A2 entertainment, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and AOL have teamed up to produce “Martha & Friends,” a new online animated multimedia series for kids based on the creative stylings of Martha Stewart.
Flipboard launched a new version of the popular social magazine app that has rocketed to the top of the app charts since it debuted last summer. In short, the new version is all about speed.
Are we in a bubble? Check out the second part of Bambi Francisco's interview with Joe Kraus, partner at Google Ventures.
Ignite100 is the newest accelerator in the northern UK, and it just launched with a £1 million fund for its startups.
LivingSocial has been meeting with bankers this week, including Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank, to discuss a possible $1 billion IPO, which would value LivingSocial at $10-$15 billion.
Microsoft is shutting down its home energy tracking service, Hohm, due to a lack of user adoption.
Check out the beatiful graph I made illustrating the brief rise of Myspace and its long, slow demise.
In a study conducted by SMB social marketing startup Roost, local businesses now prefer social marketing to search.
Twitter is working on a website dedicated purely to those developing apps and services for the microblogging platform. The site could launch as early as July.
Also: The White House will be hosting its very first Twitter townhall with the President on Wednesday, July 6 at 2:00 PM ET.
Oh, and the site's seeing 200 million tweets per day. Check out the new official stats and trends.
Today's Entrepreneur is Sam Hayes, Co-Founder & EVP, SharesPost.
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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.
