Microsoft's new search engine Bing is now indexing tweets from some popular Twitter accounts. If you search some of the more popular Twitter accounts on Bing it will return a couple recent tweets. For example if you search "Celebrity Gossip Twitter" on Bing it returns a couple of the latest tweets by @celebritygossip.
Bing says they picked a few thousand Twitter accounts to start with but could add more later.
We're not indexing all of Twitter at this time.... just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start. We picked a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets. We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter's public API to surface Tweets in people search. We'd love to hear your feedback as we think through future possibilities in real time search.
Gdgt is a new user-edited website focused on gadgets founded by Ryan Block and Peter Rojas. The welcome post can be found here. The website includes gadget profiles and spec, gadgets reviews, news, discussion and user profiles. The news links section pulls in snippets from the latest gadget blogs and news sources. Gdgt brought in Veronica Belmont to explain the website. Take a look:
AOL's TMZ.com website was the first source to report Michael Jackson's death so it not a surprise that HitWise is reporting the site saw record traffic. TMZ leaped into 60th place when ranked by market share of visits on Thursday.
As a result, traffic to TMZ reached a 3 year high, with visits increasing 5x in volume from the previous day. The market share of visits increased 18% above the previous high on February 20, 2009, which took place after TMZ published photos of a bruised Rihanna following the assault by Chris Brown. TMZ was 60th among all websites on Thursday when ranked by the market share of visits, up from 305th on Wednesday, June 24th.
HitWise also reports that mainstream media news websites and Google and Yahoo news search sites also received a traffic boost following Michael Jackson's death. The traffic boost for media outlets will continue for a little while as stories about Michael Jackson's death, health, music sales, children, will and overall oddness continue to be published. Eventually this traffic will slowly fade as people lose interest but Michael Jackson will stay in the news for a while - he was very secretive and there still is a lot about him that remains unknown.
Naamua Delaney talks about the power of retweeting on Twitter with CNN.com writer Elizabeth Landau. Anyone who has used Twitter for a while is familiar with the RT acronym and the power of retweeting. If a story gets enough retweets it has the potential to ricochet around Twitter and send lots of traffic the link mentioned in the original tweet. The CNN video has some basic tips for Retweeting:
Begin with the letters RT
Give credit to the source of the tweet
Shorten the URL when linking
It's pretty basic stuff but Twitter noobs might be confused at the sight of RT when they first see it. Giving credit is also important because sometimes people retweet without giving credit - its probably mostly noobs doing this or those odd spammy twitter accounts. CNN's Elizabeth Landau also says to make sure you are retweeting something that has value to your followers. That's pretty relevant today given all the false stories that are being retweeted and passed around lately - like the fake news that Jeff Goldblum had died. Topsy.com also gets mentioned in the video.
"Tweet Tweet Twitter" is a new song from Irish Pop Group Tinselitis who are made up of Sean McCarthy, Deborah Confrey and Jonathan Jacobson. Here's the music video:
IBM employee Andy Stanford-Clark has wired his home automation system so that it sends a tweet when windows or open or lights are turned on. The home also sends a tweet when a mouse is caught in a trap. Andy's twittering house can be found here on Twitter. Take a look:
The June 28th data for registering Facebook Usernames for their Facebook Pages is approaching. There was an earlier date but only pages with 1,000 fans that had been registered prior to May 31st could get one.
I tried to secure a name for my Page but Facebook said the Page was not eligible. What are the requirements?
Your Facebook Page must meet two requirements: it must have been live on Facebook prior to the May 31, 2009 cut-off date and have had a minimum 1,000 fans at that time.
This limitation is temporary. All Pages created after May 31, 2009 or that had less than 1,000 fans on that day will be eligible to claim usernames on Sunday, June 28, 2009.
PC World has more details about Facebook usernames here.
Facebook's system is not as open as Twitter's is. They have been trying to change so they are more useful for updates but it isn't as easy and fluid to use as Twitter is. Registering with Facebook also requires a great deal more information than registering with Twitter. Even so Facebook has a big enough audience that company's should make sure they register the names of their brands.
Fast Companyreports that MySpace is cutting 30% of its workforce, about 400 jobs.
The MySpace layoffs were rumored for weeks beforehand; the top management was reshuffled in April when News Corp., MySpace's parent company, replaced founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe with former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta, and the Web was rife with murmurs of an imminent retooling of the rest of the office.
Just one year ago MySpace was dominating Facebook in the U.S., pulling in 73.7 million users per month in May 2008 to Facebook's 36 million. While Facebook had surpassed MySpace in global unique visitors the previous month, MySpace's vast advantage in the U.S. still gave the site clout with advertisers.
MySpace has fallen behind Facebook in the social network race. They still have plenty of visitors to interest advertisers so it is probably the weak economy - not losing to Facebook - that has forced the company to cut jobs and reduce costs.
Sports Illustrated has an article about Twitter and sports enthusiasts. The article also discusses some professional athletes who are using Twitter.
In fact, the entire sports world is obsessed with the microblogging tool, through which users update their web audience with frequent messages of 140 characters or less. For example college coaches, who can showcase their programs to web-savvy prospects and their parents, are copycatting each other onto Twitter. Pete Carroll, John Calipari, and Charlie Weis -- screen name "NDHFC" -- are among the big names with Twitter pages (somehow, it's hard to imagine Weis' former boss, Bill Belichick, huddled in his hoodie, tweeting away secrets from the film-room).
The tool is scoring for the pro leagues too. All the majors -- the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, NASCAR -- shoot their followers useful information like scores, schedules, and highlight clips, and inane chatter like this, from the NFL's Twitter page: "Boomer Esiason sighting here at NFL quarters." Whoopee. What's more relevant is that on draft day, the Atlanta Falcons and New York Jets both scooped Roger Goodell by announcing their first-round picks on Twitter before the commish called their names from the podium. According to trackingtwitter.com, the NBA, which claims more than 600,000 followers, has a greater Twitter audience than all brand accounts besides Whole Foods and online shoe retailer Zappos. "Our favorite feed," the site said of the NBA, which sits comfortably ahead of Starbucks in the Twitter top 25. "Great mix of content."
Some resources to find athlete tweets and twitter accounts can be found here, here and here. Microblogging is a great tool for tracking sports and for people to share their thoughts while watching sports. It's been obvious lately that sports have become big on Twitter. During the NBA finals keywords related to the games like "Kobe" have regularly appeared in the trending topics section.
Google Operating System reports that Google is planning a microblogging search engine that will let users search tweets and updates from other microblogging sites.
Much like Google Blog Search, Google's microblogging search service will sort the results by relevancy and it also be integrated with Google's web search engine: the keywords that are frequently used in recent posts will trigger a MicroBlogsearch universal search group.
On the plus side, a microblog search engine can return the latest information about an event or topic. On the negative side, there is the potential for the microblog services to become filled with spam and repetitive entries. The more popular they get the more likely that is. Filters can help with these problems and Google's microblogging search engine will likely implement multiple filters.
Retailers have relied on email newsletters to reach customers over the past several years but they would be wise to try Twitter. Many retailers are already using Twitter to inform customers about special deals, store events and new products. Retailers could also use Twitter to search for complaints about their stores.
There are already at least 200+ retailers on Twitter. Some of the retailers with large numbers of followers include:
Based on these large follower totals some people clearly don't mind getting tweets from stores. Retailers not on Twitter are missing out on an opportunity to reach customers. You can find a list of 200+ retailers using Twitter in the Twitter Store Directory.
The New York Times has a story about abandoned blogs. The article cites a 2008 Technorati study that found that about 95% of people who start blogs end up abandoning them.
According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.
Blog abandonment is not a new issue. There have always been people who have started blogs and then stopped blogging. Some quit because the issue or event that motivated them to blog faded away. Some quit blogging because of time constraints with work, family or health. Others quit when they found out blogging wasn't the quick path to riches they thought it was - this reason is probably less of an issue today. Some people have also left their blogs without updates for months because they found it easier to use Twitter or another microblogging service.
The Times says some bloggers quit blogging even though they managed to create a popular blog. They found the lack of privacy disconcerting.
"Before you could be anonymous, and now you can't," said Nancy Sun, a 26-year-old New Yorker who abandoned her first blog after experiencing the dark side of minor Internet notoriety. She had started it in 1999, back when blogging was in its infancy and she did not have to worry too hard about posting her raw feelings for a guy she barely knew.
Ms. Sun's posts to her blog — www.cromulent.org, named for a fake word from "The Simpsons" — were long and artful. She quickly attracted a large audience and, in 2001, was nominated for the "best online diary" award at the South by Southwest media powwow.
But then she began getting e-mail messages from strangers who had seen her at parties. A journalist from Philadelphia wanted to profile her. Her friends began reading her blog and drawing conclusions - wrong ones - about her feelings toward them. Ms. Sun found it all very unnerving, and by 2004 she stopped blogging altogether.
As you might suspect, the Times story also says that many bloggers quit because it is difficult to attract blog readers.
Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.
"I was always hoping more people would read it, and it would get a lot of comments," Mrs. Nichols said recently by telephone, sounding a little betrayed. "Every once in a while I would see this thing on TV about some mommy blogger making $4,000 a month, and thought, 'I would like that.'"
Building a readership can be a struggle and not being able to build one is the reason many bloggers evenutally quit. At the same time there are bloggers content to continue writing even for very small audiences. Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, told the Times a joke about blog readership. He said, "There's a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one."
Last month, Caitlin Hill at Rocketboom set an important record by sending seven tweets to MC Hammer on Twitter (@mchammer) in just one minute. Well done Caitlin.
Wired's Gadget Lab reports that Amazon.com has added a form where bloggers can sign up for Amazon.com's Kindle Publishing for Blogs beta program. The blog just needs an active RSS feed and Amazon can convert into Kindle content.
Any blogger can sign up for the company's 'Kindle Publishing for Blogs' beta program and set up an account to participate. Bloggers just have to made their feed available to Amazon’s website and the company will translate it into a Kindle friendly format.
Amazon hasn't made clear how much bloggers can charge for their blogs but it will split revenue from the subscriptions with the individual publishers. Currently most blogs on the Kindle charge $2 for subscription. Amazon has said individual publishers will get 30 percent of the revenue, with 70 percent going to the company.
It's probably not going to make a lot of money for bloggers and Amazon taking 70% seems a little steep. However, there are Kindle readers that do a lot of traveling that might pay to subscribe to their favorite blogs so they can read them on the plane or train.
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