to avoid introducing a new verb. So ultimately they went with the most literal choice.

This feature will be rolling out to all Buzz users over the course of the day.

Fake BP Public Relations Twitter Account a Viral Hit [INTERVIEW] —

After oil started spewing into the Gulf of Mexico following the BP oil rig explosion almost a month ago, a Twitter account launched purporting to be BP’s public relations group, @BPGlobalPR. The account, which offers dark, satirical commentary about the spill and cleanup efforts, is run by an anonymous person (I know for a fact that he’s a “he”), who responds to all media inquiries as “Terry.” Mashable contacted “Terry” in an attempt to find out more about the man behind the Twitter stream.

We were ardently hoping that “Terry” would drop the act (if it is, in fact, an act) and tell us who he really is. Unfortunately, homeboy kept in character throughout the entire e-mail interview, which we’re pasting below.

We’re fairly certain that the real BP is not behind the account — the company said as much to CNN. In fact, it’s far more popular than the official feed; after launching last week, @BPGlobalPR has more than 55,000 followers, while @BP_America has just under 7,000. (Although someone apparently hacked into the official account today and posted a tweet from “Terry” that says, “Terry is now in charge of operation Top Kill, work will recommence after we find a XXL wetsuit. #bpcares #oilspill.” The tweet has since been removed).

Check out our interview below and let us know what you think in the comments.

“Hi Brenna! I really like being interviewed by women first of all. You know what I call men who are journalists? Pickledicks. LOL. The guys said I should be the one who does the interviews ’cause I’m the smartest, which is also why I do all the hard work. It does kinda suck, though, because the other guys have so much fun all day playing grab-ass and XBox and beer pong. Ah, well.”

Why did you start this Twitter account?: “I work for BP Global PR. The reason we do PR is very simple, it’s the best job you can have. You see, corporations screw up all the time. They are very worried that the screwups are going to cost them a lot of money. They pay people like me a TON of money to make it look like they’re doing stuff, but really we don’t have to do much except talk. Our talking buys them time to figure out how they are going to sweep it all under the rug and go back to making lots of money. I get paid to talk and waste time and I get paid a lot. So why do we do this, because its our job and we love money!”

How did you amass so many followers in such a short amount of time? What was the tipping point for you?: “We got a lot of followers because we’re really good at our job. Also Roger Ebert tweeted our tweet about how our oil wasn’t good for dolphins and a lot of people like him for some reason. To be honest, the review he gave Transformers 2 (my fave movie of 2009) was a little out of line, but whatever.”

Who runs the account? Is it just you or a few other people?: “We’ve got a real brain trust running the account. The other guys do most of the tweeting, but I do most of the work and I also do a lot of dares every day. I guess I’m kinda the star, so that’s pretty cool. I have my own Twitter I’m starting up @BPTerry, but I got so frustrated trying to get to the page today I gave up. Turns out I accidentally typed www.twitter.corn. The guys gave me hell for that one.”

You appear to be selling “BP Cares” shirts via your Twitter account to benefit healthygulf.org. What’s the deal with that?: “I really messed up with the ‘BP Cares’ shirts. I wish we could drop it. Long story short, everyone was really mad at BP about the oil spill, so naturally we decided to make a ton of T-shirts to give to everyone to make them like us again. I got the design, put it in the T-shirt machine and I guess I spilled ink on it or something ’cause all the shirts are messed up. To make matters worse, I broke the controls and the thing wont stop making the damn shirts. No one can turn it off. Also, I signed some stupid paperwork that made it so I have to give all the money we make to www.healthygulf.org. I’ll tell ya, everyone was so pissed about this. We are literally losing thousands of dollars to them. The only reason I still have my job is cause I ate some oil on a dare.”

How much time a day do you spend tweeting/interacting with followers? What has been the most interesting interaction so far?: “I work about five hours a day at BP headquarters and am always the last one in the office. Interesting interactions? Felicia Day liked our tweets; Alyssa Milano liked our tweets, too.

I was hoping i could maybe meet Felicia or take her on a boatride through the gulf, but she hasn’t gotten back to us. Also, @Wired said some weird stuff about us, so we all decided they were pickledicks and we hate them.”

“I’ll admit I’m not that smart, but they write a magazine about computers. They use PRINT to talk about new technology. I mean, that’s some real pickledickery. I’ll bet those idiots write letters about e-mails. Also, right when we reached 50,000 followers we noticed a fake account w/ a bunch of typos and we had to call them out.”

What kind of feedback have you been getting from the public?: Everyone thinks we’re funny. To be honest, we’re all mostly confused by that. We’re just trying to think of solutions for this stuff and report the news. But I’m told that we’re doing great. Hoping for a bonus so I can invent the hoverboard.”

And, finally, who are you really? What’s your day job, where do you live and what are your goals with this Twitter account?: “This question doesn’t make sense. I’m Terry; I can’t tell you my last name because a lot of people hate us. I work for BP Global PR and my goal is to get paid and shut down this damn T-shirt machine. Thanks, Brenna. Btw, are u pretty? Hope so.”

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Reviews: Facebook, Twitter

Tags: humor, twitter

MyLikes CEO Says User Plugs Don't Cross Twitter Ad Rules —

Shared by Rizzn
I'm afraid Bindu is mistaken, though this is some nice repositioning of the company. MyLikes may conform to the letter, but not the spirit of the changes, and as such, see itself on the chopping block.

Increasingly, some of the new rules issued from popular Web platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, are raising more questions than answers, with words so carefully interwoven as to be interpreted any which way. The call for clarity from Facebook around privacy and from Twitter around what is permitted in users' streams from developers and programs alike seems to be unending - and it seems at times that the companies are being obtuse so they can be selective on how they choose to endorse the rules down the line. Monday's announcement from Twitter on blocking "injected paid tweets" on any service that leverages the Twitter API had a lot of people asking what this meant for services who derive revenue from posting content to the service. MyLikes, a company I advise for, was one that received questions. I spoke with CEO Bindu Reddy (@bindureddy) that night to gain her take and get some of the answers myself.

As best as I am able to understand it, Twitter is continuing to try and improve the user experience on their service, which at times has been less than fantastic. On the back of their efforts to weed out spammers, reduce the artificially-inflated visibility of hand-selected celebrities, reduce negatively-intended automation, improving uptime, and expanding a familiar presence to onboard new users, Monday's announcement looks like they want to improve the clarity of sponsored content on the network, while also protecting their own revenue stream.

The relevant line in question from Twitter COO Dick Costolo, says: "aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API." This line particularly focuses on the use of API for automation, and also the phrase "paid tweet", which is open for interpretation. What is promising in the piece is that Costolo says the company does not seek to control the content on the service, and that companies are open to sell ads, build vertical apps and analytics, and that the company does not always need to participate in revenue generated from their service. It sounds to me that Twitter is planning ahead for future battles with nefarious networks that are not in users' best interest, much more so than they are seeking to slow legitimate companies that have been built around their ecosystem.

As I mentioned when I first announced my affiliation with MyLikes, I am attracted to the company's model because the ads posted to Twitter, blogs and other networks are done by hand, by the users themselves, with the user creating the message. There is no automation on the user's behalf that they have not created themselves, and all the activity is above board.

In talking with Bindu, she agreed this sets the company apart from Twitter's foes. Also - a MyLikes generated tweet is as much of a personal endorsement as it is an ad, leaving this activity free and clear. In fact, while Costolo's post was somewhat confusing, we both agreed Twitter's move was one that continued their path toward maturation.

To hear more of Bindu's thoughts, check out the Cinchcast I recorded below:



DISCLOSURE: I am an unpaid advisor to MyLikes. I hold a small equity stake in the company. My comments on the company's product are always independent, and do not pass their way in advance.

It’s been no secret that LinkedIn has been steadily trying to make its platform more social and interactive with users. LinkedIn integrated with Twitter last fall, allowing users to Tweet from the platform and pull Tweets into the network with a #in hashtag. In fact, over one million users have tied their LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. And this year the network added the ability to “follow” companies, taking a page from both Twitter and Facebook. Today, LinkedIn is furthering its Twitter integration by allowing members to easily find and keep track of their LinkedIn connections on Twitter and more, essentially becoming a full-fledged client.

Once you’ve installed the Tweets application, the “Overview” tab on your homepage will allows you to see everyone you currently follow on Twitter, view their Twitter feed, and Tweet from your own account. A new feature, Connections to Follow, has been added to recommend new people for you to follow, based on your LinkedIn connections. You can easily see all of your LinkedIn connections who have added Twitter accounts to their LinkedIn profiles and allows you to see who you are and aren’t following on Twitter.

You can also see the Twitter information for any of your connections, follow or unfollow them, and even see a sample of their last tweet by hovering over their Twitter ID. And now you can save your LinkedIn connections as a dynamic Twitter list. When you choose to save your connections as a Twitter list, LinkedIn will create a private Twitter list for all of your LinkedIn connections that have added Twitter accounts. LinkedIn will keep this list up-to-date, adding and removing Twitter accounts to the list daily based on your LinkedIn connections.

Clearly LinkedIn has added much more functionality to its Twitter platform, which seems to be popular. Of course one million out of nearly 70 million users is still only a portion of users, it still represents a large portion of users who downloaded the app. LinkedIn is making a strong push to encourage users to share content on the site, and becoming a full-fledged Twitter client will only increase sharing on the platform. The obvious next step would be to integrate with Facebook in some way, but we probably shouldn’t hold our breath.