Twitter

“The Shack” will earn some much-needed cool points this June when the store stocks shelves with the latest version of the iPhone. Radio Shack made the announcement Tuesday via its corporate Twitter account, promising more details to follow. Considering Radio Shack’s account only has about 3,200 followers, it could be your best bet on iPhone 4 launch day to avoid lines.

Full story at Gizmodo.

Total iPhone coverage.

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Just two months after starting a flame war of sorts over whether it would acquire or go into competition with companies that were just “filling holes” in its service, Twitter is finally moving to fill one of the biggest holes the social network has had since it launched: the lack of a built-in link shortener. A post on the Twitter blog explains how the company has been shortening links in direct messages since March, in part to provide more security against phishing attempts — and will soon roll out the use of the t.co link shortener as a “wrapper” for all links.

The term “wrapper” means that every link that passes through Twitter will be shortened via the t.co system — and not just long links, but even links that have already been shortened by some other method, such as a competing service like Bit.ly or a white-label version such as the New York Times custom shortener. These links will still appear to users in the same way, but they will be shortened via t.co as they make their way through the Twitter system. When it comes to long links, Twitter hasn’t decided yet what they will look like exactly, as staffer Sean Garrett explains in the blog post:

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.

Garrett also explained that t.co links will be a maximum of 20 characters, so once the feature is rolled out to all users, links added to tweets will only use up 20 characters, regardless of their actual size.

The immediate response from many observers was to see the new feature as a Bit.ly killer, and it is clearly competition for that service, which was one of a number of link shorteners that sprang up to fill the void when Twitter first launched. But Bit.ly has moved on from its reliance on Twitter, as Betaworks founder John Borthwick described in a recent blog post. In any case, it’s clear that the real point of Twitter’s new feature isn’t to kill Bit.ly or any other service, but to accumulate data about the links that are shared on the network. As the Twitter blog post describes it:

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.

As Bit.ly understood long before Twitter did (or before Twitter did anything about it), the data underlying the links that are shared by users is far more important than the simple act of shortening a link. The analytical data that could emerge from seeing everything that is shared in tens of millions of tweets every day could produce an incredibly valuable storehouse of information about what stories or websites or content is getting the most activity, in real time. It’s about time the service started paying attention to it.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Lessons From Twitter: How to Play Nice With Ecosystem Partners

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Max Klingensmith

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Yahoo’s New Features an Admission That Facebook Has Won the Social Race —

Yahoo is doubling down on its bets on social networking, but it is doing so by effectively outsourcing its social efforts to Facebook. The web portal this week is launching enhanced Facebook integration, along with a revamped personal profile feature called Yahoo Pulse, and also recently announced the addition of new Google Buzz-style social features in the company’s email service called Yahoo Updates. The new Facebook features are the result of an agreement that Yahoo signed with the social network in December to use what was then called Facebook Connect (now known as the Open Graph protocol).

The new features integrate Facebook status updates and activity streams into the customized user pages at Yahoo, including the home page and Yahoo Mail. Users can also share content on Facebook from any of the Yahoo content sites such as its sports hub, entertainment hub, etc. In addition, the site’s personal profile pages are now known as Yahoo Pulse, and the company says they will give users more control over how and where they share their content. Yahoo has been bending over backwards to talk about its new sharing features, including its Google Buzz-style social integration for email, hoping to avoid some of the privacy pain that Facebook and Google have encountered.

While the company no doubt hopes that its new features will encourage more people who visit the site to stay longer, they are also a tacit admission that Facebook has won the social race — one that Yahoo has not really been a factor in for some time. In a similar way, Yahoo has recently outsourced many of its existing services to others, including a deal with Match.com to handle the personals business and a partnership with Nokia for mobile email, not to mention the biggest outsourcing move of all: namely, outsourcing its entire search business to Microsoft.

In the final blow for Yahoo, a recent ranking of most-visited sites by Google showed Facebook the clear winner with 540 million monthly unique visitors, and Yahoo at number two with 490 million. Whether integrating Facebook sharing and activity streams will improve Yahoo’s position or simply accelerate the current downward trend for the site remains to be seen. The company appears to want to become a portal for the social web in the same sense that it used to be a portal for Web 1.0. — but half a billion users seem to have decided that they already have a portal for the social web, and it’s called Facebook.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Social Advertising Models Go Back to the Futurehttp://pro.gigaom.com/2010/03/why-newnet-companies-must-shoulder-more-responsibility

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Making Hotmail Hot Again Hot Again [The Mossberg Solution] —

Like it or not, your personal email address says something about you. Gmail tends to be considered the cool email to have today. Apple’s .Mac addresses (now .Me) identify users who own Macs and don’t mind paying $100 a year for email and related services. AOL emails are tied to adults who haven’t changed their address since the dial-up days. And Hotmail is seen as old school.

Since its debut in 1996, Hotmail has soared to 400 million users world-wide. But it also lost users along the way—particularly in 2008—due in part to a general perception that Hotmail wasn’t as modern as other email services.

Starting this week, Microsoft Corp. will try to change the way Hotmail is perceived by rolling out a revamped version. The company, which bought the program in 1998, has scrapped its attempts to get people to use its site for social networking, acknowledging that companies like Facebook and Twitter are already doing the job. And it has cleaned up its once confusing nomenclature: Hotmail is the sole name for Microsoft’s Web email program.

To spread the word, Microsoft recently launched a massive marketing campaign, involving online, radio and outdoor ads running through the end of the year, that will cost the company tens of millions of dollars, according to Microsoft general manager, Brian Hall. Mr. Hall says that “The New Busy” campaign is intended to demonstrate how Hotmail’s organizational features help busy people with full lives. Part of the campaign will focus on reintroducing current Hotmail users to new features.

But should you really consider reviving your old Hotmail account or opening a new one? I’ve been using this new version of Hotmail for the past few weeks and I’ve found it handled large files with ease, performed browser-like tasks within the inbox and integrated third-party social networks and email accounts. Though the Hotmail name still conjures up frustrating memories of too much spam and the belief that storage was restricted, Microsoft has revamped its old email service into one that’s smart, robust and reliable. It deserves a second look.

Hotmail is still big on sorting emails according to your existing “Contacts” versus everyone else. This works well if you’ve taken the time to add all of your friends to the Contacts list, a procedure that takes a couple seconds per person and is done as you send emails to people. This prompting can be a bit of a pain, but if you haven’t done it, you might miss emails from people you care about. A Microsoft representative said that by the end of this summer, users will be able to opt out of this sorting.

At first glance, the new Hotmail doesn’t look dramatically different. But a closer look reveals intelligent organizational tools. Shortcut tabs at the top of the inbox display only messages from social networks (think of all those email notifications from Facebook and Twitter), pre-made email groups or contacts. Many other email programs only do this if users manually set up folders.

Another organizational tool is called Quick Views. It automatically sorts four types of emails into folders: Flagged, Photos, Office Docs and Shipping Updates. These categories come preset and cannot be customized.

Quick Views saved me from digging through my inbox for specific emails and from dragging certain emails into folders for saving. When I ordered gifts online for a friend’s wedding, the shipping notification emails from the delivery service arrived in my inbox and were also viewable in the Shipping Updates folder. Emails with attached Office documents were neatly sorted into the Office Docs folder.

Behind the scenes of the revamped Hotmail, Microsoft is powering all inboxes with Windows Live SkyDrive—an ever-growing, server-based storage repository that guarantees you’ll never be asked to clean out your inbox. (As with many Web-based email programs, Hotmail stores your emails on servers rather than taking up space on your hard drive.)

SkyDrive also gives Hotmail users more freedom when sharing photos: Images can be quickly uploaded to SkyDrive and shared with friends via a Web link. One message can include up to 200 photos of 50 megabytes each, or 10 gigabytes total. Meanwhile, Gmail limits attachments to about 25 megabytes per message.

When Word, PowerPoint or Excel documents are attached to any message received, they are opened right in the Web browser, without having to open another program. This works thanks to a program called Office Web Apps, which functions regardless of whether or not Office 2010 is installed on the computer. Just as photos are shared from Hotmail using a SkyDrive link, so, too, are Office documents.

Hotmail’s inbox now has a Sweep feature, which lets you move or delete all emails from a particular sender. (A similar option in Microsoft Office 2010 wipes out all emails sent prior to the last message in a thread.) Another option for tidying up your inbox is Conversation View, which sorts all emails sent in the same conversation into one group. Users can opt in or out of this, unlike Gmail, which offers only threaded emails.

Tough spam filters caught every Viagra-related email sent to my Hotmail address. And if you identify a piece of mail in the Junk folder that isn’t actually spam, Hotmail remembers this and sorts differently in the future.

Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, now plays a role in Hotmail. It’s built into the search box as an option for scouring Web content directly from the inbox. It can be accessed while composing a message: A small “From Bing” drop-down menu in the email you’re writing lets you search for content to add to emails, like maps, videos, images and movie show times. This content appears in a right-side panel and can be embedded in email messages with one click.

To keep people from straying away to different Web pages while using Hotmail, Web functions can be performed from right within its inbox. These functions include watching videos from YouTube or Hulu, or viewing photos from Flickr or SmugMug. I clicked on YouTube links in emails and watched videos in a handsome overlay screen. And if an email includes codes for tracking packages using the U.S. Postal Service, the package’s real-time shipping status appears within the email. A Microsoft representative confirmed that FedEx and UPS are in the works.

I added my Gmail account to my Hotmail account, so I could check several personal email messages on the same Web page. In a similar manner, Hotmail can pull multiple contacts from several networks—like phone numbers and emails from LinkedIn or birthdays from Facebook—into a single Contact list.

Hotmail may have burned you in the past, but this beefed-up new version saves you time and is a pleasure to use.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg. Email Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Big changes are coming to Twitter links. In a post just published on the Twitter blog, the company has announced that it will soon be using its official link shortening service t.co to wrap all links shared on Twitter. Starting this summer, every time you share a link through either the Twitter web client or a third party, it will be be wrapped in a link with the format t.co/******.

So what does this mean for the Twitter ecosystem? Twitter VP Product Jason Goldman says that the feature serves three purposes. First, it’s going to help Twitter crack down on spam, as they’ll be able to accurately monitor the distribution of each link. Second, it will allow users to better understand where links are going (more on that below). And third, it will help Twitter with analytics, which is related to its Promoted Tweets. Goldman says that Twitter is pre-announcing the feature (which is currently only active with three accounts) to give the developer community a heads up for what’s ahead.

This didn’t come as a surprise — back in March, Twitter began routing direct messages through a new link shortening service as an anti-phishing mechanism. It didn’t take long for users and developers to question whether the service would soon be broadly launching a link shortening service, and Twitter confirmed that it would in April.

Still updating

Twitter Introduces Bit.ly-Baiting URL Shortener, T.co —

Say goodbye to the bit.lys that pervade your Twitter stream--along with all the other custom URL shortners from your favorite publications--Twitter is rolling out its own way to shorten those unruly post on the Twitter blog announces the change.

As early as this summer, any links shared via Twitter will be shortened and wrapped into Twitter's new t.co URL shortener, which will seem to have some smart capabilities when viewed on Twitter:

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.

There are a couple elements of this update that push t.co into more than a bit.ly competitor that makes me subconsciously want a taco. First, Twitter will be keeping track of all these t.co links, and will use the data they've snagged to make algorithmic recommendations to users--basically, the data will be made available through API for targeted advertising.

The other element is not entirely clear right now, in what's becoming a refrain for new Twitter announcements. Twitter will be counting t.co-wrapped links differently in terms of character count. Because this URL-wrapping will be done automatically, you can actually submit updates of length longer than 140 characters--Twitter will shorten the links and then count characters afterwards. That's how many third-party apps work, but now it's built into Twitter.

This is yet another attempt for Twitter to make first-party what was formerly third-party, just like Promoted Tweets and the new mobile apps for BlackBerry, Android, and iPhone. Twitter is taking control of the ways people use their service. So what does this mean for other URL shorteners, most notably bit.ly? Will bit.ly still work? Will Twitter allow it? That remains to be seen.

Dan Nosowitz, the author of this post, can be followed on Twitter, corresponded with via email, and stalked in San Francisco (no link for that one--you'll have to do the legwork yourself).

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."

Sponsor

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.

Were you still deciding whether or not to pick up that shiny new HTC EVO 4G smartphone? You may be out of luck for some time, as Boy Genius reports that Sprint’s new flagship Android handset is entirely sold out across the U.S.

We knew that the device was shattering Sprint sales records right and left, and now it appears that demand has been so blisteringly hot that the EVO is actually unavailable pretty much everywhere. If you manage to find a secret stash of these phones or to blackmail convince any Sprint employees to let you in on the next available restock date, be sure to send us a tip.

Meanwhile, the HTC EVO 4G is neck and neck with the iPhone 4 in our weekly Faceoff Series (be sure to cast your vote if you haven’t yet). If you were one of the perhaps sizable demographic waiting to see Apple’s latest phone before picking up your next smartphone of choice, are you bummed that the EVO is currently unavailable? Let us know in the comments.

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Tags: android, HTC EVO 4G, iphone 4, Mobile 2.0, sprint

If real-time news isn’t good enough for ya, The Onion has the remedy: Future: News From The Year 2137, a new video project the satirical media outlet unveiled today at Mashable’s Media Summit.

The show, whose launch will mark the first time The Onion plans to sell digital content directly to consumers on an exclusive basis, promises to bring viewers so-new-it-hasn’t-happened-yet news via “state-of-the-art wormhole satellites… from the year 2137.”

According to The Onion, “More than 125 years into the future, the Onion News Network remains the world’s most powerful media empire, dispensing the finest news, commentary, and swooshy graphics 24 hours a day directly into the right eye of every viewer through technology called ‘EyeStreaming.’”

Naturally, this is all a spoof (for those out there who don’t get less-than-subtle humor) — but a spoof that seems firmly rooted in present-day issues. In the world of the future, a catastrophe called “the Burndown” has rendered the world virtually unlivable — IE, there’s scarce food and water, no laws or social institutions and a thug of a President reigning over it all.

Picture a planet populated by robots, humans bred to be slaves and a Doomsday Machine (that keeps malfunctioning, to everyone’s disappointment), and you’ve basically got The Onion’s vision of the future. Sunny, no?

Although the show will premiere this summer, Web Editor Baratunde Thurston gave Mashable a sneak peek at the official trailer today, as well as at a three-minute clip of a segment called “The Gaza Scrap,” which depicts the battle between the last remaining Palestinian and the last remaining Israeli on earth. Keep your eye on The Onion’s site for future updates, or follow them on Twitter: @ONNFutureNews.

The Onion has been working on some pretty exciting projects lately: Comedy Central recently picked up the Onion Sports Network pilot for a 10-episode run to air in 2011, and the Independent Film Channel (IFC) is collaborating with the parody outlet to create half-hour cable TV series called Onion News Network, also set to premiere in 2011.

Given today’s announcement, and the media outlet’s mounting cache, it will be interesting to see how the public reacts to this content-for-purchase plan. Will you pay to partake in the funny?

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Future: News From The Year 2137

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For more web video coverage, follow Mashable Web Video on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook

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Tags: business, humor, internet week ny, money, the onion, web video

Just one week after announcing Events grouping for photos, Twitpic is rolling out Face Tagging.

Just as you do on Facebook, you can now tag images of you and your friends and acquaintances on Twitpic. Below the image in question, just click the blue link reading “Add/Edit Faces.”

When you tag your pics, you’ll also have the option to tweet out who you’ve tagged. You’ll be able to add real names and/or Twitter usernames to the pics, and others can see the tags when they mouse over the picture.

Users will be familiar with the Facebook-like interface. Here’s what the feature looks like on the site:

Last week, the service added the ability to group your photos based on the event at which they were taken. In practice, this feature works a lot like a Flickr set, letting users organize, define and showcase their pictures quickly and easily and making the discovery process easier for both humans and web crawlers.

Twitpic has also just reached its 10 million users mark and is gearing up for more group and geo-location features from this service. To get a better idea of where Twitpic might be heading in the months to come, you can check out this video interview with Twitpic founder Noah Everett on the future of Twitter-based photo sharing.

Are these new features going to make Twitpic more interesting, fun and useful for you? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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Reviews: Facebook, Flickr, Twitpic, Twitter

Tags: Photos, pictures, Tagging, twitpic, twitter

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.

• Will Yahoo be the Next Twitter?
• Free Lifestream WordPress Options
• How to Get a Lifestream
• Seattle Twitter
• How To Introduce a Child to Social Media
• How to Make it Big in Social Media
• Social Media Questions and Answers
• Seattle Twitter Conference Wrap-Up
• Social Media Site Management Strategy
• Is There Too Much Noise in Social Media?

Yesterday Apple unveiled Safari 5, which now includes extensions.

Unfortunately, extensions are still in their nascent form and you’d have to be somewhat of a sleuth to even track down the functionality, let alone find and install extensions.

For those of you ready to test the waters of Safari extensions, here’s how:

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Enable Extensions

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Safari Extensions is technically a developer-only feature at the moment. So first things first, you’ve got to turn on the developer tools to enable extension functionality. Here’s a step-by-step guide to do just that:

• Open Preferences in Safari 5
• Select the “Advanced” Tab
• Scroll down and tick the “Show Develop menu in menu bar” box
• From the new “Develop” menu, select “Enable Extensions”

If you follow the above steps, the Preferences menu will include a new “Extensions” tab where you can manage Safari extensions.

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Find and Install Extensions

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The official Safari Extensions Gallery will open later this summer. But, there’s extensions already out in the wild; you can find some of them via the Safari Extensions Tumblr, an unofficial gallery showcasing several extensions.

To date, extensions are limited but include things like Amazon Search Bar, Reload Button, Scribefire, Gmail Checker and AdBlock.

Extension installation is fairly straightforward: Simply download and open the extension file and a prompt box will ask if you want to install the extension. Click Install to automatically update your Safari 5 browser with the extension.

[via Lifehacker]

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Tags: Safari 5, safari extensions, Web Development

Check out this free 31-page PDF report called How to Have a Great Life and a Great Business (Especially if You’re Not the “Business” Type).

It not only ties together the themes we’ve touched on so far in the Lateral Action Entrepreneur series, but also delivers practical ideas on starting a business that leads to more than just money.

Here’s what you’ll discover:

• Why I quit my cushy law firm job and turned to online publishing.
• How I failed miserably.
• How I then succeeded miserably.
• How I learned my lesson the hard way.
• The allure of the global microbrand.
• The rise of the “feeder” business.
• Why small is beautiful (and powerful).
• The 37signals approach to market research.
• Real-life examples of “smartly small” entrepreneurs.

Plus, you’ll get an examination of the 6 critical components of smart entrepreneurship:

1. Create (Don’t Compete)
2. Lead (Don’t Manage)
3. Communicate (Don’t be Shy)
4. Automate (Don’t Duplicate)
5. Accelerate (Don’t Stand Still)
6. Succeed (Don’t Stress)

The report is available here. You’ll also get full optimized transcripts of our recent seminars with Steven Pressfield and Jason Fried.

About the Author: Brian Clark is founder of Copyblogger and co-founder of Lateral Action. Get more from Brian on Twitter.

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Bing Opens to Developers with Maps SDK & Search Library for PHP —

Good news for developers and fans of mashups, as this morning Microsoft has announced the availability of a software development kit (SDK) for building map apps on Bing Maps. What's more, last week Microsoft announced the creation of the Bing Search Library for PHP - a wrapper built in conjunction with PHP expert Cal Evans that gives developers easy access to the Bing Search API via PHP. Microsoft seems to be embracing third-party developers more openly now with these tools, so here's a breakdown of what's available now.

Sponsor

Bing Map App SDK

Previously, the Bing Map App Gallery - a collection of map mashups for showing data overlaid on Bing maps - has been fenced-off to third-party map app development. The gallery has only featured Microsoft-built apps, like Photosynth, or those from partner sites, like Twitter or Foursquare. Now, however, Microsoft is opening the gates for anyone to create and upload a map app - well, almost anyone.

To build apps, developers will need a Microsoft Live ID to access the SDK, a Windows box running Visual Studio 2010 to build the application, and a browser with the Silverlight plug-in to view the apps. Microsoft is also placing an Apple-esque app store submission process in place for the map mashups, requiring developers to submit apps for review and approval.

To kick off the opening of the SDK, Microsoft has also unveiled a pair of new apps from partner sites today. An app from WeatherBug lets users visualize various weather related data on Bing Maps, and another from panoramic and 3D image service EveryScape helps users find interesting imagery from inside restaurants.

Bing Search Library for PHP

Announced last week, the Bing Search Library for PHP is a wrapper that allows developers to easily harness the power of Bing Search on dynamic Web pages. In the example shown by creator Cal Evans, developers can contextually place domain restricted search results from Bing onto web pages based on any search query - and it's all done from within the PHP written to power the site.

"The Bing API is very straightforward and most importantly, consistent in design. These two facts make it very easy to work with," says Evans. "The Bing API is easy to work with, powerful, and since Google doesn't give you access to this information from an API, unique."

Evans says the current wrapper only includes support for the Search API, but that he hopes future releases will support other Bing API hooks, such as News, Translation and more.

Discuss

Shared by Jesse Stay
I love this idea

Mashable is partnering with Foursquare to give you insider tips and recommendations when you check in. From New York City to Silicon Valley, our reporters and editors will be your guide as you explore your city.

We’ve gathered recommendations on social media venues, tech gatherings, startup headquarters and even offered some of our dining picks at local eateries. The location-based social gaming site is nearing one million checkins and continuing to add partnerships.

And while some might see the service as one of the worst inventions, we’re hoping our tips can be a resource to you. Stay tuned as we update the page with more tips and features. Follow us here.

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Reviews: Facebook, Foursquare, Mashable, Twitter

Tags: Announcement, announcements, foursquare, internet week ny, location-based apps, mashable, Mobile 2.0

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.

SwearJarr is a unique idea that asks those that swear on Twitter to donate to the jar.  The money raised is split between two charities each month.  According to the statistics they collected, over 425,000 swear words a day cross the public stream.

Now they cannot force you to donate, but allow you to search your stream and give suggestions as well as prompt others.  The top swearing celebrities are listed on the bottom right and you are free to check anyone with a public stream.

Donations collected have a small 7.5% fee to SwearJarr for hosting, credit card fees and over all administration.  Not bad at all since the rest goes to charity.

Major Social Media & Search Engine Relationships —

Adding real-time search and social search to the mix in the search engine world has created a number of new opportunities for marketers that want to do a better job of reaching customers. With new data sharing announcements happening fairly regularly, it can paint an interesting picture when you lay out the relationships between major social networks and search engines. It’s not unlike the search engine relationship chart from Bruce Clay I remember from several years ago documenting the relationships between Inktomi, Yahoo, Lycos, Alta Vista, Excite, HotBot, Direct Hit/Teoma, Northern Light and even Google. Not many of those are still around.

As the diagram above illustrates, the major data sharing for real-time search is between the social sites Twitter and Facebook and the major search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing. To be more specific:

Yahoo announced yesterday that they would significantly enhance their relationship with Facebook. According to Yahoo’s Jim Stoneham, VP Communities, “People who use Yahoo! and Facebook can now link their accounts to view and share updates with friends across both networks”.  That kind of cross sharing relationship blurs the lines between social and search even more than the one–way integration of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook into Google and Bing search results.

Yahoo is expected to launch similar cross platform sharing functionality with Twitter and other social sites in the coming months according to MediaPost.

When search engines used to syndicate search results from different sources or even each other, it was important to know how to get web pages included in those sources so they would appear in search results where customers were looking.  As the major search engines update their data sources for real-time search and even socially influenced search, there’s an opportunity for marketers to understand how their participation on the social web can continue to provide signal and even content for the major search engines.

It doesn’t take much to see that some of the solutions for inclusion and earning top visibility are technical and related to publishing platforms, feeds and certain types of formats. Others are qualitative based on network size, type and topical focus. In the end, what matters is not just the changes search engines make to gain market share over each other, but the ways in which consumers respond in their information discovery, consumption and sharing behaviors.

While the effect of real-time search on current marketing programs isn’t anywhere as near as substantial as search marketing or even social media marketing, it’s an area that smart marketers would do well to monitor and experiment with.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Major Social Media & Search Engine Relationships | http://www.toprankblog.com

As far as we know, there is no official Social Media Day. But we do think there should be one. So we invite you to celebrate the revolution of media becoming a social dialogue by attending or organizing a Social Media Day meetup in your area on June 30. What better way to celebrate social media than connecting with other enthusiasts in your area?

On Wednesday, June 30, we’ll be organizing meetups in cities where we have staff using Meetup Everywhere. So come join us for drinks in New York City or San Francisco or anywhere. Because we can’t be everywhere, we encourage you to attend or organize a meetup in your community using our Meetup Everywhere page (or by creating a meetup using the widget below).

Social media has changed our lives. It has not only changed the way we communicate, but the way we connect with one another, consume our news, conduct our work, organize our lives, and much more. So why not celebrate?

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Tags: announcements, Events, mashable, meetup everywhere, social media day