Twitter Launches Embedded Tweets, but there are Flaws
Ever since this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin Twitter has been quite busy lately with acquisitions, rolling out new services, and launching their own Twitter clients. Well today Twitter took another step forward and launched a new tool that allows users to embed a tweet into a Web page or blog post. The new tool, Blackbird Pie, is a website that will create an embeddable tweet once a user has entered the tweet’s URL in the field provided.
Here’s How It Works
1. Copy the tweet’s URL you wish to embed by clicking the tweet’s timestamp. (i.e. about 21 hours ago)
2. Visit Blackbird Pie, paste the tweet’s URL in the field provided, and then click “Bake it.”
3. If you’re satisfied with the preview, select and copy the code at the bottom.
4. Visit your Web page or blog post and paste the code into the desired location.
Done!
My Foursquare Buttons, Stickers, and More
There really isn’t much to write about in this particular post other than I recently received some Foursquare “swag.” About a week ago I asked Dennis Crowley for some branded merchandise so I could help promote the company when I’m in Atlanta. Promote. Foursquare. Atlanta. Awesome. That’s pretty much how the chat went between us.
Shortly after our chat Dennis was nice enough to hook me up by shipping out some stuff so I could pass it around inside my circle of friends as well as share it with potential “Foursquare-ers.” I’ll be keeping a few items for myself of course.
How Mayorships are Awarded on Foursquare?
Recently there has been a lot of confusion about how mayorships are awarded on Foursquare. Hopefully this blog post will help clear up some of the confusion and provide users with a better understanding of how mayorship battles are won.
After doing some digging, I have noticed that more than 90% of the blogs, and even a few websites, I have read are feeding wrong information to its readers about how mayorships are awarded on Foursquare. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, mayorship information isn’t explained very well on the Foursquare website. According to Foursquare’s “Help” and “Learn More” Web pages, mayorships are awarded “If you’ve been to a place more than anyone else.” Although this information is posted on the Foursquare website, it’s not how the algorithm works. Since there has been a lot of questions surrounding this topic, I decided to send a tweet to Foursquare about this issue so they could clarify how mayorships are awarded on their website.
Foursquare Superuser Status
Recently, the location-based service, Foursquare, crossed the one million user mark and since then they have not looked back. The company is growing their user base at a nice clip and as more people use the social media service, the more venues are created. While this is absolutely encouraged by Foursquare since it helps expand the service, it could lead to a lot of duplicate venues.
This is when a “Superuser” comes into play. Foursquare Superusers are users who are very active with the service and are handpicked by the Foursquare staff. These users are usually people who have checked into a lot of venues and spent time creating new venues. Superusers play an important role in the Foursquare service because they improve the service by editing venues, merging duplicate venues, closing fake venues, adding aliases, adding useful tags, removing incorrect tags, and ultimately keeping the database nice and clean.
Foursquare Hits One Million Users… or Not
So today I jumped the gun and congratulated CEO Dennis Crowley and the Foursquare team for hitting one million users when in actuality the company fell a bit short of that milestone today. Whoops! I assumed Foursquare was using the sign up user ID as the official count to determine the one millionth user, however, Dennis Crowley corrected me and let me know that the user count was only at 983,000 the last time he checked.
After Dennis was kind enough to share that information with me I decided to do a quick calculation. According to my math, the user ID count should be at approximately 1019000 in order for Foursquare to hit one million registered users. Foursquare sees thousands of new user signups each day so Friday looks like it will be the day Foursquare crosses the milestone and joins the One Million Member Social Media Club. Well, there is no such club, but it’s not a bad idea.
Foursquare Day: Inside the Numbers
Yesterday marked the first global social media holiday in history, Foursquare Day. If you missed it, Foursquare, the location-based social media service, announced last month that every April 16th will be Foursquare Day, a social media holiday. This particular day was chosen because April is the 4th month of the year and 4^2 = 16. Simple enough, yeah?
Twitter’s Chirp Conference 2010: Day 1 Recap
So I just finished watching the live stream of the Chirp Conference and it was very interesting stuff. If you’re not familiar with the conference, Chirp is Twitter’s first conference for app developers. It’s a two day conference held at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Today’s speakers included Evan Williams, Biz Stone, Ryan Sarver, Dick Costolo, and a few others. The topics that were covered included OAuth, streaming, geolocation, business strategies, mobile integration, product roadmap, third-party developers, monetization, and Twitter’s @anywhere platform which just went live a few hours ago.
Co-founder Biz Stone kicked off the event with some key statistics about the company. Biz revealed that Twitter now has 105 million registered users, or to be exact, 105,779,710 registered users since its launch in 2006. He went on to say that Twitter is also adding 300,000 new users each day and about 60% of these users are coming from outside the U.S. According to my math, that’s 180,000 new signups coming from outside the U.S. and 120,000 coming within the U.S each day. While these are very impressive numbers, I have to wonder how many people sign up for multiple Twitter accounts, how many users are currently active, and how many signups are spam users or bots. Nonetheless, to learn more about all the statistics revealed at Chirp visit Chirp Conference – 2010: Twitter Statistics Revealed.
Chirp Conference – 2010: Twitter Statistics Revealed
Kicking off Chirp, Twitter’s developers conference, co-founder Biz Stone took the stage this morning and revealed some surprising statistics about the company and its growth. Take a look at some of those statistics listed below.
The Official Foursquare Day Badge
Foursquare, the popular location-based social media service, made it official last month when the start-up declared April 16th Foursquare Day. Why April 16th? We’ll, it’s the 4th month of the year and since 4^2 = 16 there is really no other day on the calendar that is fitting. Foursquare has been growing at a rapid pace in the social media arena and three days from now it will gain even more popularity. April 16, 2010 will be the first social media holiday in history and will be celebrated across the globe in cities such as Beijing, Sydney, London, New York City, and San Francisco to name a few.
Foursquare Day is not one of those holidays when we all share gifts so let’s get that out of the way first. Instead, it’s a day of social media fun, discounts at participating venues, special events, sharing information, and unlocking badges like the official “4Sq Day 2010” badge. That’s right, there is an official badge for this holiday, but I’ll come back to this in a minute. So, if you are not sure what events are taking place in your city, feel free to visit 4SqDay.com to view the list of participating cities. If you are interested in hosting an event or adding a special on this day you can do so by filling out the form here.
TwitPic Implements OAuth and Gets a New Look
TwitPic, the largest photo sharing service on Twitter, posted a tweet to their Twitter account tonight announcing that they had just implemented OAuth as the new login method for their site. If you’re not familiar with the OAuth protocol, how it works, or how it affects you as a user, here is the short version.
OAuth is an open protocol that allows a user to share content stored on one site with another site without having to fork over the login credentials. In other words, you no longer have to provide TwitPic with your username and password to login to their site. Instead, you will need to click the “Sign in with Twitter” button located in the top right corner, when prompted enter your username and password on Twitter.com, and then click the “Allow” button to grant access to TwitPic. This allows TwitPic to connect to your Twitter account so it can access your data, but at no time will TwitPic receive your username and password. To learn more about OAuth visit their Web site here.
