Category Archives: twitter

Weekly Reader: Facebook virality, Twitter patents and Groupon’s Lefkofsky

This contains a summary of my work this week. I had two very important non-Groupon stories this week, on Facebook and Twitter. My work Secrets of Facebook’s success: Virality — Facebook’s photo tagging feature was an important driver of its growth. … Continue reading

Posted in daily deals, facebook, groupon, twitter | 2 Comments

Twitter and Google are both responsible for you not being able to search tweets

Chris Dixon ignited a firestorm on his blog when he said it was Twitter’s fault that Google doesn’t index tweets. It’s the fault of both parties, really. Neither has the moral high ground. Twitter does not block Google from crawling … Continue reading

Posted in facebook, google, search, twitter | 4 Comments

Google should just buy Twitter already. At any price.

I’ve been thinking more about Google+ since my TechCrunch post on the Google circles colliding. Even if you buy the argument that categorizing your friends into buckets offers user value (which I don’t), that is not a defensible feature for … Continue reading

Posted in facebook, google, twitter | 5 Comments

Facebook Places is at the beginning of a long road

Facebook’s much awaited Places product finally launched this week. It’s the first step toward bringing friend finding to the masses. People have been using Facebook to do this for years; posting their location in freeform status updates that their friends can … Continue reading

Posted in facebook, foursquare, geotagging, lbs, maps, mobile, twitter, wireless | Tagged | 6 Comments

Checking in with foursquare at SFO

With the increasing use of mobile applications such as Yelp and foursquare, it’s becoming possible to pull ideas from thin air. Users of these apps can leave tips for others to find that are linked to a specific location. In … Continue reading

Posted in audio, foursquare, geotagging, lbs, local search, maps, mobile, social networking, twitter | Tagged | 1 Comment

Now we’re going Places

I’ve been writing about Twitter and location since my first post about Twitter in 2007. This week, Twitter launched Places, which allows users to add their location to a tweet. Here’s a screenshot from 2007: and today: In 2007, I … Continue reading

Posted in geotagging, gps, lbs, local search, maps, mobile, social networking, twitter | Tagged | 1 Comment

Geo-enabled Twitter comes alive on Twitter Maps

I’ve been playing with Bing’s Twitter Maps lately and it’s one of the better implementations of Twitter’s geo APIs that were introduced last fall. It shows tweets within the last 7 days plotted on the map. Google Maps recently introduced a … Continue reading

Posted in bing, geotagging, lbs, local search, maps, mobile, social networking, twitter | 3 Comments

Plowing through the middleman

The snow day. Growing up in Michigan, it was always a treat. Whenever a significant amount of snow was in the forecast, I’d wake up early to see if I got the day off. I’d listen to the radio as … Continue reading

Posted in facebook, journalism, media, newspapers, twitter | Comments Off on Plowing through the middleman

Twitter and foursquare: the tipping point to getting local business online

Getting small local businesses to go online has been the holy grail of the Internet. I’ve written before about some of the reasons local business don’t go online and suggested several ways that they could use emerging technologies to get … Continue reading

Posted in foursquare, lbs, social networking, twitter | Comments Off on Twitter and foursquare: the tipping point to getting local business online

Missing out on the big stuff on Twitter and Facebook

One of my friends recently got engaged and posted that fact on Facebook. I missed it. It’s one of the frustrations of the constantly flowing river of news in social networks — births, deaths, weddings and job changes get lost … Continue reading

Posted in facebook, social networking, twitter | 2 Comments