StockTwits and WallStrip founder Howard Lindzon is at it again, 140 characters at a time. After buying out Chart.ly, thus attracting its lead developer Adarsh Pallian to his latest venture(s), he has now also acquired the latter’s other Twitter-related project Tweetizen, we’ve learned today.
Furthermore, it seems like Lindzon is also spinning off a Twitter-only incubator / fund along with some of his partners at Social Leverage, dubbed 140Labs. Currently, the 140Labs website actually leads to a Twitter web service that enables anyone to set up communities on any given topic (much like StockTwits), but we got confirmation that a separate company bearing the same name has been formed together with Dan Kelly, James Altucher – who was appointed CEO – and several other individuals that aims to incubate other projects related to the popular micro-sharing service. This is kind of similar to what Betaworks, an investor in StockTwits and co-investor in TweetDeck together with Lindzon, is doing.
The first upcoming initiative from the 140Labs team will be I’m Big On Twitter, which can quite accurately be described as a HOTorNOT for Twitter users. The service is not live yet, but Pallian gave us a sneak peek at it earlier today. There’s not much to explain about the service, especially if you’re already familiar with HOTorNOT. You can use your Twitter avatar or upload a picture from your computer, and others get to rate the way you look on a scale from 1 to 10 and follow you on Twitter while they’re at it. That’s about it, although a related dating application is apparently also in the works.
More Twitter related services are on the way, Pallian told me, including one that aims to compete with Super Chirp which yesterday launched as the first service that enables Twitter users to monetize their message streams.
Ever since they added OAuth support, I really don’t trust sites without it. I’ll wait until they offer it to try the site.
I’m Big On Twitter has OAuth support though.
The funny thing is that most websites that ask you for your twitter username and password can be implemented without the need for it. at 140b.us we used to require twitter credentials, but we quickly figured out a better approach. Check us out.
But do you guys really think this is a sustainable model and if it creates any value out of twitter. I guess Twitter has much more than this and are there any companies that are creating real value?
I guess there are quite a few companies that extract information from twitter and serve as a real-time search engine. Their results are indeed spectacular when compared to the traditional search engines. Few of them are http://www.boilingpage.com (my favorite), http://www.twitturly.com, http://www.scoopler.com
500 is the new 140:
http://www.yout...h?v=s7oqUfe5pug
Hehe, that video was actually pretty funny, though the fact that there’s a serious campaign behind it is even funnier.
Why stop at 500 characters? Why not just let people write articles of any length? Surely that would be popular and succesful, in fact, I’m surprised no-one has thought of it before…
You add to many characters to Twiteer, you start causing them – and a gazillion other services built on top of them – major issues. You have to change page layouts, API calls, desktop clients etc.
Going from 140 to 500 should be relatively easy to accomplish.
The thing is, what can you REALLY say in 140 characters (the whole point of the clip)? “I’m eating an egg”, “I’m tired”, “out to work” ?? Twitter can become much more than that, if it only allowed more characters.
I believe the 140 character limit is for SMS, which is often limited to 160 characters (140 + 2- character names).
However, my main point was that Twitter has to draw a line somewhere. Too many characters, and it becomes just another blogging platform. Twitter’s entire model revolves around short, concise messages.
Is this like the old HotOrNot website?
oh boy…more twitter-related junk.
web2.0 sucks.
test
Not sure why but your “<” isn’t being recognized on the techcrunch.com splash page and is showing up as the code.
The link is showing up on click-thru on this page though.
Just a heads up!
thanks, fixed!
There is a new version of StartupTweet using 140labs… http://startuptweet.com
If you’re someone who converses about #startups or #metrics on Twitter, join the community to aggregate participate
Adarsh is an incredible developer.
And… we are LIVE!
and our database CRASHED
We’ll be back up in a couple of minutes… what fun!
When they say it’s an incubator, are they accepting applications from other developers or are they building only in-house apps?
It would be interesting to know more details.
Looks like you have your DB login and password showing in the current error on the site. Might want to fix that ASAP: http://img.skit...ctfcwje8i6w.jpg
Your database login and password are showing on the Fatal Error your site is currently showing. Might want to fix that: http://img.skit...ctfcwje8i6w.jpg
thats so awesome, I saw the same thing on another twitter based site. so incompetent.
Just love it when a guy who makes stupid puppet shows and silly videos comments on developers. EPIC FAIL
http://twitemperature.com gives you real time Temperature readout of your “Twitter hotness” based on comparing your last 200 tweets to current Twitter trends.
http://twitemperature.com/faq
Similar concept to hot / not, but more relevant to actual information and less vanity driven. We’ve been around for a good 6 months with plans to expand the functionality, reveal data once we get the time to play around with this again. We built it in a weekend.
Curious to see how many Twitter applications prove to (1) have a sound business model or (2) provide value to another application/company that’s worth an acquisition.
Any examples of either of those points?
Looks like their db login and pw are showing in the Fatal Error up on the site now. They might want to fix that ASAP http://img.skit...ctfcwje8i6w.jpg
Sorry for the multiple comments. Something went screwy and I didn’t think it was posting.
Doesn’t Howard regularly rip Arrington? And yet he gets a decent writeup?
I didn’t think that was the way it worked.
Howard is the funniest entrepreneur out there and I have learned a lot from him (not personally). can’t wait to see more.
agreed!
OK, we’re officially in another bubble.
Very cool idea. To go and ‘iterate’ over twitter ‘wisdom of the crowd’… sounds like other web app we see more and more these days:
http://nba-buzz.blogspot.com
or
http://runners-...zz.blogspot.com
and even the all time buzz tracker:
twitter-buzz.blogspot.com
I’m not sure how imbigontwitter has been around, but I’ve been on hottweeters.com for a while, seems like the same idea, but overall seems cleaner to me. How does techcrunch pick one twitter site over another, shouldn’t you list out the many in the category at the very least?
Very interesting news. Howard and team have done some great things in a short period of time, I assume with a lot less money burned than so many other companies I’ve followed over the venture funding years. Good luck to him, his team and those that land in the lab!
If you enjoy wine, give us a follow on twitter @WineTwits!
People who liked this service also enjoyed http://www.twitchamp.com
It is really unclear why do they need user name/password in that service.
See for example local trends: http://bit.ly/2lvCd6
they launched their dating site months ago unfortunately for them datetwit wiped it out with 20x as many ppl.
This sort of seems just like a rip off of hottweeters.com no?
Agreed.
and no Im not selling out to HL either!