Read more on this over at Business Insider.

So, smart idea, right?

Well, maybe not!

Google announced last month that sites that load slowly will be penalised with a lower search ranking.  Twitter is known for poor reliability (fail whales) and slow load times. See where I’m going here? So, by pasting code on your site which is having to wait for twitter to get moving, you may be slowing your overall load speed and thus, get penalised by Google.

Whilst it’s a pain in the ass to manually do a screen-grab of a tweet and then upload it to a post, at least there’s nothing in that process to slow your load time down; especially if you compress the image and are hosted on a nice, quick server.  It will be interesting to see what the feedback is once people have been using the new embeded tweet feature for a while.

Thoughts?

Twitter business model to include advertising?

This got me thinking.  In recent weeks, Twitter has made a number of significant improvements to the functionality of the main Twitter website.  Most recently we saw the addition of the superb Twitter Lists feature, but Twitter are ALSO working on a new retweet feature too.  These improvements have one thing in common; they render web-based apps like Tweetdeck and (my favourite) Seesmic Desktop less and less essential.

Both Tweetdeck & Seesmic Desktop are superb apps, but they are also a lot more resource hungry, than simply using a browser to access the Twitter website. Now that users are able to get all the core functionality direct from Twitter.com, using their favourite lightweight browser – There’s less motivation for NEW Twitter users to bother installing the aforementioned Twitter apps.

The Twitter team are actively, suddenly doing everything they can to make Twitter.com stickier.  Obviously, this keeps MORE new users on Twitter.com.

Here’s why I think these recent moves by Twitter are so interesting, from a business model point of view.

Twitter’s business model puzzle

One of the biggest challenges Twitter has had to deal with, is how to turn the popularity of the service into an effective business model.  A big reason that this has been such a challenge, is that only a small percentage of tweets are sent via Twitter.com.  As a result, Twitter gets just a small percentage of the ‘eyeballs’ it could have; rendering Twitter.com far less attractive for potential advertisers.

I believe the recent introduction of Twitter Lists, project retweet and now the new ‘updates’ feature,  show that Twitter is focusing hard on developing a key part of their business model around advertising on Twitter.com.  As I mentioned some time ago, Twitter users in some Asian countries already see small banner ads on Twitter.com.

Conclusion

Whilst many longer term users will want to stick with their favourite Twitter desktop apps, there’s less and less reason for new desk-based users to want to use them.  This should see a significant increase in the number of people using Twitter.com and as a result, transform the site into a more attractive platform for future advertisers.

Very few users of Twitter are likely to object to ads, particularly if they are somehow targeted around the user’s tweets, so they are relevant.  Maybe Twitter users with an objection, could opt to pay a fee to have these ads removed; like wordpress.com do for their users.

What do you think?

BTW: You can follow me on Twitter here @thetechnewsblog

Balloon boy was a non-story from the start

The father’s decision to call a TV company on thinking his child was missing in a weather balloon, rather than the emergency services, sounded strange and should have alerted CNN that this was a publicity stunt from the very start.

Image Credit: The Daily Telegraph

Then, when the networks find out within minutes, that the father was also a contestant on a reality TV show, (and that he had his children performing on Youtube), it seemed even more like a publicity stunt from someone obsessed with being famous.

The odds of there ever being anyone in that balloon were close to zero.  BUT this did not stop CNN covering the event live – AND let’s face it, there’s plenty of REAL news happening right now.

Why broadcast the balloon boy story when it was so flimsy?

A few years ago, stories were researched before they were broadcast and that’s the first we would know of them.  Today, every time a big story breaks, it’s picked up on Twitter first and the news companies / TV networks are left playing catch-up.  This is BAD NEWS for the networks, as it means they no longer get all those valuable viewers / listeners to advertise to.  Remembering, advertising revenue is what funds the networks. (Excluding The BBC here in the UK.)

Whilst Twitter is a super fast way of getting breaking news, it has one well-known, massive weakness – It’s extremely unreliable as a news source.  You hear of a celebrity dying, (like Jeff Goldblum recently) and you know there’s a good chance that he’s probably water-skiing or in the gym training for a marathon.  Like most people, I’ve lost count of how many disasters I have seen on Twitter as breaking news, which never actually happened.

That’s why whenever a big news story breaks on Twitter, the first thing most intelligent people do, is check to see if the news networks are confirming it. The news might break first on Twitter, but like the boy who cried wolf, we never know if we can trust it or not.

News outlets playing to Twitters strengths

The strength of the established news outlets and TV stations is their highly trained staff, their network of contacts and their researching skills. However, rather than play to their strengths, the news outlets and TV stations are trying to compete with Twitter on speed – a race that they can not win, if they want to remain a trusted, reliable source. That’s why we can expect to see more balloon boy non-stories in the future.  From here in, I think I’m going to refer to this speed over facts bullshit as ‘ balloon boy journalism.’ (You saw it here first folks!!)

I’m hoping that this dumb-ass story isn’t the starting pistol, as the news outlets take their places for a ‘race to the bottom’.  Yes, there has always been political bias in the news and yes, the news outlets have often got things wrong.  However, focusing on speed rather than facts is hardly going to improve the quality and reliability of the news we watch or hear.

Balloon boy journalism plays into Twitters hands

If this really is a sign that the news outlets are going to focus on speed, rather than facts, Twitter could become our most valuable news outlet.  At the moment, the only thing Twitter has over the traditional news outlets is speed.  However, if the news outlets become just as unreliable, no one will bother checking a story out via their TV, radio or the website of one of those currently, trusted outlets.

People will see a story break on Twitter and stay there, until it’s either called out as a hoax or confirmed as a fact.  After all, as in the fake Jeff Goldblum death story I mentioned earlier, many TV stations report Twitter hoaxes as facts anyway.  Surely, for the news outlets to compete and survive, they need to play to their strengths and spare us more balloon boy ‘stories’?

What do you think?

So-called ‘live blogging’ was once a useful practice, where a small number of people attending an event, would send key messages via Twitter, to their targeted followers.

Live blogging Blog World Expo #bwe

However, today – when almost every attendee at these events is tweeting everything they hear, live blogging has become (at best) a nuisance for Twitter users.  The deluge of duplicate messages coming from is week’s Blog World Expo #bwe is the latest example.

At one point yesterday, I saw the same Tweet on my screen 7 times in around 3 minutes.  Yes, of course I unfollowed the culprits!

Live blogging from the gurus

There is something REALLY funny, about listening to the worlds leading ‘social media gurus,’ spraying the same hosepipe of identical information to their followers.  After all, THESE GUYS are the self-appointed experts.   Their inability to realise how pointless it is, to tweet the exact same ‘news’ as the guy sitting next to them is laughable.

Maybe they need to read their own books on how to use Twitter, (great value at just $9.99! with coupon code #bullshit.)

Live blogging does still have a place, as was very powerfully demonstrated at a number of recent, under-reported world events.  But to sit in an air-conditioned exhibition venue, surrounded by thousands of people already tweeting every point made by every speaker is insane.  If these people REALLY want to provide something of value, surely it would be better to write a blog post, based on THEIR unique understanding of what they discovered?

Am I being unfair here?

RSS Cloud and WordPress.com

All of a sudden, blogs on the WordPress.com platform became almost real-time. In other words, posts will be broadcast almost immediately; allowing bloggers to both deliver real-time content to their RSS subscribers AND potentially share real-time comments with their readers.

Even mashable, possibly the most pro-Twitter site on the ‘net, said that the fusion of WordPress + RSS Cloud could offer Twitter-like speed and be a watershed moment in the real-time web. They are quite right, it could be that big, if the predicted domino effect happens and more RSS readers support it.

The RSS Cloud software can also be installed on self-hosted WordPress blogs, like this one. In fact, we were one of the first news blogs to install it.

Just think: You own your own blog, own all your own content and now potentially, have real-time communications enabled – Which YOU control of everything; rather than Twitter, Facebook, Google etc.

RSS Cloud and social media

I have written a lot over the past couple of weeks, about the problems associated with maintaining control of your online content.  Facebook bought Friendfeed recently and suddenly, Friendfeed users found their data in the hands of a VERY different kind of company; one that many Friendfeed users have privacy issues with.

Other social media sites are just waiting to be acquired and thus, users are left wondering; “who will eventually have ownership of our pictures, posts, tweets etc?”

Right now, only one RSS reader supports RSS Cloud (Dave Winer’s River2).  However, now that WordPress.com’s 7.5 million users are enabled, I guarantee the major RSS readers will support it very soon.

The real-time web is about to get very interesting – But so is the potential for us, the users, to have full control over our online content and networks.

I wrote recently about how the sale of Friendfeed to Facebook, has caused people to reconsider where to put their online content.  A number of Friendfeed users are concerned because of Facebook’s reputation for privacy and their angst was widely reported across the ‘net. Users of other sites are now wondering how to secure their online content; if their current providers either go broke or get swallowed up by a company they don’t want to be involved with.

On This Week In Tech (TWiT) respected industry commentators, John C Dvorak, Om Malik and Leo Laporte recently said that the obvious solution to this problem, is a self-hosted blog.  I agree. However, whilst blogs make it easy to share content, they lack the power of Twitter or Facebook, when it comes to communicating/messaging people.  That’s because blog comments lack the fluidity required for conversation.

NOTE: I’m currently researching some open source options, which ‘could’ make it possible for you to not only share your content via your own blog, but to message in real-time with your online network. I will be telling you more about this soon.

The comment gathering trend

In an effort to make their blogs a more central part of their online presence, many bloggers have started to use comment gathering plugins.  Services like the excellent Disqus and Echo are proving to be extremely popular, because of their ability to gather content from various social networking sites, and deliver them to the user’s own blog.

Whilst these plugins offer a useful step in the right direction, the obvious problem, is that once these plugins have been uninstalled, the content they had pulled into your blog will disappear. You only keep the comments actually left on your blog.  In other words you become dependant on them and are kind of ‘locked in’ to using them.

If the content could be pulled in an then permanently stored on the blog, it would be an additional step in the right direction.  By the way, if you know a way of doing this, please let me know.

Your feedback please

I would like to know what you think, about sharing and storing your content with 3rd party providers.  Also, what solutions do you have for people, who want to safeguard their network of followers on services like Twitter / Facebook / Friendfeed. Let me know!

FaceBook bought talent – Not a platform

FaceBook is huge and has no need to buy in the relatively tiny number of users that FriendFeed has.  So, this was not an acquisition of eyeballs.

The FriendFeed software is (as any geek will tell you) awesome; but that’s the problem. Geeks like us LOVE it, but it’s not usable enough for mainstream use.  Although far superior to Twitter technically, FriendFeed lacks the instant usability that sites like Twitter offer.

So, I don’t believe FaceBook bought FriendFeed for the platform either.

FriendFeed does have one extremely valuable asset though – Talent!

In buying FriendFeed, FaceBook has just acquired the services of four extremely smart people; Bret Taylor, Sanjeev Singh, Jim Norris and Paul Buchheit.  Before founding FriendFeed, these guys worked at Google and helped develop services like, Gmail, Google Maps and Google Groups.

Their market value is huge and that’s what I believe FaceBook is paying for.

In a press release accompanying the acquisition, FaceBook confirms the value it places on FriendFeed’s co-founders – saying they will; “hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.”  The remaining 12 FriendFeed staff members will also be joining FaceBook, as part of the deal.  At the time of writing this, there’s been no mention as to what FaceBook has paid for Friendfeed.

What do you think about the FriendFeed acquisition?  Let us know!

Just 0.3% of Twitter users claim that they use Twitter for fun, with the majority of users saying they Tweet in order to keep in touch with friends (41.6%).

I can only assume these same people either don’t have fun with their friends or that they enjoy screwing around when researchers as them questions.

If you want to see the rest of the figures, including who uses Twitter most and what they use it for, take a look at this article on the superb eMarketer website.

You can join me on Twitter here.

Image Credit: IconTexTo

That’s because the good people at TweetMeme have just accused a ‘soon to launch’ rival (called ReTweet) of copying their idea…. and some of their code too!

ReTweet flattery

In a post on Tweetmeem’s blog, Nick Halstead explains how ‘flattered’ he is, to find someone copying his idea.  Apparently, he found out about the ReTweet flattery, while reading a post on techcrunch:

What caught my attention was that some industrious individual (@travisketchum) had left a comment on the TechCrunch article that he had been doing some digging around on the website and had found a link to their development environment.  What we found ourselves was that our retweet button Javascript and the WordPress plugin code seemed to have been directly copied from ours.

He goes on to say that they are seeking legal advice regarding the situation.

If you have a few minutes, I recommend you take a look at Nick Halstead’s post. Also, check out Caroline McCarthy’s post about this over on Cnet.