July 1, 2009
TweetCraft summons Twitter for Warcraft
MMORPG client lets computer gamers tweet in-game
If you’re becoming increasingly concerned about losing valuable World of Warcraft playing-time to take breaks for updating your status on Twitter, then today is your lucky day.
Becoming an essential World of Warcraft plug-in for Twitter users over the weekend, TweetCraft is the latest Tweet dashboard tailored to a specific community. At its most basic, TweetCraft is like any of the many other third-party Twitter clients, allowing one to send and receive tweets while online.
What makes the plug-in shine are its game-related features. At the moment, the client gives players the ability to automatically upload screenshots of their current activities using TwitPic, a feature that as literally as possible answers the question, “What are you doing?”
In the same vein, players can also select options that will enable the program to automatically tweet whenever the player logs in, enters an instance, or attains in-game achievements.
In the constantly connected community that is World of Warcraft, a client like this makes perfect sense for users who want to keep their Twitter profiles always updated. Yet there is no reason why the same idea could not be expanded to other computer games and even console games.
Maybe we should already be expecting a wave of TweetCraft-inspired software to hit the web in the next few weeks.
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What is Twitter?
Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.
Where did the idea for Twitter come from?
Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.
How is Twitter built?
Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.
We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.
How do you make money from Twitter?
There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.
In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.
At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.
Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.
What's next for Twitter?
We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.
We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.
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July 1, 2009