Twitter Founders: 2010 Is About Business

by Ed Sutherland on January 1, 2010

What were your New Year’s resolutions? Lose some weight, read more? For the creators of Twitter, the goal for this year is turning an obsession into a revenue-generating enterprise. “We need to build a business out of Twitter – that needs to start happening in 2010,” Biz Stone tell the Financial Times.

To reach that goal, Twitter will double its workforce from 100 after doubling it in 2009. The co-founder supplied a rather generalized answer to just how it plans to get serious: “deliver tweets that are interesting and relevant to you that you didn’t know you wanted to see till you saw them”
[Read More…]

{ 0 comments }

Blogging Becomes So 2009

by Ed Sutherland on January 1, 2010

It’s that time of year, when prognosticators and pundits dust off the crystal ball to predict the trends for the New Year. In the case of the business of blogging, several interesting trends are in sight for 2010. In no particular order, we start with the banishment of ‘blog.’

Remember when we’d go to the record store to buy music and the book store to find our reading material? The same can be said for ‘blog.’ It started as short-hand for a Web Log, then transmuted into both a noun and a verb umbrella indicating short online writing. However, as more and more people turn online for news and information, those blogs quickly became more than the inane rambling of someone inordinately occupied with lint, to disseminating facts. Couple that with the decline of newspapers and you need a better term to describe the wide range of online material. For that reason, I suggest the following: site. This connects with a similar prediction from our friends at the Inquisitr: five major blogs will be in the top news sites for 2010.
[Read More…]

{ 0 comments }

TMZ To Launch Sports News Site

by Ed Sutherland on December 27, 2009

Celebrity news site TMZ Sunday night confirmed it will launch a website focused on sports. TMZ’s Harvey Levin said there is little difference between Hollywood and well-known athletes.

“I don’t really see a difference between a sports star and a celebrity,” Levin told The New York Times. When word of Tiger Woods’ one-car auto accident happened, TMZ’s ears perked-up. “We immediately jumped on that and said we have to dig deeper,” Levin told the paper’s media reporter Brian Stelter.
[Read More…]

{ 1 comment }

Twitter Co-Founder Preps Mobile Payment Startup For Early 2010

by Ed Sutherland on December 27, 2009

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is preparing to launch Square, a mobile payment system for small businesses. But can Dorsey do for mobile payments what he’s done for social-networking?

Square, set to launch the first quarter of 2010, markets a hardware dongle for a cell phone’s audio jack. Rather than small companies obtaining an expensive merchant account to process credit card transactions, Square allows shops to “piggyback” on its account. For its trouble, Square will charge a fee from small businesses and a fee from credit card companies.

The service is now in a testing phase with around 300 small businesses in St. Louis, San Francisco and New York.

The similarity between Twitter’s revenue plans is eerie. Square co-founder Jim McKelvey told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch the company is waiting for a signal before setting a course.
[Read More…]

{ 0 comments }

Twitter Pursues Location-Tracking With Mixer Labs Acquisition

by Ed Sutherland on December 27, 2009

Mixer Labs, Twitter's first move into location-based tweets.

Twitter’s recent acquisition of Mixer Labs for its GeoAPI location-based technology prompts a number of questions. Will location become the hot subject of 2010? How will the other social-media giant Facebook respond?

Although Twitter is mum on what it paid for Mixer Labs (founded by two former Google employees), the San Francisco company recently said this acquisition was just the first of more to come. “Our efforts in this area have just begun,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced.
[Read More…]

{ 0 comments }

Technorati to Become a Blog?

September 6, 2009

Technorati, the blog search engine with an identity crisis, is now set to become a blog. In an e-mail, Technorati said it would unveil its revamped mission in October. Technorati says it wants to feature original blogging content.

Read the full article →

Bit.ly Creates A Four-Character Clone: j.mp

September 4, 2009

For Twitter users fighting the 140-character limit, URL shorteners were the perfect answer. Now Twitter’s default URL shortener bit.ly has cloned itself and dropped two characters. Now bit.ly users need only type j.mp.

Read the full article →

Did Google Kill RSS?

September 4, 2009

New numbers seem to fly in the face of current wisdom. Blogging still beats Twitter in terms of benefit for employees, as well as customers. A survey of 1,700 executives found 43 percent felt blogs provided significant benefit for internal use. An even greater number – 51 percent – of business leaders said blogs benefitted outreach to customers and clients.

Read the full article →

Google’s Costolo Becomes Twitter COO

September 4, 2009
Thumbnail image for Google’s Costolo Becomes Twitter COO

Twitter picks Google exec and former Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo as its Chief Operating Officer. The move prompts speculation the microblogging service is preparing for a buyout by Mountain View.

Read the full article →

StockTwits Unveils StockTwits Desktop

September 1, 2009
Thumbnail image for StockTwits Unveils StockTwits Desktop

In a sign of its growing popularity, StickTwits Tuesday launched StockTwits Desktop. The Adobe Air-based application employs the familiar TweetDeck appearance.

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries