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Twitter's Evan Williams: Making money through corporate accounts?

SAN FRANCISCO--In a panel at the Web 2.0 Summit, Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams wouldn't concretely answer one of Silicon Valley's biggest unanswered questions: how the company plans to make money.

But he gave some strong indications. Hint: it's not advertising.

He spoke obliquely of a possible business model that we've heard whispers about before, corporate accounts for businesses that want to use Twitter. Twitter is a communication channel, he said, and what it can do is "charge the people who want to use that communication channel commercially."

He named companies like … Read more

The 404 221: Where Randall Bennett makes his holographic debut

OMG, WTF, LMAO, and a million other Internet expletives for our new leader, Mr. Barack Obama. Even Jeff, The Lone Hater, can't seem to contain his excitement over the election results. Former 404 host Randall Bennett also joins us via completely useless hologram to share in the excitement and recap the events. Hats off to you, Mr. President. Please give us a call if you're ever in the Gramercy, N.Y. area, we'll see if we can pencil you into the show.

Even though all of us are out of breath and stricken with sore throats from a night of "Whoos!" and "F**K You Tennessee," we still manage to drag ourselves into the studio this morning to celebrate our country's triumphant return to common sense. It's like waking up from an awful nightmare that somehow managed to last eight grueling years. Our special guest on the show today is Randall Bennett, former host of The 404, who helps us weigh on the presidential election, the cheerful optimism resonating from the streets of New York, Twitter's flawless victory in the face of 13562834791 simultaneous tweets, and perhaps most hilarious--the AMAZING CNN HOLOGRAMS! Because when you've got money coming out of your ears and split screens just aren't enough, count on CNN to be the face of American frivolity. USA! USA! USA!

EPISODE 221 Download today's podcast … Read more

10 election tweets worth remembering

It was a marathon evening for media buffs as Barack Obama beat rival John McCain to become the United States' first African-American president-elect. You couldn't miss it on Twitter, as the microblogging service exploded with election updates, commentary, and speculation.

Miraculously, Twitter's servers lasted the night, and had quite a lot of terrific, 140-characters-long election commentary (in messages known as "tweets") to serve up for hungry news hounds. Here are 10 of CNET News' favorites.

10. One of Barack Obama's most-buzzed campaign innovations was announcing his running mate choice via text message. It not only … Read more

Twitter: Hey! We're hiring!

Biz Stone, co-founder of microblogging service Twitter, sent out an e-mail to the site's members on Monday night. The take-home point: They're hiring.

"We're hoping to hire for a bunch of new positions," the e-mail read. "If you or someone you know wants to work at a small company with a bright future then by all means, check out our jobs page."

Twitter's jobs page doesn't give any specifics. But putting out a big "we're hiring" e-mail is an important message for a small start-up that's high … Read more

Problems at the polls? Send a tweet

Long lines, broken voting machines, and citizens who can't vote because their names don't show up on the registration rolls. A group of software developers and designers have teamed up with the blog techPresident to make it easier for voters to broadcast such issues far and wide--fast.

The Twitter Vote Report, as its name suggests, lets voters share experiences and resources via the popular microblogging service. The messages will then be aggregated and mapped so followers can "see" voting problems in real time via state-specific Google Maps, like the Colorado map at the top of this … Read more

FriendFeed offers 'push' service to Twitter users

Social aggregator FriendFeed has just rolled out a new option for its users to post some or all of their FriendFeed activity over to Twitter.

Earlier on in the start-up's life the functionality was introduced to send replies (via FriendFeed) to other people's Twitter messages. This worked as long as you had plugged in your Twitter credentials to give the app permission to post as you.

This new system is similar to that model, although it can be set to do this for everything you publish to FriendFeed. Users can also select which specific services they'd like … Read more

Oosah launches widget production for social networks

Oosah, a company that offers Web 2.0 hosting solutions, announced Thursday that it has launched a new widget design tool that will allow any user to easily create customizable and embeddable rich-media widgets with images, videos, and status updates from popular social-networking platforms, Twitter, YouTube, Craigslist, MySpace, and Flickr.

"Consumers are increasingly using the Internet as their platform of choice for viewing and sharing media with their families, friends, business associates, and customers," said Dan Khasis, Oosah co-founder and chief technical officer. "We felt that what was needed now was a way to make it simpler … Read more

Current TV to broadcast Diggs, Twitters on election night

After broadcasting live Twitters during the U.S. presidential debate, Current TV had to go one notch higher for election night.

The cable channel, co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, has partnered with both Twitter and social news site Digg for the evening of November 4, during which it will feature a "multimedia dashboard" with live messages from Twitter, headlines from Digg, and video from both Current and "video status update" start-up 12seconds.tv. In keeping with the network's young target audience, electronica act Diplo will be performing DJ sets throughout the night, too.… Read more

Twitter developer claims the "the internet is built wrong"

In a recent article, Alex Payne, API Lead at Twitter, claims that the internet is broken. While some of his arguments may have merit, it's a shockingly bizarre PR tactic to come out against something (especially the internet) when your own stuff is broken. Especially the APIs!

The basis of his argument is that the internet is "in production" but there are scaling issues such as IPv4 and now we have to rethink how to fix them. True, but maybe he can give IM back to Twitter users in his spare time.

In true ironic reality show … Read more