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Posts Tagged ‘Party Applications’

Details of Twitter Ad Platform Emerge

Peter Kafka of All Things Digital has come out with some more details, which he says come from “people who have been briefed by the company”, about Twitter’s expected advertising platform. According to Kafka, the platform will be primarily search based, distributed via third-party applications and will appear in the familiar 140 character tweet format.

He makes sure to include a caveat, because there’s been a bit of confusion since reports of an “imminent” launch the other day, but the details mesh with what we’ve heard so far.

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“Everyone I’ve talked to cautions that the plans are evolving and that there are plenty of details to work out,” Kafka writes. “Including a launch date, though it seems as if the first half of this year is a very safe bet.”

When we first wrote about the ad platform this week, it was based on an article in MediaPost, which reported that a Twitter ad platform was “imminent”. Since then, Seth Goldstein, who led the talk on which the reports were based, has back pedaled, saying he was only referring to a November statement by Twitter regarding its advertising future. Goldstein since called MediaPost’s article “speculation“, but this seems to only apply in relation to the time frame. Anamitra Banerji, head of product management and monetization at Twitter, is still on record with MediaPost as saying that the company is working on an ad platform, which is currently in the test phase.

According to Kafka, this is what we currently know about the developing ad platform:

• Ads will be tied to Twitter searches, in the same way that Google’s (GOOG) original ads did. So a search for, say, “laptop”, may generate an ad for Dell. The ads will only show up in search results, which means users who don’t search for something won’t see them in their regular Twitterstream.
• The ads will use the Twitter format — 140 characters or less — and will be distributed via the third party software and services that use Twitter’s API. The services will have the option to display the ads, and Twitter will share revenue with those that do.
• Twitter will work with ad agencies and buyers to seed the program, but plans on moving to a self-serve model, like Google offers, down the road.

The details jive with what Banerji told the MediaPost at the meeting in question.

“We don’t think of ourselves as a Web site — essentially it’s a platform,” Banerji said. “We don’t really control the ads or the way the tweets are viewed and then consumed. We are completely open around other people innovating around us. Ultimately, publishers should have choice. But the one area of concern for us — and that’s if bad ads get identified in Twitter — it’s a problem for us in the long term. So, we should do whatever we can to encourage positive behavior.”

An ad platform that leaves the appearance of advertising up to the program just calls out for a freemium model within third-party Twitter apps, where paying users could avoid seeing Twitter advertising. Or perhaps we’ll see the emergence of more open source Twitter applications as advertising begins to appear in our previously ad-free apps.

So while reports of Twitter unveiling the ad platform at SXSW may be a bit premature, it seems that there is no question that it is in the works and will take on many attributes of Google’s AdWords program.

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Twitter Hires Pixar Financial Chief, Preps for More Profitability

Two months after announcing that the startup managed to turn a profit in 2009, Twitter has announced that it will be hiring Pixar finance head Ali Rowghani as its chief financial officer.

Twitter’s CEO Evan Williams told Reuters today that the new hire represents the company’s direction toward “creating value for our users and capturing the financial opportunities that result from it.” Rowghani will join Twitter officially in March.

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Last year, Twitter’s search deals with Google and Microsoft made the company around $25 million – about $15 million from Google and $10 million from Microsoft. These two deals were enough to make the company profitable last year. For a fairly young company that offers a simple, free web application for end users, this is quite a feat.

Other revenue channels include creating a revenue-sharing scheme that would let Twitter share the profits generated by third-party applications. The details of this plan are still under wraps, but Twitter’s platform director Ryan Sarver announced at LeWeb that the company would announce details about this plan early in 2010.

Other possible sources of revenue are multi-user accounts, which Twitter has been testing internally.

Twitter has also recently made another high-profile hire, calling on Current TV’s Robin Sloan to work on media partnerships, covering “everything at the intersection of Twitter and media, from live events on TV to citizen journalism on the web.”

We’re excited to see how the startup that’s managed to become a cultural zeitgeist within a few short years will continue to grow and profit. Particularly in its early days, many who lived through the dotcom crash were skeptical about the monetization potential of a free web service. Without incorporating advertising – something that no users wanted to see – Twitter has managed to create a sustainable business.

We can’t wait to see what ideas Rowghani will bring to the table.

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Tired of Logging In to Twitter? Seamless App Integration On the Way

It’s been just about a year now since Twitter started using OAuth as a solution for connecting with third-party applications, but to this day we still find situations where we are asked to enter our user name and password.

According to a blog post by a member of Twitter’s API/Platform team, we may not need to worry about this particular nuisance, and potential security hole, much longer.

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Raffi Krikorian, a self-professed “hacker, writer, and … tinkerer”, made some waves in the Twitter development arena late into last night with his blog post, which proposes a solution to a problem many developers have been keeping an eye on.

“We really want to get people to switch over and stop using Basic Authentication when talking to our API in a production manner,” he writes. “Why? Basic Authentication is, simply, horribly insecure.”

Here’s the problem, as Krikorian describes it:

You’re an OAuth enabled Twitter client, and you’ve already authorized your user. You user wants to use a media providing service like TwitPic. TwitPic, currently, asks for the username and password of your user so it can store the photo on behalf of the Twitter user. You don’t have that username and password, so how do you give the ability to TwitPic to verify the identity of your user?

Krikorian is proposing a solution he calls “OAuth identification delegation”, wherein the application your using, Tweetie in his example, passes along its OAuth authorization to TwitPic, which TwitPic can then use to verify its actions as authorized. Right now, using TwitPic requires you to enter your user name and password separately.

For now, he says the idea is still in development, writing “once I think we’ve come upon the best solution, I’ll write this up more formally, as well as port it to OAuth WRAP/2.0 (where Twitter is headed).”

Krikorian included a diagram of his solution and is soliciting feedback on his blog.

OAuth Identity Verification Delegation Example Workflow v0.2

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Loopt To Start Pushing Check-In Specials Hard Using A New App And Facebook

When Loopt released its iPhone app alongside the App Store launch in 2008, it seemed to have everything going for it. Founder Sam Altman was given time on stage at WWDC to show off the app. It was featured prominently in the App Store for a while. And it was really one of the first hot location-based services. But then it cooled off, partially because the app needed to be open to update your location. And since the iPhone didn’t allow for third-party applications to run in the background, it was severely hamstrung. Meanwhile, a series of check-in based location apps that didn’t need to be open all the time came along and stole the location buzz. More importantly, they brought to light new business opportunities for local venues with the idea of location-based deals. Loopt’s new goal is to make a strong push for that.

As you can see in the deck we’ve obtained below, Loopt is working on yet another new product that is all about location-based deals. This deck is apparently making the rounds with a bunch of agencies and advertisers, as Loopt hopes to get them on board when they launch they app in a few months. The new app is called LooptCard. Clearly, from the deck it will run on the iPhone, but it should also work across all the major mobile platforms, we’re told. And these advertisers are being told that Loopt already has several retailers and venues on board with deals for when they launch.

So why is it any different than what Foursquare, Gowalla, and most recently, Yelp, are doing with location-based deals? It would seem that Loopt is trying to convince venues to use their system by offering the most customizable deals to give away. For example, certain deals are only unlocked if you do certain tasks, such as check-in at a certain time of day. This could be enticing to venues because while something like a coffee shop may be busy in the morning, it may be dead in the afternoon, and may want a way to pull in more traffic at only that time. There are also incentives for users to check-in with friends, which obviously benefits the venues since it means more people in the store. There are also options to give customers real goods or virtual goods. Users will also have an easy way to see what specials they are close to unlocking.

Perhaps most significantly though, LooptCard will be built entirely on top of Facebook’s social graph, we hear. This means there is a low barrier to entry to gain new users who may be wary of signing up for yet another social network. This also means that it will be tightly integrated with Facebook Connect so that all of these deals and check-ins will pour back into users’ Facebook streams, upping the viral potential of both the app and the deal.

Loopt has tried to rebuild itself before. They’ve spun off their Loopt Mix feature into its own app and made Loopt itself more predicated around check-ins. But they’re still fighting an uphill battle since those other players either got to the check-in game first — or they happen to be Yelp, with millions of users. Loopt has also crossed into Yelp’s more immediate territory recently with a local review site.

The new application is apparently an offshoot of Loopt’s recent acquisition of the Y Combinator startup, GraffitiGEO.

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FMyLife Starts Clamping Down On Its API, Has Some Developers Saying FML

FMyLife’s developer community has a new reason to visit the site this week: to complain about the restrictions the company has recently started to enforce on its API. From now on, FMyLife requires all applications that feature advertising or that have a price tag (e.g. on the App Store) to send 50% of their revenues back to FMyLife. Apps that are available for free, sans advertising, will be able to operate as usual.

For those who haven’t been introduced to the FMyLife phenomenon, the site invites users to leave brief personal stories that generally end in catastrophe or extreme embarrassment. All of the stories conclude with “FML” (or F*** My Life), which has become a catchphrase outside of the site as well. It’s a great Schadenfreude fix, and you may even wind up feeling some empathy for your peers (or not). The site, and the third party applications it has spawned, have proven to be extremely popular.

Now, FMyLife disallowed paid applications and advertising when its API launched in February 2009, but the company has been inconsistent about enforcing those rules. Some developers have offered their applications with advertising for some time. And FMyLife has even approved the use of advertising and premium versions in some cases, without anticipating just how popular these applications could become. As it turns out, some of these applications have turned into big businesses in their own right, and some have proven to be drains on FMyLife’s servers. Rather than kill off all applications that are monetizing the service, FMyLife has decided it wants a cut.

Here’s how FMyLife co-founder Didier Guedj is describing the changes to the policy:

The Fmylife API was created to spread FML stories on the internet for free, in the spirit of sharing. However, in recent months, several developers made a very big business by selling FML’s applications or by advertising on it. This has led us to change our policy:
1) Access to the Fmylife API remains free for those using it for non-business purposes.
2) We will now ask that those who are using Fmylife for profit share their revenue at a fair 50/50.

The recently policy changes are directly related to a conflict FMyLife has had with Enormego, a developer that built two applications for the iPhone: “F MyLife and” “F MyLife Pro”, (the free version was briefly ranked as the top application on the App Store) . Here’s how Guedj describes the situation:

Enormego created two applications for iPhones (”F-MyLife” et “F-MyLife Pro”) which generate consequential revenue (through the sale of the apps, plus advertising) because they got more than a million hits per day since April 2009. These two iPhone applications only work thanks to our website, its concept and content. It was agreed with Enormego on July that any revenue generated by these apps would be split 50/50 (no contract was drawn, just via an email exchange). Enormego has never paid to Fmylife any money, and has not replied to any of our Emails since September. After several warnings without any answers, we decided to cut off their access to the API function. Since, they have been pirating the content of our website to feed their applications. We then asked them to stop. They did, only a few days ago.

We’ve reached out to Enormego for their side of the story.

FMyLife’s motivations for implementing a more restrictive API are obvious: they want to make money off the site they’ve built. At the same time, the FMyLife service has certainly benefited from the efforts of these third party developers — you can be sure plenty of people who downloaded these mobile apps are also frequent visitors of the service’s homepage. FMyLife can do what they want with their data, but it’s clear that they should have been consistently enforcing their policies from the start. Some applications have already been discontinued (or removed FMyLife support) since the change.

All of that said, it does sound like FMyLife would be willing to work something out if a developer has already built an application using the API and objects strongly to the changes. From Guedj:

For new applications (premium or ads), we explain the new rule to their developer and they have the choice to share the future income, or they don’t have access to the API.

We’ve never disabled an application (except Enormego’s) because these developers work hard too, and we respect their work a lot. We talk with them, explain the situation and all of them have agreed easily (for now) with our new conditions.

Image via sjdvda on userlogos.

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The Unofficial Google Text-To-Speech API

Last month Google unveiled enhancements to Google Translate. Among the new features was a simple text-to-speech function. You can try it out, or watch this video to see how it works (skip to 0:45).

There’s no official API for the text-to-speech service. But Weston Ruter noticed that anyone can access the service in the same way Google does: “Looking at the Firebug Net panel for where this TTS data was coming from, I saw that the speech audio is in MP3 format and is queried via a simple HTTP GET (REST) request: http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=text”

Translation: just change the URL to whatever you want it to say and you’ll get back a MP3 file. Example: copy the URL http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?q=I+love+techcrunch into your browser.

This is English only for now, and its limited to 100 characters. But unless Google shuts this down, third party applications can now use this in any creative way they want. Have at it.

Via Ajaxian.

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Layar Adds Foursquare, Beatlemania and Civic Projects to its AR Offerings

Augmented reality browser Layar recently launched it’s v3 publishing site chock full of developer tools. The launch signifies more than 1000 active developers being given the chance to showcase their 3rd party applications. By exposing this immersive platform to outsiders, the company is solidifying its title as a pioneer in the “future of augmented reality”. In a recent blog post Layar outlined 5 cases to demonstrate the power of the platform. In addition to some of the company’s earlier 3rd party releases, below are some of our favorite layars.

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1. Civic Projects and Politics: A Netherlands-based Provast created a layar where users can see the final plans for the currently unfinished construction of the Markthal Rotterdam. Meanwhile developer Andree Toonk worked with NetKnowledge.ca on a slightly more political project. His layar gives information on all of the projects that receive funding from the Canadian government as part of Canada’s Economic Action Plan.

2. History and Landmarks: Those visiting Liverpool and London can walk down music’s memory lane with a visual tour of Beatles-related points of interest. Layar developer Augmentedreality.co.uk created a layar where users can follow the exploits of the Fab Four. Meanwhile a number of developers have looked to historical landmarks as inspirations for their work. Similar to Junaio’s editable AR app, BuildAR lets you create your own points of interest and customize your layars to suit your needs.

3. Social: Dutch Squio.nl engineer Johannes la Poutré has a number of social applications for Layar. Similar to TwittARound, Tweeps Around queries Twitter for posts and marks the exact location that the post is given on an augmented reality layar. In his Foursquare application Poutré gives users access to the latest Foursquare venues and tips.

4. Advertising and Inventory: In addition to obvious product finding and advertising-based layars, Masternaut created a layar that allows users to track vehicles and assets across cities. Meanwhile developer Bastian Voight created a real time ship tracker for Vesseltracker with a layar that displays the position of moored ships in the world’s largest ports.

5. Specialized Reference: Developer Pablo Garcia created the Elipse Golf layar where users can find the exact location of a golf hole and tee up for success. Smallroomstudios.net developer Patrick O’Reilly focused on transportation with both a Dublin bus location layar and a layar for Dublin’s public bicycle program. Other layars also exist to locate hospitals, apartments for rent and wireless hotspots.

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Salesforce.com and Adobe: Applications Enriching The Platfom

Salesforce.com and Adobe have entered a partnership that allows developers to create rich Internet and desktop applications in the cloud. The partnership is just one more example of how an ecosystem is developing between Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendors and application developers.

In recent weeks Salesforce.com has partnered with a host of companies, including Box.net last week and an integration with Cisco earlier this month.

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The partnership with Adobe means that users may create enterprise applications on the Force.com platform.

Developers may create applications that are launched through a browser using Adobe Flash technology or on the desktop using Adobe Air.

This is intriguing. We’ve seen a number of consumer application developed using Adobe Air, including Tweetdeck, the rich Twitter application that has grown immensely in popularity. The partnership with Salesforce.com means that developers may create similar applications through the integration of third-party API’s that may provide another means for enterprise customers to create their own social applications.

We know there are any variety of ways to create applications for the enterprise but the relationship between Adobe and Saleforce.com demonstrates how easy it is becoming to create rich applications for specific, business purposes.

The simplicity is evident in the way developers create applications using Adobe Flash Builder. It’s a as simple as drag and drop to add such features as calendars, grids, charts, buttons and all the other elements to make the user interface compelling for the user.

On the desktop, the data is synced to the Salesforce.com environment via an API, creating an integrated platform for users.

Remember how third-party applications accelerated Facebook’s growth? A similar model is emerging in the SasS world. Applications are making SaaS platfoms rich integrated environments, tailored to the business user. Development is far easier than ever before, making it possible to create tools that can enrich the experience for the user by viewing data in ways that helps them take faster action without the need for an IT administrator or analyst to present it in a way that makes sense.

The release preview for Adobe Flash Builder is available at force.com. The product will be fully available in the first half of 2010.

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