More and more tweets from iPhone or Android apps in my timeline. Last year almost all comes from Blackberry apps. Shift happens, RIM.
Tag: Twitter
160 users in three months, 200 million in 5 years
Twitter only had 160 users after three months but they were sending up to 1000 messages per day, or roughly 6 messages per person per day. Of course, the whole thing didn’t really start to catch on until March 2007 at SXSW. That’s when they started to get thousands of users.
URL Shorteners
The Jakarta Globe today this week introduced its own shortened URL to help identify and track links that goes to its stories from Twitter.
I’m a huge fan of custom URLs because it tells you where your link goes. While shorteners like goo.gl, bit.ly and tinyurl are fine for the general public, these private, branded ones like aol.it, tcrn.ch, engt.co, on.mash.to and jglo.be are much better for content publishers as well as everyone else.
While publishers will be able to track the links, readers will be assured that they won’t be duped into going to another site.
Of course, then we come across Twitter for Mac that automatically shortens any URL that gets manually entered into it to t.co. Whoever thought this would be a great idea needs to be put into a blender. By the way, this URL issue with the app deserves a post on its own.
[update] Turns out the link on each of @thejakartaglobe’s tweet leads not to individual articles but to the category page the article belongs to. This puts a major dampener on the excitement front and pulls out the, “what the fuck were you thinking?” banner.
How Google’s Andy Rubin defines open. If that is indeed Andy Rubin’s Twitter account. For context, see this transcript of Steve Jobs’ tirade on Google and RIM from Apple’s Q4 financial conference call.
To Apple and Jobs, Android vs iOS isn’t about open vs closed it’s about fragmentation vs integration.
Trending on Twitter: Maple Syrup. I wanna know why.
or maybe I don’t.
Oooooo finally!
That was pretty easy to switch. /via @gedeon
Seems that Twitter today updated their direct message email notification. In the new format, the content of the message finally takes priority billing and it includes much more information about the message itself such as the line that says, “Direct message sent by (sender) to (receiver) on (date).”
While the information was already there in the older format, this one line makes it that much easier for people to identify the nature of the email.
You can now send a direct message back to the sender (provided the person also follows you) by clicking on a button on the email and it will take you to the Twitter page already set up to send the message once you’ve signed in.
It also includes an instruction to send a direct message via SMS should you prefer to do so.
If you haven’t set up to receive your Twitter direct messages by email, you should, it makes messaging that much more effective and efficient. You can set this up by going to Settings > Notices> and clicking on the check box for Direct text email.
If you wish, you can also set up to receive direct message via SMS by going to Settings > Mobile, and activating device updates. By default you will not receive updates from anyone unless you go to their Twitter pages and turn on tweet notification, so your phone won’t be flooded with constant updates from everyone you follow.
Footnote: If you’ve set up to receive direct message via third party services such as Topify, there’s a chance your message won’t be shown. This could be a side effect of the new email format from Twitter. I don’t know for sure, but it’s certainly possible.
My suggestion is if you use such a service, keep direct messages out of it. If the service goes down for maintenance or breaks down, you won’t get your DM emails. At least with Twitter, you rely on it directly instead of on some middleman.
If you went to school with the people on Twitter, they’d be the ones in your Facebook and you’d wish you’d gone to school with other people.
Me
On this day three years ago, I signed up to Twitter.
AuliaSays 