Yahoo on Thursday announced a new partnership with Twitter that will see tweets brought directly into the company’s homepage newsfeed. The new integration will be rolling out “over the next few days” on Yahoo’s US site, available to both desktop and mobile Web users.

Yahoo says it plans to include “relevant and personalized tweets” alongside its stories. If the partnership bears fruit, however, it’s fair to say Yahoo will look to expand it to its mobile apps as well as overseas.

If you’re in the US, here’s what to look for on the Yahoo homepage (notice the third item in the middle column):

Yahoo’s justification for the inclusion of tweets is fairly straightforward. The company sees the social network as a source for news, and since its homepage is still largely centered around delivering just that to its users, adding Twitter support is just one of many steps in its attempt to become relevant again.

“Updates direct from politicians, celebrities, media outlets, and other publishers have become an important source of real-time news and information,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said in a statement. “140 characters can connect athletes with their fans, capture live chatter from the red carpet, and inspire global debate.”

Details of the deal were not disclosed, though if money was exchanged it’s very likely Twitter was on the receiving end as Yahoo has more to gain in this case. If its editors can keep up with the constant stream of content on the social network, and choose pertinent ones in a timely manner, Twitter might be able to give Yahoo’s homepage new life.

That being said, Twitter also gets quite a bit from the deal: Yahoo users will not only be exposed to more tweets, but they can also discover interesting people and publishers to follow on Twitter. Details on how the integration will work on Yahoo’s homepage were not revealed, though it’s likely Twitter users will be offered more personalized content if they’re signed in.

Top Image Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

SocialBro is a really useful app when it comes to analyzing your Twitter community, but until now it’s only been about people. Now the Spanish startup behind the app is taking a step towards offering a more well-rounded analytics product by presenting data about your tweets too.

The new Tweet Analytics feature is a little hidden in a UI that has arguably outgrown SocialBro’s featureset, but once you find it in the Tools menu, you’re presented with a graph that shows information about how your tweets have performed over time.You can see the relative popularity of each tweet in terms of the number of Favorites, retweets and replies each one got – the larger the circle representing a tweet, the more popular it was.

You can break the data down into tweets and replies, and you can adjust the date range covered. I noticed that only the past eight days’ worth of tweets was accurate, with a big chunk of data missing before that – although as this is a new service released today, I’d expect it to start logging the data more accurately from now on.

SocialBro is particularly aimed at businesses wanting to monitor their Twitter presence, and the introduction of analytics for tweets in addition to its strong suite of audience data tools certainly makes it a more attractive proposition in that regard. It follows the recent introduction of DM-based marketing campaigns to its toolset. However, its lack of profile in the face of well-established competition like Salesforce’s Radian6, Topsy and SocialBakers Analytics Pro is a challenge the company needs to tackle.

➤ SocialBro

Twitter and ESPN have enhanced their partnership in a move that will see the sports entertainment channel distribute highlight clips from major sporting events through Twitter’s platform. The Wall Street Journal reports that the this new deal is part of an attempt by the social network (or rather, media company) to better integrate TV networks into its offering to foster a potential new advertising revenue stream.

Established a year ago, the partnership was referred as a strategic one. It was the first time Twitter partnered with a network in order to craft custom sponsorship packages. Under the existing terms, fans and advertisers would have a “unique, interactive way” to integrate broadcast TV with online social conversations. During marquee sporting events, marketers could spend their ad budgets in a way that would reach audiences on-air and online, across ESPN networks, ABC, ESPN.com, ESPN Mobile, and now Twitter.

With this expanded relationship, ESPN says that highlights from soccer matches leading up to the World Cup, NCAA college football games, and the X-Games extreme sports tournament will be distributed through Twitter. In doing so, the TV network will sell ads that will run inside the video clips and marketing sponsors will “commit to buying from Twitter a minimum value of ‘promoted’ — or paid — Twitter posts to circulate their marketing pitches.”

When the partnership was first formed, ESPN began incorporating fan Tweets on-air in its telecasts and began experimenting with in-stream college football Web-video highlights. The WSJ says that “ESPN showed highlights of college football bowl games on Twitter, and Ford Motor Co. bought ads from Twitter and ESPN to promote the clips. ESPN says the video highlights were seen more than seven million times.”

Eric Johnson, ESPN’s Executive Vice President of Multimedia Sales, told the WSJ that Twitter has become a great opportunity for the network to push ESPN’s content wherever sports fans are.

Twitter has sought to grow in its role beyond simply being that 140 character service that people used to share what they ate today. Seven years after its creation, the service is seeing itself as a media company and even a “global town square“. As part of its shift, last month, the company signed an advertising deal with Starcom MediaVest Group, to help foster advertising programs for the agency’s clientele.

The social company’s head of promoted content and sponsorships, Glenn Brown, says that Twitter has been receiving a lot of interest from broadcasters: “Video is very popular on the Web; it’s what our TV partners are good at doing, and it’s an area that ad partners are most interested in.”

Photo credit: Thinkstock/iStockPhoto

Twitter has acquired data analysis firm Lucky Sort, which will be shutting down in the coming months, said the company on its website. Lucky Sort is a visualization and navigation service that allows people to break apart topics on news and social media in a visual manner.

Lucky Sort CEO Noah Pepper says that several people from the team will be moving to San Francisco to join Twitter’s revenue engineering department. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Lucky Sort had recieved $600k in seed funding in January of 2011 from Neu Venture Capital, Invite Investments and Angel investors including Simple co-founder Alex Payne, Howard Lindzon of Stocktwits and Adam Riggs of Shutterstock.

The primary product of Lucky Sort was a tool called TopicWatch, which allowed tracking of terms across twitter and the visualization of those trends. Twitter confirmed the acquisition in a tweet. Twitter continues to make small acquisitions for either talent or product expertise as it recently exemplified with We Are Hunted and Vine.

Image Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images

GSV Capital Corp. values its shares in Twitter at around $18.50 per share, Bloomberg today reported, valuing the social service at – using a diluted share figure of 530 million – around $9.8 billion.

We know how GSV values its Twitter investment as it is a public company, and thus listed the following in its most recent 10Q:

This figure is large, but not surprising. Blackrock recently purchased shares from Twitter employees at a price that valued the company at $9 billion. The Wall Street Journal tried to make the case that Twitter was worth $10 billion using some odd math, but that the company is prized among investors is no secret.

Twitter is said to be profitable, and is generally tipped to be on the road to an initial public offering.

That in mind, to see into the thoughts – regarding valuation – of one of its investors is revealing. GSV owns a mere 0.3% of the firm, but its filings represent a rare look into the current thought-worth of a private company.

This is a new wrinkle, however, as the above valuation of Twitter represents a decline. In the same 10Q, GSV notes that in the fourth calendar quarter of 2012, as compared to the first three months of 2013, it placed a higher value on its Twitter stock:

The share numbers are the same, but the ‘Fair Value’ figure falls. It’s a small change, down about 2.5% from earlier highs, but at the prior price, Twitter’s valuation would have crested the $10 billion mark. What caused the easing in Twitter’s price isn’t clear.

We checked back, and found that GSV valued Twitter at a lower price per share in December of 2011, around $16.46. However, the December 2012 figure listed above is consistent with how GSV valued Twitter in September of 2012. What this indicates is that GSV does recalibrate its valuation of Twitter on a per-share basis. The share price of Twitter remained the same between quarters three and four of 2012. The first quarter of 2013, however, recorded a decline. We are unsure as to what might have caused the dip.

For now, however, Twitter remains an exceptionally high-valued firm by those who have invested in it. If the public markets agree is what we will learn next.

Top Image Credit: Steve Snodgrass 

Twitter is now a lawyer short as the company’s Nicole Wong, its legal director, will leave the firm to become the nation’s first White House chief privacy office, CNET today reported.

The role comes at an auspicious time. CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, passed the House of Representatives. The White House, before its passage, floated yet another veto threat at the bill, citing privacy concerns.

Thus, what battles Wong will fight are not hard to surmise; cybersecurity has never been a more discussed issue than now. China was accused of hacking recently by the United States government, the Wall Street Journal reported:

The Chinese government has targeted U.S. government computer systems for intrusion, the Pentagon said Monday in a more direct accusation of cyberespionage than the U.S. has made in the past. While American officials have long charged that China is a top perpetrator of cyberespionage, a new Pentagon report goes a step further, blaming some cyberintrusions directly on the government and its military.

Those are not small claims.

Intrusion of the sort mentioned above is a simple abrogation of privacy, but Wong will also likely face issues more subtle; how might the government wish to view privacy online for minors, such as those children that want to join Facebook before the age of 13, for example.

Wong joined Twitter in late 2012, making her tenure at the social network short. Previously, she worked for Google, a company that is not itself virgin when it comes to privacy kerfuffles.

A final note: free speech online is currently being hemmed in around the world; the privacy that the Internet can afford – anonymity, in short – is no small issue. The leadership of the United States on the issue isn’t to be underestimated in its potential impact.

Top Image Credit: Andreas Eldh 

Earlier this evening, US time, (morning UK time) Twitter suffered an hour-long issue that froze user timelines and resulted in a significant delay in the delivery of new tweets. The issues initially affected Twitter.com and its mobile apps, but also caused problems for other apps, and began just after 23:00 PDT, 7:00 BST time.

TNW staff across Asia, Europe and North America were affected by the tweet jam on Twitter’s main site. Some third party services — including Twitter-owned Tweetdeck on the desktop, Hootsuite on the Web and the Tweetbot mobile apps — worked as usual at first, but were later also affected by the problems.

While the site was not taken offline, the fact that it was beset by this problem for almost an hour is a concern. Many users access the service via Twitter.com, so any issues there essentially cut them off from the service and take it offline for them.

Twitter is channelling its efforts to drive users to its own properties, ahead of third parties, in order to help its advertising services target and reach a larger proportion of its userbase. Obviously it needs to ensure that its service is working reliably in order to keep its users active and engaged.

We’ve reached out to Twitter for more information.

Headline image via westm / Flickr

Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo addressed the University of Michigan’s Spring 2013 graduating class on Saturday. It was during this talk where he shared insights into his life following his graduation from the university and lessons that he learned from his comedic experience and also his time as Twitter’s CEO. His parting wisdom to the newly graduated? To be bold, courageous, and to be in this moment.

Prior to beginning his 17 minute-plus speech, Costolo did what any Twitter user would do in the moment: Snap a photo and share it to his more than 1 million followers.

Commencement @umich My view twitter.com/dickc/status/3…

— dick costolo (@dickc) May 4, 2013

Costolo recounted his days following his graduation from his alma mater when he was confronted with whether to take a job with three technology firms or pursue a life as a comedian in Chicago with the Second City troupe. He chose the latter and it was during his studies in improvisation that he was taught the three lessons he referenced today.

When it came to being bold and courageous, Costolo cited an example when he was asked by a director to describe a specific scene on stage, although there was nothing there. The lesson was that we shouldn’t be afraid of taking risks and setting the scene according to what we want.

In another class, Costolo said that he came up with a perfectly good line to use in his next act and during his performance, he tried to steer the improv group’s conversation in the intended direction. The director stopped the act before it got there and told Costolo that you can’t plan a script. The beauty of improvisation, said Costolo’s director, is that you need to live in the moment. If you try to plan it, you’re going to be disappointed when others don’t do or say what you want them to do, leaving you frozen. The lesson: Be here in this moment.

Eventually he moved on to work on the Internet and it was there that he applied these rules to his experience, most specifically Twitter.

Costolo says that the graduates should choose to do something that they love, and for him, that’s Twitter:

If there’s ever an example of the importance of making bold bets and focusing on what you love, it’s Twitter.

But with Twitter, its effect on the world was nothing planned. Costolo said that none of the co-founders had any expectation or understanding of what could result from millions of people using it to communicate. He cited examples where no one at Twitter expected the service to be influential in, such as President Obama using it to declare victory in the 2012 US Presidential election, being a lifeline in the aftermath of the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami, and an important communication tool in organizing the Arab Spring protests.

Costolo implored graduates that if they make courageous choices and bet on themselves, and put themselves out there, they will have an impact as a result of what they do. But they don’t need to know now what that will be or how because no one else does.

Not only can you not predict the impact, you won’t even recognize it when you have it. The impact is what others frame for you and the rest of the world after it happens. The present is only what you’re experiencing right now.

Costolo’s parting line?

Don’t worry about what your next line is, don’t have any expectations, and be in this moment.

Thank you. #GoBlue

Photo credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Today Instagram released version 3.5 of its iOS and Android applications. Key to the release is a new feature dubbed ‘Photos Of You’ that tracks the pictures that you have been snapped in; it’s a running compendium of images that you are featured in.

Facebook, of course, has done this for years, helping people keep track of not just their own photos, but also the photos of others. Instagram has added new capabilities to its service to allow for the tagging of individual people in images in the new application versions.

However, only the taker of an image will be able to tag people in it, different than on Facebook on which other people can suggest tags of themselves or others.

The new tool will not be visible to other people until May 16, meaning that users have time to ensure that if someone browses their section, it won’t contain any surprises or images best forgotten. Instagram put together a short video on Photos Of You that is worth watching:

The applications will be available on the relevant app stores shortly.

Update: The iOS app is available on Apple’s App Store and the Android app is on Google Play.

Top Image Credit: Elliot Bennett 

Today it was announced, fittingly on the service itself, that Twitter has hired Cynthia Gaylor from Morgan Stanley to run its corporate development team. At the banking firm, she was a managing director.

It is perhaps the worst kept secret in technology that Twitter intends to reach the public markets as soon as 2014; the company recently signed an ad deal that is said to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Its other ad products have seen price increases as the service matures into a stable, revenue generating venture.

Gaylor’s pedigree is a prime fit for a company such as Twitter, given that she has been party to a number of high-profile technology acquisitions, and IPOs, according to her LinkedIn page. To wit:

Most recently Cynthia is leading Morgan Stanley’s technology execution effort, advising clients across a broad array of strategic financing activities including IPOs, follow-on offerings, equity linked, private placement and debt security transactions. Cynthia has advised on transactions for Workday, ServiceNow, Palo Alto Networks, Facebook, Infoblox, Splunk, Zynga, Jive, Netflix and Linkedin.

Twitter’s revenue and profit figures remain occluded, and we likely – barring a leak – won’t see the full picture of the company’s health until it files an S-1, but the tea leaves are perfectly legible: all roads lead to IPO.

If you are looking for a real-time chronicle, you can follow Gaylor on Twitter here.

Top Image Credit: Andreas Eldh