Twitter advertising platform could launch in March, seems to be first real attempt at generating revenue
According to a new report today by MediaPost, Twitter product manager Anamitra Banerji made interesting comments that confirmed the company is working on it’s own advertising platform. He declined to give a specific time frame relating to when the platform could launch, but confirmed the product is in a test-phase.
Rumors speculate Twitter could officially launch the product at the Southwest Interactive Festival that is scheduled to take place in March in Austin, Texas. Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams is scheduled to deliver a keynote at the festival on March 16. Twitter firstly used the same festival to launch in 2007.
Twitter founders, Biz Stone (right), and Evan Williams (left)
BusinessWeek has published a report that says the popular microblogging website Twitter will earn a profit in 2009.
The report says deals to make tweets available for indexing by Google and Microsoft worth $25 million in 2009 ($15 million and $10 million respectively) contributed to the profit along with new cost cutting measures.
The report cites people familiar with Twitter’s finances who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Dell today has released new numbers relating to sales generated from online social media.
The company said today that it has generated $6.5 million in sales as a direct result from being on Twitter. The company says sales from Twitter have tripped from the last report.
Dell currently has 1.469 million followers on its @delloutlet Twitter account.
With companies such as Dell generating all of this revenue, the question remains how will Twitter generate revenue with basically no business model at this time.
Twitter is expected to monetize the service by adding premium features to accounts for a small price tag. No other information is really being disclosed right now as to availability and possible other features.
Microsoft and Sony are set to add new features to their respective gaming consoles, the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3.
On November 17, Microsoft will let users update their firmware via Xbox Live that will include many useful and much anticipated new features.
The most important Xbox updates include new Twitter, Facebook and Last.fm (with support for only the U.S. and the U.K. users for Last.fm) integration, on demand 1080p 5.1-channel HD video streaming via Zune Video, and a new News section that streams content from various content partners including MSNBC.
Twitter has raised a new round of financing at a $100 million dollar valuation.
Benchmark Capital, Spark Capital, Institutional Venture Partners are returning investors and were involved in the new offering. There were also two new shareholders added to the mix, T. Rowe Price and Insight Venture Partners.
The terms of the deal will not be disclosed, including neither the total amount Twitter has raised (except to say it was a significant sum) nor any indication as to the investment weights from each investor.
We just know that Twitter was valued at $1 billion after internal people familiar with the matter confirmed the valuation to the AP.
The new funds will be used to fund company operations, and could include purchasing new equipment to grow the service and even expand the current 60-strong workforce.
According to a new blog post by Twitter founder Biz Stone, Twitter will begin to include native support for geo-location based information via a new API. The new feature will now give users the option to include their GPS location from each tweet.
The feature will be available directly from Twitter and it’s mobile site. Third party applications will also begin to add the GPS support from the API.
The popular social news community Digg is set to reportedly open up more by restructuring its API to allow both read/write access.
Digg developer Jeff Hodson noted in a recent post, “In forth coming versions of the API, people will be able to not only read data, but also contribute data too.”
Digg was once the top social media site where people would go to find and share news and interesting content. The problem with Digg remains that content that hits the front page of the site could take hours to go through the ranks of other user-submitted stories, and of course, the problem with that is people don’t want old news, they want news in real-time as it breaks.
Google has just released a new Mac search application dubbed Quick Search Box that will allow you to easily search your Mac and the web from the app. It is essentially like using Spotlight to search for local files, but now you can easily search the web and local files from one text-box.
Google notes Quick Search Box is different from Google Desktop in that Google Desktop doesn’t support the ability to actually launch applications.
With Quick Search Box, you can also update your Twitter status straight from the text-box after you have set up your twitter account details. Quick Search Box does not have the ability to search through Tweets, or do much else with Twitter except let you update your status.
Google firstly announced Quick Search Box back in January.
On April 27, 2009, Facebook announced it would open the entire activity stream via a new API. According to Ethan Beard, Facebook’s director of platform marketing, the new Facebook Open Stream API will be two-way, meaning developers can leverage the data but people will also be able to respond (for example to comments), via the third party applications. Developers will be able to use the entire feed via one simple API call, or use parts of the feed.
Some did not expect Facebook to become so open, as the company was previously very restrictive when it came to taking data outside of the community. Given intensifying competition from Twitter, who is very
Twitter has just released a new Facebook Connect type feature, allowing developers to use Twitter’s OAuth technology to let their users to sign in with Twitter. The website can then use your Twitter account to let you tweet, utilize your friend lists, followers, small bio, among other information.
I personally don’t believe Twitter presents a threat to Facebook Connect, for many reasons, at least not right now. Facebook has a lot more information about its users, and it has the capacity to send information to the FB news feed. Even though information can be pushed to Twitter, it quickly gets lost with the high volume of tweets from all the users everyone follows. The difference here with Facebook is, people don’t have thousands of followers and actually care about what their friends are doing and actively monitor their feed.
In other Twitter news, Twitter CEO Evan Williams (@ev) and actor Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) both appeared on the Oprah (@oprah) show the other day, celebrating Ashton’s one millionth follower (see Ashton celebrating when he reached one million followers).
Dell today has released new numbers relating to sales generated from online social media.
Twitter has raised a new round of financing at a $100 million dollar valuation.
The popular social news community Digg is set to reportedly open up more by restructuring its API to allow both read/write access.
