Twitter Blocks Tumblr

Twitter’s API changes announced last week upset quite a few people. But what about its relations with other social networks and services?

The Guardian reports that Twitter has blocked Tumblr’s access to its users ie. you won’t be able to search for your Twitter contacts on Tumblr anymore.

As the various social networks buy up services that work with them you can expect to see more and more of this.

Take a look at what’s been happening with Instagram to get an idea.

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Facebook Buys Instagram For One Billion, But Who Else Was In The Running?

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

Last weekend the news broke that Facebook was acquiring Instagram for $1 billion. Needless to say the tech news circles were buzzing with this announcement all week.

According to an article on TheNextWeb Twitter had also tried to acquire them, but failed.

And others suggest that Google may have been trying to acquire them ..

 

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Twitter Sells Tweets

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...

Image via CrunchBase

With most social networks the users are the product.

In the case of Twitter one of the problems the company has been struggling with is how to actually make money from it all ..

So selling their content ie. their users’ tweets appears to be one of the solutions.

According to an article on RWW Twitter has sold the data to Datasift and has other companies lined up to buy the same data.

So not only is Twitter claiming ownership of the content, but they’re also happily ignoring any privacy concerns users might have..

Expect privacy advocates to get very vocal on this.

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CoTweet Standard Being Pulled

CoTweet

Image by Gustavo Pimenta via Flickr

CoTweet Standard, which is used by a lot of companies to manage Twitter for teams, is being withdrawn on February 15th

From then on CoTweet will only be offered as a paid service under a new name “SocialEngage”

There aren’t much details about SocialEngage on the CoTweet / Exact Target site unfortunately, nor is there any information on pricing. It looks like they’re adding support for tracking Facebook, but without knowing pricing etc., it’s really hard to see if this is going to end up costing companies a lot more than they’ll gain or not.

Their Enterprise product “Cotweet Enterprise” may have been very powerful, but it also came at a very high price.

So are there any viable alternatives?

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Guinness Try To Force Age Restrictions On Twitter

Guinness Ireland’s Twitter account is a bit odd.

They want to restrict their followers to people over the age of 18!

Guinness Ireland's Twitter account trying to impose age restrictions

Of course I’m not “following” their account, but I can still see all their content!

And here’s the screenshot to prove it:

Guinness Ireland's "over 18 only" twitter account

I think the word I’m looking for is “fail”

They’ve posted a “clarification” of what they’re “trying” to do:

You won’t be blocked as such.You’ll be removed from our followers & you’ll need to verify age before u can follow us again

 

Seemingly this is similar to the laughable “age restrictions” that alcohol companies put on their websites.

It’s kind of sad really that they’d even try to do this on a social media network. So you can add alcohol companies to the list of those that simply don’t “get” the web..

 

 

Fox Twitter Account Hacked?

Looks like one of the Fox News Twitter accounts may have been hacked, as it’s spewing “news” of Obama’s death ..

See screenshot below:

Foxnewpolitics twitter account

@Foxnewpolitics twitter account

If this is a prank it’s in pretty bad taste ..

So I would assume that the account has been compromised .. and since it’s July 4th in the US it may take longer than normal for people to notice ..

 

Twitter Hits New Record

Twitter has released another new statistic

It’s now doing 200 million “tweets” per day. In January 2009 they were “only” sending 2 million / day.

Here’s a nice graphic to show how that all compares with various other things:

Twitter 200 million tweet comparison

Twitter 200 million tweet comparison

There’s a full blog post about it over on the official twitter blog.

Of course they’re still not issuing big media releases about their record earnings are they? Oh wait .. they can’t! Doh!

Which Twitter Client Do You Use?

If you use Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn on a regular basis then you probably don’t rely solely on the “standard” web interface. You’re more likely to be using some kind of desktop (or mobile) client.

Personally I’ve been a big fan of Tweetdeck, but the last few days it has become more unstable than usual and has become practically impossible to use.

I asked a few people what they’d recommend and got some interesting replies.

Here are a few of them:

Hootsuite

Twitter (official)

Twitterific

Seesmic (desktop and web)

Echofon

Chromedeck

 

So what do you use? And, more importantly, why?