Twitts

Twitter will not host adverts on its website this year, says co-founder Biz Stone.

Stone used the 140: Twitter conference in Los Angeles this week to reveal that the micro-blogging service has benefitted from substantial investment and funding this year, ensuring advertising isn’t a priority.

“Any kind of approach toward advertising is going to be a while… we’re not thinking about that just yet,” he said.

However, Stone didn’t comment on whether the ads would appear in 2010.

Stone said the company was focusing on rolling out new features, scaling the business and adding new services, such as paid-for commercial accounts.

He also revealed that these account holders would be given access to new tools that could analyse and gather data from their followers.

[ via - pcworld.com ]

Twitter users on Thursday will, for the first time, be able to make voice calls directly to each other through the microblogging service.

During the beta period, voice chats will be limited to two minutes on Twitter, the company Jajah said.

A new third-party offering from Jajah known as Jajah@call is expected to go into beta Thursday morning that will allow Twitter users to initiate a two-way voice chat with other users by typing “@call @username” — where “username” is someone’s Twitter ID — into any Twitter client.

During the beta period, the company said, the calls will be limited to two minutes, but the company will evaluate that length during beta. However, it sees the two minute period, after which the call will end, as “the verbal equivalent of a tweet.”

According to Jajah, an Internet communications provider with tens of millions of users, the service will allow a user to place a call to any other user, so long as the second person follows the first on Twitter and both have Jajah accounts.

The service is free to use and is expected to work on any Twitter-enabled device, from PCs to smart phones.

[ via CNN.com ]

Ahh, the Internet, where people will try anything to make $1 million.

Thanks to Twitter, we’re now aware of 1milliontweets.com, a Web site set up to sell 1 million tweets for $1 each.

“Promote your website, advertise your business or just leave your mark – you can send as many tweets as you’d like for only $1/each,” the site advertises. The tweets will later be organized into a book.

Will it work? That’s a lot of tweets to buy, even in blocks of 10 or 100.

Won’t it piss people off? The nice thing about Twitter is that — outside of the search engine — you’re only exposed to people you subscribe to on purpose. The Twitter account @1milliontweets only has 163 followers so far — down from 165 last time we checked. We’ll see how far this goes.

Blair Cummins, who is running the scheme, is not new to the Internet. He is listed as chief executive of SportsMates, a company that operates sports social networks, including Kournikova.com, “the official Website of Anna Kournikova.” Blair also used to sell domain names, including selling encryption.com to RSA Security.

A born entrepreneur who started his first business while he was in high school, Blair is the great grandson of diesel and automotive pioneer Clessie Lyle Cummins, founder of Cummins, Inc. (CMI), a Fortune 500 multinational and one of the world’s leading manufacturers of diesel engines and engine components.

This is, of course, the Twitter take on the “million dollar homepage,” which a 21-year-old British student cooked up in 2005.

[ via - BusinessInsider.com ]

Fast growing startup Twitter will soon be joining a select group of startups with private venture round valuations of $1 billion, technology news site TechCrunch reported on Wednesday.

CEO Evan Williams disclosed the round to employees at a recent all hands meeting.

The company will raise around $50 million, we’ve heard, although the final amount of the raise is apparently not yet locked down.

Twitter raised $35+ million earlier this year in a round led by Benchmark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners. That round valued the company at $250 million.

The company has raised a total of around $55 million to date, and sources tell us they have approximately $30 million left in the bank.

As a necessity for human life, sex has been a popular topic of conversation undoubtedly since the advent of communication. And thanks to various technology, things like phone sex are a part of our culture these days. So why not explore sex with the newest emerging form of communication: Twitter? Behold, Twitt Sex.

The site is very barebones at the moment, but it appears that it is hoping to be the the adult version of Twitter. But rather than being one of the countless sites built on top of Twitter’s APIs, it looks like Twitt Sex wants to be its own contained site that simply mimics much of the Twitter functionality in its own contained environment. And it actually has its own API.

Right now, there are only 2 users of Twitt Sex and creating a new account doesn’t appear to work correctly yet. But one of the first two tweets on the service shows what it will be about. It looks like the service will let you attach sexual pictures to your tweets, which then display in others streams. That should make tweet sex (the action, not the service) decidedly more visual and interesting — and should help with that whole 140 character limit thing (though being unable to test it, I’m not sure if Twitt Sex has that same limit).

While the service’s about page has no information yet, oddly, its Terms and Conditions page seems to be from 2007. Also weird is that its Privacy Policy page makes numerous references to Twittr.com, which may look like the old name for Twitter, but it’s not (that would be Twttr). While you might assume this is just an old site that never launched, the first tweets are from today and yesterday.

I’m shocked that it has taken this long for someone to come out with a Twitter for sex. But then again, there are plenty of people out there using the regular service for that purpose. Violet Blue wrote a good overview about it back in January in the San Francisco Chronicle.

[ via -TechCrunch ]

Twitter Inc. changed its terms of service today to clarify that advertising on your Twitter page is OK and that users, not the company, own their tweets.

For months, ad services have flourished in certain circles of the social network. Twitter’s legal provisions reinforce those companies’ legitimacy.

Twitter also inserted sections to the user agreement addressing standards for third-party developers and intolerance for spammers, wrote co-founder Biz Stone on the company blog.

When Twitter announced the changes earlier today, I was having lunch in Hollywood with Ben Huh, chief executive of Pet Holdings Inc., the parent company of Fail Blog and popular kitty site I Can Has Cheezburger. Quite aptly, we were eating cheeseburgers at In-N-Out.

Huh and I joked about how Facebook had gone out of its way in February to say it owned all of the content you upload to your profile — and had to backtrack — compared with Twitter going out of its way to assert the opposite.

For the record, Huh prefers Twitter to Facebook but acknowledges that they both have their place — the latter being good for interactions with real-world friends. Oh, and actress Alyssa Milano agrees.

Facebook can simplify its interface and photocopy Twitter all it wants (cough, Facebook Lite). But it won’t convince the world to entrust Facebook with every bit of its personal content as long as the company keeps making blunders like the terms change, followed by the joke of a democratic legal page and the infamous Beacon.

– Mark Milian

Follow my commentary on technology and social media on Twitter @mmilian.

Original photo by ChrisL_AK via Flickr

In line with efforts to bring fans closer and truly make them part of the show, MTV is teaming up with leading interactive and social media companies Radian6 and Stamen to bring fans real-time online Twitter visualization experiences to complement the “2009 MTV Video Music Awards” airing live on Sunday, September 13 at 8pm ET/PT. Popular video blogger iJustine (Justine Ezarik) will be the official VMA “Twitter Correspondent,” and will be interpreting Twitter comments during the red carpet pre-show. The on-air component will be executed through a new interactive application created in partnership with social media measurement company Radian6 and design firm Stamen, and will bring Twitter to the television in a new and interesting manner.

“MTV is always looking to build on our strengths of creating and curating content that our audience will enjoy,” said Kristin Frank, GM of MTV.com. “We’ve found that by concentrating on our core competencies and regularly working together with third parties such as Radian6 and Stamen, we’re creating a truly complementary experience for our viewers that we know are multitasking as they watch events such as the VMAs.”

Twitter Visualization

The “Twitter visualization” tool allows MTV to track the real-time, aggregate activity and volume of buzz around what’s happening live throughout the show and report on how the fans are responding and feeling about the personalities at the VMAs. A tag cloud created by Radian6 tracks tweets about designated celebrities, including VMA performers, nominees, attendees and hosts, to create a visual interactive application hosted on MTV.com. The visual application and user interface created by Stamen expands a celebrity image as its respective Twitter tag cloud activity increases.

“MTV’s enthusiasm for engaging directly with their audience through Twitter is inspiring,” said Biz Stone, Twitter Co-founder. “It’s encouraging to see Television evolving into a more interactive medium.”

Radian6′s flexible dashboard and as-it happens alerts enable MTV to monitor and react on the fly to trending topics on Twitter with regards to the live show. MTV.com will also host a special page within the VMA site to house the Twitter visualization product for post-show fan interaction.

“Twitter is one of the fastest moving parts of the social web, and Radian6 helps communicators and media creators harness and engage in that conversation every day,” says Marcel Lebrun, CEO of the social media monitoring company. “We’re thrilled to work with MTV, Twitter, and Stamen to deliver real-time Twitter dialogue to the VMAs and create an awesome experience for the show’s audience – both live and online.”

“Data visualization sounds like something out of a dry and analytic college course, but we believe this kind of work can be fun and sexy too,” said Stamen Founder and Creative Director, Eric Rodenbeck. “Working in tandem with Radian6 we we’re able to create a simple and beautiful data design that extends these analytical sensibilities to the world of pop. All MTV had to say was ‘Live, Twitter, and Russell Brand’ and we were there.”

VMA Highlights on MTV.com

MTV.com will also host an interactive “Watch and Discuss” video feed, exclusively sponsored by Sonic, during the pre-show and main show through an embedded video player on its homepage. Alongside the feed, a Facebook “Live Stream Box” will allow fans to comment on what they are watching live, which also posts to their Facebook profiles, alongside comments by others watching the VMAs. The video player will stream a special multi-camera feed from the preshow and within the side-stage areas of the main show. MTV.com will also feature a Twitter module aggregating tweets about the VMAs and a “Headlines” module that will pull in MTV’s latest new stories and blog posts about the VMAs.

The messages are powerful and poignant: 160-character remembrances of where people were when they learned of the terror attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

As President Obama and his wife observed a moment of silence at the White House, many took to the microblogging site to share messages of hope, solidarity, and respect, leading 9/11-related terms to claim nearly all of Twitter’s top trending topics. Hashtags also sprung up, one of the most popular of which was “#whereiwas.”

Students remember being at school:

Heard rumors, then got to Physics class where the teacher had set up a t.v. I sketched the towers as the clips aired #whereiwas (@rotatingworld)

Senior year of high school. Getting ready for a homecoming week pepfest. Instead we all watched the tv in silence & fear (@anitalynns)

Mr. Stoutz’s 10th grade Algebra II class, fourth seat in the last row by the window. (@xanderbecket)

Walked into Art Class and saw it on TV. I asked what movie we were watching…”Real life” someone replied. (@seebabcock)

And businesspeople talk about going in to work:

At my first job. Got to work and all desks were empty. Everyone was huddled into one office watching the towers on TV. (@emilyyolks)

From my office I could see the plume of smoke from the Pentagon I had just passed . and fighter jets. I panicked. My boss worked. (@meitweet)

Saw it all from my office windows in midtown. walked downtown as far as i could. i remember it was very quiet down there. (@petersng)

Getting ready for work, heard it on the radio. Went in to the office, not thinking that it was 6 blocks from the White House. (@kathwertheim)

Share your memories in the comments, and on Twitter, where we’re @CSMHorizonsBlog.

RankSpeed, a new search tool, announced today the launch of its public beta that does a sentiment analysis on the Twittersphere / blogosphere to find the best websites, the most useful web apps, the most secure web services, etc…

Users can search for any website category using tags and rank by any criteria: good, useful, easy, secure, etc. For each result a statistical analysis computes the percentage of twitterers / bloggers who have said it is good, easy, …

“Traditional search tools rank results by popularity“, said Florent Voignier, CEO of RankSpeed. “But sometimes the best product or service is not the most popular. A statistical analysis helps us find which result is more often associated with good, great or other synonyms in blog posts and tweets.“

Several sentiments can be entered to compare results by a set of subjective qualities defined by user: powerful, easy, secure, fast, etc. For each sentiment a bar graph shows the percentage of bloggers who have expressed this opinion.

RankSpeed tracks 3 millions of websites, selects the most commented in the Twittersphere / blogosphere and ranks them by any criteria.