twitter

Twitter on Tuesday announced a new limit on third-party access to its service via its application programming interface, or API. Later this week, according to Twitter developer Alex Payne, the Twitter platform will limit API calls from a single IP address at approved ("whitelisted") Twitter services to 20,000 per hour. This will affect services that use Twitter APIs in bulk for non-messaging functions, like managing followers. Normal calls to read and write status updates are not part of this change.

There is already an API limit in place for third-party applications that give users general access to … Read more

Social-network aggregator FriendFeed announced Tuesday that it's built in a Twitter friend importer, and my e-mail in-box was sort of thrown into shock.

See, here's the thing: I have a FriendFeed account, but I don't really use it; not enough of my friends do, and I've never found aggregators to really fit my social-networking habits in general. I'm a big Twitter user, however. So when FriendFeed instituted its Twitter contact import feature, I was flooded with dozens of subscription requests from people I'd never heard of. Before I was clued into the new tool, … Read more

I'm an unabashed New York Times fan boy. Warts and all, it remains the best edited daily newspaper in this country. Disagree? Then come find me on Twitter and let's mix it up. (My handle is "coopeydoop").

You won't have a chance to do the same with many Times reporters and editors--on Twitter or any other social network, for that matter. Batting it back and forth with the hoi polloi just isn't part of the drill. Not, mind you, because they lack for opinions or have no stomach for engagement.

The Poynter Institute reposted the text … Read more

I continue to marvel at the huge amount of coverage that Twitter gets from mainstream and business press, as well as the huge amount of traffic the service enjoys.

But while Twitter is becoming omnipresent in every layer of the media, the business remains a mystery. Ubiquity without clear methods of monetization can easily result in a situation where free really means free, with no way to make meaningful money.

The recent levels of Twitter adoption, attention, and omnipresence are starting to lean toward a situation where the company may never be able to effectively monetize the user base.

Don Reisinger wrote on CNET's Webware earlier this week about five Twitter improvements he's still waiting for. I completely agree with all of Don's points, but there is one key item that Twitter users and supporters are really awaiting: proof that the service will exist in the future.

By proof, I mean a business model, or even an inkling of a revenue stream to suggest that there is life beyond free and that users will remain loyal. … Read more

Within the past 30 minutes, I have received Twitter follower notifications from a couple of high-profile Twitterers, or so it would seem.

The subject line of one reads "Duncan Riley is now following you on Twitter!" Upon clicking through to the profile, it's obvious that this is not the Duncan Riley that we know from The Inquisitr, but rather an impostor trying to cash in on affiliate rewards from the sale of the book, 5 Steps to Twitter Success. According to the book's site, which I am not going to link to here, it is authored … Read more

If you were a user of the previously blogged about Twitter-to-FriendFeed Contact sync tool by Carter Rabasa, you'll be pleased to know similar functionality is now built-in to FriendFeed. On Tuesday the company quietly launched its own importer as part of its other friend-finding tools.

To find buddies from Twitter who are also using FriendFeed you simply type in your Twitter username and it does the rest. Unlike Rabasa's tool, there's no need to give the service either your Twitter password, or (obviously) the one you use for FriendFeed. As an added bonus, FriendFeed's import tool … Read more

Could the odd confluence of a US Airways jet crash-landing in the Hudson River and Barack Obama's presidential inauguration finally push Twitter over the top and into the broad mainstream consciousness?

That could be the case, according to statistics released Tuesday by Hitwise, an Internet analysis firm.

Hitwise reported that as of Tuesday, Twitter, the popular microblogging service, had for the first time surpassed the market share of visits of the hit content aggregation site, Digg.

According to Hitwise, Twitter now stands at number 84 in its Computers and Internet category, one space up the chart from Digg.

A … Read more

Firefox users looking to shorten their Twitter messages to fit inside the service's 140-character limit should check out TwitterEyes. This new, experimental extension takes a look at what you've written and shortens any words it can. This includes any extra spaces you might have put in, along with words like "and" which gets turned into "&" as well as "first" which becomes "1st." In future versions developer Danny Pier says he intends to add a user-controlled dictionary that would allow you to add your own words and their shorter replacements.… Read more

I'll be the first to admit that I'm addicted to Twitter. Each day, it's kept in the coveted second tab in my Firefox window, lodged between Gmail and Meebo. But that doesn't mean it offers me everything I want or that I have no desire for more features.

In fact, I have a list of features I'd like added to Twitter.

Groups

I still don't know why Twitter has failed to add groups to the service. Maybe the company believes that groups would make it too closely resemble a social network, but who cares? … Read more