Twitter

Disclosing Paid Placements on a Blog

Mel Cooley: "I didn't come here to be insulted!" Buddy Sorrell: "Oh, where do you usually go to be insulted?" Last month I called out Dave Winer for selling a paid placement in Radio UserLand that was never disclosed to his users. This sparked a tempest in a TechMeme in which Mike Arrington dropped the hammer on Winer, declaring that his credibility was permanently shot by the secret deal. I am now obligated, under enemy of my enemy is my friend rules, to extend to Arrington my warm hand of ... (read more)

2009/04/12

Bit.ly Builds Business on Libya Domain

The URL shortening service Bit.ly just secured $2 million in financing from investors including O'Reilly's AlphaTech Ventures. Though URL shorteners have been around for years, Bit.ly believes there's money in offering Twitter-friendly short links along with web analytics to track how the links are used. The company reports that its links were clicked 20 million times last month. So far, the news coverage I've read about Bit.ly has neglected an unusual aspect of the startup: It's one of the ... (read more)

2009/03/31

The Size of Your Twitter Makes Me Feel Inadequate

Dave Winer is criticizing Twitter over the suggested users feature, which was added recently to help Twitter newbies get more out of the service. In the past when you joined Twitter, if you didn't know anybody else using the service you'd end up with nothing to do, an experience akin to being the only person in an AOL chatroom, giving yourself A/S/L checks and telling yourself you just got home from cheerleader practice and it's time to get out of these sweaty clothes. So Twitter now tries to ... (read more)

2009/03/12

Displaying Twitter Updates on a Web Page

I recently began using Twitter, a microblogging service for posting short, chat-like blog entries and reading what other users of the service are doing. The site has severe reliability problems, but it's still an entertaining way to get real-time updates from bloggers I read along with others I know who've been sucked into Twitter's maw. I wrote some code to display my most recent Twitter update on my weblog, Workbench, in a sidebar at upper right. This afternoon, I've released the ... (read more)

2008/07/08