July 7, 2009
China's great Firewall; Stoned Biz; Tips from Gruber
What does “GFWed” stand for? It means the “The Great Firewall in China”. Yes, China this week put up a firewall to block its citizens from accessing sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The move, as you can imagine, caused a fury across the blogosphere! But come on China. It's "Social" media. We're not talking about "capitalist-pig, free-market" media. It's social!
See: China blocks Twitter, Facebook, most Web 2.0
Want some marijuana? Go to Twitter. Apparently, some California pot sellers are living the high life on the micro-blogging site. Artists Collective is the largest weed seller, which uses Twitter to promote its products. Co-founder Biz Stone was not available for a comment. Now it is legal to sell marijuana for medical purposes in California. So, California pot sellers appear to be abiding by the rules. But the rules on promotion of such products on social media sites have yet to be written. Until then… brownie anyone?
Siri’s CTO Tom Gruber gave us some tips on entrepreneurship recently. The first this was to stay away from bright shiny objects. Don’t work toward something, get bored and move on to the next thing. .. and no, I’m not talking about dating. The other tip was to design for buildability. Meaning design a product with the resources in mind. In other words, don’t bite off more than you can chew.
See: Siri CTO Tom Gruber on Design for buildability
Related Companies, Investors, and Entrepreneurs
Startup/Business
Joined Vator on
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.
Siri
Startup/Business
Joined Vator on
Siri is a Virtual Personal Assistant - a new way to interact with the Internet on your mobile phone. Like a real assistant, Siri helps you get things done. You interact with Siri by just saying, in your own words, what you want to do. You can ask Siri to find a romantic place for dinner, and get reservations for Saturday night. You can discover things to do over the weekend, get tickets to the movies, or call a cab when you’re out on the town. You don't have to search through a bunch of web pages, following links and hunting down facts. Siri does all the work giving you the information you need at your fingertips.
We believe that in five years most people who use the Internet will have a Virtual Personal Assistant (VPA) to take care of the details of using online services. We will look back at the birth of VPAs in 2009 and wonder how we ever got by without our trusted assistant. The days of wading through links and pages from your mobile interface will seem quaint, because the natural way to interact with the rich world of information and services is to have a conversation. As John Batelle, the author of The Search, says "The future of search is a conversation with someone we trust."
Tom Gruber
Joined Vator on
Related News
July 1, 2009