Editor’s note: Today, being a news junkie requires not just the ability to keep up with hundreds of breaking stories a day, but the ability to redistribute those stories to your followers and news sites. To get some insight into the modern news junkie, we asked Mrinal Desai to share with us how he screens the news in the guest post below. Desai is the co-founder of CrossLoop, but some of you may recognize him more from Twitter or Techmeme, where he tips stories every day—580 of those tips have appeared as headlines since the beginning of this year. You can read his last guest post here.

Like many out there, I have been, am and always will be a news addict. For many news junkies, it is the fleeting, current fix of information about a breaking topic that interests them, only to be replaced by the next headline. They jump from headline to headline, forgetting the one they just read as they move on to the next one.

For me personally, news is not only timely information on the current state of affairs but also a way to take a deep dive, to connect analysis and information together and learn through application.  I am looking for insight.  It could be patterns, it could be knowledge about an industry or it could be an opportunity to become introspective and ask questions.

Keeping this in mind, here is a snapshot of my consumption and distribution of news both offline and online.  I’ll divide the way I screen the news by the screens on which it comes to me.

No Screen:

• I don’t start a day without reading The Wall Street Journal in print
• Currently, I get 4 magazines and I go through them on the weekend: The Economist, The Atlantic, Wired and Fortune. Before they stopped, I used to also get Business 2.0 and MIT’s Technology Review.

Screen 1 – MacBook Pro:

Apps: Twitter, Google Reader, Techmeme and a little bit of Facebook

Twitter: I’ve been a user since January 2007.  Its always on for me. I invest a significant amount of time in figuring out who/what to follow based on my interests.  Today this ‘list’ stands at 489. Building this list is a continuous process and it typically consists of people who can teach or inform me of something, news sources and people I respect and with whom I want to build a long term relationship with independent of business. Of this, I have a column/list/group called “Pigeons” (birdie, early days of communication—you get it, right?).  I read each and every tweet of this group. I have about 75 in this group. 15 of my personal favorites, apart from @techcrunch and all those who write for it @techcrunch/team, are:

@bxchen – Technology Reporter, Wired
@148apps – iPhone App Reviews
@msuster – General Partner, GRP Partners
@jennydeluxe – Technology Reporter, The New York Times
@scobleizer – everything social media
@Learmonth – Reporter at Adage
@jasonhiner – Executive Editor at TechRepublic (CBS Interactive)
@leplaporte – Technology Journalist and Broadcaster
@appadvice – Editor, Webware (CBS Interactive)
@taylorbuley – Technology Reporter, Forbes
@sarahintampa – Writer, ReadWriteWeb
@reckless – Nilay Patel, Engadget
@gizmodo – Everything gadgets blog
@dmac1 – Technology reporter, Business Week
@joshk – General Partner, First Round Capital

You can follow them all in one click on the Twitter List I created called “Fifteen”

Screen 2 – iPhone: I have played with a few iPhone news apps, both paid and free.  These include the mobile apps from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times , Byline, Fluent News, News Fuse, BBCReader, NPR News, ReadItLater, ZenNews, and News Pro. I also visit mobile news sites. Being a little glued to Techmeme, I was very excited to see its new mobile version for smartphones—the icon took a spot right away on my home screen:

After experimenting and trying them all out, though, my current favorite native iPhone app is Newsstand (iTunes Link) which stays on my dock. Its a $4.99 app but it does the following extremely well for me:

1. Synchs beautifully with Google Reader and is fast.  It allows me to organize my folders, move them up and down and importantly very easily “Mark all as Read”

Below is a snapshot of my Feeds and a folder creatively named ‘Top News” that I keep a close watch on every day.

2) Newsstand has a lot of social goodness to share through Twitter, Delicious, ReadItLater and Instapaper

What’s Missing:
—bit.ly so that I can track data on the links I share as I do on Tweetie 2 with my API key.
—Sharing on Facebook
—Ability to RT or @respond to my twitter stream that I subscribe to as an RSS feed from within Google Reader.

Before social media, I always shared news via email to specific people. Now I have replaced email with these easy tools:
—Twitthat bookmarklet. One click.
—Twitterbar a Firefox Add-on customized with a prefix. One click.

—Google Reader’s Share is connected to my Twitter account. One click.
—Facebook Share bookmarklet or if I want it all on one place, I recommend Shareaholic.

Screen 3 – TV. I do not get my news here since I watch very little TV.

Screen 4 – eReader
I have a Kindle that I use to read books and have not switched from print to this one yet for news. As you can imagine, I get enough news on my other screens all day and like some time away from it.

Below is a visual of how I personally share news and the tools I use. Everything goes through Twitterfeed as my central hub for news going in and out.  Note that lately I stand undecided between Seesmic and Tweetdeck. (Image courtesy: Zurb, click to enlarge).

I spend a significant amount of money on news—4 print magazines, 2 newspapers with one online and iPhone apps.

The only screen I care about:

• well written analysis
• Unique and timely content/information
• Thought provoking story telling
• “Connection” with the writer—literally or figuratively from a style perspective
• Delivery channel. Find me—the “paperboy route” has changed

How do you screen the news?

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At our Realtime CrunchUp in San Francisco today, TweetMeme founder Nick Halstead has unveiled AdTweets. As you might expect, this involves ads that appear on your site — but with the addition of a retweet button. Yes, you can also retweet these ads just as you would any piece of content.

The idea seems like an obvious one for the company. It’s similar to what Digg is doing with its Digg ads, where users can vote on advertisements just as they would with regular content. The difference here is that you would be sending an ad to your contacts on Twitter. Is anyone really going to want to do that? And if they do, will their contacts start unfollowing them?

But the idea here is clearly not to share just any ad, but rather ads that have the potential to go viral — particularly video ads. And TweetMeme already has a big partner on board. They’ve just announced that they cut a deal with Federated Media in two weeks time. With this partnership, their button can be added into any standard advertisement that FM allows.

The tweeting out of ads or sponsored links has long been a controversial thing. Some are convinced this is a great way to make money, while others consider this absolutely pure spam. It’s an interesting play, to say the least. If TweetMeme is able to spread this idea the way they’ve spread their button, they’re going to make a ton of money.

AdTweets will launch in 2 weeks.

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At today’s Real-Time CrunchUp, Mozzler launched its real-time search engine based on Twitter. Mozzler, which has real-time functionality, searches Twitter for the most popular content in the last six hours based on retweets.

You can search Mozzler by keyword, similar to searches you can do on OneRiot and other search engines that include Twitter results. Results can include videos and images as well. Mozzler has also created numerous categories of searches under technology, entertainment, sports, business and more.

What differentiates Mozzler is the ability filter the stream. You’ll be able to create customized streams by keyword, which are updated in real-time. You can share links to streams on social networks and users can also subscribe to streams.

And one particularly compelling feature is Track (which should be sure to make TechCrunchIT editor Steve Gillmor happy), which is like Google Alerts for Twitter. Twitter has yet to implement Track yet, but it’s a very desirable feature to help filter and “keep track” of the stream.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Taylor said that Le Meur’s request seemed “reasonable” and continued “we should do that.” “We’re not working on that. But we should be,” he continued. So there you go, done deal. Great. It would seem that soon, third parties should have access to the list filters that Facebook uses.

Here’s why this matters. With services like Seesmic (Desktop) and Brizzly importing data from both Twitter and Facebook, the social graph for those services is starting to get messy. If there were a way to merge Twitter Lists and Facebook Friend Lists, third-party services could provide a valuable new service: Easy-to-make Facebook and Twitter social graph mashups.

Granted, it seems unlikely at this point that either Twitter or Facebook will ever sync these lists with one another on their respective services. But as long as they’re willing to provide that data to third-parties, other companies should be able to do interesting things with it.

The Lists, it seems, are starting to merge.

[Photos: (cc) Kenneth Yeung - www.thelettertwo.com]

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Costolo didn’t divulge many more details, though he did mention that it wouldn’t be tied into the site’s retweet feature. When TC editor Michael Arrington tried to clarify by asking if the ads would be integrated into the Tweet stream, Costolo said that “he didn’t say the ads would be mixed in with tweets”. But he didn’t say they wouldn’t, either.

Costolo closed out the topic by saying that the message he wants to send is that “Twitter will have an advertising business, ready in the near future, and available to partners.”

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Twitter is one of the hottest players in the realtime field right now. And it has a $1 billion valuation, which has been the source of much controversy. Twitter also recently signed search deals with both Microsoft and Google.

Easily the most interesting bit of information Costolo offered up during the talk was that Twitter will soon turn on advertisements. This is surprising since in the past Twitter has said that would likely not be a part of the revenue model. But recent changes to Twitter’ TOS suggested something like this could be coming. And other more recent comments from the company have suggested the same thing. But Costolo’s comments were very clear, “Twitter will have an advertising business, ready in the near future, and available to partners.”

Costolo talked quite a bit about Twitter’s revenue model. When Mike noted that internal documents leaked this summer indicated Twitter was looking for 25 million users, $4 millon in revenue, and 75 employees by the end of this year, Costolo noted that they were “above and beyond” across those numbers across the board.

When Mike pushed about the $4 million number, Costolo would not give a specific number, but reiterated that they were certainly beyond $4 million already. He also once again confirmed that the search deals with both Microsoft and Google are bringing Twitter money, though he declined to state how much.

Costolo also talked a bit about Twitter’s freshly turned-on Geolocation API. “The opportunity around Geo is huge,” he said. He notes that the idea of the “check-in” (as opposed to location always being on) is proving to be a powerful thing thanks to services like Foursquare. Now that it’s live, Geolocation is going to be very important for Twitter going forward, Costolo noted.

Below find my live notes (paraphrased):

MA: Thanks for starting things off with us this morning. You had trouble getting in?

DC: I got in on time no problem.

MA: So anything we want to talk about? What’s happening?

DC: What are you doing? (Laughs) That’s exactly what I want to start with, we decided to change that wording yesterday. Before “what are you doing?” didn’t make sense. People would look and say, “what are you doing?” and they’d say “nothing.”

MA: You spent money on user studies?

DC: We did do some. We have other things to do like getting rid fo the suggested user list.

MA: When will you get rid of it.

DC: ASAP hopefully by the end of the year.

MA: When did you join?

DC: End of August.

MA: Before that you started Feedburner which Google bought. Do you like RSS is dead.

DC: No. I think what happened with RSS is what people predicted, it got pushed down the stack. You just don’t think about it anymore. You don’t know the things behind email, etc.

SG: But it got pushed down the stack by Twitter.

DC: Well it was a lot of things, but yeah Twitter was one. People are more interested in what’s happening this second now, certainly.

MA: There were some docs published this year (laughs). Did you see those docs.

DC: I saw what you posted.

MA: The financial forecast was 25 million users, $4 millon in revenue and 75 employees. What’s true?

DC: Across the board on those numbers we’re above and beyond.

MA: What about traffic?

DC: These sites aren’t great for measuring.

MA: What about user accounts?

DC: Yeah I won’t say that, but 58 million undercounts it.

MA: Growth has been great right?

DC: Yeah. But Facebook is way ahead of us with what 350 million users. Also the growth in the U.S. has slowed, as Ev said a few weeks ago. We’re making changes though to get rid of the SUL and the new site, we think it growth will return.

MA: So 10x growth next year?

DC: We’ll see.

MA: So there won’t be more people on Twitter than there are on the Internet?

DC: No.

MA: So you’ve raise $155 million right? How much is left.

DC: Yes. Plenty of money is left.

MA: What about the new offices, those aren’t cheap?

DC: There are cheap ways of doing things and smart ways. We’re not worried about runrate right now.

MA: When will you turn on revenue.

DC: Our runrate is higher than $4 million, it’s on. Before we had deals announced, everyone wanted to know about our business model – but then we did the Google and Microsoft announcements. We won’t talk details, but they are financial relationships. And they’re compelling. They point toward a way we’re going to go to market. As an open ecosystem. Partners can display our tweets, etc. We shouldn’t care where people go to say tweets.

SG: So we pay Microsoft and Google and they pay you?

DC: You click ads. Look we’re going to syndicate our data to other partners too.

MA: Like who?

DC: We’ve done those deals and there are others. 10s of thousands of ecosystem partners out there. CoTweet, TweetDeck, etc.

MA: What do you use.

DC: I use twitter.com, I’m old school. Even on the mobile, cause I’m getting a new device.

MA: Talk about the geo API.

DC: The opportunity around Geo is huge. It’s like with Foursquare, the notion of checking in some place is opt-in, it’s great. It used to be all about turning on my location, now it’s the explicit check-in. Before it was problematic. The cool thing that Dennis Crowley of Foursquare has done is to use the gesture of checking-in. I’m here for a period of time, and it’s public – and there’s a lot of things you could do with geo with that.

MA: More detail on business model?

DC: We will have an advertising strategy. You will see that from us in the future. It will be fascinating, non-traditional, and people will love it.

MA: What’s new about it?

DC: We want to do something that’s organic, like the way it happened with Google. It will work with the tweets. People will love the ads when they see it.

MA: Talk more about the ads. Mixed in with the tweets?

DC: I didn’t say that but the message I want to send is that is that there is an advertising idea and it will come next year.

———-Audience Q&A————–

Q: Is the current $4 million revenue? From where?

DC: It’s not $4 million, it’s higher. From a variety of sources.

Q: Is the SUL paid for?

DC: No the SUL is totally non-financial. It’s a super-primitive mechanism.

MA: But you take people off when you piss you off.

DC: Laughs. There’s a lot of problems with it.

Q: You didn’t say premium – but what about paying for access?

DC: It’s not just pay and free access – we’re going to provide a way for partners to participate in our business model. We’re going to be open and foster ubiquity of the tweets. We need to provide mechanisms for partners that want to do things to do things.

MA: Do any partners pay yet?

DC: We do have some payments from partners.

SG: Will there be a Twitter app store?

DC: It’s something we talk about but it’s not top of mind for us.

MA: Will there ever be decentralization?

DC: I don’t think that’s the only way to deal with scalability problems. We can absolutely scale. There are easy things to do.

SG: So why don’t you put track back in?

DC: There are 50 things we want to do to the product, that’s on there. The pace of execution within Twitter is extraordinary. We did Retweet, we did French, we did Lists, we did Geolocation.

MA: What other features?

DC: The requests are diffuse. We want to get back to the ecosystem. Like geo is only on the API, not on the site.

Q: I have a feature request. When someone starts following someone that should be a message through the stream. There is no record of how the social graph evolves now.

DC: I don’t disagree with that. There are things like that we’re thinking about it. Analytics are super important to the future of the way people use Twitter. It would be nice to see data about your tweets.

Q: Will you sell those?

DC: That will be a part of the commercial accounts package, yes. Other things are things for companies, like multiple people access. This is all what we talk about. It will roll out in the very near future.

Q: You talk open source, but you’re never at the open source meetings.

DC: Okay that’s an accusation question. Look when we hire people we ask about open source, it’s important to us. I’ve never seen people working harder in the last 3 months, and I’ve been a lot of places. When we have more people in house, I think we’ll be bigger in those meetings. We use open source, and we hope to be producers of it.

MA: Great, thanks for all your time.

SG: Is there a number to call about track?

DC: Yeah, call me.

The end.

Video: Recording can be seen here.

Transcript: Provided by PLYmedia.

Good morning.

I’m Heather Harde with TechCrunch.

We’re ready to get started.

A few, just sort of housekeeping items.

If you’re trying to get onto the Internet, make sure you connect to intercontinental conference,

The general password is real.

For those who are going to be tweeting, doing photo uploads, other real time media, we’re also

Using the hash tag CrunchUp today.

Gillmor.

Was real.

And now I think we want to kind of drill down into the different aspects of this.

What are the business opportunities.

What are the, you know, where is everybody sort of going with geo streams.

And how is this affecting media.

And investments, etc..

So we’re really going to be covering all this throughout the day.

First we’re going to start with.

>> Let’s get this going.

>> A Q&A with

>> We’ve delayed a lot.

People are coming.

>> Everyone’s here.

Stop talking?

Mike and Steve are going to interview Dick Costolo, the COO of Twitter.

Costolo.

>> Just get off the stage.

Are you back there?

>> Told me I was going to mangle it.

I did.

>> Sit right there in the middle.

Dick Costolo, COO of Twitter.

Thanks for starting things off with us this morning.

[APPLAUSE]

.

Had a little trouble getting in this morning.

You had a problem with a ferry.

>> I was here on time.

Got here right on time.

No problem.

It looked grim for a moment.

>> So we have 30 minutes to talk about, you said anything we want to talk about.

>> Anything.

>> What’s happening?

Did you get that?

>> What are you doing.

>> Oh.

Isn’t it

>> So diving right into my talking points.

So the reason we changed what are you doing to what’s happening is what if I had come out here

And you had said, “So what are you doing?

“Instead of what’s happening.

I think what we found in our user research people would sign up for Twitter and then they’d

See this box, this big white box that said: This pillow is behind me are making me slouch.

I’m not usually this slouchchy.

They see this big white box that didn’t talk about the pillow but that said what are you doing.

.

A lot of people would look at that and just say what am I doing?

God, I’m not doing anything.

[LAUGHTER]

.

This is what we’re spending the venture we just raised.

>> You said you did user studies?

>> Yeah.

>> You could just read Twitter.

You actually spent money on user studies.

>> We did a lot of user research, and you notice how I skipped right through this, you spent

A lot of money on.

We did a lot of research on, look, it’s sort of obvious that it’s no secret that when you sign

Up for Twitter, you fly into this cliff and you catch fire and you

if you’re a brave soul

And you can climb back up the cliff look over on to the vistas beyond you might be able to

Find out how to use it.

We’ve got this on boarding challenge and it’s a lot of things from simple things like what

Are you doing.

And everyone has an answer to that.

Two more sophisticated things like getting ready of SUL.

Suggested user list and replacing it with more elegant suggestions based on how maybe you got

There via a list.

Maybe you got there via David Carr’s Twitter account at the New York Times, etc. Etc..

>> When will you get rid of the suggested user list.

Is there a firm date for that?

>> No firm date for it ASP.

I hope it’s gone at the end of the year.

We’ll see if I’m right or not.

>> When did you actually join the company, August?

>> End of August.

>> So before that you were at Google.

Not doing anything with feed burner at the time, but you were COO and co-founder of feedburn

Er, which Google bought, when was that, ‘07, ‘08?

>> June of ‘07.

>> I don’t want to dwell on feed burner but it’s interesting seeing the sort of old way of

Google reader and the other readers, you know, signing up to a site with using their RSS and

The way we and others are using Twitter today as almost a feed reader.

I think Steve has written about this almost constantly.

How do you feel about that.

>> That was a jibe.

Did you catch that.

>> Do you feel like RSS is dead?

>> Do I feel like it’s dead?

No, what happens with RSS is what many a pundit predicted would happen is that it got pushed

Down the stack.

It became like SMTP or http, right?

Nobody thinks about it.

You don’t think about the Sun mail protocol anymore you hop into Gmail send people a note don’t

Think about http or Apache configurations you just use websites.

What happened with RSS it got pushed down the stack, which is what happens to technology, protocols

Or mechanisms as they mature.

>> It got pushed down the stack by Twitter.

>> I think it got pushed down the stack by a lot of stuff.

Twitter is certainly one of them.

People are more interested in what’s happening right now, this second, and now this second

And now this second.

As opposed to necessarily catching up on here the 300 pieces of news from the past couple of

Days I need to catch up on.

>> So I think that was one component of it, certainly.

I wouldn’t deny that.

>> If you look at

there’s some documents that were published earlier in the year with some

Internal Twitter information.

It was before you started.

>> I like how you changed into a low voice there.

>> I think it’s just because I’m now talking directly into the mic.

>> Maybe.

Maybe.

>> Did you see those documents?

>> Did I see them?

No, I didn’t.

>> I saw what you posted.

>> Yeah.

Were done earlier this year.

Twitter would have 25 million users.

Four million in revenue and 79 employees.

>> Can you tell us what the real numbers are and how the company, how many users do you have,

what revenue?

>> This is what I’ll say.

I’ll say we’re across the board on those

on those numbers, well above and beyond.

>> How many users are there comecourse has 58 million unique worldwide users.

>> These services measure count in traditional ways.

They measure traffic to a site or they’ve got a panel that measures the kind of

the sites

That a person users.

But it’s no secret that there are tens of thousands of ecosystem applications for at which

Twitter, including Twitter clients and mobile clients.

>> The easy thing is how many user accounts are there?

Maybe active ones.

>> That would be the easiest thing to answer.

And

but I’m not going to give you that answer.

I’m instead going to say those numbers short count Twitter significantly.

>> So 58 million short counts Twitter significantly?

>> Uh-huh.

>> Wow.

And what’s interesting is a year ago, September, comecourse did 5.5 million uniques worldwide

Now they see 58, that’s a 10 X increase something like that.

>> Little more than 10 X.

>> Pretty amazing.

I don’t think any service has grown at that level that quickly.

I’m sorry, Facebook is growing obviously a huge number of users every month.

But I don’t think they’re even approaching this growth rate.

>> You know, good, that’s a good question.

I wouldn’t know what the answer to the growth rate percentages are.

I will say this about growth.

Look Facebook’s got 350 million users, something like that now.

They’re way out ahead of us.

It’s not, you know, it’s not close right now.

The other thing I would say about user growth is it’s also no secret that user growth has diminished

Significantly for us in the U.S. Lately.

.

I’ve talked about it at the Web 2.0 conference and I said earlier hopefully the suggested user

List goes away soon and we changed to what are you doing now to what’s happening.

Knows are super small things.

There’s lots more sophisticated things we can do about on boarding users.

And we’ve got a robust group of people and team assigned to on boarding users and we’re going

To make a lot of changes there, and I think you’ll see, you know, similar changes in the numbers

As a result of that

>> You continue to see the same growth rate.

You’ll be at 10 X or more than 10 X the number of users possibly a year from now?

>> Uh-huh.

>> Wow.

>> You’re asking.

I thought you’re stating it as a fact.

>> I was asking you and you said yes.

>> No, look, you can only continue to grow at that rate for so long before you have more people

Than are on the Internet in the world.

Of course we’re not going to continue at that growth rate.

>> Clearly you’re not there because 300 million is not all the people.

>> Of course.

No, I realize that.

But Mike was saying.

>> So the only thing you’re confirming you will not have more users by this time next year

than on Internet you’re willing to say that [LAUGHTER]

>> You’re not going to continue at that growth rate for a long period of time.

It’s going to be wavy, right, of course it is.

You’re going to have dips, all services have dips.

And we need to work our way out of it and we’ve acknowledged that.

>> So you guys have raised how much money?

>> 155 million.

>> $155 million.

How much of that is left?

Probably 100?

>> About a buck 80.

[LAUGHTER]

Let’s see, plenty.

Plenty of money.

So I’ll say a couple of things about that because I can kind of see where this is going.

[LAUGHTER]

Our run rate, you know, our expenses and our burn rate, whatever you want to call it, we’re

Not going to be needing to do anything.

>> You have those amazing new offices where Bibo used to be, literally down the street.

>> I have no idea if that’s the right direction or not.

Yes literally very close by.

>> That’s not cheap.

[LAUGHTER]

.

>> There are cheap ways to do things and there are expensive ways to do things.

We’re doing a really good job of managing our costs.

Like I said, one of the things that anybody with a financial interest in a company would do

Is measure run rate or EBITDA or burn rate.

That is the least of my worries right now.

>> When you have $155 million, it’s not

>> Even if we didn’t have $155 million.

>> In all seriousness let’s talk about revenue.

When do you turn it on.

At any point you could turn on revenue and what do you think the top ways you can generate

Revenue without impacting the user experience.

>> I already told you our run rate was higher than what you suggested.

>> It’s higher than four million.

>> So it’s on.

I think that, you know, one of the funny things that happens to me is

Costolo: That from ads or search deals.

>> I was going to talk about that.

I was kind of leading into my thing.

>> I apologize.

>> You’re right there in with the knife.

>> I formally apologize.

Go ahead.

[LAUGHTER]

I don’t want to cut you off.

[LAUGHTER]

>> Hey.

>> Come on, you’re sitting by me, looking at him.

>> I’m having fun.

>> So, look, there’s a couple things.

One, when we didn’t have any deals announced, people would say, you know, when is at which

Twitter going to talk about their business model, I don’t want to have to pay for at which

Twitter, then we go out and kind of have this very explicit set of announcements with Google

And Microsoft.

And that start to point to a go to market strategy and we can talk more about that, and then

There’s

we’re obviously not going to talk about the details of those relationships, since

Those are confidential relationships.

But they’re financial relationships.

That’s been said as much by all the parties involved.

And they’re compelling.

They’re compelling relationship on all sides.

And they point toward a way we’re going to go to market.

And the way we’re going to go to market is as an open ecosystem, allowing partners to distribute

Tweets or have access to the tweets.

And redisplay them in interesting ways.

And we’re

I think

and I hope sophisticated enough to have prethought about the implications

For the tweets being displayed on other sites in a way that facilitates our business model.

>> Right.

.

>> So what I mean by that, is we shouldn’t care if people are going to Bing and Google for

Tweet search results instead of to search.Twitter.Com.

And so we’ve tried to go to market with our partners in such a way we don’t have to care if

They go there.

>> From a financial standpoint.

>> From a financial standpoint.

>> So what you’ve done is to shift, instead of paying you, we pay Microsoft and Google, and

Then they pay you?

>> Well, how much do you pay

what do you mean you’re paying Microsoft.

>> I don’t know, you’re not telling us how much you’re paying or getting paid.

>> If Microsoft and Google come to you and ask you for money.

>> Click ads.

>> Click ads.

Look, we’re going to syndicate our data to other partners who have their own business models

And have business models that are compatible with the way we’re going to market.

>> Who would you think would be stop syndication partners beyond the ones you’ve already

>> We’ve already done those deals, right?

There are others.

Of course there are others.

And, look, there are tens of thousands of ecosystem partners.

You’ve got the TweetDecks of the world.

You’ve got the real time search engines.

You’ve got companies that do data mining for brands, right?

You’ve got companies like Code Tweet that have a great model doing around essentially CRM for

Brands on Twitter.

We’ll provide all these companies with a mechanism for using the leveraging the ecosystem and

Leveraging our APIs that allow them to make a lot of money.

>> What do you use when you access Twitter?

>> I’m totally old school.

I use Twitter.Com.

And search.Twitter.Com.

>> You use your phone as well or go to the website.

>> I do use my mobile.

But I’ve got this mid-switching, mid-switching devices.

So I still use the site.

>> So you guys, fascinated by the geo API that you’ve released.

Could you talk a little bit about your strategy around GEO and what the opportunities are?

>> So the opportunity around GEO is huge.

I think that one of the things you see with applications like Foursquare is that this notion

Of checking in to someplace is an explicit op in into identifying my location.

So the challenge around geo, one of the challenges, we were talking about this back stage,

Has always been I turn on my location.

I opt into turning on my location and I leave it on and I forget about it and then three months

Later I get a call from a friend that says, hey, you’re in Las Vegas right now.

You go, where is he?

And like, oh, I left that location thing on.

And now he can see on his map that I’m in Las Vegas.

And that can be more problematic for some than others.

So the cool thing about what Dennis Crowley has done at Foursquare, and I think Dennis is a

Genius, is that he’s made explicit for a short period of time this opt in via the gesture.

I use this, little Steve Gillmor term there.

We view the gesture of checking in.

Did you like that gesture.

>> He doesn’t want me to talk about track.

So keep going.

>> So check in is an explicit I’m here for this period of time and it’s okay that it’s public.

I did it intentionally.

There are lots of interesting things that you could perceive doing with geo around that would

Otherwise be difficult, because you don’t want to have a geo AP that’s constantly don’t forget

To opt turning on your location when you want to say something about the great Indian food

You’re having.

Did that make sense?

You look bored.

>> I’m not bored at all.

I didn’t want to cut you off.

Because it clearly pissed you off when I did.

We’ve talked about just about everything I wanted to cover.

Business model.

You’re not going to go into more detail.

How about we take questions from the audience.

Hold on, audience.

Wait.

If you have a question, go ahead and line up.

We’ll take a few.

But let’s talk about business models.

>> Yeah, we will have an advertising strategy, right?

You will see an advertising strategy from us in the very near future.

And I think that it will be fascinating and completely nontraditional and people will love

It.

>> Right now you have some sort of display ads, testing, messing around.

But those text ads.

>> Yeah, yeah.

>> That’s not fascinating or unique.

>> No.

>> What was it you said how did you describe it a minute ago.

>> I don’t know I was improvising.

>> You said fascinating.

What’s new?

>> I think it will be

it will be in the genius of Google was that the

when Google first

Rolled this out was that the ads were also the kinds of things that people were looking for.

And so I think we want to do something that’s organic and in the flow of the way people already

Use Twitter and not here’s the tweets and here are the ads.

So it will be

>> It’s here are the ads mixed in with the tweets so you can’t tell the difference when you

Click on them.

>> It’s going to be really cool and people will love it when they see it.

>> People will love the ads when they see it.

People will never get so much joy on clicking on ads as they will.

>> It’s going to be really cool.

>> And this love is going to be sort of packaged up in the retweet function?

>> No.

I wouldn’t say it will be packaged up in retweet function.

>> You’re not going to be making money on retweets?

>> I don’t think we have any intention of doing anything with retweet.

>> Can you explain about the ads?

You described starting using Twitter as flying into a cliff and catching fire.

Which isn’t awesome.

And then you said these ads which will be mixed in with the tweets, correct me if I’m wrong.

>> I didn’t say mixed in with the tweets.

>> You said I want them to be in the same flow.

>> Look, the thing I want to

the message I want to send is that we’re going to have an

Advertising business.

It will be ready in the near future.

>> It will be awesome.

>> It will be available to partners.

I think it’s going to be awesome.

Available to partners.

>> What’s the near future.

This year or next year.

>> Next yearish early next year.

>> Questions from the audience.

Are you that asleep that you have no questions?

>> What’s the

>> For the COO of Twitter.

>> Camera 2

>> Do you mind using the microphone.

>> Question: My name is Adam.

The current revenue that you have right now that’s reported four million, is that coming from

The recommended followers?

>> So it’s not four million.

Mike said the run rate would be four million.

I said our run rate was higher than that.

No, it’s coming from a variety of sources.

>> Meaning two sources, Google and Bing.

>> No, it’s coming from a bunch of different things.

>> Question: Do they pay you the recommended followers?

>> The suggested user list is merely a nonfinancial artifact of when you sign up for at which

Twitter, we need to put something in front of people so that they can know what they should

Do or who they should follow.

It was a super primitive mechanism.

It is not a financial relationship.

People don’t pay us to get on the list.

It causes lots of acrimony.

>> You should take them off when they piss you off.

>> It costs lots of money.

>> TechCrunch got taken off right after they posted those documents.

That didn’t piss us off at all.

>> We know we need to get rid of it and do something more interesting there.

And we will.

>> Another question.

say who you are.

>> Question: I have a question.

You were saying

>> We’re all still waking up here.

>> You didn’t use the word premium but you did talk about in terms of your business model

Providing APIs, providing other things.

I’m thinking you’re talking about metrics.

Two partners and you mentioned things like TweetDeck and code tweet and the question is right

Now a lot of people are providing free services to their users.

>> Of course.

>> Where do you see that division being in terms of what you provide to them and how that

Gets passed off and what the difference in experience between paid and free is going to be

For accessing it.

>> It’s not going to be, so I’m not trying to send the message it’s going to be paid and free

Access.

What we’re going to do

so thank you for asking that question.

What we’ll do with all our ecosystem partners is provide them a way to participate in the business

Model.

And it’s not going to necessarily be, you know, you pay us a bunch of money and then here you

Get to keep using it.

That’s not at all the idea.

The whole concept behind the Twitter ecosystem is we are going to be open.

We are going to foster ubiquity of the tweets.

We want to do things like, you know, if you’re a start-up and you have no money but you have

This great idea around displaying tweets, or using Twitter for certain B to B applications

You should be able to do that without having any money.

We’re absolutely going to continue to do those things F but what we’re also going to do is

For companies that want to work with us in a more in depth way, with a service level agreement

That they don’t have today, you know, when TweetDeck or other people uses the as-is search

API today it’s as is.

If it stops working or we say you’re over your QPS limit, too bad.

So what we should do is foster mechanisms, provide mechanisms that allow partners that want

To do more sophisticated things to do those things and that’s what I’m talking about.

Not charging the people that are doing simple things for free.

>> Do any of these partners pay you yet?

>> We get paid by partners for certain pieces of the API.

>> Louie, I see you in the audience with Seesmic.

Do you pay Twitter anything?

>> No, but as soon as we stop doing revenue, we’ll be able to share [phonetic].

>> Will there be a Twitter AP store.

>> There’s a lot of talk about the Twitter ap store.

It’s a discussion we have internally a lot.

It’s not top of mind for us.

I think top of mind for us right now is on boarding and discovery.

Right.

How do we get the best tweets in front of people without lots of effort on their part.

It should be effortless.

We don’t think a lot about an AP store.

It’s been suggested and one of the debates that rages internally that we don’t feel any your

Urgency dealing with right now.

>> We’ve had this debate for a long time now.

But I don’t believe it is sort of theoretically possible for Twitter to scale given the snaur.

You said it will.

Given that you’re the COO of the company.

Do you ever see decentralization as an option whether you can scale it or not getting at which

Twitter servers out to people so they can run their own at which timers.

>> That’s another debate that rages inside the company whether Twitter remains a centralized

Service.

There are ways to decentralize it, etc..

I would say that debate or discussion is disconnected from the scalability question.

For example, we don’t say, hey, we have the scalability challenge and the only way to deal

With it is decentralization.

There’s a scalability challenge and there’s a separate discussion around decentralization.

>> Which side are you on?

>> To the scalability side.

On the scalability point, there’s no question it can scale.

There are

>> There’s a question.

I asked it.

You said absolutely it can.

>> It can absolutely scale.

>> There are easy things you can do around the ways to fan out tweets to followers even if

You have a million, ten million, 100 million followers.

In a scaleable manner.

Efficient manner.

>> Why don’t you put track back in?

>> That’s a good question.

It’s a little off topic.

>> Google is starting to put track in Google alerts.

>> Yeah.

There are 50 things we want to do to the product, right?

>> Yeah.

>> And it remains at the bottom of the list, right?

>> There’s an

I would say the interesting, the really cool thing about working at at which

Twitter, when you’re on the inside, is that the pace of execution by the small team that’s

There, considering the size of our user base, is extraordinary.

So yesterday, you know, two days ago we rolled retweet out to 100 of our users.

Yesterday we launched Twitter in French.

Two days ago launched an enhancement, specific enhancements to lists.

We rolled out the GeoAPI fully.

There’s this pace of execution that’s absolutely remarkable given the scaling and the speed

Of scaling.

>> The track is

if you’re in the audience, track, do you all understand what track is,

Sort of the Google alerts for Twitter.

How many people would it be your number one feature request at Twitter is to have track?

100 percent of the audience just raised their hands.

>> Let me ask it a different way.

>> What are the top feature requests, since only a few people, just yell them out.

>> They’re very diffuse.

>> These guys are still asleep.

>> The feature requests are diffuse.

And there are certain things, look, there are certain things that we want to do that are important

Because they go to the core platform and those can be fanned out to ecosystem partners, right?

Getting back to the ecosystem, the geo stuff is purely

>> It’s not even on Twitter.Com.

>> It’s purely to the API to foster interesting geo uses of the API and improve the kinds

Of user experiences you can have with mobile Twitter.

>> I have a feature request, actually.

So when someone adds a friend or starts following someone, that should be a message through

The stream.

Because right now

if you’re doing analytics, there’s no historical record of how the social

Graph is evolving over time.

At least for us.

You guys may have that data.

But we don’t.

So it would be really, really awesome, when people started following other people, this became

A tweet just like anything else and it could just go through all those other mechanisms.

>> Yep.

I don’t disagree with that.

Right?

There’s a lot of things like that you should be able to

>> Get track before that.

>> Track is just one of many features that people want that is something we’ll

>> Our audience has spoken.

Track is

it was 100 percent.

All right.

One last question.

>> So to the point in the back, analytics are super important to the future of the way people

Use Twitter.

It would be really nice to see how your tweets fan out and what the usage of them are and what

Kinds of things were more interesting than others, etc.

>> Are you guys going to sell analytics or provide

>> We talked about before the fact we’ll have commercial accounts package and that commercial

Accounts package, one of the fundamental features of that commercial accounts package for businesses,

Will be an analytics dashboard.

Other things will include stuff like, you know, the kinds of things that companies would want

For their accounts.

Right?

Like I want multiple people to author to this one account, and maybe I turn myself on and now

I’ve got the controls and this person’s checked out.

Etc. Etc..

So that’s absolutely something we have talked about before.

We’ve said we were going to roll it out soon.

We continue to be on the time frame of rolling it out in the very near future.

>> Kevin.

>> Question: So you’re talking about openness in ecosystem but I haven’t seen anyone at at

Twitter at any of the IW open standards stuff.

When there were five of you now there’s 60 of you we’re not seeing you anymore.

Please come out more.

>> I think the question was an accusation question.

[LAUGHTER]

>> Good to see you.

Not an accusation.

>> We’ve known each other for a while.

I’m giving him a hard time.

So why aren’t we

look, when our engineers interview people, one of the questions a lot of

Them ask is tell me about your contributions to open source.

It’s like super important to the team and the community and we understand that.

It’s also the case that I’ve never seen people working, you know, harder and more passionate

Ly and I’ve worked in a bunch of places, than I have in the last three months, and people are

Just absolutely, you know, the pedal is to the ground.

So when what you will see is when we have more engineers in house and more people doing the

Kinds of things that everyone is wearing four hats for right now, we will be more par tis pa

Ticipatory in all of those avenues.

We use open source.

We hope to be producers of it.

You’ll see nothing but advocacy from us on that front.

>> I appreciate all your time.

I appreciate you coming out here first thing in the morning.

Sounds like you have some great stuff coming up.

>> Happy to be here.

>> And you’re going to keep this sort of open door so that we can

is there a number I can

Call to ask them about where track is on that list?

>> Yeah, my cell phone.

Text me.

>> What is your Twitter.

It’s DickC.

Photo is courtesy of Kenneth Yeung.

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For those who have not had the opportunity to try Brizzly yet, it’s a web app that serves as a way to interact with both Twitter and now Facebook. It has advantages over Twitter’s regular website because it shows pictures and videos inline, and they actually did lists (which they called Groups) before Twitter. Now that Twitter has rolled out that functionality, Brizzly has integrated it. Perhaps more importantly, Brizzly also offers as one-click way to do the old-school way of retweeting. You know, the “RT” way.

But the opening of its service is not all Brizzly is announcing today: They’ve also made a new hire. Ben Darnell joins the team from Facebook, where he worked for just a few short months since he came over after the FriendFeed acquisition. But Darnell’s ties run close to Brizzly as he’s a former Googler like Thing Labs’ Jason Shellen, Chris Wetherell, Dolapo Falola. At Google, Darnell was one of the original Google Reader team members.

With Brizzly, Darnell will work on “larger framework for communication and content discovery,” Shellen tells us. This means he’ll be working on their infrastructure and APIs.

And Brizzly has one more new trick up its sleeve today: On-the-fly translation of tweets. While Twitter is busy rolling out its service into other languages, Brizzly is translating it to anyone who wants it thanks to Google Translate. Translating a tweet is as simple as clicking a button.

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And we’re starting off with a bang. Twitter COO Dick Costolo is on stage first for thirty minutes of cold war style interrogation by Steve Gillmor and me.

And we want your help.

Let us know in the comments what questions you’d like us to ask. We can’t promise that Costolo will answer those questions, but we can guarantee that we’ll ask them. And if your proposed questions are good enough, you can get into the event. We’ll give up to five passes (the last seats in the house) to anyone with deeply insightful ideas. Just make sure to use your real email.

Don’t limit yourself to Twitter-related stuff, either. If Twitter is willing to give advice to Rupert Murdoch on how to run his newspapers, then absolutely anything goes.

I’m looking forward to meeting everyone tomorrow in person, if not at the event then at the party afterwards. See you there.

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As the service announced in October, it needed help from the community in order to roll out to the so-called “FIGS” languages. That is French, Italian, German, and Spanish. Just over a month later, 2 of those are already complete.

Just as they did the last time, Twitter wrote the entire post in the new lanuage, so we’ll give a rough translation here:

With the addition of the Spanish version of the site last month, many people have joined the conversations on Twitter. More and more people tweet outside the United States and we are now able to accommodate users of nearly 30 Francophone countries. It is now possible to change the language settings in French with the participation of translators who have helped turn Twitter into a platform for truly global communication.

The French twitteurs golds can already track people and companies they are familiar. Whether you attended @lepicerie or @lopera for your gastronomic outings, you read @lemondefr way to work or you listen @theteenagers on the way home or you’re a fan of @CanadiensMTL, there is a wealth of information useful to discover at any time.

To see Twitter in French, just check your settings and select “French” from the menu.

One last thing: some of the Twitter team will be in Paris on 9 and 10 November for LeWeb conference, presented by @loic. The specialists of our platform, Ryan Sarver (@rsarver) and Marcel Molina (@noradio) will present, among other things, a session developers. If you are in the region these days, please join us!

As they note, they got this done just in time for LeWeb, where member of Twitter’s team will be talking about their platform. Quite a few members of TechCrunch will be participating in the event as well. And no doubt even more people will be tweeting about it now.

UPDATE: In fact TechCrunch Europe is helping to organise the Startup Competition at Le Web.

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This means that applications that have been built using the APIs — such as Birdfeed, which we previewed recently — will be the first to be able to use location features. As Twitter notes, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and a few others are also supporting location right now.

As you can see in the screenshot, there is a new “Enable geotagging” option in the Settings menu on Twitter. It’s important to note that this feature is entirely opt-in. There is also a button to delete all your location data if you feel the need to do that. The process apparently takes up to 30 minutes to complete.

It’s worth noting that Twitter snuck in a post about its new privacy policy just before the Geolocation post. For those interested, find the updated policy here. Twitter says it basically just updated the language to account for the new location functionality.

Location appears to be a big part of Twitter’s strategy going forward. Not only do they have the Geolocation API, but they have a new API to serve up better Trending Topics based on location.

In his blog post, Twitter Platform Director Ryan Sarver notes, “This release is unique in that it’s API-only which means you won’t see any changes on twitter.com, yet.” “Yet” is the key word there. Given the extensive UI changes Twitter has undergone in the past few weeks with features like Lists and now Retweets being added, it shouldn’t be that surprising that Twitter is choosing not to roll this out on the main site right now. But you can be sure it will be a part of the experience eventually.

Developers interested in Geolocation should also look at the notes left today in the Twitter API Google Group.

Twitter has a good sense of timing with this rollout as our Realtime Crunchup is taking place tomorrow in San Francisco, and Sarver will be a part of our panel talking about geolocation. It’s good that he now has something to talk about.

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Twitter has implemented a small change today, which by comparison to Retweets and UI redesigns isn’t such a huge deal but it’s definitely worth mention. Twitter’s prompting question above the box from which you Tweet from has been “What are you doing” since the microblogging platform launched. Today, it’s been changed to “What’s Happening.”

It’s a wise move because “What are you doing” seemed too narrow for the platform. Broadening the question to match all the things people use twitter for was necessary. Considering that Twitter is now used for breaking news, that term doesn’t really cover it. Here’s the full text of co-founder Biz Stone’s blog post:

People, organizations, and businesses quickly began leveraging the open nature of the network to share anything they wanted, completely ignoring the original question, seemingly on a quest to both ask and answer a different, more immediate question, “What’s happening?” A simple text input field limited to 140 characters of text was all it took for creativity and ingenuity to thrive.

Sure, someone in San Francisco may be answering “What are you doing?” with “Enjoying an excellent cup of coffee,” at this very moment. However, a birds-eye view of Twitter reveals that it’s not exclusively about these personal musings. Between those cups of coffee, people are witnessing accidents, organizing events, sharing links, breaking news, reporting stuff their dad says, and so much more.

The fundamentally open model of Twitter created a new kind of information network and it has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates. Twitter helps you share and discover what’s happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about. “What are you doing?” isn’t the right question anymore—starting today, we’ve shortened it by two characters. Twitter now asks, “What’s happening?”

We don’t expect this to change how anyone uses Twitter, but maybe it’ll make it easier to explain to your dad.

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As the Twitter mobile account noted earlier tonight, if you simply send “RT USERNAME” to 40404 (at least in the U.S.) it will automatically retweet the last tweet of whatever username you entered has sent. And yes, it will be a new-style Retweet.

If you love the new Retweets, that’s a great feature. If you hate them, well, then, you’ll hate this too. For more on that, see here.

Regardless, Twitter’s quick moves to expand and extend mobile support is pretty impressive.

A couple other things worth noting about Retweet now that it’s live for everyone:

1) You can stop seeing the new Retweets from any user simply by clicking on their profile and making sure the rotating arrow badge under their name is not green.

2) New style Retweets do not show up in your @replies section. To see them, you have to go into the new Retweets section and click on the “Your tweets, retweeted” area.

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Yes, you’ve always been able to name a list whatever you want, but that usually involves creating ugly titles like ‘tech-people-I-think-are-smart’. Take for example, TechCrunch’s list on Tech (check it out if you haven’t already). The word ‘tech’ is probably what most people would search for if they wanted a list related to technology, which is why we chose it. But it’s also ambiguous: that list could be a stream of stories from the top tech blogs, breaking news, or tweets from the people behind the stories. Now that Twitter is rolling out a description field, we’ll be able to keep the succinct title while more effectively describing what the list is about.

In a followup tweet, Dornfest gave instructions on how to add descriptions to lists you’ve created:

Adding a description to an existing list is as simple as: visit list page, click “Edit” (top-right), add a description, and save.

And if you’re looking for some lists to follow, be sure to check out the rest of our lists here (we’re always updating these so let us know if you thikn you should be added).

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We’re here at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s annual cloud computing event in San Francisco. CEO Marc Benioff is delivering the keynote and we will be live-bogging the news below. Salesforce has had a banner year, reporting strong earnings yesterday for the third quarter, launching a new version of their fastest growing product, Service Cloud 2; and rolling out a lightweight contact manager for small businesses. So what is the future? Benioff has long praised the virtues of the real-time cloud and said recently that real-time technology is not only crucial to Salesforce’s offerings but is the future of the company’s products. Benioff has even praised Twitter for making the transition between the cloud and real-time web seamless.

Today, Salesforce is making its own venture into the stream with Salesforce Chatter which allows any company to collaborate in real time with a secure, private social network for their business. Content, applications and people will now have profiles, feeds and groups, enabling them to be connected. In addition, developers will now be able to use the Salesforce Chatter platform to build social enterprise applications, and all 135,000 native Force.com applications will be able to tap into Chatter.

Salesforce Chatter will let users post profiles, like on Facebook, which include things like contact information, area of expertise, work history and a photo. The social network will also include the ability to post real-time status updates. And Salesforce is tapping into the real-time stream that will feature status updates, not only from people, but also from content and apps. Content will notify users in the Salesforce Chatter feed when new or updated content is available. Apps will join the conversation by posting when there is a change in status, like when an opportunity closes or a case is escalated in Salesforce CRM. Salesforce Chatter will also allow users to create groups within the social network.

Similar to Facebook, users will be able to post content, like documents, spreadsheets and presentations, in Salesforce Chatter’s feed. Companies can decide which employees have access to certain information on a network, with a multi-tenant sharing model.

Of course, Salesforce Chatter will enable users to filter the most relevant Twitter feeds into their Chatter app. For example, a user can set-up a Twitter search for a competitor and automatically stream the real-time results into Chatter. Employees will also be able to pull information from their Facebook profiles to auto populate their Salesforce Chatter profiles.

Any native app built on the Force.com platform can stream updates to Salesforce Chatter’s feed. And with all salesforce.com apps, Salesforce Chatter will be available on the BlackBerry, Windows Mobile devices or iPhone. Salesforce Chatter is currently scheduled to become available in calendar year 2010 and will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com. Chatter will also be sold for $50 per user per month and will include Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce Content and Force.com.

Benioff says that Salesforce Chatter is the “magic of Facebook and Twitter brought to the enterprise.” But the feed itself looks similar to FriendFeed.

Benioff will also be revealing more about Salesforce Chatter and his real-time strategy at TechCrunch’s Real-Time CrunchUp on Friday, November 20.

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Joel Strellner, who started the project, finally put Twitturly up for sale on Flippa ten days ago, and the auction just ended. Only five bids came in, and the sale ultimately netted no more than $8,500 – Strellner was hoping for double that amount.

Now, to be fair, Strellner has moved on to other things in the past few months and acknowledges that little attention has been paid to the service for a while, but the low selling price is still undeniably a bit of a bummer for him and his team. Despite a PageRank 6 and an Alexa rank of 40,106, Twitturly only attracted about 1,000 unique visitors per day, and that’s not even enough to warrant anyone to start thinking about monetization.

It’s unclear who the winning bidder is, but he or she is getting the codebase for the site, one month of support from Strellner, some domain names and 622 GB of data.

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Though they’d never admit to such a thing, the reasoning should be obvious: The longer you’re at your computer, the more time you’re spending on their sites. The more time your spending on their sites, the more ads you’re being served. The more ads being served, the more money they are earning. No matter why these sites originally started, or what features they add, that is, quite literally, the bottom line. They’d have us strapped to a chair with our eyes taped open like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, if they could. The only difference is that we’d have a contraption on our arms to allow us to click on the ads being shown every so often.

Thankfully, we don’t quite live in that world yet. And there are a couple factors pushing us the opposite way from that. Mobile devices are the biggest one. But even that is still just a screen. You may not be chained to a desk using it, but as plenty of people with an iPhone will tell you, you may end staring at this screen even more than you do a desktop or laptop monitor throughout a day. But there’s another up and coming factor working against our screen slavery: Location.

Social networking has been perhaps the most popular trend on the Internet over the past several years. At first the term was ironic. “Social networking” was anything but social in the traditional sense. But over time, we’ve grown accustomed to the idea that you can do social activities such as play games, collaborate on work, and talk, online. And in fact, many times it’s even more convenient than doing it in person. It’s social, but it’s a different kind of social.

Ever since the term was born, countless people have debated the implications of taking social interactions virtual. At one point or another I’m sure that it has been said that it would be both the downfall of mankind, and the thing that would bring the planet together. The truth is that social networking, while great in many respects, does not fulfill a fundamental human desire: To be in the actual presence of other people.

If you’ll allow me to be embarrassingly obvious for a second: Sitting in a chat room all day, even if all of your friends are in it as well, is not the same as being in the same physical room with them. Even if you all are having great discussions in the chat room, and not saying a word when you’re hanging out with one another, there is just something that’s different. Something that social networking will never be able to replace.

That’s where location comes in. It has the power to be the bridge between social networking and actual social interaction. We’re already seeing the very early signs of this with services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite, and Google Latitude, to varying degrees.

To the masses, most of these services still either don’t make sense, or are way too creepy. Social networks used to be thought of in the same way. This will change.

The people who do use these services likely have at least one story about a situation where a friend saw where they were, or where they planned to be, and showed up to meet up. Some have many of these stories. And for some of us in cities where these services are popular, this happens just about everyday. And it’s really quite amazing.

Is it annoying if a friend shows up if you want to be alone or don’t want to see them? Of course. But that’s why it’s important that you’re in control of what location information you are sending out. Is it creepy if a stranger shows up to meet you somewhere? Of course, but that’s why privacy settings are so important.

Make no mistake, there are hurdles to location-based services gaining widespread acceptance. But the upside of it far outweighs the downside. And with that the case, these types of services are ripe to take off.

At the core level, using a social network to facilitate actual social interaction just seems to make sense. Though I poked fun at them in the intro of this post, don’t think that Facebook doesn’t recognize this. In some ways they already do this through their popular events offering. But anything they do with location — which it should be no surprise, they are working on — will go far beyond this. When you have a social graph with over 300 million users and you add a realtime location component into the mix, it’s going to change things.

I remember the first time I used sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster (back in the day) to find people that I went to high school with who I hadn’t talked to in years. It was a little weird, but also in some ways exciting. Imagine that transfered into the real world. Maybe you’re in a city with a person you went to high school with, but hadn’t talked to in years. It’s unlikely that the two of you were ever run into each other randomly, but maybe you can get pinged by Facebook location when they’re nearby. Maybe neither of you want to meet, and that’s fine. But maybe you do.

The word we keep hearing over and over again for such situations is “serendipity,” but really it’s not. None of this needs to be left up to chance. It’s simply an extension of social networking into the real world.

Another social network, Twitter, is already in hot pursuit of such functionality. Any day now, the service will turn on its geolocation service which will both allow you to send tweets with your location tacked on, and allow you to pass in location information from other services, like Foursquare. As a service with tens of millions of users, Twitter will be the first massive test of location as an extension of social networking.

It may be a while before users start truly taking advantage of it since it is an opt-in feature. But eventually, I believe we’ll see more and more users opt-in to be able to use third-party clients like Birdfeed which let them choose which tweets to attach their location to and let people know where they are.

And beyond individual user data, this location data will be very interesting as an aggregate. Undoubtedly people will use things like Twitter’s geolocation APIs to make services that can show where people are flocking to in realtime. This is the next step for what services like SocialGreat are doing with location data, showing hot spots in towns. And we already know that Twitter is planning to use the data to tailor its trending topics to show the hot things being tweeted about in specific places.

Social networking up until this point has been great. But it’s also really a bit odd. The core concept is still to gather your friends in a virtual construct, while the companies behind these constructs convince you to hang out in them as much as possible. Instead, they should be using the interesting social data they have to help you connect in other places as well. That’s what makes Facebook Connect is so powerful. But that doesn’t extend to the real world yet. But with location, it could. And that’s exciting.

We’ll be discussing this and other topics at our Realtime CrunchUp this Friday in San Francisco.

[images: MGM and Warner Brothers]

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I refuse to believe that Twitter is really trying to add your DM inbox/sent messages, and all those new retweet categories to the main stream like that. Unless they read my post the other day and decided to do the opposite. And what on Earth is up with those numbers? Why the hell do I need numbered tweets in my stream, this is not Sesame Street.

Twitter is scheduled to undergo maintenance today, but that’s not until 11 PM PT tonight. What is going on?

Update: Order has been restored, it was in fact a bug and not a completely awful new UI. Thank God.

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The fact that it doesn’t own the @Kodak handle on Twitter hasn’t stopped them from being active on the popular micro-sharing service either, where marketers of the company and several employees from its international office locations share all sorts of Kodak related stuff with their followers.

Of course, it’s only natural for a company like Kodak to share pictures with the community, and if you look closely you’ll see most of the Kodak accounts on Twitter use TweetPhoto to do so (e.g. @JeffreyHayzlett, CMO of Kodak). That’s not a coincidence.

First launched back in April 2009, TweetPhoto has been steadily building out its service with multiple useful features and that has worked out well for the startup. According to Compete, TwitPic is still the leader of the pack, but the graph below shows TweetPhoto (blue line) is close to overtaking ImageShack’s Yfrog while TwitPic’s traffic appears to be in a downward trend for the past few months.

TweetPhoto is now the default photo sharing app on TweetDeck for iPhone, one of the most popular Twitter clients for the platform, and it is also integrated with many other mobile applications, including for Blackberry devices (already on Ubertwitter and coming later this week on SocialScope).

The service may look like a dog – a redesign is in the works – but they must clearly be doing something right.

Now the fledgling company is announcing that it has struck a partnership agreement with Kodak, under which the two companies intend to collaborate on initiatives focused around real-time photography and photo sharing on the web. Basically, that means they will be co-developing, testing and launching new products and services together, centered around the nature of the realtime web and image sharing.

The first lovechild of the two companies has already been born: meet the real-time Event Photo Stream, which essentially functions as an aggregator for both photos and tweets around a conversation using a given hashtag. The photo stream was originally released at the 140 Conference last month and will be demoed this week in Los Angeles at the Underground @ PDC event.

TweetPhoto has also let us know it has engaged in initial talks with angel and institutional investor about a potential seed funding round – the startup has been completely been bootstrapped to date.

Keep an eye on this one.

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The deal, announced on the Twitter blog by Thau, allows Orange UK Twitter users to send picture messages to a number (86444) to be posted to their tweet streams. The reason this works is because Orange UK runs a photo site called Snapshot, which will host the pictures and tweet out a link to them automatically.

Twitter notes that it is not charging anything extra for this service, and it should work just like SMS does — which is to say that standard carrier rates still apply for these messages. Still, it’s a pretty sweet deal to bring something new to UK Twitter users first. Hopefully something like this can be worked out in the rest of the world too, but seeing as it took AT&T several months to get MMS just working on the iPhone, I wouldn’t count on it.

It’s also worth noting that non-Orange UK customers can still use SMS for Twitter through Vodafone, O2, and, of course, Orange.

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As Twitter has posted in its Twitter API Announcements Google Group today, there is now a new Find People API. This will extend the “Find People” capabilities that exist on Twitter.com to third-party developers. Presumably, as with Find People on the site, you’ll be able to search by first names, last names, businesses, and brands, on top of usernames.

Seeing as most activity still comes through Twitter’s APIs, this is potentially big news as the service tries to get back on track in terms of growth after flatlining the past few months. Plus, as Twitter extends business and brand functionality in an attempt to monetize, this new search ability will also be key.

You can find out more about the Find People API here. As Twitter co-founder Evan Williams tweeted a few minutes ago, “Oh good, a find people API: http://bit.ly/dDvy8 If you wondered why you can’t search for people from Twitter apps, this was the missing link.” Indeed.

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A few members of the Twitter team spent much of the weekend decorating the new digs with a number of Twitter-themed elements like birds and @ symbols. Check out some of the pictures being posted to the web by Twitter employees below. And yes, there is a DJ booth — and apparently vanity mirrors in the toilet stalls.

[photos: flickr/ryansking, twitpic/caroline, yfrog/robey, twitpic/wfarner, twitpic/jennadawn]

Update: And a bunch more pictures from the @twitter Flickr account:

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That revelation was made tonight during a Q&A session at a town hall event with Chinese youth that was held in Shanghai this evening (which was streamed live on the web). The President fielded a question about the restricted use of Twitter in China and he had this to say, “I have never used Twitter but I’m an advocate of technology and not restricting internet access.”

This is interesting considering the Internet, and social media in particular, was considered a large part of his ascension to the Presidency. Obviously, he had a killer team around him that was able to embrace the web without the then-Senator getting too much involved. Still, it’s somewhat surprising that he never sent any of his own tweets during the primaries. And undoubtedly part of us wants to believe that when you see tweets like “This is history,” which was sent on November 7 — or “Humbled” after he won the Nobel Peace Prize in October, that’s it could the President really sending it. Nope.

Of course, the more important story here is his stance on Chinese Internet censorship. It’s ridiculous that people in China are restricted from accessing certain parts of the Internet. But we’ve all known that for a long time, and we’ve known the President’s position on it.

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This guest post was written by Steve Poland, a former TechCrunch writer working on his soon-to-launch start-up InSeconds that allows sites to easily customize each visitor’s experience, resulting in optimized revenue for each visit.

Affiliate marketing is 15 years old this month—CyberErotica is said to have launched the first program in 1994. The adult industry has always been ahead of the curve, but I digress. Despite 15 years of existence, which is essentially an eternity in “online years”, the performance based marketing method is still in its infancy. Sure, there are lots of affiliate programs that exist for many online etailers (and other sites that seek sales, leads and visitors) and $2.1b was paid out last year from affiliate programs, but affiliate marketing is still not as easy as it should be for website/blog Publishers to implement and get compensated for their referrals.

For those that don’t know, affiliate marketing works like this—a company with a product or service for sale pays a referral fee to Publishers (marketing companies) that can drive sales, leads, or visitors to them. The Publisher is taking on the risk here—they might be outlaying their own cash on advertising to promote the product/service, or they are linking to that company’s product/service in the content of their site’s own webpages (when they could be linking to another company instead). The Publisher signs up for an account with the affiliate program and is then given “trackable links” to use in their content, which track referrals back to them. Most etailers have an affiliate marketing program in place—for example, Amazon.com’s Associates program will pay 4%-15% referral fees to you when a visitor of your website clicks a link on your site and makes a purchase at Amazon.com.

Twitter & Facebook Turn Everyone Into An Affiliate Marketer

Most recently, it’s not just websites/blogs that are referring sales, but rather individuals themselves, who are using realtime sites like Twitter and Facebook to influence their friends and followers by recommending products to buy, music to listen to, and movies to watch. These realtime discussions are becoming important sources of referral sales and leads for websites—if someone is asking on Twitter what digital camera they should buy, you bet your ass that Amazon.com wants anyone on the Internet responding to that user’s question to be linking to a camera for sale on Amazon.com (and not Walmart.com or BestBuy.com). Amazon.com wants to make sure that those influencers are compensated for referring people to buy from their website, which thus positively reinforces them to continue linking to Amazon.com product pages in the future.

Everyone with access to the Internet today is a Publisher. They are a voice. This has always been the case, but not the way it is now with Microblogging. Individuals were Publishers on a smaller scale via email forwards, email replies, IM, or most recently blog posts. Blogging broadened individual’s view points (influence) up to a global scale—no longer would they only influence just a few friends in a closed-circuit email, but they could influence the masses online. But blogging wasn’t realtime discussions. Instant messaging and chat rooms were always realtime discussions—but primarily on a one-on-one or small-group basis. Twitter and Facebook status updates, aka microblogging, has mashed the realtime nature of instant messaging with the global scale and voice of blogging.

Amazon.com Pioneers Affiliate Marketing, Again

As an early pioneer of affiliate marketing for site/blog Publishers (holding the patent on all the components of an online affiliate marketing program), it only makes sense that Amazon.com would now become an early pioneer of affiliate marketing for individual publishers—those who simply tweet and comment on their friend’s Facebook updates. Last week, Amazon.com announced they would start compensating individuals with referral fees for using Amazon.com links in their Twitter messages and in their Facebook status updates/comments. Although it will likely lead to more noise (and spam), I think we’re going to see many companies follow Amazon.com’s lead. I also think this has the potential of being a game changer, if some other pieces fall into place—more on this in a bit.

What has shocked me over the years is the number of links in webpages that aren’t trackable links. Most links in content are just regular links out to other webpages, which means that they don’t contain a tracking code that corresponds to them as the referring website—which means that when a sale is referred and occurs on a site that has an affiliate program in place, that affiliate program site doesn’t know who to pay the referral fee to (even though they honestly would like to, because it encourages future linking to them by that referring Publisher). In a perfect world, all the links on all the webpages on the Internet that link to Amazon.com product pages would be trackable links which would earn those websites referral fees for whenever their visitors click over and purchase products from Amazon.com. Ditto for all the links that have affiliate programs in place.

Affiliate Marketing for Publishers Still Not Quick and Easy, Yet

I would go out on a limb and estimate that 99.99% of all links on the web are not trackable links. Why? Because it’s been a bit of a pain in the ass, quite frankly. If you’re a publisher and you’re writing a content piece, you would need to go away from your writing, login to the affiliate program for the website you want to link to (i.e. Amazon.com Associates), and then generate the trackable link for the webpage you want to link to—ensuring that when your visitors click that link, that you’ll earn referral fees from Amazon.com when purchases occur. Not to mention that you have to signup for all of these affiliate programs; some of these programs are handled by third-party companies and become discontinued (making your links dead). And then there’s the money—if you don’t get very many visitors each month to your site, you may only earn a few dollars a month from affiliate programs, which then discourages you from putting forth the time to place trackable links into your content in the first place.

The lack of ease that sites/blogs have had to endure to use affiliate marketing over the years is the same for Individuals now. Amazon.com has said they endorse trackable links by users in social media, but it’s still not easy enough. Sure, you can go over to Amazon.com, login to your Associates account, and a button appears at the top of every product page saying “Share on Twitter”, which then creates a tweet with your trackable link in it, but that’s still one too many steps. People are lazy. More than half of Twitter users are using a Twitter application to do their tweeting. Until the affiliate programs are integrated into the social networking platforms (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, forums) or the applications used on these platforms (Tweetdeck, Seesmic, Tweetie, bit.ly), this affiliate marketing by individuals won’t take off.

It’s in the interest of the platform (Twitter) to make this easier because it will ultimately allow their users to earn money. It’s in the interest of the users, because it earns them money and reinforces their usage of the platform (Twitter). It’s in the interest of the affiliate program (Amazon.com), because it positively reinforces users to share links to their site. (On the flip side, Twitter might not want to encourage this for fear of making teh spam problem even worse than it is).

“Facebook Credits” could become de facto Virtual Currency with a Facebook integration of Amazon.com

But if you really think about it, Facebook should really be integrating these affiliate program partners into its platform first. Facebook has the most to gain by integrating. You may have heard of the virtual currency system that Facebook has been working on—Facebook Credits. It will allow users to purchase Facebook Credits with cash and then use them in third-party Facebook applications, such as leveling up your character in a game or buying a virtual rose for a friend. To get people using this system, Facebook will likely give away some initial credits to every user, to get them to see how simple they are to use, then get the user to pull out their credit card and refill.

What about a constant refill of Facebook Credits every month to help spur more in-app activity/purchases? That could happen. Even if users were merely earning $0.44 or $1.32 monthly from their link sharing habits, if these referral fees were automatically turned into Facebook Credits, Facebook could really jump-start this in-app currency of theirs (and if they operate anything like Apple, they’ll nab 30% of all in-app money spent). This will work for Amazon.com and other affiliate program participants, as long as the user knows that the 1000 Facebook Credits they earned this month were from their sharing of Amazon.com links. Facebook would love it because these affiliate links would be an income generator for their users, encouraging their users to spend more time on Facebook, and of course there is revenue associated with users spending their credits. Finally, Facebook application developers would love it because they’ll be seeing a steady stream of revenue as well. Meanwhile, app developers and Facebook can steer clear of Scamville-type offers. With affiliate links, you only get paid if someone actually clicks through and buys something. Good referrals get rewarded,while bad referrals get nothing.

Plus, imagine the publicity for a Facebook or Twitter. I can see the headlines now, “Facebook now ‘employs’ 300 million people” or “Facebook lets 300 million people to start earning money just by sharing links”.

This is Now, Get Ready for the Effects

One effect of affiliate programs becoming integrated easily into these realtime platforms (and/or client apps) is that referral fees will go down. Amazon.com currently pays out 4%-15% on referral sales, but that’s because they know only a small percentage of their sales occur now from referrals (because of the lack of ease—and because of the laziness of sites linking to Amazon.com). But with a vast usage of trackable links, then for example, if sales remained flat and 5% of all purchases were referrals previously and now that number becomes 25%, then Amazon.com can’t be paying out 8% referral commissions (unless sales went up 5x too), so Amazon.com would reduce that to 1.6% referral commissions (8%/5).

Yes, this movement is going to turn up the volume of spam noise to us all via our use and searches on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere. Those people who you follow may get spammy, but their influence over you will go down (just like those people that send you too many nonsense email forwards). Everyone has a personal brand and if you spam your audience with tons of links, they won’t be listening to you as much.

But what I’m talking about isn’t the future—it’s here now, with Amazon.com leading the way. Those companies that don’t embrace affiliate marketing for Individual Publishers, will lose. If someone is tweeting about the new iPod, that someone is going to link to the webpages that will earn them money.

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Yahoo hasn’t exactly seemed like the ideal place to work over the past couple of years. Besides just the Microsoft acquisition offer distraction (and subsequent search deal), and the CEO shuffle, the company has lost much of its sterling polish that it once had during the dot-com era. But what’s even more odd is that Raffel has worked at Yahoo before. It’s where he made a name for himself by helping to create Yahoo Pipes, the popular content mashup tool. But a few years ago, Raffel took off to work at Pioneers of the Inevitable, where he helped make Songbird, the open source desktop music player.

So why’d he come back to Yahoo at a time when others were pursuing him? It’s hard to say for sure, but one source believes Yahoo paid a significant amount of money to lure him back. Another source believes he was promised more resources and an easier time rising up the ladder than if he went to Google. Still, Yahoo over Google is not a choice that a lot of people seem to make these days. And one source is sure that Bradley Horowitz, a former Yahoo exec that is now at Google, would have obviously wanted to bring Raffel on board, and was likely pushing for it.

There’s another reason he may have went with Yahoo. Since returning in late August, Raffel has been serving as a senior product manager under Cody Simms, the senior director of product management for Yahoo Open Source (Y!OS), we hear. He’s apparently working on mainly off-network projects such as making the Yahoo authentication platform more seamless. That might not sound sexy, but the bigger picture may be involve Yahoo building out its own platform product to better connect Yahoo with the rest of the web. Yes, think Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, and the like. The chance to get into this hot space and play a critical role in building a “Yahoo Connect,” may have also enticed Raffel to come back, but that’s pure speculation at this point.

“He’s one of those rare product guys who is technical and can actually build stuff,” says one our sources. We’ll be watching what he’s building for Yahoo the second time around.

We’ve reached out to Raffel for comment, but have yet to hear back. We’ll update if we do.

[photo: flickr/sektordua]

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At the beginning of 2009, during a now-famous strategy meeting, Twitter’s executives asked themselves, “Are we building a new Internet?” At the crux of that question was the realization that Twitter “introduced a new form of communication to the world.” Public micro-messages are now everywhere—on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google, Bing, Yahoo, AIM. They are infiltrating every part of the Web, particularly as the backbone of realtime search.

Yes, status updates (which are a form of micro-message) existed before Twitter, but it is the growing public nature of these messages which makes them exciting. For one thing, they need to be public in order to be visible to search engines. But when Twitter and other companies talk about building a new Internet, they don’t mean that 140-character messages are going to replace web pages. Rather it is that these realtime streams are becoming the center of people’s attention on the Web, and sending them off in all different sorts of directions.

These streams are the new Internet not so much because of the micro-content which they contain, but because they are a more efficient means of communication. Remember, the Internet at its core is a communications system. The battle going on now between Twitter, Facebook, Google, and others is to control this new realtime layer of communications on the Internet. Each one wants to be driving the micro-message bus.

In computer terms, a message bus carries data between different parts of a computer or between different computers. Realtime streams can be thought of as a micro-message bus which carries information instantaneously between people. The power of a micro-message is its ability to carry data, usually in the form of a link. It is a vehicle for passing links and other information. The value of a Tweet or status update or a Yammer or a Wave is not only in what it conveys about the sender, but where it leads to.

Other kinds of data can take a ride on this micro-message bus as well. Geolocation data, photos and videos are among the most popular. Whoever is in the driver’s seat of this micro-message bus will be in an enviable position, which is why everyone is trying to clamor aboard in hopes of taking over the wheel.

Next week, at our Realtime Crunchup (tickets are still available), we’ll be examining how this new communications layer on the Internet is being built and who will be driving the bus. We hope you can join us.

Photo credit: Flickr/Jan Krutisch.

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