1st Pulitzer for Online Journalist
Mark Fiore is the 1st self-syndicated cartoonist and the 1st online journalist to win a Pulitzer; http://j.mp/bQzYXy
Updates from April, 2010 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Twitter: Promoted Tweets
Twitter is expected to launch promoted tweets: first in search results, later in user feeds; http://j.mp/bQ7bUk
Gerrit Eicker
3D Internet?
Koehl: The Internet may never go fully 3D, but 3D environments are probably capable within 5 years; http://j.mp/bEzGm3
Gerrit Eicker
TweetUp
Bid on keywords to give Twitter posts a top ranking: TweetUp, organising tweets by popularity; http://j.mp/9Wc3BB
Gerrit Eicker
Early Adoptors
NYT: Vanity +desire for status +higher-than-average income -fear of initial flaws = early adoptors; http://j.mp/cblU2d
Gerrit Eicker
Jobs and Apple: Rewriting History?
Schonfeld: Is Steve Jobs ignoring history, or trying to rewrite it? http://j.mp/buaNKQ
Gerrit Eicker
Twitter Acquires Tweetie
Twitter acquired Atebits (Loren Brichter): its leading iPhone Twitter client Tweetie to be serious; http://j.mp/a5R7c8
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Gerrit Eicker
Twitter: “We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve entered into an agreement with Atebits (aka Loren Brichter) to acquire Tweetie, a leading iPhone Twitter client. Tweetie will be renamed Twitter for iPhone and made free (currently $2.99) in the iTunes AppStore in the coming weeks. Loren will become a key member of our mobile team that is already having huge impact with device makers and service providers around the world. Loren’s work won the 2009 Apple Design Award and we will eventually launch Twitter for iPad with his help.”
Brichter: “Once upon a time I wanted a better Twitter app for my iPhone, so I wrote one. My goal was to make something simple, beautiful, and intuitive. It’s been a wild ride since 1.0, and over the last year and a half Tweetie has gone from a no-name app from a little known software company to an app hailed as one of the best mobile experiences around. It’s been featured in TIME and Wired, won the Apple Design Award, and I’ve had the privilege of working with the folks at Twitter from the outside as their service evolved. – Now I’ll be working with them on the inside. I’m happy to say that as of today Twitter is the proud owner of Tweetie – and I’m joining their mobile team and starting work on turning Tweetie.app into Twitter.app, for iPhone and iPad.”
pC: “In a move that will strike fear in the hearts of every Twitter client companies out there, the company Twitter has made its first client acquisition, though a focused one: it has acquired Tweetie, one of the most popular iPhone Twitter clients, according to a company blog post late Friday evening. Here’s the slightly thin rationale of why it bought one: ‘Careful analysis of the Twitter user experience in the iTunes AppStore revealed massive room for improvement. People are looking for an app from Twitter, and they’re not finding one. So, they get confused and give up. It’s important that we optimize for user benefit and create an awesome experience.‘ I use Ecofon and pretty satisfied with it; others I know use Tweetdeck for it and have also had generally good reviews for it.”
VB: “So there’s a big question – will new developers want to come and build on top of Twitter’s APIs knowing a) that there is no killer revenue model yet and b) there’s a very real possibility that Twitter might come their way, pick off the best of the bunch and leave the rest out in the cold?”
RWW: “People are saying that the acquisition of Tweetie by Twitter is bad news for the ecosystem of 3rd party developers that made Twitter so much more useful for millions of people. In truth though, those odds were pretty good for all of them. Tonight’s news demonstrates again that independent developers can code their way into cash, equity and a job at one of the hottest startups on the web. That bodes well for those of us who love to use the software built by all of them, too.”
TC: “It’s a move that manages to be both jarring and unsurprising at the same time. Unsurprising, because Twitter investor Fred Wilson recently wrote that Twitter developers needed to stop ‘filling holes’ in Twitter’s product and instead build entirely separate businesses. And just this morning, Twitter launched an official Twitter for BlackBerry application, so another mobile application shouldn’t come as much of a shock. And yet, the iPhone is a platform where Twitter has a very strong third party presence, and Twitter has no doubt been benefiting from the contributions of these developers. Tweetie is extremely polished and is arguably the best, but there are plenty of other quality applications that are getting hung out to dry. Still, a move like this seemed inevitable.”
ATD: “All that said, I’m not totally convinced that Wilson meant to use his post as a buy/build roadmap. To me, it reads a bit like someone trying to win a debate – perhaps with Twitter’s founders – about the best way to run the company going forward. And I have a feeling we’ll be coming back to this idea over the next few days.”
Gerrit Eicker
iPhone OS 4: Privacy Perils
VB: Always-on iPhone apps in iPhone OS 4 raise new promises, perils for location privacy; http://j.mp/chYKAL
Gerrit Eicker
iAd
Apple offers ways to build complex interactive ads into apps for the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad: iAd; http://j.mp/bewhQ2
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Gerrit Eicker
Apple: “iAd, Apple’s new mobile advertising platform, combines the emotion of TV ads with the interactivity of web ads. Today, when users click on mobile ads they are almost always taken out of their app to a web browser, which loads the advertiser’s webpage. Users must then navigate back to their app, and it is often difficult or impossible to return to exactly where they left. iAd solves this problem by displaying full-screen video and interactive ad content without ever leaving the app, and letting users return to their app anytime they choose. iPhone OS 4 lets developers easily embed iAd opportunities within their apps, and the ads are dynamically and wirelessly delivered to the device. Apple will sell and serve the ads, and developers will receive an industry-standard 60 percent of iAd revenue.”
NYT: “Mr. Jobs sharply contrasted the market for ads on mobile phones with the way its ally-turned-rival, Google, had profited on PCs: by running ads alongside search results. ‘Search is not where it’s at’ on phones, he said. ‘People are not searching on a mobile device like they are on the desktop.’ Instead, he says, smartphone owners are getting all of their information through apps, so search ads are not as effective.”
TC: “Apple will sell and host the ads, giving 60% of ad revenue back to developers, and Jobs says that developers can add ads to their apps ‘in an afternoon’. Unlike most mobile ads, which kick users outside of the application they’re currently using, iAd keeps users in the same app. In a jab at Flash, while showing an ad, Jobs said ‘Oh, by the way, all of this is done in HTML 5.‘”
ATD: “And that’s the real goal of the ad network launch: To keep those developers happy. At the ‘sneak preview’ Apple offered developers today, Jobs talked about the huge financial opportunity available via ‘in-app’ ads: ‘One billion impressions per day!’”
pC: “iAd’s solution is to offer advertisers a full-screen video and interactive ad content without ever leaving the app, and letting users return to their app anytime they choose.”
Tuaw: “After the event in the Q&A session, Steve said they attempted to buy AdMob and got sniped by Google, so they bought Quattro and are trying very hard to come up to speed on what web advertising is like, presumably so they can change it. As long as they aren’t trying to get me to refinance my mortgage or whiten my teeth, I’m looking forward to the future of advertising on the iPhone.”
VB: “By building the technology into the operating system, Apple should be able to offer richer integration with the device and with apps, compared to other mobile ad services. Jobs showed off or at least mentioned the ability to play a game in an ad, have an ad detect your location, make purchases in an ad, shake your phone to play another ad, and then return to your application once it’s over. Apple will sell and host the ads and pay developers 60 percent of the revenues.”
Gerrit Eicker
Online Advertising: All-time High
IAB/PwC; PDF: U.S. online ad revenue hit an all-time high of $6.3B in Q4 2009, plus 2.6% vs. Q4 2008; http://j.mp/bYhK9b
Gerrit Eicker 08:27 on 13. April 2010 Permalink |
AdAge: “Initially, Twitter’s version of keyword ads will appear only on searches conducted on its website; users will start seeing those Tuesday afternoon. A single ad will appear at the top of a search. That ad is itself a tweet, and users can ‘re-tweet’ the ad to pass it around, make the ad a favorite or reply to it. … Promoted tweets also have the potential to scale revenue quickly for the company, backed by $160 million in funding from a coterie of elite VC firms including Union Square Ventures, Institutional Ventures Partners, Benchmark Capital and Spark Capital. … Twitter is also not the first to try to build an ad model around Twitter search results. Search-ad pioneer Bill Gross unveiled TweetUp on Monday, which allows marketers to promote their own tweets by buying keywords. … During this roll-out, Twitter will study how resonance works and decide in the fourth quarter whether – or how – to take ads beyond search and into users’ Twitter feeds. ‘Is it great in search and horrible in the timeline? We are going to test and test and test,’ Mr. Costolo said.”
NYT: “Businesses have been eager to wade into conversations on social media, said Bernardo Huberman, senior fellow and director of the social computing lab at Hewlett-Packard’s research and development arm and co-author of a recent study that found that chatter on Twitter can forecast box-office revenue for movies. But he is not convinced that it can change people’s opinions. … At first, companies will pay per thousand people who see promoted posts. Once Twitter figures out how people interact with the posts, it will figure out alternate ways to charge advertisers. … Anyone who uses Google has grown accustomed to seeing ads alongside their search results, but Twitter users could resent seeing promoted posts in their personal content stream. – Twitter is aware of that risk. It is still figuring out how to determine which promoted posts should appear. It could be based on topics they are writing about, geographic location or shared interests of people they follow.”
VB: “It’s an idea observers of the company have suggested for quite a long time, although it’s still unclear whether those types of queries will monetize nearly as well as conventional search. Sensitive to keeping the user experience free of annoying marketing messages, Twitter will boot sponsored tweets if they’re aren’t receiving lots of replies, clicks or retweets. If this happens, advertisers won’t have to pay for the tweets. … Search ads and in-stream advertising should come as no surprise. After Twitter bought search engine Summize in 2008, search advertising was a fairly obvious approach to monetization. That said, the company has a bit of an unusual take on it. The search ads will appear at the top of results, not on the side like with Google results and Twitter is using a system they call ‘resonance’ to pull out ineffective advertising.”
RWW: “It’s not banner ads, it’s not sales of data to direct marketers, it’s not licensing access to Direct Messages to the CIA. Twitter is at its best when it keeps things simple, when it stays out of the way and acts like a dumb, if textured, pipe. Put a contextual ad up to keep the lights on, what do I care? – It’s entirely predictable, shouldn’t hurt too much and might even work. As Liz Gannes said so well in her headline at Gigaom tonight: ‘The Twitter Ad Model Revealed (What Were You Expecting, a Pony?)’“