Twitter’s hiring continues apace. The company was up to 175 people at its inaugural developer conference Chirp. And now it has snatched one more key hire for its vice president of engineering slot — former Palm senior vice president Michael Abbott.
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Twitter grabs a VP of Engineering from Palm; Pass moves up to CTO
Back in the good old days of Facebook (think 2004), you used to be able to click on people’s profile interests and easily pull up a list of all friends who were into the same things like bands or TV shows. That changed as the site’s search evolved and as the company launched more marketer-friendly Fan Pages. Today it looks like some of that functionality may be coming back with new Community Pages that are very search engine-friendly and have wiki-style editing. They’re different from traditional Fan Pages in that anyone can add to the content.
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Facebook overhauls profile interests, converts them to Pages
Peter Yared is founder and CEO of social app development company Transpond. XAuth, Google’s attempt to head off Facebook’s domination of online content sharing , is fraught with problems. It appears to be built with good intentions, allowing smaller social services to persist in a Facebook- and Twitter-dominated world. But unlike OAuth, the standard many of those services use today to link publishers’ websites to their services and which allows any website to work directly with any identity provider, XAuth actually stands in between the two and directs traffic. And that spells trouble. I should know. I’ve tried what they’re doing before.
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Why Google can’t out-open Facebook with XAuth
For Web publishers, “share and share alike” is a nightmare, not a dream. Picking which social sharing services to show a user, from networks like Facebook and MySpace to discussion sites like Reddit and Digg to bookmarking services like Yahoo’s Delicious, is a maddening challenge. As Facebook pushes to make its “Like” button a standard on the Internet , not just its own website, Meebo, a smaller startup based in Mountain View, Calif., is trying to solve the problem through a new Web standard called Extended Authentication, or XAuth. And it’s got Google in its camp.
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Meebo’s XAuth could turn social sharing into a big business
Google today answered a longstanding question today about its web-centric netbook operating system, Chrome OS: How do you print?
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Google’s answer to printing from smartphones and Chrome OS: Cloud Print
The big game-changer (or alternately, the potential disaster) that came out of Twitter’s first big conference this week was Annotations . It’s a new way for developers to attach any kind of metadata to tweets. Twitter has long supported certain kinds of metadata like geolocation or what service the tweet was sent from, whether it was the web site or a Twitter client like Brizzly. The new annotations open the possibility for making tweets and search much richer. One could search by tweet type, looking for all song tweets or tweets containing videos. As one founder said to me, “It’s the most disruptive thing the company has done in two years.” It could also be a huge mess — if one developer adopts one type of metadata, other applications will have to recognize it to make it useful. So what can happen now? Here are a few ideas I’ve heard people talking about through the week: The Obvious Media attachments: The basic stuff
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Ideas for Twitter’s new Annotations: From obvious to intriguing
Editor’s note: This story is part of our Microsoft-sponsored series on cutting-edge innovation. Peter Yared is founder and CEO of social app development company Transpond
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TV 2.0: Hulu’s flatlining, and the networks are ready to innovate
Amidst much Twitter-related news today, thanks in large part to Twitter’s Chirp developer conference , came a surprising announcement courtesy of the Library of Congress’s Twitter account : The Library will soon be home to Twitter’s entire public archive of tweets. That’s a lot of tweets, as the Library mentions in a blog post about the announcement.
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Library of Congress offers a new home to Twitter’s full archive of tweets
For the second time today, Google unveiled a new feature for navigating Twitter. The Google Follow Finder feature seems pretty straightforward: You enter your Twitter username, then Google shares a list of people you don’t follow who you might be interested in, and of similar users. In both cases, Google says it’s analyzing the public social data in Twitter. Using popular Twitter slang, Google calls them “tweeps,” short for “Twitter peeps.” “Tweeps you might like” is based on the idea that “People on Twitter who follow the users you do also tend to follow these accounts.” Google’s list of “Tweeps with similar followers” is basically a list of users who have similar follower lists. When I tried this out, the results were solid, if not exactly revelatory — it suggested I should follow tech pundits like Jeremiah Owyang and Dave Winer, and it said that VentureBeat writer Dean Takahashi has a similar follower list. I suppose someone who spends less time on Twitter and thinks it’s “ too hard to use ” might find this a useful way to get started
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Google going Twitter crazy, adds Follow Finder
Note: This is a live-blog. We will be updating it as we go. Twitter chief executive Ev Williams tried to assuage developers a week after the company made its first acquisition of a major iPhone app, threatening competing products created by third parties. Last week the company bought Atebits, the maker of a popular iPhone app called Tweetie . It marked a major sea change in the way the company treated its ecosystem. For a few years, Twitter had kept its own properties relatively spare and had instead relied on outside developers to create apps and sophisticated clients for reading tweets. “I know this is a controversial decision because there were Twitter apps on these platforms,” Williams said
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Twitter CEO Ev Williams tries to assuage developers