Twitter Launches An Issue Tracker And Other New Features For Third-Party Developers

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

In early September, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey posted a note to developers asking for feedback on how the network could better serve them. From the post: We want to know what additional materials you need from us to help you build products, boost distribution and expand your reach. It looks like Twitter has taken this feedback into account, and has rolled out a number of new features for developers based on their responses.

One of the main developer requests was a centralized issue tracker. Twitter has now launched a dedicated Issue Tracker, hosted on its new developer portal, which will replace the existing Google Code Tracker.

Another piece of feedback was a clear policy on API changes. Twitter will now give developers a minimum is 30 days advance notice before ‘sunsetting’ anything. For more broad, sweeping changes, Twitter says it will be flexible with developers and give them as much time as possible.

Rate limits are a big issue for Twitter developers and the company says that it permits 350 requests per user (oauth_token) per hour if you’re making authenticated calls and 150 per hour against the calling IP address for unauthenticated calls.

The goal is to scale usage of the API with the growth of a developer’s user-base and as they bring on more users, they will get greater access to the APU. Twitter also said that it is committed to push Site Streams, which will allow apps to receive real-time updates for events such as mentions, follows, timelines, and more, out of beta by Q1 of 2011.

Twitter promises to be more communicative overall with developers and especially help third-party developers work through authentication issues using oAuth.

By investing in creating new tools and features for developers, Twitter is clearly making a more concerted effort to work with third-party developers. In the past, there have been come miscommunications and it’s wise for the network to start listening to what developers want and need. In March, Twitter basically told developers to avoid competing with them on native clients. It’s not that Twitter doesn’t want developers to build off their platform, they just don’t want developers to build clients that mimic Twitter’s own services. As we’ve written, this is business, not personal. Regardless, it’s good to see Twitter taking actions to smooth things over with developers.

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message. The company has been busy adding features to the product like Gmail import and search. They recently launched a new site section called “Explore” for...

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Twitter Vs. Ticker

Alexia Tsotsis currently works for TechCrunch as a writer. She is also a blogger who attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA. She majored in Writing and Art, moving to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Entertainment/Media industry. After four years of living in New York City and attending courses at New York... ? Learn More

“What’s happening?” The text entry box on the Twitter homepage innocently asks us constantly, compelling us to type in a <140 character window into what we’re doing RIGHT NOW. For the most part, if you’re an active Twitter user, you partake voluntarily, contributing to a real-time hum of over 200 million updates daily.

On the receiving end of these updates are people who’ve chosen to subscribe to your one way broadcasting of your constant status. Like it or not, they’ve opted in to what you ate for breakfast, read this morning, or think about the financial crisis in Europe.

Last week Facebook introduced features that seem intent on making this basic status posting function of Twitter look like a toy.

The most “Twitter-like” of these features, Ticker, sits docked at the right side of your Facebook profile and automatically scrobbles Facebook user activity including what songs people are listening to on services like Rdio and Spotify, whom users are Friending, what users are Liking, what photos they’re being tagged in and what they’re commenting on. Ticker may even eventually show app-specific activities like reading and hiking.

“Last year when we introduced the Open Graph, we added ‘nouns’ so you could like anything that you wanted, this year we added ‘verbs,’” Zuckerberg described the expanded Graph at F8 earlier this week, failing to mention that as of right now these “verbs” enable a mostly meaningless trickle of noise, parlaying disembodied friending activity and songs people listen on Spotify or Rdio.

ROBERT SCOBLE IS LISTENING TO “YOUR BODY IS A WONDERLAND” BY JOHN MAYER ON SPOTIFY, ad infinitum.

As comedian Chelsea Peretti notes, it’s almost like Facebook hopes, with Ticker, that its users will take the following stance, “I’ll quit Twitter since Facebook has this constantly updating feed of my friends activity on the upper right side now!”

Well, maybe not quit Twitter per se (that battle has already been lost), but spend more time on Facebook for damn sure.

But, while both start with a T and end in “er,” Twitter and Ticker elicit very diverse visceral reactions. As Facebook user Joe Braidwood put it, “One is a fast-moving source of genuine updates — the other is a feed of all the crap you wouldn’t usually care to pay attention to.”

Of course we’d rather follow the firehose of breaking news and glib commentary available in our Twitter feeds than become party to the fact that someone we met at a conference and someone we don’t know are now friends. Okay, so Twitter > Ticker.

But, in making fun of Ticker’s apparent uselessness, we forget that Twitter too has its own version of Ticker, the Activity Tab. Yes, you tend to forget the Twitter Activity Tab because it’s not in your face all the time, but it too shows the world your actions on a social network, if you click-through to it — it’s just as “stalker-like” as Ticker if you will.

Clearly both Twitter and Facebook have thought this thing through. And who is to say that the Twitter activity tab won’t one day achieve the same sort of Ticker-like prominence on the Twitter homepage? After all, Facebook was following much of this activity this whole time, just not making it visible.

With these sorts of real-time activity streams “the panopticon has reappeared with a chilling twist,” writes AJ Keen, referring to Jeremy Bentham’s idea of a Panoption, or the notion of a space where one was constantly observed. “ What was once an action is now passively taken care of for me,” The Verge’s Laura June brings up in her treatise on why she’s wary of Ticker.

June brings up a key point: before Ticker, it was your choice to update your Facebook status with your actions, and this new “frictionless” sharing of your activity feed takes that option away from you. And moreover disallows you the option of providing a context to your actions i.e. “I am listening to this Chumbawamba song IRONICALLY, GUYS!”

Knowing that your activity on a social network will be broadcast to your connections sans context in fact can cause friction, or more anthropomorphically defined, stress. Jason Kincaid writes, “[With] the addition of this new effortless sharing I’m going to deal with a nagging feeling in the back of my head wondering if I really want the article I just clicked on to be shared with friends. I think the word for that is stress, or maybe anxiety.”

Exactly. Now all we need is a technical term for the anxiety of no longer being judged by what you voluntarily publish, but what you involuntarily share.

Old school ticker image via: Investing Stockmarkets

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...

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Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message. The company has been busy adding features to the product like Gmail import and search. They recently launched a new site section called “Explore” for...

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The Guy Behind The Qwikster Twitter Account Realizes What He Has, Wants A Mountain Of Cash

Greg Kumparak is the editor of MobileCrunch.com, a mobile industry blog within the TechCrunch Network. Greg has been writing for the TechCrunch network since May of 2008. Greg was born in the outskirts of San Jose, CA, and now lives in the East Bay. ? Learn More

Last night, Jason went to bed a normal man, with a normal Twitter account (albeit one with a weed-smoking Elmo as the avatar), and a few dozen followers.

This morning, Jason woke up to an inbox full of messages, thousands of new followers, and wants to sell his account for many thousands of dollars.

As we chronicled last night, Netflix made a rather fundamental mistake in launching their new spin-off brand, Qwikster: they didn’t make sure they had the name locked down on all of the big social networks before making the announcement. As Jason’s luck had it, he had long owned the @Qwikster handle. He’s willing to part with it — he just wants to make sure he’ll “be making bank” first.

After over a month of silence, Jason’s @Qwikster account sprang back to life just a few hours ago and, likely to Netflix’s horror, has been more active today than it ever was before. Jason keeps touching on the idea of selling the account between poetic bursts like “I’m about to go play soccer n I got stug by a fucken bee” and “I just got scared I went into the shower turned on the water n then stuff started falling I was lik omg wtf lol”:

Jason seems to have rallied the, erm, expert counsel of his friend Gabriel (@SoccerIsLifegc7) who says they’re “not talkin til the offers get in 6 figures”.

Someone should probably tell Jason that selling Twitter handles is strictly against Twitter’s Terms Of Service, and attempts to do so can quickly result in the banhammer being dropped. Then Qwikster gets their name, free of charge.

Launch Date: September 20, 1997

With more than 23.3 million members in the United States and Canada, Netflix, Inc. is the world’s leading Internet subscription service for enjoying movies and TV shows. For $7.99 a month, Netflix members in the U.S. can instantly watch unlimited movies and TV episodes streaming right to their TVs and computers and can receive unlimited DVDs delivered quickly to their homes. In Canada, streaming unlimited movies and TV shows from Netflix is available for $7.99 a month. There are...

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HootSuite Raises $3M From Hearst And Others, Buys Twitter Data Analysis Tool TwapperKeeper

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

As we reported yesterday, social media dashboard company HootSuite had raised a new round of funding, according to an SEC filing. We’ve confirmed the funding with the company, and today, the startup is announcing a $3 million raise from previous investors and new investor, Millennium Technology Ventures. HootSuite has previously raised $1.95 million from Blumberg Capital, Hearst Ventures and Geoff Entress.

HootSuite offers brands and businesses a comprehensive social media dashboard that allows teams to collaboratively schedule and monitor updates to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, WordPress and other social networks via web, desktop or mobile platforms. Via the application, HootSuite users can also track campaign results, analytics and other data.

The company is also announcing a new ‘strategic acquisition’ of social storage and reporting startup TwapperKeeper.com. TwapperKeeper helps academic organizations, conference leaders, marketing departments, customer service teams and PR companies to archive, track, monitor, and analyze Twitter data. Basically, TwapperKeeper allows users to archive tweets by hashtag, keywords, or person, and offers an API as well. The app will be integrated into HootSuite’s dashboard.

By way of history, TwapperKeeper ran into some trouble with Twitter earlier this year for violating the network’s terms of service.

This follows previous acquisitions of SwiftApp (now HootSuite for Android), and TwitterBar, which enables users to post to a variety of social networks straight from the web address bar (now HootBar).

HootSuite, which now has over 2.5 million users is a profitable, and has a $8 million run rate (estimated $10 million by end of year). The company will use the new funding to make acquisitions, for sales and marketing efforts and for hiring. The company has also added Steve Johnson (former VP of Channel Partners from Constant Contact and Blackbaud) as chief revenue office; Darren Suomi (formerly at SAP and Business Object) as VP of Sales and Greg Gunn as VP of Business Development.

Similar to social media app Seesmic, HootSuite started as a third-party Twitter app, but has found a viable business offering a more enterprise-focused dashboard for agencies, brands and others. HootSuite was also the first application in which Twitter began testing its own in-stream ad product.

HootSuite helps organizations use the social web to launch marketing campaigns, identify and grow audience, and distribute targeted messages across multiple channels. Using HootSuite’s unique social media dashboard, teams can collaboratively schedule updates to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, WordPress and other social networks via web, desktop or mobile platforms plus track campaign results and industry trends to rapidly adjust tactics. Launched in Dec. 2008 by Invoke Media, HootSuite’s rapidly growing user base includes governments, artists and organizations like The White House,...

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@shopr Connects Buyers And Sellers On Twitter

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

Not a day goes by that I don’t see one of the Twitter users I follow Tweet a request for an item, such as last-minute tickets; or post about a newly available item, such as an apartment for rent. As Twitter has become the de-facto broadcast network, part of the content being shared revolves around buying and selling items via users’ social graph. @Shopr, which was developed at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon over the past 24 hours, is launching as a service that matches buyers and sellers on Twitter. It’s sort of like a Craigslist for Twitter.

Basically, @shopr uses Gnip to mine the Twitter firehose for people selling things and looking to buy items. The service’s founders tell me that in their initial research currently around 7,000 Tweets per hour relate to commerce and people looking to buy and sell items (over 5,000 selling-related Tweets are sent every hour).

Buyers can search on @shopr’s site, by specifying the item desired and their location. @shopr will match buyers with the appropriate Twitter users who have Tweeted about the item to sell. Buyers can also Tweet @ShoprBuy with what they want and where they want it and the service till Tweet back when they find the desired item. @shopr will also allow user to see pics of the item as well.

If you’re a seller and you Tweet about posting an item, @shopr will surface posts in their search engine so long as they make it clear what they’re selling and where they’re selling it. Sellers can also tweet @ShoprSell with what they’re selling, location and an asking price, and @shopr will match this with a request from a buyer.

And for an idea which was only born 24-hours ago, @shopr’s team has convinced a number of local retailers to participate in their selling service. A local San Francisco REI is listing several of their bikes, tents and backpacks (from the REI brand) with atShopr. San Francisco bookstore Dog Eared Books hast listed some of their inventory, Lost Weekend Video will be posting niche-genre movies and memorabilia, music store Aquarius Records are also putting some of their records on sale via the service.

@shopr says that currently the most desired items posted on Twitter included bikes, books, apartments, tickets. What makes the service unique is that it allows sellers and buyers to expand beyond your Twitter social graph—which could be very useful for both buyers and local merchants and brands.

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Is Facebook Copying Google+ And Twitter? VP Of Engineering, Mike Schroepfer, Responds

Mike Schroepfer, Vice President of Engineering at Facebook, spoke with Jason Kincaid at this morning’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference. The topic of the conversation focused on many of Facebook’s newest features, including the recently launched Friend Lists and “Subscribe” option, which lets users follow others’ public updates in a model very similar to Twitter and Google+.

This led, of course, to a discussion of how much “inspiration” Facebook drew from other sites. Is Google+ now influencing Facebook’s feature set?

The “Subscriptions” feature, in case you missed the news, addresses one of the biggest pain points for Facebook users who have a lot of friends, Jason blogged earlier today. It means that power users who want to follow the updates of public figures now have a way to do so, without having to submit a friend request to the person in question. It also provides a way for users to breach the previously constricting 5,000 friend limit on Facebook.

But what about Facebook Pages?, Jason wanted to know. How does this feature compare?

“Pages are an awesome product for multiple people who are administering a Page for a brand,” explained Schroepfer, but subscribe is for sharing with friends and others more broadly. (Hmm…sounds like Twitter, doesn’t it?)

In addition, Facebook also rolled out a new feature that lets you customize the kind of updates you see from friends. For example, if you only want to see status updates, and not updates from games, you can now do that.

The recently added automated friend lists were discussed, too. Instead of dragging-and-dropping friends into Circles as on Google+, there is no manual effort involved with these lists. And the lists are there if people want to use them, otherwise, they just fall off the left-side navigation where they now reside. It’s not overly complex.

But one-way follows, ways to get Games out of your stream, friend lists? Who else in the social networking space is doing this? Twitter and Google+.

So why launch these features now, asked Jason? (The implication that Facebook is now being directly influenced by competitors’ products).

“We’ve been working on lots of iterations of friend lists and the subscription metaphor for a while,” hedged Schroepfer. “No one wants to spend their afternoon dragging and dropping,” he said. But Facebook couldn’t get the Friend Lists really working until now, he added.

In response to a more direct question about what Schroepfer’s favorite feature of Google+ was, Schroepfer had nothing to say. However, he later explained, “the challenge with this is that anytime we launch something, you can say it’s a response to X or Y.” But competition is great, he believes, and people can choose.

Not all of Facebook’s attempts to emulate other social networks or new trends pay off, though. Examples of recent failures are Deals (a Groupon-like service), Questions (a Q&A product similar to Quora or Yahoo Questions and others) and Places (a check-in function that emulates Foursquare). All have either been largely downgraded in importance or killed off entirely.

“In order to innovate, you have to experiment,” said Schroepfer. But to get things right, you have to fail, he said. Facebook has a sign hanging in its offices, for example, that says this job is 1% complete.

Most importantly, Facebook wants to be able to ship code fast…it wants to deliver changes to its 750 million users faster than a startup with a million users can. Of course, moving quickly can mean more bugs. But dealing with that issue has been a big focus this year, says Schroepfer. Every single metric he’s seen says it’s getting better.

But the best question from the interview was probably Jason’s bold attempt to get some info on new Facebook products, namely Facebook Music and the forthcoming iPad app.

Will we see Facebook Music integrated into the iPad app?, asked Jason.

A “death glare” was the jovial, but decidedly non-comittal response.

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...

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Twitter Releases Web Analytics Tool

How much traffic does your website receive from Twitter? Twitter Web Analytics, a new tool announced Tuesday, should help provide some clarity to website owners who rely on the information network for content distribution.

Twitter Web Analytics is intended to give website owners more data on the effectiveness of their Twitter integrations. It’s powered by BackType, the social analytics company that Twitter acquired in July.

Twitter Web Analytics, explains BackType founder and new Twitter platform staffer Christopher Golda, will help publishers and website owners understand three key things: How much of their content is being shared on Twitter, how much traffic Twitter is sending their way and how well Tweet Buttons are performing.

The tool is free and currently in beta. A small group of partners will gain access to Twitter Web Analytics this week, and Twitter will roll it out to all website owners in a few weeks. An API will also be released for developers.

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In Battle Over The ‘Tweet’ Trademark, Twitter Sues Twittad

Robin Wauters currently works as a staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in Belgium, a tiny country in Europe. He can often be found working from his home or... ? Learn More

You may remember that back in July 2009, Twitter made a big stink about developers using the term ‘tweet’ in their Twitter apps. Oddly enough, while Twitter has long been trying to register the ‘tweet’ trademark in the United States, it has so far failed despite its efforts mainly because one or more third-party developer(s) actually beat them to the punch in – successfully – filing for trademarks including the word ‘tweets’.

Now, Twitter has moved to sue one of those developers, online advertising service provider Twittad (see launch coverage), in an attempt to cancel the latter’s registration of the “Let Your Ad Meet Tweets” trademark.

In the complaint, which is embedded below, Twitter alleges as follows:

This action arises from the registration of the mark “LET YOUR AD MEET TWEETS” by Twittad, LLC (“Twittad” or “Defendant”) in connection with online advertising services for use on Twitter. Defendant’s LET YOUR AD MEET TWEETS registration unfairly exploits the widespread association by the consuming public of the mark TWEET with Twitter, and threatens to block Twitter from its registration and legitimate uses of its own mark.

In fact, it appears that Defendant has used LET YOUR AD MEET TWEETS solely as a generic phrase to refer advertising in connection with Twitter itself, and as such it is incapable of serving as a mark, rendering the registration subject cancellation on that ground. Alternatively, if Defendant is able to establish use of LET YOUR AD MEET TWEETS as a mark, its registration is subject to cancellation based on Twitter’s preexisting rights in the TWEET mark.

Accordingly, Twitter seeks cancellation of Twittad’s LET YOUR AD MEET TWEETS trademark registration under the Lanham Act 15 U.S.C. § 1052(d), § 1064 and § 1119.

Twittad originally filed its trademark application on July 2, 2008. From their website:

I have contacted Twittad, but haven’t heard back yet. Twitter comments:

“Twitter’s organic growth has taken many forms, including a widespread, dictionary-documented association of the word ‘Tweet’ with the use of Twitter. It is in the best interests of our users and developers for the meaning of ‘Tweet’ to be preserved to prevent any confusion, so we are taking action to protect its meaning.”

Dictionary-documented, really, you ask? Yup!

In a response to an inquiry made by NyDailyNews.com back in March 2011, Twittad founder James Eliason acknowledged that Twitter had expressed “concern” over the Let Your Ad Meet Tweets trademark and “wanted us to assign our trademark to them.”

However, Eliason called the dispute “a timeline issue” and that his company acquired the rights “well before the word ‘Tweet’ became widely used in the Twitter ecosystem”. He also wrote:

“We firmly stand by our position of the legitimacy of the trademark due to the fact that our mark was cleared by the Trademark office in 2008.”

Fighting words indeed.

However, reading between the lines, it seems like Eliason is trying to cut a deal with Twitter, i.e. sway the company into acquiring Twittad’s U.S. trademark.

Doesn’t look that that’s ever going to happen, though. Notably, Twitter has not only sued them but also suspended Twittad’s @Twittad account. It’s also worth noting that, in the complaint, Twitter asserts that there have been “numerous attempts to resolve the dispute amicably”.

More as the story develops.

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message. The company has been busy adding features to the product like Gmail import and search. They recently launched a new site section called “Explore” for...

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Twittad is a 3rd party advertising service that utilizes the Twitter API. It is a place for advertisers and Twitter users to connect for a pay-per-tweet model. Advertisers benefit by being able to create fully customized opt-in campaigns targeting specific demographics of Twitter users and their followers. Twittad also has a Targeted Tweets model for advertisers to send @replies to potential clients who tweet keywords or if the Twitter user is tweeting near their business. Twitter users...

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Gootip Turns Twitter Into A Location-Based Q&A Service; Launches iPhone App, APIs, and More

Rip Empson is a writer at TechCrunch. He’s not here to make friends, he’s here to WIN, and don’t you forget it. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More

Gootip, the location-based Q&A startup from France, launched in May to take on Hipster (we think, as Hipster is still stealth) and other sites like it trying to make Yahoo Answers, for example, a valuable, realtime service. Gootip was founded by PriceMinister alumni Mathieu Bidart, Eric Gagnaire and Thierry Sebba, and operates out of a small garage in the South West of France. I’ve seen the pictures, and these guys are bootstrapping all the way, looking like the Jobs and Woz of Southwestern France.

But Gootip, in spite of a questionable name, is trying to separate itself from other Q&A services out there, like LocalMind for example, by not only enabling users to ask and answer questions in context of a particular city, town or specific location, but by going a few steps farther.

Gootip allows users to sign up and link their accounts to Foursquare and Facebook to integrate their check-in data, along with their home and work location. Users then categorize their questions (be it by nightlife, shopping, arts and entertainment, etc.) and enter an expiration date for when they need their question answered by, whether that be 24 hours or one week.

As Steve O’hear pointed out in our initial coverage, Gootip is proving that the barrier to entry for location-based Q&A sites taking advantage of Facebook and Twitter’s data sets has “gotten lower” and young, savvy startups can quickly build services that offer worthwhile expansions of the popular social networks. However, at the time of their beta launch, as he noted, there were a few key pieces missing.

So, to make Gootip more than a simple website or mobile app, the startup is aiming at building a platform that can retrieve and analyze local questions and answers from both internal and external services: Web, mobile, APIs, SMS, social networks, and beyond. It’s an ambitious goal, but to get started and showcase how functionality can work with other big social networks, Gootip has created “Askgtip”, which it calls a “mentioned application” that works with Twitter (and soon Facebook, Foursquare, and Gowalla) to ask questions of their favorite social networks — in this case, Twitter.

Askgtip allows users to ask questions directly of Twitter, whereupon the startup will analyze the question, pull location data, and post it to Twitter and Gootip.com so that users of both will be able to see the question and post an answer. The application retrieves answers given on Twitter and displays them on their homepage, specifying locations given in the answers.

Askgtip also supports Twitter’s topics, which are often linked to an event (like #tcdisrupt, for example), which will be analyzed by the application and linked to a specific location. That’s the main pain point Gootip is trying to address: The difficulty of finding locations and analyzing questions to produce the correct location and location-correct data.

So, for example, if you were to ask “Who is the best doctor in the ‘Mission District’ in San Francisco?” Gootip would convert “Mission District” to a location that exists on the Gootip website so that when Askgtip answers the question (because users have answered on Gootip), transforming it into a map and location on both sites, in short, bringing Gootip’s functionality to Twitter.

As the startup rolls out its service for various social networks, it is also opening up its APIs and plugins. In the coming weeks, Gootip Co-founder Mathieu Bidart says, Sud Quest (one of the biggest local, daily press groups in France) will be integrating the startup’s API to allow users to ask local questions directly from, in this case, Sud Quest’s website.

Beyond the addition of plugins and widgets to enable partnering websites to take advantage of Gootip’s features, the startup is also launching an iPhone app to enable users to search, ask and answer questions, with content presented based on a user’s GPS location — all from the comfort of your iPhone.

The cool thing about Gootip is that it’s already working with over 30 million locations, so that every Gootip search can be performed by keyword (or by using your GPS default on mobile) from millions of towns and cities across the globe. Results are presented with the number of answers to the question, with locations pinned on an interactive map with all the details, including address, phone numbers, etc.

Gootip has also enabled Facebook and Twitter authentication to the new mobile app to allow users to sign in through the social networks, on top of simply signing in through the Gootip.com — the website already offers authentication with Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla and Google — plus, the service is now available in English and French, with German and Spanish translations launching in the next few weeks.

O’hear pointed out several things that Gootip would need to accomplish after launching their beta, and with a new iPhone app (Android is coming soon), plugins and widgets, open APIs, Twitter functionality, and new languages, Gootip has certainly made some great progress. The UX does still need a little tweaking (along with some of the translations), but for three guys bootstrapping in their garage, Gootip has already made leaps and bounds. Hipster better be ready.

For more on Gootip, check them out at home here, and play with Askgtip here.

Gootip is a local questions/answers website. Users can ask every kind of question linked to a town or a precise place. Where can I see a hip hop concert tonight in...

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Facebook Imitation Not Sincerest Form Of Flattery, Says Twitter Mobile Designer

Alexia Tsotsis currently works for TechCrunch as a writer. She is also a blogger who attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA. She majored in Writing and Art, moving to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Entertainment/Media industry. After four years of living in New York City and attending courses at New York... ? Learn More

Because this reminds me of that time when Facebook unveiled that the Facebook Places logo was, no joke, a “4? in a square, I’m just going to copy the intro sentence to that post:

On the right is the status and photo update interface for Facebook’s iOS app, updated to a 3.5 version yesterday. On the left is the iOS interface for the current leader in the status update space Twitter. Notice anything interesting?

Sure you say, a standard mobile status update box isn’t exactly a UI opus. But it’s the little things, like how the people tagging icons are in exactly the same place on both apps, that matter. Also, this is what the Facebook iPhone status update interface looked like before the 3.5 version.

Heh.

Apparently I’m not the only one who sees the resemblance between the two, as Twitter mobile designer Bryan Haggerty has tweeted out comparative screencaps of both, with the comments, “Seriously Facebook?” and “Okay Facebook, enough with the flattery.”

Interestingly enough, Haggerty used to work on the mobile team at LinkedIn, which, coincidently, was at some point itself on the receiving end of claims that it had copied Facebook’s iPhone app interface.

What goes around comes around.

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Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to...

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Bitdefender Launches Anti-Malware Protection For Twitter

“Did you see this photo of you?” “Look on your face in this pix is priceless!” “LMAO this video of you is funny!” 

If you’re a regular Twitter user, you’ve probably see tweets like those come through as @replies or direct messages at some point. And you probably know not to click on the accompanying link. After all, there is no picture of you behind it, only a malicious web page set up by a criminal that wants to scam you, spam you or worse – infect your computer with malware.

But now there’s a tool that gives you added protection against these sorts of threats. Bitdefender’s new Safego protection for Twitter scans your profile for spam, phishing attempts and malware, and automatically notifies you when threats are detected.

Similar to the company’s Safego Facebook app, the new Twitter protection (now in beta), uses the same anti-malware and anti-phishing engines to scan the URLs posted to your profile.

The service checks unknown users before you follow them, checks the accounts of people you’re following and scans direct messages for spam, suspicious links and highjacking attempts. Threats are ranked by their severity as red, yellow, grey (low threat) or green (no threat). An optional setting can also warn your friends if it finds their accounts have been compromised.

But the service stops short of deleting tweets or unfollowing users on your behalf – it notifies you via direct message instead.

To use the service, you simply sign in with Twitter and authorize the Bitdefender Safego application as you would any other third-party app. You can then scan Twitter users’ profiles, your Twitter timeline and your direct messages, as well as configure any necessary settings.

The app is clearly in its development period, I must warn. The first time I tried it,  there were issues authenticating my account and I was directed to the Bitdefender 404 page. But because the app is in beta right now, I supposed I’ll give it a pass for the crash. It’s stable at present (if a bit slow). And, let’s face it, the app is providing a much-need service for the spam-overridden, link-filled social network that is today’s Twitter.

While the service did an OK job with detecting obvious threats upon its initial scan, I was surprised that it had some big misses too. For example, it claimed some anonymous link-tweeting profile was safe, when it was clearly a spam bot.

Still, this app is notable because of its uniqueness. After checking with several security firms for similar products, the closest we could come up with was McAfee Mobile Security’s SiteAdvisor, which scans links in all social networking sites, including Twitter. But none of the firms connected had heard of a dedicated anti-malware app just for Twitter.

But as with anything security-related, you can’t just trust software alone to do the job for you – you need to use a little common sense, too.

BitDefender™ provides security solutions to satisfy the protection requirements of today’s computing environment, delivering effective threat management to home and corporate users. BitDefender products eatures antivirus, firewall, antispyware, antispam and...

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Twitter Has 100M Monthly Active Users, And 40% Of Active Users Don’t Tweet

Alexia Tsotsis currently works for TechCrunch as a writer. She is also a blogger who attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA. She majored in Writing and Art, moving to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Entertainment/Media industry. After four years of living in New York City and attending courses at New York... ? Learn More

We’re at Twitter HQ listening to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo talk about the state of Twitter as business. Costolo begins the talk dropping some recent user numbers, wanting to give a “complete picture” of Twitter usership.

Costolo said that Twitter.com is now seeing 400 million monthly uniques according to Google analytics, which is up from 250 million at the beginning of the year, “There’s still a lot of people who log into Twitter but don’t use it every day,” he said.

Costolo confirmed that Twitter now has 100 million global active users, which he defined as anyone who logs into Twitter once a month, with 50 million users active or logging in every day.  He also revealed that 40% of active users don’t tweet, which means that they haven’t tweeted in the past month. 55% of active users are active on mobile, which has seen a 40% quarter on quarter growth.

Twitter wants to be on over 2 billion devices eventually he said.

Costolo emphasized that the fact that 40% of users are logging in and not Tweeting doesn’t mean that those users aren’t doing anything, and brings up the example of Twitter investor Fred Wilson’s son, who only follows NBA players or his family friend who follows chefs like Mario Batali and Daniel Brooks, “It’s fun to see the conversation around people you view as celebrities,” he said.

He also said that the statistic represents Twitter’s potential, and that Twitter will be making changes in order to move those people from a consumption to a production experience.

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to...

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Subjot: A Topic-Based Twitter, Without The Noise

Jason Kincaid currently works as a writer at TechCrunch. He grew up in Danville, California and later relocated to UCLA in Los Angeles, California, where he studied biology with a minor in ‘Society and Genetics’. You can reach him at jkincaidtc@gmail.com (he has other addresses too, so don’t worry if you have a different one). ? Learn More

Ah, your first days on Twitter. A time of innocence and serendipity.

Look, your friend just made a witty joke about their burnt toast! And there — Oprah’s tweeting about her new favorite book! It’s like your favorite people are in your pocket talking to you, all the time. The future is wonderful.

And then you notice that while there are a few choice nuggets of cleverness and utility, your Twitter stream is often bogged down by self-promotion (#humblebrag lol!) — or worse — someone’s tweet-by-tweet platitude marathon recounting a social media expert’s conference keynote.

Subjot, a NYC-based startup that’s launching today to the public, might have the answer. It wants to help you connect with people you’re interested in, but only around the topics that you want to hear about.

Say, for example, you wanted to follow all my Jots on technology, but you might not be so interested in my misadventures in learning how to cook. On Subjot, you could do that — you’d just check off the ‘Tech’ box next to my name, and you’d only see Jots that I’d labeled Tech. There isn’t much more to explain: it’s like Twitter, but broken down by subject.

The site’s initial signup flow prompts you to connect with your Facebook and Twitter accounts, at which point you’re presented with a list of your friends already on Subjot, as well as the topics they’re Jotting about most frequently. If you’re good friends with someone or you find them especially interesting, you can opt to follow all of their Jots.

Subjot was created by husband-and-wife team Chris Carella and Becky Carella, who first came up with the idea last December and began working on it full-time in February. Mr. Carella says their inspiration initially came from Quora — they noticed how interesting topic-specific Quora threads often became, but that they were restricted because they’re in a Q&A format. Subjot is looking to open that idea up a bit more. You can get a sense for what a Subjot stream looks like by checking out Chris’s stream here. (My significantly more irreverent stream is here).

Some readers may be mentally pointing out that they could use hashtags on Twitter for a similar purpose: append a tag like #tech to your tweet, and it’ll show up in a timeline filled with other tech-related tweets. Of course, if you’ve ever actually tried to use hashtags for anything other than a punchline, you know that they fall apart quickly. For one, there are often many hashtags created around the same theme or event. And because running a query for a hashtag shows results for everyone on Twitter (rather than just your followers), the stream gets noisy fast and is rife with spammers.

I’ve been using Subjot off and on for the last two weeks and think it’s promising. There are a few quirks — I find that navigating between users and topics isn’t always intuitive, but this may simply be because I’m used to Twitter (for example, clicking the ‘tech’ topic next to someone’s Jot takes me to all of their Jots about tech — you have to hit a different button to see everyone else’s Jots about that topic). There’s room for improvement in the UI, but it’s a good start.

Of course, Subjot is going to have to deal with some of the same issues that Twitter has. The biggest one: getting people to tag each of their updates, and ensuring that those tags will actually be useful (as I used the site, I found myself asking if I should tag one of my Jots ‘tech’ or ‘technology’).

Mr. Carella says this is something that he’s been thinking about since they first got started on the project. During the site’s private beta it hasn’t been a major issue — you see the tags your friends are using and use the same ones. But as the site scales they’re going to have to come up with some ways to address it, perhaps using autocompleted or suggested tags.

Then again, those would be good issues to have. The site’s biggest challenge now will be to attract a sizable user base — building a social network is hard. But because Subjot is topic-based, in some ways it may actually have an easier time than your average Twitter competitor: your friends may not be on it yet, but it isn’t hard to find people who are talking about the things you’re interested in.

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Beyonce Pregnancy News At MTV VMAs Births New Twitter Record Of 8,868 Tweets Per Second

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

Beyonce helped push Twitter to a new record in terms of Tweets per second yesterday evening when the pop singer announced her pregnancy at the MTV Video Music Awards. According to Twitter, Beyonce’s big MTV #VMA moment gave Twitter a record bump: 8,868 Tweets per second.

Beyonce revealed her pregnancy at the awards show last night, and the announcement culminated in the singer rubbing her baby bump on stage after her performance. That’s when Twitter saw the record number of Tweets sent.

MTV also saw record online viewership of the event, with 2.3 million video streams for the day. MTV reports that on Sunday, MTV.com attracted its biggest VMA day audience ever (nearly 2 million), while MTV’s mobile site scored its biggest day ever, including 2.7 million mobile views. MTV.com also had its highest level of referrals from Twitter ever on Sunday and it was ‘the most social VMA day ever,’ according to the network.

It’s a little surprising that baby news from a celebrity has taken the record for Tweets per Second. The previous TPS record holder took place during the final moments of the U.S. women’s soccer team’s game against Japan in July, with 7,196 Tweets per second.

In terms of past record events, Bin Laden’s death drew a significant peak in Tweets Per Second with 5,106 TPS. Super Bowl 2011 saw 4,064 TPS, and the all-time high was New Years Eve 2010 in Japan, which hit 6,939 TPS at its peak. On the day of the Japanese earthquake and Tsunami in March, Twitter usage reached 5,530 TPS. And during the Royal Wedding in England in April, Twitter reached a peak of 3,966 TPS.

I probably wouldn’t place Beyonce’s baby news in the same shock or news worthy categories as the events above (I actually didn’t even watch the VMAs last night). But the fact that the news did reach such high engagement for Twitter does signal that people are using the communications tool in record numbers.

Photo credit/MTV

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TomTom Discovers Apps, Puts Twitter, Yelp And More In The Go Live 1535 M PND

Matt is currently working as a writer for CrunchGear. Matt Burns is a family man first and attempts to be a freelance writer second. Born and raised in the heart of the automotive world, only cars eclipse his love of gadgets. He previously wrote for Engadget and EngadgetHD before moving into the party house that is CrunchGear. He learned the... ? Learn More

Ladies and germs, this is the Go Live 1535 M, which according to TomTom, is the first PND with connected apps. That claim may not exactly be true, but the Go Live 1535 M does have an impressive — that is, impressive for a GPS — set of non-standard functions through a variety of apps such as Twitter, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Expedia. These are in addition to TomTom’s VIA connected services that includes fuel prices, weather and Google Local Search.

The personal navigation device market has lost much of its thunder the last few years. These apps are the sort of functions that could have at least temporarily slowed the transfer of power to the smartphones regime. But alas, the Go Live 1535 M is hitting a few years too late with a crazy-high price.

Most of the apps are what you’d expect. Yelp and TripAdvisor, well, advise travelers on restaurants and different locations. The Twitter apps is gimped and only functions as a sort of auto-tweeting device, automatically sending out a tweet or check-in once you arrive at a location; you can’t read tweets on the device.

The new Go Live 1535 is expected later this year for $299. The already-released 2535 M will get the apps through a firmware update at a later time. The device, thanks to its price, is likely to only satisfy a very niche market as consumers who are actually interested in apps likely have a smartphone that can pull double duty.

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Joint Brings Group Chat To Twitter

Rip Empson is a writer at TechCrunch. He’s not here to make friends, he’s here to WIN, and don’t you forget it. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More

About a month ago, Tom Anderson (or Myspace Tom, if you prefer) wrote a post on his new favorite social network, Google+, offering a few bits of advice for Twitter. While many of us enjoy a good Twittering now and again, Anderson pointed out that there are a few simple features Twitter might consider if it wants to boost the overall quality of its user experience. The main thrust being that the social experience of Twitter might be improved were the company to add a “discussion” or chat function that would, in Tom’s conception, give the viewer an input box by which to leave a comment and easily discuss tweets without flooding followers’ streams with one part of an on-going conversation.

Well, Tom might just be interested in a new startup launching today, called Joint. Ok, well it’s not an exact replica of the Myspace founder’s idea, but it’s attacking the same pain point long discussed by Twitter users: In that the platform is badly in need of a better way to facilitate realtime, private, and longer-form conversations. Of course, there’s some disagreement among users over whether or not Twitter should be the one offering this feature, or whether it should stay simple, just as it is.

Joint Founder Ethan Gahng says (and I tend to agree) that Twitter will be best served by staying simple in terms of its UI, and instead allowing third party startups and developers to be the ones to add further social and chat features from the outside. (And Twitter’s actions over the last few years seem to largely be in line with this philosophy.)

To work towards this goal, Joint essentially turns any Twitter hashtag into an IRC (Internet Relay Channel)-like chat room, which is integrated with a realtime hashtag stream from Twitter. Check it out below. This combo allows users to participate in a number of different social interactions, including a front-and-center realtime group chat feature, which populates with a live hashtag feed in the right sidebar.

Users can then pull the hashtags directly into the group chat, or invite the people who wrote the tweets into the group chat, right from the chat room, or simply hang out and enjoy synchronous chat, watching as the tweet stream populates. Compared to Hootsuite, Tweetdeck and other third party apps that let you track hashtags, being able to watch someone tweet from “outside” and bring them in and chat immediately is a subtle boundary and distinction proffered by Joint that really makes a big difference.

If you’re trying to engage in a conversation with someone on Twitter that goes beyond a few “@ replies”, you’re either forced to DM or take the conversation elsewhere. Joint allows users to easily join a group chat, as well as discuss notable or popular hashtags. For instance, of late “#irene” has become a much-used hashtag, as Hurricane Irene is poised to hit the East Coast. Joint could become a very useful resource for people looking to easily congregate and discuss ongoing situations like hurricanes, protests, or events, live, from any location.

Another cool aspect of Joint’s platform is that it’s meant to function as an off-the-record conversation medium for Twitter users, meaning that if I’m having a conversation with someone and a third person joins the chat room, they won’t be able to see the ongoing conversation. This, Gahng says, is intended to make Joint group chat more reflective of interaction in the real world.

As to Joint’s intended use cases, Gahng says that it’s easy to connect to other people on Twitter, but it’s hard to actually get to know them, so using Joint, you can meet someone on Twitter that you want to play Starcraft with — many of your followers may not want to join in on the fun. Which is why open standards warrior Chris Messina proposed the hashtag in the first place, but of course, not many people regularly follow hashtags in their day-to-day Twitter usage. Joint looks to change this by making it easy to search for different hashtags, discuss, and follow them synchronously in realtime. For an example, check out the Starcraft channel here.

Not to mention the fact that, because tweeting with hashtags means that your tweets get archived and live forever on search engines, etc., many people feel uncomfortable about having public conversations (about more private issues, especially) on Twitter. We’ve all had to delete a tweet or two, and often too late. By giving Twitter users that added benefit of social flexibility, Joint hopes to give itself a leg up on other third party Twitter apps.

Lastly, beyond simply being able to follow a hashtag group, Joint also informs a user when there’s a new user in their chat room, offers search descriptions, and gives users the ability to browse the main directory, or even start their own hashtag channel.

Joint solves a major pain point experienced often by Twitter users, and from my experience in the chat rooms and poking around on the site, the UI is straightforward, and chat is fast and easy to use. The three-person Joint team has been working on this since January, and the startup is bootstrapped at this point, but if the platform can scale and continue to function in realtime without glitches, this seems like something that can definitely have legs.

Joint and its team isn’t affiliated with Twitter in any way, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the social network comes knocking at their door at some point down the road.

For more, check out Joint at home here.

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Twitter Founders Put Their Weight Behind A New Startup: Lift

Robin Wauters currently works as a staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in Belgium, a tiny country in Europe. He can often be found working from his home or... ? Learn More

Twitter co-founders Biz Stone, Evan Williams, and longtime sidekick Jason Goldman, recently shifted their focus away from the micro-sharing service provider to reboot Obvious, the company that originally incubated Twitter.

Yesterday, Stone announced Obvious’ first project: incubating an app development company called Lift, created by Tony Stubblebine and Jon Crosby. Obvious says it will assist Lift with “strategy, design, funding and recruiting”.

What Lift is building remains unclear, but Stone writes:

“Tony Stubblebine and Jon Crosby have created an interesting new application for unlocking human potential through positive reinforcement. We love this software for what it does, and because we’ve tried it and it works.”

Crosby says more will be shared “in the coming months”. If you’re interested in learning more now: Marshall Kirkpatrick has been sleuthing and writes about what he found on ReadWriteWeb.

Stubblebine previously worked at Wesabe, Odeo (where he worked with the Obvious trio) and O’Reilly Media and also founded CrowdVine. Crosby boasts gigs at Path, Engine Yard and Songbird on his résumé.

Lift will be billed as an ‘Obvious Company’, although the Obvious team clearly sees this more as a partnership, wherein Lift gets to follow its own path under the leadership of Stubblebine and Crosby.

Its service is currently in private alpha, but the website lets people sign up to receive more information when it’s available. Oh, and you’ll be able to log in through Twitter and Facebook.

As an amusing aside: entrepreneur and hacker Connor Montgomery, and/or Stubblebine, appear to have added some humor to the Lift website code:

(meta name=”description” content=”Lift. Achieve anything (assuming we finish building this app).”)

I assume they will. Can’t wait to finally be able to achieve anything!

The Obvious Corporation creates technology systems to facilitate the process of collaboration between people to improve the world. Obvious believes that technology has the power to affect individuals, organizations,...

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