Twitter is living up to its promise to open up its data stream as much as possible to developers. While I was negotiating with Twitter cofounder Evan Williams to sit down and do a video interview at Foo Camp last weekend, Gnip founder Eric Marcoullier was hitting him up to give Gnip, and therefore everyone, Twitter’s XMPP “firehose.” Williams was obviously in a good mood, because I got my interview and, as I just found out today, Eric got his data feed.
What does this mean for the average Twitter user? It means that more third party services will start to work better. Today, other than a handful of services like Summize (which was just acquired by Twitter) and Friendfeed, third party apps must talk to Twitter via their normal APIs. Those APIs require applications to send Twitter a request and then get a response. The two way communication creates a big load on Twitter in the aggregate.
With XMPP Twitter just sends out all of their data in a constant stream, whether you ask for it or not. The third party, in this case Gnip, takes the data and parses it for further use.
Gnip acts as an intermediary between applications that create social content and those that consume it. They take the Twitter feed, which is a list of usernames, Twitter status URLs and time stamps, and make it available to any third party that requests it. Both Plaxo and MyBlogLog are already using the new feed, and more partners will add it immediately. And every third party that takes data from Gnip doesn’t have to take it from Twitter, easing the overall load on Twitter’s servers.
For now Gnip is only sending updates for requested users, not the richer data that some applications like Twhirl need to build a Twitter-like desktop environment. Twitter may give Gnip permission to send additional data, like @replies and direct messages, over time (if that last sentence doesn’t mean anything to you, it means you aren’t a crazy-heavy Twitter user, just disregard it).
What this means is that Twitter is taking yet another step towards openness and leaning on outside parties to help them with scaling issues.
Following Michael’s post the other day about the future of social networking, we have heard of several more ways the mobile, location-aware nut is being cracked already.
One of these is an “experiment” by MyBlogLog started at eTech and SXSW that leverages Bluetooth technology to discover the people around you. The Java-based service, previously named “Meetspace” but now known as MBL Mobile, works on both Bluetooth-enabled laptops and Blackberrys.
Once you’ve installed the Java applet and bound your Bluetooth ID to your MyBlogLog ID, you will be able to see other MyBlogLog members within a range of about 30 feet who have also opted into the special service. Their avatars show up on a page that breaks people down into “People Around You” and “People Encountered Most”, the former being those currently detected near you and the latter being those you’ve found yourself near the most. You can click on users to see their activity streams and commonly shared groups.
This service obviously works best when you have a group of geeks huddling around the same areas, such as conference halls. As Marshall Kirkpatrick pointed out on RRW, it also has privacy implications that should give MyBlogLog users pause before they sign up.
For other companies working on location-aware social networking technologies, check out Imity, Mobiluck, Aka Aki, and Loopt. The first three, like MyBlogLog, use Bluetooth-based detection whereas Loopt depends on GPS. LimeJuice and MeetMoi are two similarly intended startups that only require SMS. In the long run, GPS is probably the best technology for this sort of thing (provides much greater range and detail than Bluetooth), but unfortunately lots of phones don’t have GPS capabilities yet.
The blog commenting system Disqus picked up $500,000 in a series A by Union Square Ventures (Fred Wilson), Naval Ravikant, Howard Lindzon, Aydin Senkut. Union Square’s investment isn’t all too surprising considering how Fred Wilson has raved about the service. Including Wilson’s own blog, Disqus is currently used on over 4,000 blogs with nearly 60,000 commenters.
The service brings enhancements to blog comments that are not standard features in most blog installations, such as threading, spam filtering, comment/user ratings, and user identities. They’ve also integrated OpenID support through ClickPass. Disqus launched with a host of other commenting services around October of last year. IntenseDebate is a close competitor from a competing incubator, TechStars, as well. SezWho, and CoComment also provide some of the same support.
The overall trajectory of the Disqus and other commenting systems is toward building communities around blogs, similar to MyBlogLog (sold to Yahoo). The idea is to serve as an aggregation point for conversations across multiple blogs so avid commenters can more easily track what’s being talked about. They also want incorporate other feeds such as Facebook and Twitter into user’s profiles. While larger blogs might not like the idea of providing content for another destination site, co-founder Daniel Ha says that the service has already taken hold in verticals such as politics and finance.
Eric is now preparing to launch a new startup, Gnip. Details are scarce for now - Marcoullier isn’t saying what the new startup will do other than a hint on the site itelf - “Web 2.0 Infrastructure,” and a message that the service will launch in May.
The startup is already funded, he says, with a $1 million round from Foundry Group and SoftTech VC. Foundry Group’s Brad Feld and SoftTech VC’s Jeff Clavier are joining the board of directors of the company.
MyBlogLog, a blogger social network acquired by Yahoo about a year ago, launched v.2 of their service tonight, with a significant new feature. You can see the MyBlogLog widget in the right sidebar of this site - it shows pictures and names of recent visitors.
The new feature is an activity stream of recent activities by all users on various social networks - blog posts, new photos, bookmarks on Delicious, Facebook updates, Twitter updates, etc. The image shows the new profile page - mine is here, and I’ve added a summary widget below.
Yeah, I know. That’s way too many similar services to test out. If you’re a casual observer and just want to try out one service, go with FriendFeed (my account is here). People are flocking there, and starting to use it as a hub to leave comments and other content. If you’re already a Plaxo user, their Pulse product is just as good. Facebook isn’t open enough yet to really be called a competitor.
The new MyBlogLog features are a great addition to the product, but it’s not innovative enough to make a big impact. They do have a large community of loyal bloggers using their service, however (including me), and I’ll certainly keep an eye on the activity streams of the people I follow there.
Blog tracking and commenting services such as the now Yahoo owned MyBlogLog continue to have fairly widespread usage, but using these services could pose a security risk, at least according to Citibank.
Zoli Erdos uses both MyBlogLog and BlogRovr and got a rather interesting message whilst trying to log into Citibank:
Could something you type into a secured site on Citibank end up on one of these services? If it’s a browser plugin that sends data back to a central service it could in theory track and record anything…although that presumes that these services would also be being used for evil as well, not just for occasional spamming like some services are.
They aren’t new, and we’ve covered them before. The reason we left them out is that we’ve had some difficulty in categorizing them.
In many ways Sampa is a blog platform with a focus on privacy features, like Vox. But we’ve also compared them to easy site creation tools like Weebly, Synthasite and Jimdo.
But recently they’ve added new features to focus on family story telling and milestones. There is now a Geni-like family tree feature, and trusted visitors can upload photos directly as well.
And they’ve also added a MyBlogLog-type feature that shows visitors to the site - both their name and an avatar. Sampa sites have areas that are private by default, so only people you invite in see the site (they see it via an invitation URL, and subsequent visits are authorized via a cookie.
The hodge-podge of features results in a really compelling hang-out for families to tell their stories, celebrate weddings and births, and share photos and family tree information. The site is also free, although eventually users will be able to pay to have advertisements removed.
It’s a good site, and one of many startups that are doing a lot on very little capital - the company has raised just $310,000.
Angel investor and startup advisor Jeff Clavier (pictured with Digg founder Kevin Rose) just announced a new $12 million early stage venture fund today at the TechCrunch40 conference. The new fund will be called SoftTech VC II.
Clavier, who has a degree in computer science, has been actively investing in startups over the last few years and has had notable successes such as Truveo (acquired by AOL for a rumored $50 million), Userplane (acquired by AOL for a rumored $35 million), MyBlogLog (acquired by Yahoo for $10 million), Kaboodle (acquired by Hearst for a rumored $30-40 million), Mayas Mom (acquired by BabyCenter for $7 million), Dogster, Kongregate, Edgeio and many others. In other words, he has an eye for winners. His investment philosophy will remain much the same, he says. He’s just now investing money from limited partners as well as his own capital.
He says he’ll invest the fund in a total of 30 to 40 seed stage startups with investments ranging from $100k - $500k. SoftTech VC will focus on consumer Internet.
The Feedjit traffic widget launched a month ago and is now claiming some fairly serious viral growth - 3 million impressions per week from the blogs that have added it. When installed on a blog, the widget shows people who enter and leave the site and, and where they are located. Neither the blog publisher nor visitors need to register for the service - the code just has to be on the site.
Feedjit offers two types of widgets. The first resembles MyBlogLog in that it shows recent visitors to the site. I’ve installed it at the end of the post. Tonight the company added customization features to let people set the size and color scheme of the widget via Ajax controls. “Arring Town,” shown below, is my favorite for obvious reasons.
The second widget, integrated at the top of the post, shows a map with the location of the last 100 visitors. Hover over any dot to get more information about a person.
This is an excellent widget and is much easier to use than MyBlogLog. If Feedjit can keep growing at this rate, though, perhaps an early exit is also in the cards for them. There’s only so much extra space on a site, though, and there are simply too many “must have” widgets. It’s all gotta end sometime.
MyBlogLog, a distributed social network which was acquired by Yahoo earlier this year, will launch a tagging feature later this evening that will allow users to add descriptive tags to the people and blogs (called “communities”) on the service.
The new feature serves a number of purposes, founder Eric Marcoullier told me this evening. The main use will be to categorize topics and people to let users find new content they might be interested in. If you read a certain blog, view it’s MyBlogLog page (ours is here) and click on a tag to see other blogs that are tagged with the same word.
The company is also asking users to help fight spam by tagging spammy sites with the word “Schmoe,” which they say stands for “Social Media Optimizer” (SchMOe). The team will review those tags and associated sites and take appropriate action.
Tags can be added by any user to any other user or blog community. Once a tag is added, others can vote it up or down which increases or decreases its size in the cloud. The owner of a profile can permanently remove any tag. The company is importing tags for blogs from Del.icio.us and Technorati to get initial content; they say they will add other sources as well over time.
The new feature is based on a Yahoo internal tool developed by Cameron Marlow at their Berkeley research center, called Tagsona. Yahoo employees use Tagsona to tag co-workers internally (sounds like loads of fun).
MyBlogLog continues to expand. Marcoullier says they are tracking 100 million monthly visitors to sites that have the MyBlogLog widget, and have 140,000 registered users. Just recently, he said, more people without blogs (readers only) started registering than users with blogs.
Twitter is living up to its promise to open up its data stream as much as possible to developers. While I was negotiating with Twitter cofounder Evan Williams to sit down and do a video interview at Foo Camp last weekend, Gnip founder Eric Marcoullier was hitting him up to give Gnip, and therefore everyone, Twitter’s XMPP “firehose.” Williams was obviously in a good mood, because I got my interview and, as I just found out today, Eric got his data feed.
