Facebook

One of Twitter’s strongest features is the @reply, where you can direct a message to someone else on Twitter by typing @ and then their username. Facebook, which is trying to emulate some of Twitter’s best features, doesn’t have anything similar in the News Feed. In short, it’s not easy to have a public conversation.

Very soon, that will no longer be the case. Facebook just introduced the ability to tag your friends in status updates. What makes this really interesting though is how you tag people: Using the @ symbol. Facebook has just turned on their own version of Twitter’s @Mentions feature that will be rolled out over the next few weeks.

Here is Facebook engineer Tom Occhino’s explanation of the new feature:

Now, when you are writing a status update and want to add a friend’s name to something you are posting, just include the “@” symbol beforehand. As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications and Pages. Soon, you’ll be able to tag friends from applications as well. The “@” symbol will not be displayed in the published status update or post after you’ve added your tags.

Friends you tag in your status updates will receive a notification and a Wall post linking them to your post. They also will have the option to remove tags of themselves from your posts. We hope that tagging your status updates and others posts from the Publisher will enable you to share in a more meaningful and engaging way, and connect with even more people. We’re rolling this feature out over the course of the next few weeks, so you may not see the new feature just yet.

Summary: The @ symbol now works just like Twitter, and not just for users, but for groups and fan pages as well.

Facebook has just stepped deep into Twitter’s territory. How long until you can see your @reply history? We’re betting not very long at all.

via BREAKING: Facebook Introduces @Mentions in Status Updates.

In July, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) embraced the stream in a new beta (for both Windows and Mac) and started moving beyond simple IMs. You can now see your Facebook and Twitter feeds, along with AIM buddy updates and feeds from other services.

The problem was that the Twitter and Facebook feeds were only one way. You could read them, but you couldn’t send updates from AIM to the other services. A few weeks ago that changed, and AIM status updates can now appear as updates in Facebook and Twitter as well. There also appears to be a way to comment, or respond, inline to other people’s messages, although I am having trouble getting that feature to work for some reason.

Going both ways turns AIM into a full-fledged Twitter/Facebook client. It is a big deal for AIM because now it can be used as both a private and public IM client. While stream readers such as TweetDeck and Seesmic already have two-way messaging capabilities with Twitter and Facebook, Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger are still stuck in Read-Only Land.

The AIM Beta doesn’t have the Twitter integration working perfectly yet. Some updates and comments seem to never get through, while others do just fine. On the Facebook side, it is working much smoother. But AIM is making the right moves in an attempt to become an all-in-one instant communications hub. AOL’s new communications chief, Brad Garlinghouse, should keep pushing in this direction.

via AIM Now Goes Both Ways (With Twitter And Facebook) .

Open Source

Tristan Louis gives weight to new term that I like a lot: fauxpen. Faux in French means “false” or “fake”. So fauxpen means fake open. There has always been a lot of that going around, but since the world of tech inevitably contains more of everything, there’s more fauxpen stuff than ever. In his post Tristan issues a fresh warning about some of what he calls “a venus flytrap of technology”. His definitions:

• Fauxpenness: Calling a system or platform open while it is, when more closely scrutinized, under the tight control of its provider.

• Fauxpen system (or fauxpen platform): a system or platform that claims to be open but, upon closer examination, isn’t. (continue reading…)

Well, it looks like Twitter will actually do it.

In an interview with VentureBeat on Thursday, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone elaborated on the company’s goal to put out a revenue model before the end of the year. He said that yes, it will involve offering paid accounts to businesses that use the microblogging platform for marketing, customer relations, publicity, and what-have-you. That’s something Twitter has been hinting at for about a year now.

There’s not a whole lot of detail available. But paid accounts will definitely involve statistics and analytics that aren’t available through Twitter’s existing application program interface (API), and possibly a whole separate “commercial API” for business-related applications. This adds to a move earlier this year in which Twitter started rolling out an account verification process for prominent users.

In fact, Stone told Marshall, the first test phase of these accounts is already under way with a few companies. Considering Twitter’s status as marketing heaven, this is probably a product that will sell quite well. And since Twitter, which has raised $55 million in venture funding, has yet to turn a profit, that’s good news.

Marshall points out something important: “It might be hard to tease out who is using the service professionally and who is using it for personal reasons, and then charge them for it. So the idea is to build a set of features that people are willing to pay for.” Stone made it pretty clear in the interview that ordinary Twitter users won’t be forced to pay up.

Another interesting tidbit: Stone said that Twitter had been looking to acquire social-network aggregator FriendFeed, which was picked up by Facebook earlier this month.

Many people have asked us to make Facebook and Twitter work better together for those times when they want to share their content as widely as possible. We agree. Over the next few days, we will be releasing a feature that allows administrators of Facebook Pages to publish their Facebook updates to their Twitter accounts automatically. This will only link Facebook Pages to Twitter, not your individual profile.

Public figures, musicians, businesses and organizations of all types who’ve created Facebook Pages often want to share a status update, a photo or an event with as many of their supporters as possible. Celebrities may want to share personal news or charities may want to put out calls for help to both their Facebook fans and their Twitter followers, all at the same time.

via Publishing to Twitter from Facebook Pages | Facebook.

Google Maps

Location is one of the features that a lot of the Twitter apps tack on using things like the iPhone’s geolocation services. It’s a cool feature, but not enough people use it. But they are likely to now that Twitter is adding native support for it with a new API.

At first, Twitter is releasing this as a developer preview, co-founder Biz Stone notes on the blog today. This means that third-party apps will be the first to have access to the feature. But Stone also says that support for location on Twitter’s mobile and regular site will come as well. And it’s important to note that the feature will be opt-in, meaning that by default it will be off for users, but if they want to use it, they can turn it on.

And they should, because this is potentially a very powerful new feature. Just imagine if a friend tweets something and you can see exactly where they are when they do it. There are no shortage of location-based services attempting to take off right now, but Twitter already has a huge user base and depending on how developers use this new API, Twitter location could replace or bolster many of them. And that’s good news because the main problem that many of these location-based services have is a lack of users.

Just imagine if a service like Foursquare was able to send your actual location to Twitter alongside the name of the place you are at. That would save the people who follow you on Twitter but don’t use Foursquare the hassle of looking up the location of the place you are at if they want to meet up with you. It’s potentially powerful stuff.

Are there privacy implications? Sure, but that’s why it’s important that this feature is opt-in, at least for now.

via Twitter Can Now Know Where You Tweet .

careerbuilder.com

We all know that employers are getting savvy to social networking sites and the information we share online. But what you may not know is that a recently conducted survey shows that nearly 1 in 2 companies are doing their online due diligence for prospective job candidates.

This according to research firm Harris Interactive, who was commissioned by CareerBuilder.com and surveyed 2,667 HR professionals, finding that 45% of them use social networking sites to research job candidates, with an additional 11% planning to implement social media screening in the very near future.

According to the study, “thirty-five percent of employers reported they have found content on social networking sites that caused them not to hire the candidate.” The big lessons you can learn are quite obvious, but bear repeating. Provocative photos and info are a bad idea (53% of employers won’t hire you), shared content with booze and drugs is also highly dangerous (44% dismissed candidates for this reason), and bad-mouthing former employers is very risky behavior (35% reported this a the main reason they didn’t hire a candidate).

We also think it interesting that emoticons, those friendly smiley faces you see everywhere, are actually big no-nos in direct communication. 14% of surveyed employers disregard candidates for that single lapse in judgment alone.

Though this may seem as a big downer for those of us who are oversharers, the reality is that there’s still opportunity to use your social presence to land that job. The survey also found that, “eighteen percent of employers reported they have found content on social networking sites that caused them to hire the candidate.”

Just over a year ago, Twitter acquired a small startup, Summize, a search engine for tweets. Once the deal was done, Twitter launched Twitter Search, and the real-time search revolution began.Because of that acquisition, real-time search has exploded. Twitter Search and trending topics have become a staple of the Twitterverse. It has also become one of the top tools for tracking major world events i.e. the #IranElection crisis.For the last year, Twitter has had no major rival in real-time search. But last week, that all changed when Facebook launched its real-time search engine. Not only can it search status updates, but it also tracks photos, notes, videos, and more. Can Facebook, with its larger userbase and recent talent acquisition, make Twitter Search irrelevant? Or does Twitter’s open platform and first-mover advantage give it the edge?

via Twitter vs. Facebook: Who Will Win in Real-time Search?.

Twitter has been down for about 40 minutes now (since about 6 am California time), and counting. No word on their status blog about the outage at all (Update: they now say “Site is down – We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.”).

Since most of you spend your entire work day screwing around on Twitter (luckily I actually get paid to do this), you may be left wondering what to do now. No worries, we have a list. Meanwhile, I can’t Tweet (TM) that it’s raining here in Palo Alto, or go on a 140 character rage over PG&E shutting off my electricity for no reason at all yesterday, forcing me to come into the office at 4 am this morning.

Twitter declared their scaling problems over in early 2007, well before the serious problems even started. And as much as the Great Twitter Outages of 2007 and 2008 frustrated early adopters (there were so many outages that we just started reporting uptime instead), these outages are much more serious. 45 million people worldwide now rely on Twitter as a communication platform. If they want to be the “Pulse of the Planet,” it’s time to scale.

Of course, even the largest sites still have occasional outages. Yahoo suffered 15 minutes of systemwide downtime yesterday, we’re still trying to get their comment on why that happened.

Update: LiveJournal is also down. Who else?

Update 2: Some commenters are saying Facebook is down too, although it’s up for me and others.

Update 3: Work productivity surges around the world. My electricity is still off.

via TechCrunch

The first step of Twitter’s business plan is something called “Twitter 101,” which the company plans to launch either tonight or tomorrow, co-founder Biz Stone revealed at the Fortune Brainstorm Conference in Pasadena this evening. [Update below: The site is now live]

While Stone only gave a brief overview of what it would entail, as the name implies, it sounds like it will basically be a beginners guide for using the service effectively. Something like this is crucial if Twitter is going to convince businesses to sign up en masse. When most people, let alone businesses, look at Twitter for the first time, they still have no idea what they are supposed to do with it. So this guide will be a set of use cases, techniques and best practices, among other tips, to help users get acclimated to the service.

“The level of engagement is less than the level of awareness about it, and we want to change that,” Stone said. Twitter wants to teach people to use the service via these docs. And also get people hooked on trends and searches of their brands, Stone noted.

It’s through businesses using Twitter that the service plans to make money. While there are no plans to ever charge regular people to use it, businesses that are either selling items or providing support to customers through Twitter, are likely to be charged down the road. But Twitter needs to make sure the service is as business-friendly as possible first. Hence, a “Twitter 101″ service.

Again, look for Twitter 101, which we imagine will be some kind of site linked to from the main Twitter site, either later today or tomorrow.

Update: And here it is. As expected, it’s a site that contains documentation for how businesses can best use Twitter (you can also get the documents in PDF form).

Here’s what Stone says on the blog:

We coordinated with business students and writers to surface some interesting findings, best practices, steps for getting started, and case studies. The results demonstrate how customers are getting value out of Twitter and suggest techniques businesses can employ to enhance that value. While this work was envisioned for businesses, it’s also useful for anyone using Twitter so have a look if you like.

The site contains six sections. They are: “What is Twitter”, “Getting started”, “Learn the lingo”, “Best practices”, “Case studies” and “Other resources”.

One thing we noticed is that the site contains links to a new subdomain: business.twitter.com (it looks like a lot of these links have been changed back to twitter.com, but business.twitter.com is there, and it works). It works on and off, but if you put in a brand name, like “bestbuy,” it will redirect to that company’s Twitter page. This would seem to indicate that Twitter may be thinking about hosting its business accounts on this business subdomain. Or perhaps that is how they will allow businesses to access their special accounts (when those eventually launch). It does not appear to work for personal accounts.

Another thing that immediately jumps out about Twitter 101 are the case studies. They come from the likes of Dell, JetBlue, Teusner Wines, Current, Tasti D Lite, CoffeeGroundz, Etsy, NAKEDPizza, America Apparel and Pepsi. They are pretty well done, and show that even early on in Twitter’s lifespan, without much support, companies are having no trouble figuring out how to use the service for business purposes.

Here’s Twitter’s own definition of “tweet”:

Users refer to an individual message as a tweet, as in, “Check out this tweet about our CEO dancing on the sidelines of the Phoenix Suns game.” People sometimes use it as a verb, too, as in, “I tweeted about the stimulus package this morning.” If “tweet” is hard for you to use with a straight face in a business context, try “twittering” as a verb instead. Alternatives include “post,” “message” and “update.”

Here’s how Twitter explains its own name:

Twittering is the sound birds make when they communicate with each other—an apt description of the conversations here. As it turns out, because Twitter provides people with real-time public information, it also helps groups of people mimic the effortless way a flock of birds move in unison. On these pages, we’ll show you a few examples of that powerful Twitter characteristic.

Here’s what Twitter says it can do for businesses:

Twitter is a communications platform that helps businesses and their customers do a number of useful things. As a business, you can use it to quickly share information with people interested in your company, gather real-time market intelligence and feedback, and build relationships with customers, partners and other people who care about your company. As an individual user, you can use Twitter to tell a company (or anyone else) that you’ve had a great–or disappointing–experience with their business, offer product ideas, and learn about great offers.

via TechCrunch