Twitter Purchases Tweetdeck

Be fair, attentive, and customers
will return.

Twitter purchased TweetDeck,
an application for organizing
the display of tweets, for more
than $40 million using cash
and stock, per sources.

Twitter's PR account tweeted,
"For all those who might be
curious, we continue to not
comment on rumors."

Betaworks, a key investor in
TweetDeck, was not available
for comment.

A management stir-up, with
co-founder Ev Williams out
and Jack Dorsey back as head
of product, the company is
focusing on building/owning
Twitter's most compelling
features and interfaces.

In February, reports of
UberMedia, the leading
developer of apps and Web-
based services for Twitter
users and other social media
platforms, was in talks to
purchase Tweetdeck.

The deal didn't happen.

Around times of the deal chats
with UberMedia, Twitter
suspended UberMedia's
UberTwitter and twidroyd,
two popular apps used for
mobile Twitter access,
citing policy violations.

Twitter has been improving
its own main site as TweetDeck,
and many "Twitter clients"
began to surface over the
past two years.

Source: http://newsblaze.com/story/20110524095924writ.nb/topstory.html

Twitter: To Send Forth A Paid Search

Be fair, attentive, and customers
will return.

Twitter, the micro-blogging and social
networking service, allows members to
send/receive a text up to 140 characters.

It's reported that Twitter is setting-up
to add a paid advertising system. The
search will be called Promoted Tweets.
Advertisers will use up to 140 character
ads on top of specific searches. An
advertiser's tweets will be located where
they can be seen easily, and not confused
with information about the company,
its products.

Best Buy, Starbucks and Virginia America
are ready to work with Twitter per reports.
This is Twitter's first attempt at
sending forth a paid search.

There's chatter about a narrowing interest
in micro-blogging.

Source: http://newsblaze.com/story/20100423160158writ.nb/topstory.html

Smart Social Networking For Your Small Business by Frederic Paul

Be fair, attentive, and customers
will return.

Next to mobility and cloud computing,
social networking was the talk of
Interop this year--especially at a
conference session devoted to social
software tools and a portion of the
Unconference, where real SMB users
talked about how to make the most of it.

But perhaps the best thing I learned
about social media came in a meeting
with security vendor ESET. Just as at
a recent Intuit ( INTU - news - people )
town hall where I discovered Social
NOT-working, at Interop, ESET director
of marketing Liz Fraumann shared the
abbreviation for Social Media as "So
Me." Perfect, isn't it?

Anyway, Social Software Tools: A
Critical Evaluation offered useful
insight into the choices SMBs need
to make when moving into social
networking. Tony Byrne, founder of
CMS Watch, started with a useful
breakdown of the complex world of
social networking, beginning with
separating external and internal
applications, depending on whether
the connections occur inside or
outside your company:

External

--Branded community

--Tech support

--Reader interaction

--Partner collaboration

--Professional networking

--Hosted user blogs and blog
comments (you host, but don't
control, user postings)

Internal

--Project collaboration

--Enterprise collaboration

--Enterprise discussion
(especially useful after
a merger or acquisition)

--Information organization/
filtering

--Knowledgebase management
(collaboration)

--Communities of practice

--Enterprise networking (intranets
and/or Facebook groups for
employees); vendors include
Ning and Lithium

Of course, where social networking
takes place is only the first part of
the puzzle. The networking itself
can take many forms:

Social Networking Functions

--Blogs; vendors include Six Apart,
Google's ( GOOG - news - people )
Blogger and Automattic's WordPress

--Microblogs (Twitter)

--Wikis; vendors include MediaWiki
(the foundation of Wikipedia), Atlassian,
MindTouch and Socialtext)

--Project tracking/participation software

--Multimedia (video/audio, internal or
external, including YouTube)

--Information ranking/filtering--voting

--Discussion forums

--Presence/instant messaging (IM)

--Public social networks, including
Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing and MySpace

Each of these functional applications
has its own uses, strengths and
weaknesses.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/05/social-networking-interop-entrepreneurs-technology-bmighty.html