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Topsy, the Twitter-focused real-time search engine, has launched a new tool aimed at helping users find the right people to follow called Topsy Expert Search. The blog post seems to suggest that this is a “labs” product, but there’s a prominent link to Expert Search right from Topsy’s home page. Either way, Expert Search seems […]
As TechCrunch discovered today, Twitter is now showing a sample of matching usernames/accounts for name-based queries on Twitter.com. A search for matt mcgee (without the @ symbol) now shows my account and the names of two others above the tweets that match the search query. There’s also a small link to view a more complete […]
VentureBeat reports Twitter’s co-founder, Biz Stone saying that Twitter’s search volume is up 33%. That is 800 million queries a day or 24 billion search queries per month, up from 19 billion as reported in April. 24 billion is a huge number, it is larger than Yahoo and Bing, almost as large as them together. […]
Twitter announced two new ways to find new friends on Twitter. Twitter added to the find friends section, a LinkedIn and Facebook tab to allow you to connect with your LinkedIn connections via Twitter and friends on Facebook. The only issue is that as soon as Twitter announced this feature, the Facebook connection tool was […]
Twitter’s having its first ever visit by a head of state today, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. He arrives at the company’s headquarters some time this morning, Pacific Time. For security reasons, Twitter’s not giving out the exact time. But the company will post pictures on its Flickr account later today, it tells me. I’d also […]
Google and Twitter have teamed up to support a web site that’s facing legal trouble for reporting news too quickly. Reuters reports that Google and Twitter filed a brief Monday in an appeals court case involving theflyonthewall.com, a web site that reports financial industry and stock market news. A U.S. District Court ruled earlier this […]
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran an article in conjunction with Quora‘s public beta launch. The article framed the discussion as Quora (and its kin) vs. Google: The race to build a successor to Web search is heating up as a number of young companies seek to fill gaps they see with Google Inc. One […]
Earlier today several people noticed a “Promoted Trend” in trending topics on Twitter. For those who haven’t already seen it, here’s what it looks like:
One of the big, unanswered questions in the local search space is, Who’s going to do the best job of marrying location with real-time context. Twitter is hardly the first to try, but it may have the best chance to succeed. On Monday, the company announced Twitter Places, a new feature that’s being rolled out […]
It’s not your imagination. Twitter’s down. And been down for several hours. And likely staying down through Tuesday, June 15 until 3AM Pacific Time. Twitter PR has sent us this message about the outage:
I’m at TWTRCON today, where “Terry” — AKA “Leroy Stick” — the mystery man behind the wonderfully entertainly parody @bpglobalpr account is speaking. Will we learn his real identity? I’m not expecting this. CBS News had a video interview with him where his identity was kept hidden. That was also true of his statement to […]
I’m at TWTRCON today, where Martha Stewart is being interviewed during a keynote conversation by David Pogue of the New York Times.
The Twitter Blog announced they are now testing expanding their Twitter based URL shortening service, t.co on URLs that are long. The main difference here is that they will show a portion of the real URL, but pass it through t.co for security reasons. Twitter explained: When this is rolled out more broadly to users […]
Two months ago, Google confirmed an “alpha” test of new ads distributed on its AdSense network that featured tweets. Today, it appears more of these tweet-based ads are live an in the wild. Magne Uppman is part of that test and he has shared screen shots and examples of his Twitter Google AdSense ads in […]
Earlier today, Twitter posted new rules about how third party ad companies can insert ads into the Twitter “timeline” of tweets. Is this a death knell for those third party companies? Not necessarily, but it’s sure a crimp in some of their plans. Below, what the new rules seem to ban and allow. The Background […]
A battle appears to be brewing over the promise of monetizing Twitter and, more specifically, over the placement of ads on the Twitter platform. NOTE: See our follow-up post to this article, FAQ: Twitter’s New Rules On Third-Party Ads In a lengthy blog post today, Twitter’s Chief Operating Officer, Dick Costolo, announced that the company […]
There’s been some commotion from bloggers and Twitter users who noticed this week that retweets had suddenly disappeared from Twitter search results. But Twitter says this isn’t part of a “war” on traditional retweets, and things will soon revert back to normal. The issue is that retweets weren’t showing up in search results for logged-in […]
Mashable reports that Twitter has confirmed they changed their trending topics algorithm last week. Twitter’s Trending Topics, which later allowed localize trends, shows the most popular subjects being talked about on Twitter. Twitter said they now not only look at what is most popular, but what is “immediately” most popular on Twitter. Meaning, the Twitter […]
Twitter reports serving 19 billion searches per month, and that doesn’t even count Twitter-powered searches at the major search engines of Google, Yahoo and Bing. Where are all those searches happening? Who are the big players in Twitter search? No one really knows so far, which makes life tough for search marketers trying to decide […]
A month ago in this space, I wrote up a a fairly lengthy article — How To Find The Right People To Follow On Twitter — that listed numerous tools and tips for finding the the right Twitter users to follow. Google, which wants to be involved in pretty much any search-related activity you do, […]
How many searches does Twitter handle per month? We’ve finally got a figure: 19 billion. That has Twitter doing over nearly five times the queries that Bing handles and about 20% of those that mega search star Google processes. But hang on. Even Twitter cofounder Ev Williams says the figures aren’t all apple to apples. […]
Google has launched a Twitter archive service, giving it a more comprehensive index of tweets over time than even Twitter itself. (See Danny’s Where Have All The Old Tweets Gone?) Meanwhile, Twitter gets a logo presence in Google’s search results, the first time Google’s featured a partner like this.
As part of a new test, some Bing users may be seeing Twitter messages mixed in with the regular search results on Bing.com. In a blog post today, Bing explained that the test involves two types of Twitter integration: First, on searches that Bing identifies as hot/trending, tweets will show up in the search results […]
Twitter’s rumored Promoted Tweets are now official, launching only a day after the very similar TweetUp launched (will that be DOA?). Promoted Tweets has two phases, which might be described as an AdWords phase and an AdSense phase. The AdWords part is what is launching first. Marketers buy keywords (for now on a CPM basis) […]
Hot on the heels of the TweetUp announcement comes news that Twitter plans to announce its own advertising platform on Tuesday. The New York Times says the program will be called “Promoted Tweets.” The advertising program, which Twitter calls Promoted Tweets, will show up when Twitter users search for keywords that the advertisers have bought […]
Bill Gross, who all but created paid search in the late 1990s when he founded GoTo.com, has launched TweetUp, an advertising ecosystem that does for Twitter search what AdWords (and other paid search platforms) does for web search. It’s not officially tied to Twitter, and will compete with Twitter’s expected ad platform (whenever it launches). […]
Twitter’s search results have changed thanks to the addition of a feature that wasn’t much of a secret in recent weeks. When using search.twitter.com, or the search box on Twitter.com, the results now show up to three “most popular tweets” at the top, above the most recent results. For example, a search tonight for ipad […]
As Twitter continues to roll out its new home page, more users — new and old — are being exposed to the new “Top Tweets” feature. As we said yesterday, Top Tweets shows a collection of recent messages that scroll every couple seconds. That’s what it does, but the bigger question is, How does it […]
Twitter is testing a new home page design that introduces new users to a wider view of the site’s functionality by focusing on specific content and users rather than the more nebulous idea of trending keywords and hashtags. I can’t get the new home page to load, so here’s a look at the screenshot Twitter […]
Earlier this week, Hitwise put out stats suggesting that Facebook is beating Google and Twitter when it comes to driving traffic to news sites. I dug a little deeper, and I beg to differ. Along the way, some pokes at the need to more digging into stats in general. The Hitwise blog post reported that […]
Twitter’s search team is working on a project to uncover the most popular tweets for any search query, but it’s unclear when or where the project might be implemented. Taylor Singletary, a Developer Advocate at Twitter, announced and described the project today in a post on the Twitter API Announcements group. The Search team is […]
Peter Kafka from AllThingsD is guessing that Twitter will be launching an ad platform on or about April 13th. Some suspected Twitter would announce an ad platform yesterday during Ev Williams Keynote at SXSW but he did not. So why on April 13th? (1) Twitter’s developer conference, Chirp, is the day after. (2) AdAge’s Digital […]
While many of us in the marketing world tend to focus on how many followers we have and how to get more, for many Twitter users the other side of that coin is a real challenge: How do I find good people to follow on Twitter? Twitter itself has underscored the challenge as far back […]
You may have caught this in Danny Sullivan’s liveblogging of Ev William’s keynote at SXSW today, but just in case … Twitter has introduced a new platform called @anywhere that will allow web sites to integrate Twitter features more easily. The details seem a bit foggy to me, but it sounds like @anywhere takes many […]
Live blogging from SXSW continues, with Twitter cofounder Ev Williams to take the stage shortly. Will he announce Twitter’s rumored ad plans, as expected? Stay tuned for the news.
Twitter has just announced that to protect people from scams, links in direct messages and sent via email will be shortened using its own URL shortener. It’s a welcome move. Still, I was curious about any impacts this might have for good marketers who are not trying to scam people. Good news, on that front. […]
VentureBeat reports Twitter has increased their traffic by 9 percent from December to January. After deeper insight from ComScore and Hitwise, it appears that most, if not all, came from Google. When Google added real-time results to their search interface in December, it had a major impact on people discovering Tweets in the search results. […]
Last January, I wrote about finding The Value of a Facebook Fan, which effectively took the number of fans a brand has on Facebook, multiplied that by the average number of friends a Facebook user has to determine the number of impressions each brand would receive from each users network, and then applied an average […]
Lisa Barone has screen captures of Twitter testing a localized version of Twitter Trends. Twitter Trends shows you what Tweet topics are currently hot and trending on Twitter. The local trends version does all that but breaks it out by region, country and city. Here is one of the pictures from @LisaBarone: You can see […]
The death of actress Brittany Murphy is probably the first test for Google’s new real time search results. Earlier this year, when Michael Jackson died, it took several minutes for the news to make it into Google despite the extraordinary number of searches it was getting. The integration of real time results was designed in […]