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!

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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.

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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.

  • Twitter now has 105,779,710 registered users
  • 300,000 new users sign up each day
  • Approximately 60% of all new signups are coming from outside the U.S.
  • Twitter receives 180 million unique visitors each month
  • 60% of all tweets come from third-party apps
  • 75% of Twitter traffic comes from third-party apps
  • Twitter now has 175 employees
  • There are 600 million search queries on Twitter each day
  • There are more than 100,000 Twitter apps on the market
  • Twitter gets 3 billion requests each day through its API
  • 37% of active Twitter users use their mobile phone to send tweets
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    Does the Twitter for BlackBerry App Still Need Work?

    Now that the official Twitter for BlackBerry® app has been officially released to the public it’s worth revisiting this topic to tackle some of the features that need improvement. In February I reviewed the first Twitter for BlackBerry® beta and shared my thoughts about some of the nice features it possessed as well as some of the features that needed improvement. When the second beta was released in early April it was apparent that Twitter and RIM put their heads together to develop an amazing app. The app included new features, improvements to existing features, and the overall speed of the app was superb. However, while the latest beta was very impressive, there were still existing features that were untouched such as the retweet (RT) feature and photo service options.

    Will these two features see any improvement?

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    Who Will Twitter Acquire Next, TwitPic?

    Twitter was quite busy today making a huge splash in mobile. Early this morning Twitter announced that the hotly anticipated Twitter for BlackBerry app was available for download. This was great news for BlackBerry users, but Twitter didn’t stop there with the good news. Twitter made their way back to the podium tonight to announce they have just agreed to acquire Atebits, the company responsible for developing the popular Tweetie iPhone app and Mac desktop client. According to Twitter CEO Evan Williams, Tweetie will be renamed “Twitter for iPhone” and will be available free of charge in the iTunes AppStore in the coming weeks.

    While Twitter has been working closely with RIM over the last year to deliver the official Twitter for BlackBerry app, the move to acquire Atebis comes as a surprise and only two days after Twitter investor and Union Square Ventures principal, Fred Wilson, made a controversial blog post. In short, Wilson stated that he would like to see less apps that fill holes in the Twitter platform and more killer apps emerge in areas such as social gaming, verticals, enterprise, discovery, and analytics. Wilson’s blog post raised concerns among third-party developers because some felt that Twitter would now become their biggest competitor in mobile and desktop application development. Shortly after Wilson posted, he felt it was necessary to respond to an article written by Silicon Alley Insider that summarized his blog post. Wilson wanted to clarify a few things he had written in his post so in a response to the article he said, “that post was my work, not Twitter’s work. While I am on the board of Twitter, I don’t work there and I don’t speak for them.” It’s pure speculation at this point whether or not Twitter was aware of Wilson’s post prior to its release, but after the acquisition of Atebits it sure seems like Fred Wilson knows the game plan at Twitter.

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    TweetDeck Develops an App for BlackBerry

    I’ve been using TweetDeck as my desktop client for quite a while now, and in my opinion, it is by far the best social media client on the market. The ability to manage multiple social media accounts such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more all within one desktop client makes the social media experience a dream.

    Although I’m not an iPhone user, I had the luxury of playing around with TweetDeck for iPhone and I believe it trumps any other social media app available for iPhone. Unfortunately, BlackBerry users have not had the luxury of enjoying the TweetDeck experience, but hopefully that will change shortly.

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