The Social Web

Twitter Updates Terms of Service

2009-09-15T11:24:49.334Z

Twitter updates its terms of service, making them nicers to users, imho. The gain rights to distribute your content, but they state very clearly that the content belongs to you, not to them. They retain the rights to add advertising, cut on spam, and make the content available to third parties via their API.

You can read more info at this blog entry: http://blog.twitter.com/2009/09/twitters-new-terms-of-service.html. You can also read the full TOS document at: http://twitter.com/tos.

How did I realize? Thanks to a nice email send to all Twitter users by Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder:

We'd like to let you know about our new Terms of Service. As Twitter

has evolved, we've gained a better understanding of how folks use the

service. As a result, we've updated the Terms and we're notifying

account holders.

We've posted a brief overview on our company blog and you can read the

Terms of Service online. If you haven't been by in a while, we invite

you to visit Twitter to see what else is new.

Overview: http://blog.twitter.com

Terms: http://www.twitter.com/tos

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com

These updates complement the spirit of Twitter. If the nature of our

service changes, we'll revisit the Terms as necessary. Comments are

welcome, please find the "feedback" link on the Terms of Service page.

Thanks,

Biz Stone, Co-founder

Twitter, Inc.

Is a Perfect Storm Forming For Distributed Social Networking by Marshall Kirkpatrick

2009-08-12T11:26:26.707Z

I've found (thanks a a twitter post by Michele Costabile) a very nice article by Marshall Kirkpatrick covering the effects of recent troubles of some social networks (like Twitter), acquisitions of others (FriendFeed), and the overall evolution of the social networks. The post is at www.readwriteweb.com/archives/is_a_perfect_storm_forming_for_distributed_social_networking.php.

I have to say that with social networks asking for full ownership of the contents you post, disabling accounts they feel illegittimate, and not providing enough confidence in being always online, it would make sense to build the "social" nature of the Web by aggregating separate sites, rather than letting one site own the content. We'll see.

Business Guide to Twitter (by Twitter)

2009-07-28T13:57:57.677Z

Twitter has made available an interesting business guide to its own service, with case studies and examples. You can find it online at http://business.twitter.com/twitter101.

I find it very interesting and revealing of the current trends.

Social Before Facebook

2009-07-10T11:43:14.607Z

How Facebook and the like changed the meaning of the word "Social"? This cartoon on "the Facebook generation" as the first "Post-Of-The-Wall generation" is quite nice...

Facebook Username Available on Saturday

2009-06-12T01:48:46.274Z

Facebook will make available readable usernames (rather than IDs) starting on Saturday on a first-come first-served basis. The description of the new feature is in the Facebook Official Blog, "Coming Soon: Facebook Usernames".

The usernames countdown site is at: http://www.facebook.com/username/. The feature will become available "Starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, June 13", that is 6 am European site. The countdown page will show the time at your current location.

Google Declares The Web Has Won

2009-05-28T11:16:40.264Z

Interesting summary of Google I/O conference: The Web has won. The article is by David Needle is on Internet News.

On the same line, Tim O'Reilly report from the same conference pushes the idea that HTML5 will push the adoption of the web platform even more: Google Bets Big on HTML5.

Twitter Growth

2009-05-26T11:44:03.231Z

As this article on Twitter Growth on TechCrunch shows, according to ComScore in the month of may Twitter has surpassed the web visits of Digg, LinkedIn, and NYTimes.com. ComScore estimates Twitter at 32 million global visitors, which is impressive considering how many people use the service with a multitude of clients (including phones) and don't use the web site itself. This is the ComScore graph:

Checking out on Alexa top site ranking, Twitter holds the 37th place as of today, but half of the places above it are taken by various Google properties (including national Google landing pages). Alexa rates Twitter at a 280% increase over the last 3 months:

Million Twitters

2009-04-21T13:29:53.346Z

There was a race last week to reach one million followers on Twitter, and CNN lost it to Ashton Kutcher (an actor who's also well known for his wife, actress Demi Moore). There was a lot of turmoil in the twitter sphere and blog sphere, and I think this event is relevant, as an individual can beat a large news organization in terms of web presence!

You can read more details on this article http://news.cnet.com/8301-13515_3-10221785-26.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5 and also look at the image above comparing the two twitter accounts shortly after the million mark was hit. As for my self, I'm getting close to 200 followers on my twitter account, long way to go!

How To Demo Twitter (by Guy Kawasaki)

2009-04-20T12:54:45.559Z

Nice article on Twitter for Business by technology guru Guy Kawasaki at: http://blogs.openforum.com/2009/04/19/how-to-demo-twitter/.

(And this should who up on my twitter account as well).

YouTube Symphony Orchestra

2009-04-17T12:05:05.088Z

The YouTube symphony project is an impressive example of web cooperation and how multiple people can contribute to a unique work. I think the idea was nice, but the result is impressive.

You can read about the project at http://www.youtube.com/user/symphony and see the result on YouTube, or below: