TwitterMass: A Smarter Way to Auto-Follow on Twitter. Auto-following is a sensitive topic on Twitter, and the release of TwitterMass is surely going to create some controversy, as it takes auto-following to the next level. TwitterMass is a clever tool that automates what many Twitter users are already doing: finding new Twitter users to follow by searching for keywords and then following the most interesting of these users. One twist here, however, is that TwitterMass also automatically unfollows users who don't follow you back within a few days.
The point of this, of course, is to create a larger network of followers, which, because it is built on top of keyword and hashtag searches, should, at least in theory, be built on mutual interests. Features. Chris dixon's blog / You need to use social services to understand them. I don’t know if Malcolm Gladwell is right when he claims “the revolution will not be tweeted,” but I can say with certainty that the Twitter he describes is not the Twitter I know. Gladwell’s central argument is that Twitter creates weak ties but social movements require strong ties. I’ve made more strong ties through Twitter (and blogging) than I have through any communications medium I’ve ever used before. The relationships start off weak – a retweet, @ reply, or blog comment – but often strengthen through further discussions and eventually become new friendships and business relationships. I can see why Gladwell gets this wrong – he doesn’t seem to really use Twitter (he does blog occasionally).
I barely tweeted or blogged for a long time too. I read blogs basically since their advent, but social services are fundamentally participatory: reading blogs/tweets is to social services as watching TV is to a real life conversations. Starling | Audience Connected. Inc. - oneforty.
Is 2011 like 1994 for Apple, Twitter, Facebook, and the Web? Fact: In 1994 I thought Apple was going to own it all. By 1999 most magazines thought it was dead. Fact: In 1992 Pointcast shipped. By 1999 it was dead. Fact: In 1994 Microsoft was beta testing a system called “Blackbird.” They killed it before shipping it. It was designed to compete with Pointcast and AOL, both walled garden approaches. What changed the course of all these technologies? Developers and content producers. I remember Pointcast well. Lots of people thought it was killed by lack of low-cost Internet (their business just didn’t work back then.
No, what killed Pointcast was its lack of openness. It was beautiful. But it pissed me off. Sure seems a lot like Time Magazine does on the iPad. Guess what? So why haven’t I returned my iPad if its major content partners behave just like Pointcast’s did? What did Pointcast in (content publisher greed) isn’t what did Apple in, though. Not that Apple was all that wrong. What did Steve Jobs do yesterday? Now WHY would he do such a thing? #fave140 - Top Friends for your Twitter Backgrounds. FAQ. Twitter Proves Its Worth as a Killer App for Local Businesses - Advertising Age - Digital. The Boss - For Twitter C.E.O., Well-Orchestrated Accidents. Tweetbacks: Mashable Post Inspires Innovative Twitter Service. In a post earlier this week, we mentioned the concept of “Tweetbacks” – essentially the idea of showing Twitter activity relating to blog posts in the same way that comments are displayed on most blogs today.
Much to our delight, this feature has already arrived, via Dan Zarrella, who has built exactly what Mashable guest contributor Rachel Cunliffe envisioned. What Tweetbacks does, after adding a line of code to your blog template, is display all of the Tweets that link to that blog post. It does this by finding mentions of the URL on Twitter, accounting for the top 5 link shortening services like TinyURL and Bit.ly.
The result is a listing of Tweets about your blog post that looks much like regular blog comments: In other words, if we had Tweetbacks installed on this blog (which we might someday soon!) , and you tweeted “check out this awesome mashable post – that Tweet would show up in our comment area. Hahlo 3.1. I’m a little bit sad today. Twitter has today turned off v1.0 of their API. As a result of this my mobile twitter client, Hahlo, has also ceased to work just short of its 6th anniversary. Six years is a long time in the web world, I know a lot of things now that I wish I’d known back then - sure would have made many things a lot easier.
Twitter has changed a lot in that time, as have the capabilities of the browsers and devices being developed for. So, why is Hahlo dead? Basically, Twitter have turned the old version of the API off which, as you can probably work out for yourself, means it no longer works. When they originally announced the plans for the v1.0 API retirement I investigated ‘upgrading’ Hahlo to use v1.1 of the API, but the changeover would have required much more than a simple find ‘1.0’ replace with ‘1.1’. The beginning, the challenge. The original concept, back when it was iTweetr. Hahlo comes from a time before native apps were even an option. Some numbers. Lots of usage. A fork in the road (An important announcement about I want Sandy) Today marks a fork in the road for this particular startup. Values of n [ the company behind Stikkit [ and I Want Sandy [ will be closing its doors. Both services will going offline at close of business (5pm PST) on Monday December 8th, 2008.
Until then, they'll be up and running as usual to allow our users time to make the transition, find alternative services, and download any data they wish to take with them. While the company and services will be shutting down, Stikkit and Sandy's DNA will live on; the intellectual property behind both has been acquired by Twitter, Inc [ While Twitter has no immediate plans to incorporate Sandy or Stikkit's feature sets into its core product, those who know our apps well may notice familiar-feeling bits and bobs appearing in your Twitter experience. The third tine of this fork is me: I have taken an engineering position in the User Experience group at Twitter. Rael.