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Posts Tagged ‘Urls’

Brizzly Releases iPhone App

For power users, the Twitter website is often just a thing of the past. We’ve moved on to third party interfaces with multiple columns, special user list navigation, search, and so on. But what about the novice user that wants something more than Twitter.com?

For that, there’s Brizzly, a web-based Twitter client that today is announcing the release of its awaited iPhone app, along with a neat feature or two.

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The web-based version of Brizzly takes the Twitter stream and opens it up for the average user. It expands shortened links into full URLs, making it easier to know what you’re clicking on, and turns links to YouTube videos or images into just that – embedded images and videos. In a way, it takes the guess work out of Twitter.

Today, the company is releasing a full-featured iPhone app that was built off of the skeleton of Birdfeed, the company acquired by Brizzly last fall. The app is a simple and doesn’t offer some of the opening up of Twitter that you find on the website, but that would be difficult for an iPhone app to do, with it’s limited real estate. Links are shortened and images hidden behind links, but that’s as expected. Still, it handles multiple accounts, each of which you can view in its own stream. It also supports lists, mentions and DMs – all the standard stuff you would expect.

As we mentioned the last time we wrote about Brizzly, when the company added Facebook to its stream, the tool tries to make the experience of twitter simple for the non-geek. In that way, it interprets and explains Twitter Trends, the hashtags that are most popular at a given time. The Brizzly staff looks at hashtags and writes up a quick little blurb that explains what the Trends are that day and why. The iPhone app prominently contains these guides as a separate tab called “News”.

Brizzly is expanding on this trend explanation feature with its launch of the Brizzly Guide on its website. The Guide gives each of these trends its own page, which is a “permanent source for up-to-date information on topics people are talking about,” it says in its press release. In addition giving these explanations a permanent home, Brizzly has acquired WikiRank, a visualization web application based on Wikipedia data. It will be “integrating WikiRank technology into the Brizzly Guide” the company says in its press release. We can only wonder what will come of that, but it sounds interesting.

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Chomp Closes In On 300,000 Users, Launches App Review Site And Chomp Connect

When Chomp launched eight weeks ago in the iTunes store, it launched as an app for reviewing other iPhone apps. The app shows you a stream of realtime reviews, which you can filter by everyone or just your Facebook freinds. The app is showing some traction and should hit 300,000 active monthly users sometime tomorrow, according to co-founder Ben Keighran.

While it started out as an app, today Chomp launched a complimentary Website with full app search capabilities and links for each app. There, users can also see the stream of reviews, as well as dedicated pages for each app and vanity URLs for each reviewer. Developers can now link to the Chomp reviews directly from inside their apps using Chomp Connect, which also launched today in private beta. Chomp Connect lets developers add Chomp review buttons right inside their apps without forcing to go anywhere else.

Keighran contends that reviews on iTunes tend to have a more negative bias because people are prompted to submit a review every time they delete an app. With Chomp Connect, developers can ask their most engaged users to submit reviews.

He hopes to make Chomp a social alternative to iTunes reviews. By driving reviews straight from their apps, developers can promote their apps in the Chomp review stream. The more reviews, the more often it appears in the stream.

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MySpace Mail Now Has Over 15 Million Users

Last July, MySpace decided to get into the email business and launched MySpace Mail. According to the latest data we just received from MySpace, this initiative has turned out to be a success for the social network. In total, over 15 million MySpace users now use the service to receive and send messages. MySpace smartly coupled its users’ email addresses to their vanity URLs, which surely helped the adoption of the service.

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Thanks to this connection to MySpace’s vanity URLs, all of MySpace’s users have access to what is very likely to be their preferred email handle, even if they haven’t started to use the service yet. MySpace also offers unlimited file storage for MySpace Mail users.

Exceeded Expectations

According to MySpace’s Rajit Marwah, who headed the launch of MySpace Mail, “Hitting the 15 million mark exceeded our expectations – at launch we set a goal of 10 million accounts created within a year – we surpassed this goal in less than a quarter.”

Some Perspective

Of course, it’s important to put these numbers into perspective. Most email services don’t release very detailed statistics about their user-base, but according to ComScore, Gmail had about 30 million unique visitors in February 2009 and Hotmail had around 45 million visitors. It’s also worth noting that the number of unique users to MySpace has declined over the last year. According to the latest data, however, MySpace has been able to stop this decline and the numbers have now stabilized.

At the time of MySpace Mail’s launch, the site’s messaging system accounted for about 20% of MySpace’s traffic. Chances are that the increased popularity of MySpace mail is helping the service to stabilize its user numbers, though chances are that it isn’t bringing a lot of new users to the service either.

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Facebook Launches Live Counts & Stats for Sharing Widget

Joining the ranks of tools such as Tweetmeme and Digg widgets, Facebook’s Share button will now be showing the number of users who share items in real time – and with a new set of analytics features.

Facebook Platform product manager Mark Kinsey writes on the Facebook Developers blog, “Today we’re making the sharing experience on Facebook and off even richer by launching the next version of Facebook Share, with a live counter, as well as new ways to measure how content is being shared on Facebook.”

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While the cosmetic change is a nice feature for end users, the real news here is the analytics on the back end. Content creators and site owners can access the data associated with each shared item, including how often users share the link, how often they “like” shared content, how often they comment on the shared content on Facebook, and how often users click through from the shared item on Facebook to the original website.

“You can do this programmatically by calling the links.getStats API method, or you can run an FQL query on the link_stat table,” writes Kinsey. “By giving you access to this data for all URLs, we hope you’ll create tools to help analyze and understand how users interact with your content on Facebook.”

The Facebook post further notes that Techmeme, bit.ly, and awe.sm have already put this data to use in analyzing traffic and monitoring user attention.

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Wolfram Alpha’s API is free, but using it costs

Lots of Web services provide a formal API that allows structured data to be obtained for display on a separate website or via a desktop app. Many of these, however, come with certain display requirements, which allow the service provider to get a bit of free advertising out of the data that’s shared. The folks behind Wolfram Alpha, a search and computation service, have apparently decided advertising isn’t enough. The company has provided a public API for using its service, but users will have to pay fees that add up to a minimum of over two cents a search.

The API itself is documented in a 34-page PDF. Formatting a URL to perform a query is very straightforward, and the service returns the results as XML. The XML contains individual “pods” that correspond to the different clusters of information that appear on the results pages that Alpha generates. The results can be sent back asynchronously (additional URLs are provided for pods that haven’t been completed yet), and include image data and formatted HTML.

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Cartoon: The Worm Has Turned

Last week’s flurry of Twitter DM spam from hacked or phished accounts wasn’t the first instance of that and won’t be the last.

As long as people are willing to trust their Twitter log-in information to third parties – and don’t look carefully at URLs before they log into websites – and as long as a small number of bad actors want to pee in the social media swimming pool, this kind of thing will continue happening.

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And it’s not just the log-in-here-and-we-will-steal-your-password.com’s of the world you have to worry about. Legitimate third-party services whose security isn’t up to snuff could be compromised, and your credentials could be stolen from them. Twitter’s use of OAuth is a big step forward… although the rash of Mobster World spam shows that that isn’t a perfect solution either.

Apparently there’s no substitute for ruthlessly and constantly policing your own feed, thoroughly investigating services before you sign up for them, double-checking the URL every time you are about to enter info into a form, and regularly purging your OAuth settings of services you no longer use.

Also, to be safe, change your password regularly… you don’t have to be obsessive about it: every three hours or so should be enough. And because erring on the side of caution is always a good idea, fake your own suicide and change your identity at least once a year.

And you thought Twitter was going to be fun? Slacker.

More Noise to Signal.

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A Couple Little Nifty Facebook And Twitter Username Tweaks

So, you remember those Facebook vanity names? Yeah, well starting today they’re even more useful. That’s because you now use them to sign in to your Facebook account.

One of the most annoying things about logging into Facebook was that it still required you to use an email address as your username. The problem is that most of the time those are much longer than regular user names. So this move to the vanity URLs is a nice one. On the downside, this may make it slightly easier for hackers to crack open your account as usernames are public while most email addresses probably weren’t.

Not to let Facebook take all the username glory today, Twitter also rolled out a small tweak. Now, your @NAME will work in your Twitter URL. So, for example, if I direct people to twitter.com/@parislemon, that works just as it would without the “@”. I have no idea why they did this, but I have to believe there is some reason.

Earlier this week, Facebook rolled out its update to let you tag friends in your status messages using the @ syntax. Of course, there still is no real interoperable way to connect Twitter usernames and Facebook usernames, as that might be asking too much from this growing rivalry.

[thanks Peter]

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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Nambu Wants $80K-$100K For Tr.im, Considers Shutting Down Its Twitter Client

Earlier today, we reported on Bit.ly offering Tr.im parent Nambu Network, a couple of ways to ensure all its links don’t die when the service stop supporting them at the end of the year. Nambu rejected those, as it is instead looking to sell. Now we know the price it’s asking for: As of right now, they’re seeking something between $80,000 and $100,000, three separate sources have told us.

Not surprisingly, all three are balking at that price. After all, the main reason Nambu is giving for folding Tr.im is that it can’t compete against Bit.ly when Twitter is actively promoting and using it as its default link shortener. Still, several other parties have reached out to us to say that they are interested in purchasing the service (though they did not appear to know the price tag).

We’re also hearing that Nambu Network is also considering shutting down its Nambu Twitter client, again citing Twitter’s preferential treatment of others. Currently, Nambu has a desktop and iPhone client.

Again, Tr.im URLs are going to be supported through the end of the year, so there is still plenty of time for a buyer to step in and scoop up the service. But with so much negativity surrounding it now, and not great numbers to begin with, will anyone?

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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