The new World Map Of Social Networks has just been released. The map, which was created by Vincenzo Cosenza is based on this month’s Alexa & Google Trends for Websites traffic data. The data shows that Facebook has gain some serious ground recently, most noteably in Europe.
The US military is banning the use of removable media. This policy is in response to recent security leaks that branches of the service have been experiance. This information was first repoted by Wired.com's Danger Room, after the memo with the policy change was leaked.Twitter has the
Twitter has released a holiday Tweet tree. The tree, which is part of Twitter's year in review project, will highlight major figures who joined Twitter this year. The tree will also feature some of those users posts.
The Google Zeitgeist 2010: The Video project has been released. The video shows searches that influenced the lives of web-searchers this year. Topics covered in the video range from the Gulf Oil Spill to Bed Intruder.
WearTheShift, a custom sized clothing startup that bases sizing on an algorythm instead of measurements, has entered beta with a Kickstarter page. Beta users who donate $80 or more to the start up, will get a custom fit dress.
YouTube has announced that it is removing the time limit on uploaded video limit entirely for some of its users.The annoucement did not specify which users will get the upload restriction lifted, or if this plan will eventually be effected for all users.
Factual, an open and collaborative data platform, raised $25 million. This first round of funding was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures. Other investors include Michael Ovitz and SV Angel.
The bill would require a report on how these industries use AI to valuate homes and underwrite loans
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Steven Loeb
The artists wrote an open letter accusing OpenAI of misleading and using them
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Steven Loeb
The role will not be filled by Elon Musk, though he will be involved in who is chosen
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Steven Loeb
Startup/Business
Joined Vator on
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.
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.
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.
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.
