Nurph, which very recently launched in public beta, is a new exciting site that lets users embed a chat box on any Web site they please.
The service is incredibly simple to use. You go to the Nurph homepage, enter any URL you want into the text box at the top of the page, and the service will redirect you to the site you entered with an embedded chat box in the lower right of the browser window. (Click here to go to a Nurphed version of this page.)
In order to chat, users must sign in with their Twitter account. Though there's no other way to participate in the chat sessions, at the moment, the limitation works well because it means that everyone already has profiles set up with their name and avatar--no registration required.
What makes Nurph even cooler is that it refuses to be a static experience. Inevitably, when a user in the chat shares a link with everyone, users need only click the link to be redirected to that page with a new Nurph chat window embedded in it. As long as all chat participants play along, everyone could be surfing all around the Web, finding and discussing all sorts of interesting content as a collective.
Rightfully assuming that the ordinary Web user now works in multiple tabs within their browser, the tab with the Nurph chat running will automatically update with the number of new messages as soon as they come in.
What's most exciting about Nurph is that it seems like it could transform a lot of the noise we find on the Internet, especially on a site like Twitter, into actually interesting and meaningful conversations. On the other hand, that could be an effect of the startup still being very small. If, in the future, the service expands to the point where hundreds of Twitter users turn to a Nurphed version of a breaking New York Times article, for example, the noise could grow overwhelming.
Nurph is a UK-based company with just two employees, co-founders Neil Cauldwell and Paul Horsfall. Bootstrapped at the moment, the startup's founders are interested in investment opportunities.
Still a service in its early stages, Nurph nevertheless shows much promise in making the Web an even more interactive and community-oriented place.
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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.
