Social Networking Watch

Survey: How Many Would Pay For Twitter? 0%

READ WRITE WEB - July 27 - A recent survey of ~2,000 people found that 0% of respondents would pay to use Twitter. The survey, conducted by the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, is part of its yearly "Digital Future" report, which looks at the overall state of the Internet in the U.S., from adoption to views on advertising and paywalls. As PaidContent's Joseph Tartakoff notes, Twitter has never said it has any plans to charge for the service. While the survey came up with nobody saying they would pay for the service, we have to imagine it was just missing the proper segment of the population. FULL ARTICLE @ READ WRITE WEB

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Facebook, Twitter Battle For Billions In TV Ads

MEDIA DAILY NEWS - July 6 - Social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, are now going after the big media prize: billions of worldwide TV advertising dollars. A new "Social TV" report from media researcher Futurescape says the next leap in the social-marketing world is pursuing the business of "social television," tapping into an $180 billion worldwide ad market. Google TV and other connected TV systems will put Facebook and Twitter targeted ads on TV screens. FULL ARTICLE @ MEDIA POST

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Twitter Acquires Smallthought Systems

MASHABLE - June 10 - Twitter has acquired Smallthought Systems, makers of Dabble DB and Trendly, an analytics dashboard that appears to have inspired the acquisition. With the acquisition, Twitter will bring the Smallthought team in-house to integrate Trendly concepts into Twitter. FULL ARTICLE @ MASHABLE

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Twitter Now Has 190 Million Users

TECH CRUNCH - June 8 - Twitter is now attracting 190M visitors per month and generating 65M Tweets a day. These numbers are up slightly from 180M self-reported unique visitors per month back in April, and 50M Tweets per day in February. The number of visitors to Twitter.com is not the same as the number of registered users. (ComScore, in contrast, estimated 83.6M worldwide unique visitors to Twitter.com in April and 23.8M U.S. visitors in May). FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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China Likes Twitter, But Will Still Censor It

READ WRITE WEB - June 8 - The Chinese government released a new white paper on Tuesday detailing the country's official position on Internet policy. Not surprisingly, China still supports the so-called "Great Firewall" approach to controlling and censoring Internet content, but also oddly mentions Twitter as a favorable development for Chinese Internet citizens. Why is that odd? Because China routinely blocks Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social networking services from being accessible to Chinese citizens. Lost in Translation: "Microblog" Doesn't Mean Twitter in China. It appears to have been a translation error since the Chinese language document only touted "microblog" services, and did not specify Twitter specifically. FULL ARTICLE @ READ WRITE WEB

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More People LinkedIn Than Tweeting

SF CHRONICLE - May 29 - The number of profiles on LinkedIn has grown by 300% since 2008. And while Americans are far more aware of Twitter than they are of LinkedIn, ~8% have LinkedIn profiles, compared with 7% who say they are tweeters, according to Edison Research. FULL ARTICLE @ SF CHRONICLE

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Twitter: 15 Billion Tweets And Counting

MASHABLE - May 29 - Twitter has surpassed 15 billion tweets less than three months after it broke the 10 billion count. FULL ARTICLE @ MASHABLE

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Microsoft Launches Project Emporia, Twitter Tool

EWEEK - May 28 - Microsoft announced the alpha preview of a social-networking initiative, Project Emporia, being developed through its FUSE Labs. The app gives users the ability to browse information on Twitter most relevant to their needs, and refine their experience through a “like/dislike” recommender system. In October 2009, Microsoft announced the creation of FUSE Labs to explore “social connectivity, real-time experiences and rich media” software and services in both a business and consumer context. FULL ARTICLE @ EWEEK

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Twitter To Prohibit Any Third Party To Advertise In-Stream

TECH CRUNCH - May 24 - Twitter will not be allowing any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. The changes will be reflected in an updated set of Terms & Conditions, which is due to be released ‘shortly’. This is not so good news for Twitter-focused advertising startups like Ad.ly and Twad.ly. Here are the reasons Twitter says it decided not to allow third-parties to advertise in the stream: First, third party ad networks are not necessarily looking to preserve the unique user experience Twitter has created. Secondly, the basis for building a lasting advertising network that benefits users should be innovation, not near-term monetization. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Facebook, MySpace & Others Share Identifying User Data With Advertisers

TECH CRUNCH - May 20 - A report in the Wall Street Journal reveals that Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and a number of other social sites are passing along data that advertisers could potentially use to identify users who click their ads. It sounds like Facebook and the others are failing to scrub ‘referring’ URLs that are always passed along whenever a user clicks a link. This is actually normal behavior but the issue is that these social sites include some identifying information as part of their URLs; when you visit a friend’s Facebook profile, the resulting URL might include both your friend’s username and your Facebook ID, which could be used to associate you with the ads you’re clicking on. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Twitter Debuts Official iPhone App

CNET - May 20 - Twitter hit the iPhone market with its first official app, dubbed simply Twitter for the iPhone. But the new app is actually just the 3.0 update of Tweetie 2.0, which the company got hold of after acquiring Tweetie developer Atebits in April. FULL ARTICLE @ CNET NEWS

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Twitter To Launch Twitter Business Center

MASHABLE - May 11 - Beta testing of Twitter's new business features, dubbed the “Twitter Business Center,” has begun. One of the biggest additions is the ability for businesses to accept direct messages on the service, even from people they don’t follow. This is huge for businesses that perform customer service via Twitter; they can get feedback and deal with private customer issues without having to follow the person back first. FULL ARTICLE @ MASHABLE

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Facebook Seeps Onto Other Web Sites

NY TIMES - Apr 18 - With about half of Facebook’s 400M users checking in daily, the social networking has established itself as one of the Web’s most popular destinations. Facebook is intensifying its efforts to expand its empire beyond its Web site; the company wants to turn scores of sites across the Internet into satellites where users will be able to interact with their Facebook friends. On Monday, a coalition of other companies, including some Facebook rivals like Google and MySpace, are banding together to establish a new standard for sites to allow visitors to share information, not just with Facebook but also with dozens of other social networks. The coalition is led by Meebo, a company that offers a toolbar featured at the bottom of many sites that visitors can use to share articles, photos and other links with a variety of social networks. Twitter is also looking to expand its presence with its @anywhere service, which will allow people to log in to Twitter from other Web sites. The moves by Facebook and its rivals set up a battle for control over social interactions across the Internet. FULL ARTICLE @ NY TIMES

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How Big Is Twitter Really?

TECH CRUNCH - Apr 16 - It’s always been difficult to get a handle on the size of Twitter because 75% of its activity occurs outside Twitter.com via third-party desktop and mobile clients. According to the latest numbers from comScore, for instance, Twitter.com attracted 79.4M unique visitors worldwide in March, 2010, a 316% increase from a year ago. ComScore lists Twitter as the 30th largest site in the world now, bigger than Craigslist, Sony Online, and Expedia. Twitter also disclosed for the first time earlier this week that it currently has 105M registered users and 180M unique visitors to Twitter.com. So that means comScore’s estimate is a little more than half what it should be. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

 

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Twitter Will Have An Official Android App

TECH CRUNCH - Apr 14 - It’s unclear whether Twitter will acquire an existing app (like it did with Tweetie), if the company will partner with a developer or mobile device maker (as it did with RIM for the BlackBerry Twitter app) or if it will develop the app themselves. These announcements came after investor Fred Wilson wrote a post telling Twitter start-ups to stop filling holes in Twitter’s products and to instead look to launch killer apps that start entirely new businesses. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Google Searches Twitter Archive

LA TIMES - Apr 14 - Google is giving netizens access to the vast archive of billions of updates on Twitter. Searching for past tweets used to be an exercise in futility. As quickly as they would appear, they would disappear. The feature will be available around the globe in the next few days. It currently goes back two months but will eventually include every tweet dating back to the first one on March 21, 2006. FULL ARTICLE @ LA TIMES

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TweetPhoto Raises $2.6 Million

MASHABLE - Apr 13 - TweetPhoto has secured $2.6M in series A funding led by Canaan Partners. The company plans to use the money to expand its reach by offering additional APIs and becoming more accessible from mobile devices. In short, we should see TweetPhoto make a strong push to be integrated as the primary photo sharing option in multiple web, mobile and desktop social media apps. FULL ARTICLE @ MASHABLE

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Full Details On Twitter’s Ad Platform

TECH CRUNCH - Apr 12 - Twitter has launched its new ad platform called “Promoted Tweets”. The new system serves up ads based on keywords in Twitter search queries, promoted Tweets will appear at the top of the search results page and one ad will be shown at a time. Twitter will eventually allow third party Twitter clients to integrate Promoted Tweets, with the app developer receiving a cut of the revenue. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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