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- Video: Fox News Takes On Violent Video Games. Again.
- Cleaning House Before Its IPO Will Cost AOL $200 Million And Up To 1,000 Jobs
- Reddit Opens Its Homepage To Anyone Willing To Pay (Invites)
- Incsub Launches WP Plugins; App Store For WordPress Plugins
- SpotiChart Picks Up Spotify Tweets, Charts Music Trends On The Fly
- Myxer Delivers 10 Million Ringtones To iPhone Users
- Full Streams Ahead: Clicker’s TV Search Engine Is Now Open To The Public
- Listiti Offers More Ways To Promote And Track Twitter Lists
- Social Gaming Still In Play – Wooga Raises An Additional €5 Million
- Already Profitable Redfin Raises Another $10 Million
- Sales Guy v. Web Dude, Parts 2-4. Oh, Yeah.
- Personera Connects With Facebook To Make Custom Print Calendars
- Bump Goes Cross-Platform With New Android App; Upgrades iPhone Version Too
- Dealtaker’s @couponbot Will Fetch Coupons For You On Twitter
- MOG Shows A Teaser Video Of New Music Service
- Simple Is As Simple Does: The Risk Of Retweet
- StuffBuff: Real-Time Auctions With A Viral Twist
- The New Palm Pixi Commercial: The Mystery Witch Is Dead!
- Facebook Coming To PS3 In Mystery Update
- Interview With Matt Bromberg, CEO of Major League Gaming
- The Crunchies Are Coming, The Crunchies Are Coming!
- Online Advertising Stops Falling, Thanks To Search
- Facebook iPhone Dev Quits Project Over Apple Tyranny
- Free Streaming May Soon Be History: Spotify Delays U.S. Launch, MySpace May Move To Pay Model
- HP Acquires 3Com For $2.7 Billion
| Video: Fox News Takes On Violent Video Games. Again. Posted: 12 Nov 2009 09:12 AM PST  Fox News held a fair and balanced debate over Modern Warfare 2, the popular new FPS that lets you play a CIA operative tasked with helping Russian agents clear terrorists out of an airport. In the game, it turns out that the Russian had turned on you and forced you to kill innocents in the airport. It's a depiction of USA-funded terrorism. It is not a murder simulator. The debate here, if it can be called that, seems to rotate around the correlation between video game violence and real violence. The old man in this debate mentioned an American Association of Pediatrics statement. Video and commentary after the jump.  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cleaning House Before Its IPO Will Cost AOL $200 Million And Up To 1,000 Jobs Posted: 12 Nov 2009 07:49 AM PST
As AOL prepares to spin off from Time Warner in an IPO, it wants to gussy itself up so that it looks as appealing as possible tp ublic investors. Today, AOL disclosed that it plans yet another restructuring which could cost as much as $200 million. The biggest cost savings from any restructuring is usually through layoffs, and the latest round has already started at AOL, with 100 let go this week and as many as 1,000 of its 6,000 jobs at risk of being eliminated. Despite new leadership under CEO Tim Armstrong, AOL has yet to turn around financially. Last quarter, revenues sank 23 percent to $777 million. The biggest drop came from subscription revenues to its legacy Internet access business, down 29 percent, but advertising revenues also took a hit, down 18 percent. AOL depends on display advertising, which has not yet rebounded like search advertising appears to be doing. By cleaning up house and removing as many costs as possible before the IPO, Armstrong is trying to make AOL as lean as possible. But eliminating salaries and benefits can only go so far. He has to show that his new content strategy can create actual growth as well.
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| Reddit Opens Its Homepage To Anyone Willing To Pay (Invites) Posted: 12 Nov 2009 07:45 AM PST
Now, obviously, this link will be clearly labeled as “sponsored,” but that shouldn’t make it that much less of an enticing opportunity for some individuals who want to drive traffic to their site. Reddit says it sees anywhere from a 2% to a 10% click-through-rate on the ads that run in this area. At the very least, this should mean thousands of hits coming to your site that wouldn’t otherwise get. So what’s the catch? The only catch is money. As long as you’re willing to pay the minimum of $20 a day, Reddit will enter you into a pool with everyone else willing to pay to determine how much face time you’ll get on the homepage. For example, if the total bids for the day equal $200, and you bid the minimum $20, you’ll get 10% of the day in this ad slot. It seems very likely that the daily bids are going to be quite a bit more than that, so $20 probably isn’t going to buy you much, but still, it will get you something. With this beta, there won’t be the ability to target specific Reddits (the Politics Reddit, for example), but the plan is to eventually offer that option to better match individual advertisers with the audience they are trying to reach. Adding your own self-serve ad is as easy as can be. Once you’re accepted into the beta, you simply fill out a title for you link, enter the URL, put in the duration that you wish to run your campaign, optionally disable comments, put in your bid amount, and then upload an image (if you choose). You then pay by entering your credit card information into a form. What’s great is that just like regular Reddit items, users will be able to vote up or down on your ad, which means that if your content actually is good, you can even appear on the homepage for longer than you’ve paid for. The company notes that users have tried to game the system for years attempting to get traffic, so this is a logical extension to allow them to pay to get it. It officially unveiled sponsored links for advertisers (big name ones) in January. Reddit’s main competitor, Digg, also has a advertising voting system, but so far, it’s only open to Digg’s advertising partners, not anyone willing to pay. Assuming they put guidelines in place (which Reddit has), it’s not hard to see this type of model eventually making its way to Digg as well. Reddit’s founders, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, recently left the company three years to the day after Condé Nast purchased them. But they’re still clearly involved, as we spoke with Ohanian about this new launch, and he seems pretty excited about it. As a part of the launch, Reddit has given us some invites to give to TechCrunch readers to check out the self-serve advertising system. The first 50 people to email MArrington [at] reddit.com will receive the invites.
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| Incsub Launches WP Plugins; App Store For WordPress Plugins Posted: 12 Nov 2009 07:00 AM PST
Wordpress is one of the web’s most popular blogging platforms, with over 8.5 million downloads and 7,200 plugins. But with all those plugins, finding the high quality ones can be a challenge. That’s where WP Plugins comes in. Launching today, WP Plugins hopes to be the App Store for WordPress plugins. WordPress plugin developers can upload their premium plugins to WP Plugins and sell them to users. Developers have the choice to sell their plugins at whatever price they choose, and can two choose from two pricing models: they can offer their plugin as-is (buyers will have a 7 day window to download it) or they can offer it as a subscription, which includes upgrades and personal support from the plugin’s developer for as long as you continue the subscription. Of course, the subscription will cost more in most cases. WP Plugins then takes 10% of each plugin sale. To participate, plugin developers have sign up for a developer account, and upload their plugin. Incsub’s team of WordPress experts will then look over plugin, and once it’s approved, it’ll get put on the store and up for sale. Incsub will monitor plugins and make sure there is no malicious content as well. WP Plugins has more information here. Incsub has quite the experience with WordPress; they’ve run sites including Edublogs, WordPress Multi-User Dev and blog network hosts Blogs.mu. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| SpotiChart Picks Up Spotify Tweets, Charts Music Trends On The Fly Posted: 12 Nov 2009 06:29 AM PST
SpotiChart, for example, is an amazing pet project by London-based developer Benoit Xhenseval that aggregates Spotify tweets from public Twitter accounts and parses the data in order to build dynamic global music charts based on streams of tracks, albums, playlists, artists and more. SpotiChart regularly tracks the public Twitter timeline for tweets that contain the word spotify (which can be in a URL, even when it is shortened by one of the many tools for that) and upon reception contacts the Spotify service to get the details of items. SpotiChart then weeds out duplicate tweets, compiles the rest and turns the data into custom charts. Every now and then (see schedule), SpotiChart will create updated charts and alert followers of the @SpotiChart account, which means in between 7 and 12 tweets per day will be sent to these users. Custom charts for tracks, albums and artists also have their own RSS feed, which updates once every day. Great stuff, Xhenseval. But expect some backlash over that one unsolicited tweet your service sends out to random Spotify users to raise awareness for SpotiChart. (Via Kieran McGrady)
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| Myxer Delivers 10 Million Ringtones To iPhone Users Posted: 12 Nov 2009 06:00 AM PST
Mobile content delivery startup Myxer has officially delivered over 10 million free ringtones to iPhone users.Myxer allows users to download ringtone in two ways. First, Myxer’s free ringtone podcasts allows any iTunes user to pull ringtones directly from the channel. And the startup has a standalone site that gives users the ability to download from a catalog of more than two million ringtones and sync them to the device from their PC. The easier of the two options is surprisingly subscribing to the podcast. Being subscribed means that iTunes will check for new files as they become available, allowing users to get Myxer ringtones directly from iTunes and on their mobile phone every time they sync. Two new ringtones are added each week. In addition to ringtones, Myxer offers over 2 million free ad-supported ringtones, wallpapers and videos and currently counts more than 27 million users. Users can also make their own ringtones, videos and wallpaper from music and files a customer already owns. Competitors include mSpot, Playphone and SendMe. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Full Streams Ahead: Clicker’s TV Search Engine Is Now Open To The Public Posted: 12 Nov 2009 06:00 AM PST
I spoke with Clicker CEO Jim Lanzone (formerly CEO of Ask.com), who says that the site’s beta was actually shorter than expected, in part because intital feedback has been quite positive. Since appearing at TechCrunch50, Clicker has added 33% more content to its database, growing from an index of 300,000 up to 400,000 full length episodes. These 400,000 episodes come from over 7,000 different shows across 1,200 content sources around the web. Lanzone says some of the biggest changes since we last saw Clicker have been to its Playlist function, which new includes more DVR-esque features like new episode alerts and season passes. Lanzone also says that the site has continued to build out its search engine, which now allows you to constrain your search to episode descriptions of a specific show — for example, you could do a search for “Michael Arrington” within the Charlie Rose show to see all of the times Michael has been interviewed on that show. Clicker has also launched a ‘related search’ feature that suggests shows you may like based on what you’re currently viewing (this feature was only a placeholder during the TC50 demo because it relies in part on user data to help determine what’s related). And there’s integration with Facebook Connect, which you can use to sign in and to share content to your News Feed. Another big change is the addition of premium content to Clicker’s search engine: the site now includes shows from both Amazon Video on Demand and Netflix’s ‘Watch Instantly’ content (you’ll obviously have to pay for these to watch them). Clicker doesn’t actually host any of this content — instead, it provides deep links that point you directly to whichever episode you want to watch. All of this is provided free, but the site plans to roll out premium features (following the ‘imdb model) in the future. Stay tuned.
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| Listiti Offers More Ways To Promote And Track Twitter Lists Posted: 12 Nov 2009 04:25 AM PST  Whether you're a fan of Twitter's new list feature or not, it has proven to be a great way to discover people of interest one can mass-follow. But keeping track of Twitter lists can prove cumbersome and overwhelming. Recently, Listiti launched, combining the concept of Google Alerts with Twitter Lists by sending out e-mail notifications based on the appearance of keywords in tweets from lists you keep track of. This is particularly useful for marketers who'd like to keep track of conversations about a company, product or brand, but only from a specific subset of Twitter users. Listiti just pushed a new version of the service live, and has added a useful new feature that makes it even more worth checking out: badges. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Social Gaming Still In Play – Wooga Raises An Additional €5 Million Posted: 12 Nov 2009 03:57 AM PST  It seems that social gaming is where the action is right now, and we're not just hearing that from the kids. Following Electronic Arts' $300 million acquisition of Playfish, and the just-reported $43 million further investment that Playdom has raised, we've caught wind that Berlin-based wooga has secured €5 million ($7.5m) of additional funding. The round is being led by Balderton Capital, although earlier investor Holtzbrinck Ventures has also participated. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Already Profitable Redfin Raises Another $10 Million Posted: 12 Nov 2009 03:01 AM PST
This was a safety round, as Redfin announced profitability over the summer and have now exceeded a $20 million in revenue run rate (it was just $15 million last summer). They’ve roughly quadrupled in size since 2008, even in a down real estate market. I used Redfin as a buyer over the summer when I was looking for a house. Here’s how it works, and why it’s so attractive compared to normal real estate broker deals: As a buyer you spend a lot of time on the Redfin site, looking at available houses and a rich set of data on previous sales, comps in the neighborhood, other homes listed in the same price range, etc. (or you can use their iPhone app, which the company says is the highest rated real estate app). If you want to view a home you schedule online. They set it up for you and meet you at the house. In all, it isn’t much different than the standard buying a house procedure. Except at the end they refund 50% of their commission to you. On a $500,000 house, you get a check for $7,500 at closing. Sellers who use Redfin pay a flat a $5,000 – $7,000 fee, depending on services ordered. And if you’re also using Redfin to buy a home while you are selling, that fee drops by $1,000. As you can imagine, real estate professionals aren’t thrilled. Nor do they love CEO Glenn Kelman, who said In an interview with 60 Minutes: "Real Estate is by far the most screwed up industry in America." But customers clearly love the service, and they have closed more than $2 billion in home sales since launching in February 2006. The total U.S. home real estate market is around $1 trillion, so they have some room to grow. Redfin is currently available in Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Washington DC, Baltimore, New York’s Long Island and Westchester County as well as most of California, including the San Francisco Bay Area, Southern California and Sacramento. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Sales Guy v. Web Dude, Parts 2-4. Oh, Yeah. Posted: 12 Nov 2009 02:53 AM PST
The creator was quiet for a long time after that video. But in the last few months have been productive for him. And he now has three new videos and posted them on The Website Is Down. All, including the original, are embedded below: Episode 1 – Sales Guy vs. Web DudeThe original website is down video web dude tries desperately to get his important work done while assaulted on all sides by rampant incompetence. Will he survive??? Episode 2 – Excel HellVideo #2 from the website is down! Chip takes us on a wild ride into the life of a master salesman. How many sales can he make in a single video? One? Maybe? Episode 3 – Remain CalmChip Demonstrates his special procedure for a hot-swap hardrive replacement using only his steel-toed boot and his razor thin patience. Watch and Learn! Episode 4 – Sales DemolitionBiz Tip of the week: Get your clients in the room and shove your product down their throats in a sales demo! Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Personera Connects With Facebook To Make Custom Print Calendars Posted: 11 Nov 2009 11:00 PM PST
I don’t know about you, but I don’t know anyone other than my grandparents who use use print calendars any more. Launching today, Personera, hopes to bring print calendars into the Web Age by combining the old with the new. The company is offering the world’s first print calendar that is personalized with the birthdays of your Facebook friends, upcoming events, and photos. Personera's service allows people to use their Facebook accounts to log in through Facebook Connect, and make all of their social network content instantly available for product personalization. Users are able to choose a theme, automatically add their friends birthdays and events each day, and drag and drop their favorite photos into the monthly layouts. A high quality 12-month, 32-page printed calendar then is delivered to their mailbox. The service itself costs $24.95, but that includes shipping to anywhere in the world. Also, Personera is giving TechCrunch readers a 30% discount coupon off any products that they purchase from Personera. On the checkout page, enter the code "TCREADER" in the voucher box to claim your discount. The offer is valid for a week. Personera has received $125K in funding from Vinny Lingham, Michael Leeman and Tomas Van den Berckt.
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| Bump Goes Cross-Platform With New Android App; Upgrades iPhone Version Too Posted: 11 Nov 2009 08:34 PM PST
The updated iPhone app includes a ‘Friend Compare’ feature that looks at the address book and Facebook profiles of you and the person you’re bumping with to see if you have any mutual friends, which can be a good way to break the ice if you’re meeting someone for the first time. The app now also includes deeper Facebook integration, allowing you to send a notification to yourself through Facebook when you bump someone (this seems like it would serve as a good reminder for following up). You can also choose to publish an item to your friends’ News Feeds when you Bump a new contact. Finally there’s the addition of a Bump history, which lets you see at a glance who, where, and when you’ve met all of your contacts (you can use filters to search through the history quickly). The Android app is still a bit behind the iPhone (it doesn’t have the features mentioned above), but it does have everything Bump 1.1 has, which includes support for both contact and photo swapping. Better yet, Bump is cross-platform, which means that you can bump an Android phone with an iPhone and it should work seamlessly. This is where the real potential of Bump lies — if the service can establish itself on more mobile platforms, it could potentially become the de facto way to swap contacts, photos, and other media between phones with next to no effort required. You can grab the new Android version here (you’ll want to visit the link from your Android phone).
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| Dealtaker’s @couponbot Will Fetch Coupons For You On Twitter Posted: 11 Nov 2009 08:20 PM PST
As the holiday shopping season approaches, more consumers are looking for online coupons to provide discounts. In fact, Google Insights for Search indicates that searches for coupons and promo codes are steadily growing with 68% of consumers reporting that they plan take advantage of coupons this season. Free coupon site DealTaker is making it easier for consumers to find coupons on Twitter via a Tweet command @couponbot. Here’s how it works. You send a Tweet to @CouponBot with a specific store name (@CouponBot BestBuy). DealTaker calls on an army of Twitter agents to search thousands of coupons in the DealTaker database and return links to the most current coupons to you via an @reply (not a DM). The links could be from DealMaker or the retailer’s site and you will receive a maximum of ten @replies. And Users do not have to follow DealTaker to use @CouponBot. CouponBot’s model is compelling because it provides an alternative to searching on both Twitter and Google for coupon codes. Twitter is home to other coupon sites including Coupon Tweet and CheapTweet. Plus, plenty of retailers like Dell and BestBuy also offer coupons and specials on their Twitter streams. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| MOG Shows A Teaser Video Of New Music Service Posted: 11 Nov 2009 07:51 PM PST A month ago we were criticizing MOG for over promising and under delivering with their new All Access music service. Our chief complaint was that the service wasn’t free, which was the original vision. Today though, we reported that the odds are against Spotify launching for free in the U.S., and MySpace Music may move to a subscription model. Suddenly, MOG may be right in the thick of things, despite the fact that they will charge $5/month for the service.
The social aspect of the service, including public and shareable playlists, is an advantage over Spotify. Spotify is mostly about you and your music, and you aren’t bothered with stuff from other people. But I like the idea of finding new playlists from friends, or that have been made popular by others. I also like that MOG is browser based and doesn’t require a download. I’ve been testing Spotify but only have it on one computer, so I can’t use it all the time. It’s still way too early to call services like MOG All Access, or the upcoming and still secretive Rdio, a sucess. But users will pay for experience and convenience. I like what I’m seeing so far. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Simple Is As Simple Does: The Risk Of Retweet Posted: 11 Nov 2009 07:38 PM PST
Why is there so much controversy? The answer is simple — literally. When Twitter began, you could do one thing on it: Send a blurb about what you were doing in 140 characters or less. This led to an immediate outcry from a wide range of people who thought that it was just about the dumbest service in the world. Others saw the potential behind such a simple service, precisely because it was so simple, and history has proven time and time again that sometimes simple ideas can explode into the biggest ones. As Twitter grew in size, its simplicity remained largely intact. While just about everyone had ideas for what features Twitter should add, Twitter stayed the course in its core simple vision. Instead, it decided to rely on both its user base (@replies, RTs, etc) and third-party developers to add functionality. In fact, at points, Twitter began removing features (auto-refreshing, IMing) because it simply could not scale with so much load on its servers. While some might view this as a failure to innovate. I would argue that this adherence to simplicity is what brought Twitter to where it is today. We live in an age where feature-bloat reigns supreme. Far too many startups replace the word “better” with “more.” That is to say, rather than perfecting the product they have and maintaining a singular focus on what they want to accomplish, they keep adding new features either because rivals are doing them, or because users are suggesting them. This is rarely a good idea. One great feature beats a dozen half-assed ones any day of the week. Keep it simple, stupid. That’s why the past several weeks have been so interesting for Twitter. With its scaling problems seemingly now solved and with enough funding in the bank to buy a small European country, Twitter finally gained the flexibility to address a terrifying question: What’s next? Search The answer actually started coming several months ago when Twitter finally wrapped Twitter Search into its core service. By all accounts, that has been a rousing success. Twitter Search is now perhaps the key way to get a pulse of what the web is thinking about at any given time. Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo have all recognized this, and all now either incorporate tweets into their results, or soon will.
Then there is the question of links. Sharing links is one of the key uses for Twitter, and the company has said in the past that it would like to create a way to better search those links. Twitter has run tests on and off to track clicks on links, but it remains unclear if their intention is still to incorporate links into search results in a way more similar to what the big search engines do. That could be a further off goal now since a few of its bigger third-party developers, like bit.ly and Tweetmeme are also working in that space. Lists But search was just the first major change to be implemented. These past several weeks have seen a second, and much larger round of changes. It’s been a phase that I’ll call Operation: Features. The first of these new additions was Lists. Despite fears that spam would overrun it, or that it would simply be a new vanity benchmark, Lists seem to be a hit. They are proving to be great both used as filters, and for user/content discovery. There is already a robust developer community swarming around Lists, to both add them to existing services, and create new ones around the functionality. That’s great news for Twitter because it reinvigorates their already strong developer ecosystem. And, if you’ll allow me to go against my “simple” mantra for a second, it seems like Lists are a natural addition to Twitter just for the filtering capabilities alone. Any community that gets big enough absolutely needs a way to filter. Sure, you could argue that you can just do that by not following anyone that you absolutely do not want to see in your stream at all times, but if Twitter continues to grow and more people you want to follow continue to sign up, that’s simply not really a realistic proposition. Filters, in this case, Lists, are. Geolocation Another wave in Operation: Features will come shortly in the form of Geolocation. While the ability to add location information to your tweets will undoubtedly raise privacy concerns, it’s important to note that this feature is entirely opt-in. And while the usefulness of such a feature may not be immediately apparent to a lot of users, there are a ton of things Twitter and third-party developers can use this for to make the service more useful.
We’re also on the verge of seeing an explosion in interest in location-based services. Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, Loopt, and Google are all already in the game. Facebook is likely to enter soon as well. With its Geolocation API, Twitter has the opportunity to become the go-to place to send your location information when you want to broadcast it widely (well, probably not from Facebook, given their little rivalry). Or, to put it a different way, this feature could allow Twitter to become the de-facto location social graph. In terms of your social information, like it or not, location will eventually play an important role. Twitter has positioned itself well here. Retweets But here’s where things get interesting. So far, none of these stated new features have or will significantly alter Twitter’s core simplicity. Each of these is an add-on. They are either shoved to the side (literally, the right-hand side of the page with Search and Lists), or are opt-in (Geolocation). And with third-party apps, these also do not alter the core experience in any meaningful way. But Retweets are an entirely different story. As we’ve seen with a limited roll-out over the past few weeks, Retweets alter not only Twitter’s main stream, but also users’ actions. That is why Evan Williams wrote his blog post. And that is why we’re already seeing backlash. As a general rule, users dislike change to the services they’ve grown accustomed to. But that dislike could be amplified on Twitter for two reasons. 1) They haven’t made such a significant change to the core functionality before. 2) Twitter is an extremely simple service that just got a little more complicated. As Williams notes in his post, users have been asking for a Retweet button ever since it entered the lexicon of Twitter organically, rising out of the collective. But rather than give everyone a simple RT button that might work like the current Reply button (pre-populating the tweet field), Twitter decided it was time to use this new function to alter the user experience. There are two key things that people don’t like about this: 1) It potentially inserts a user you don’t follow into your tweet stream. 2) You can no longer comment on the retweet. Strangers In My Stream
Already, we’ve seen users completely and utterly confused as to what is going on with these new retweets. In one high-profile example, Mallory from Family Ties believed users were actually paying to insert themselves in her stream. As I wrote at the time, this could well be a harbinger of what’s to come. It doesn’t matter if the actual tweet information is fundamentally the same, what matters is the user perception. Users were used to an unwavering constant: That their stream would contain only tweets (and again, their pictures) from those people that they follow. By breaking that, Twitter will have users questioning the integrity of their stream. Eventually, most users will get used to this. And remember, from Twitter’s perspective, they believe that there are still many more users who have yet to sign up for the service than those who already have and now have to learn something new. And there is also a way to turn off these new-style Retweets from showing up in your stream, but only on a user-by-user basis. It may be wise for Twitter to introduce a universal off-switch, even if that’s silly and against what it’s trying to do, just to give users comfort. I Want My Say The second point may actually be even more problematic for Twitter: Users want a way to include their own statements in Retweets. The new way of doing this does not allow for that. The fundamental principle behind this should be obvious: If you share something, that’s a natural desire to explain why you’re sharing it. That’s what a lot of people do with current retweets. Even if they just add “LOL,” it shows that they think the tweet they’re sharing is funny. We’re also vain. Sometimes retweeting something is more about getting your say in rather than simply highlighting what someone else has said. Or, maybe you’re even retweeting something because you disagree with it. With the new Retweets, you can’t let that be known. But Williams says that they’ve thought about this commenting functionality for the new Retweets, and notes it could come down the line as an add-on. I suspect Twitter may have to do something like that if it’s serious about getting everyone to use the new Retweets because otherwise, people are just going to keep doing it the old way. Two Roads Diverge
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that except that it introduces confusion. And again, when you’ve been sold as a simple service, that’s the last thing you want. Perhaps it would have been a better idea to call this something other than “Retweet,” even though that’s what it is. Maybe you call it “Highlight” and see if users (who again, invented the retweet) switch to using it more than manual RTs. This would seem to go against my belief of tacking-on new features, but as Williams lays out, clearly Twitter believes this new Retweet structure will fundamentally change Twitter for the better. In that case, a new feature is absolutely worth it because it’s extending core concepts (discovery, trackable data), while cleaning up problems (noise, attribution). Box Of Chocolates In fact, none of this is to say that the Retweet change is the wrong call to make. When I first read about it, before even seeing it in action, it made perfect sense to me as a concept. But what I am pointing out is that this is a risky call to make. Actually, I would say that it’s the riskiest call Twitter has made yet. Remember, this is Twitter taking a component that was invented by the users, and altering it. While Twitter has adopted user-created elements in the past such as @replies and hashtags, they didn’t actually alter anything about what the users had created, they simply enhanced them. (And when they did sort of alter things, by removing the option to see @replies for people you don’t follow, there was a mini-shitstorm.) They’re enhancing Retweets too, to an extent, but they’re also changing the idea and making it more complicated. It might ultimately pay off, but again, it’s risky. But it would seem that Twitter is doing this at an opportune time. As has been discussed a lot in the past few months, Twitter’s growth has been slowing. If everything were still growing like gangbusters, it would probably be ill-advised to change core functionality. But in a slow period, it’s easier to justify risks, and all of these changes are things that could actually help kickstart growth again.
But here’s the key question that will play out over the next few months: If a service is predicated on being as simple as possible, and then moves away from that, even just a little, will it still be the same service? Will it maintain its appeal with its rabid user base? Will it pick up new users? Facebook changes all the time, but it’s ultimately okay because Facebook has always been a mess of things going on. They’ve improved some messes, made others worse, but they didn’t go from simple to that mess. Facebook was not built for one purpose, Twitter was. Is Twitter still Twitter when the features roll in? You never know what you’re gonna get. [pictures: Paramount Pictures] Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| StuffBuff: Real-Time Auctions With A Viral Twist Posted: 11 Nov 2009 07:23 PM PST
A standard StuffBuff auction (called a ‘Live Haggle’) looks quite similar to a chat room, with a few key differences. The top of the chat window shows a ‘time left’ indicator that lets you know when the auction ends, and there’s a bidding window below the chat box where you enter how much you’re willing to pay (entering a bid is considered binding). Whenever you create an auction, you’re responsible for staying active in the chat as viewers come online and bid and ask questions (because of this auctions only last a matter of hours or minutes, as opposed to the day or week-long auctions you’ll find on eBay). And because of the public nature of the chat everything is transparent — you don’t have to worry about back channel discussions. Aside from the real-time nature of the auction, what sets StuffBuff apart from tradional auction sites is the potentially viral nature of their auctions. Any time you create an auction, you can embed it in your website to share with friends. Visitors will be able to bid on these auctions directly from your site (they’ll be able to use Facebook Connect or Twitter OAuth to sign up, though these aren’t implemented yet). Payments are done through Paypal’s payment platform.  StuffBuff also has a second kind of auction called ‘Blink’ that does have some similarities to Swoopo. The auction invites users to watch as the price of an item falls down over time. The more people watching, the faster the price falls, until someone pulls the trigger and buys the item. These can be embedded as well. StuffBuff makes money by charging around 25-50 cents to set up an auction (which is substantially less than eBay), $1.50 to set a reserve, and then 5% of the final value. The pricing of the Blink auctions is still be determined. StuffBuff has done some interesting things to help make creating auctions easier than on some other services. The site has a feature that lets you either plug in a USB barcode scanner or use your computer’s camera as one: point it at a product, and StuffBuff will enter it into your sellable inventory. When you’re ready to sell an item the site will try to pre-populate your auction’s details with known information about the item, like size and weight. StuffBuff has an interesting idea, but there are are few obstacles that immediately come to mind. Founder Michael Langer says that he wants StuffBuff to be like “eBay 2.0″, explaining that he sees eBay’s 95% marketshare as an opportunity since that site hasn’t changed much in years. But launching an auction site isn’t easy — it’s going to take some time to get users to trust these embedded widgets enough to actually start handing money over to them. My other concern involves the real-time nature of the auctions. Because auctions only last a few hours, unless you have some mechanism to really spread them virally (say, through a popular Twitter account) it seems like it would be challenging to get more than a few people bidding, and even then they might well be your friends, who aren’t always the best people to do business with. That problem might go away once the site has a sizable user base that will expose your auctions to strangers, but StuffBuff needs to get over that initial hump. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The New Palm Pixi Commercial: The Mystery Witch Is Dead! Posted: 11 Nov 2009 06:08 PM PST  It's a new day at Palm. The Pixi, Palm's Treo-esque addition to the WebOS line-up, is getting new commercials without Miss Crazy Face and her magical Pre. Instead, you get hot people taking pictures of each other and having fun. This is the kind of commercial that I call the McCafe (or Devin's lifestyle in Seattle) - excited people doing something exciting. It's a big departure from Palm and a points to a move towards the mainstream. Video after the jump. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Coming To PS3 In Mystery Update Posted: 11 Nov 2009 05:40 PM PST  Some leaked screenshots from Sony show a PS3 running with what looks like a native Facebook client configurable. There's also a new photo browser and the ability to change the color of your gamercard, but at those features I make a dismissive gesture— thusly. A Facebook app would be handy, though a constant stream of status updates from heavy players might be lead to mutings by less gaming-orientated friends. "Devin found a new item!" There's one small picture of Facebook on the PS3 (yes, that's all there is), and it's not even of a client. It's a user accounts configuration screen that happens to include Facebook. So it's not much to look at, but it was traced to Sony UK's site, so we're pretty sure it's legit. Sony "doesn't comment on rumor or speculation," obviously, so we won't be hearing from them, but it would be ridiculous to think that a all-in-one entertainment device like the PS3 wouldn't have Facebook on it eventually. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Interview With Matt Bromberg, CEO of Major League Gaming Posted: 11 Nov 2009 04:28 PM PST
I had the opportunity to speak with the CEO of Major League Gaming, Matt Bromberg, about MLG’s continued growth through this recession and their plans for the upcoming years. In this interview, Matt spoke about many of the misconceptions of the gaming business, including companies continued persistence of trying to bring video gaming to broadcast television; instead of focusing almost entirely on internet streaming. Additionally, Mr. Bromberg spoke on the possibilities of creating an MLG-branded video game as well as the possible integration of mobile gaming to their circuit of console games. A transcript of the interview is embedded below. David Diaz: We’re here at MLG Anaheim with Matt Bromberg, CEO of Major League Gaming. Thanks Matt for taking the time to speak with us. Matt Bromberg: Thank you for having me David. DD: My first question for you, is now that we’re down in Anaheim, do you have a rough estimate of how many people are here today and how many will show up this weekend? MB: Yeah, we typically do about 5,000 people a day, so that’s 15,000 over the course of a weekend. DD: And that was for Anaheim? MB: That’s what we typically get, I haven’t gotten the full numbers for this event, but it’s usually around that number. And our broadcast audience is typically between 600 and 700,000 men, under thirty. Who generally speaking watch the broadcast for about an average of 72 minutes each. DD: And that’s for a day, or the entire weekend? MB: Over the weekend of programming. So it’s interesting, if you start to think about how big is that. And you look at prime-time audience in that demo, 12 to 30 or 34, for the major cable networks. What you find is that’s between 3 and 7 or 8 times the Nielsens rating in that demo. So directionally it’s getting pretty big. DD: When I came down here I noticed a lot of sponsors including Dr. Pepper and Old Spice. What is MLG’s main source of revenue? Is it these events, or is it through sponsorships? MB: It’s 75% sponsorships, and about 25% licensing and direct to consumer. DD: Do the events themselves make money or are they mainly put on to increase your user base? MB: They’re mostly a break-even proposition. It’s as you know, because you’ve been here, it’s a big undertaking, it’s a big production. It’s six tractor trailers, and we drive them around the country, so it’s a big deal. But the live event is not really what sponsors are buying. They’re buying integration into our digital media and into the online competitions. And so eighty percent of what they’re paying for, eighty percent plus, is integration into that digital world. Then they come here to have the direct contact with the consumer, which they love. But I think it’s a big misconception about our business is that it’s about the live events, because they’re so big and attractive, but it’s not really what the business is about. DD: Is MLG profitable at this point? MB: It is. DD: How much money have you taken in to date? MB: We have raised about $42.5M. DD: Can you take us through the growth of MLG, from when you started to where you are now? MB: We raised our first round of money in very early of 2006. We we doing live competitions for three hundred people, and we had three-thousand people watching the live streams and i think we had 25,000 monthly uniques on our websites. Now we have 11 million folks every month on the websites, and we talked about the size of the broadcast and the live event audience. It’s been a real explosion. We had one sponsor at that time, and now we have closer to fifteen. It’s been exciting for us to really break through into the mainstream media world, really by almost any measure. It’s not just the number of sponsors, it’s the quality: Doritos, Proctor and Gamble, Dr. Pepper, Bic, Ball Park, really top tier marketers. DD: And what about ESPN? Are they a sponsor or a partner? MB: They are a partner, they are our coverage partner. They cover the events, they interview our pros. In fact, we do a weekly chat with our pros on ESPN, and they told us recently that–we had some player shifts a while back–and Walshy did a chat there, and they had more questions submitted for him by users than they’ve ever had for any pro athlete they’ve ever done. I don’t know that it’s because Walshy has more fans than say Lebron [James], but it’s because the audience is so pure and focused in that place–our audience is 100% online–and that’s part of the value proposition from a business perspective is there’s an intensity and purity of our audience and a directness of being able to connect to them. It’s pretty unique out there, and it helps us to sell those partnerships. DD: When MLG first started, the gaming market was up for grabs–it was a pretty crowded niche–what did you do that either other companies didn’t do, or didn’t do well enough? MB: We had a lot of competitors, and we drove them all out of business, kind of one by one. And I think that there were a couple of big misconceptions. The first one was that competitive video gaming would be about television primarily. That was a big mistake that a lot of people made. We’ve done television in our day, but we always knew that this was really an online activity. Focusing on television killed a lot of people. The other thing that I think we got that other folks didn’t get, is that in order to succeed in this market, you also have to own the online competition. It’s not enough to have live events, it’s not enough to make content. Because every other day of the year when people aren’t here, you want to be the place where people come to compete. Growing that part of our business was a major differentiator for us. And the third thing was a lot of folks came in from a very top-down corporate perspective, and sort of said “hey, we’re a big company, this is the way it goes.” And what they didn’t recognize is that this is an activity that people are already engaging in. We didn’t create it. What we did was shape it, codify it, package it, and build it up. We came in trying to sort of celebrate and appreciate what people were already doing and what they were already into and add to it; not roll in and change the whole thing because it suited our partners or it suited our sponsors, or anything like that. DD: I know that a few months ago you acquired a company and raised a new round of funding a while ago… MB: That’s correct, we acquired Agora a couple months ago, and closed a round of funding at the end of last year. DD: And there were speculations that the money was for the acquisition of Agora… MB: There was actually some incorrect reporting about it. The funding is now almost a year ago. And we did the Agora deal only very recently. But because the Agora deal was largely a stock deal, I think there was some reporting about…I think people thought we had sold some stock to buy the company, which we hadn’t. Last fall we had been having some M&A conversations. Some folks had been interested in buying the business and we decided we wanted to double-down and reinvest and continue as an independent entity–and continue to run the company. That’s when we raised the money. DD: What was that money used for? MB: We did use it partially for acquisitions. But really, for us, just continuing to invest in the platform. We’ll do many more broadcasts. We we also announced a big deal with Electronic Arts whereby we’re doing all their online and offline competitions for the EA Sports titles, which you saw in the back corner [at the event]. It’s a big new addition. We announced a big deal with Doritos, whereby next year we’re going to do four skills combines across the country. Like the NFL combine where you evaluate amateur players for promotion to the Pro Circuit. We are very heavily reinvesting in our technology around the online tournament business. So we’re using it for all those things. DD: I noticed that there were no games for the Wii. Is there a reason for that? MB: There are no games for the Wii, this is true. DD: Is there just not enough interest out there for the games? MB: Historically we used to do Smash Brothers. Then the new Smash Brothers that came out was sort of disappointing from a competitive perspective. The competitive community didn’t really embrace it. And so I think for us it’s always a balance of finding titles that have enough of a following that we can sort of sprinkle our pixie dust on it and help it grow. And I haven’t yet seen that title [from the Wii]. DD: Do you see MLG ever sponsoring a video game and helping with aspects of the production process? Is that something that's in your… MB: Ya. You know, it's interesting, when I arrived that was actually a big part of the original business plan that the founders had created. Y’know, hey, lets build a video game. There should be an MLG video game. And I always believed it was an incredible idea, but it was an idea that was too early. DD: Okay. MB: And now we actually are actively talking to several publishers about potentially creating an MLG game. Because if you think about… part of the growth of our business is that the world has kind of come in our direction a little bit. Four years ago we said that the whole video game business is going to be about multiplayer. And multiplayer by definition is about competition. There's gonna be a big media property here and this is what we're gonna do. People thought at the time that it was interesting, but what's happened, of course, over the last several years is that multiplayer is becoming a bigger and bigger part of the video game business. And the idea that you're making a boxed retail product for a single player, which is the historical model for the video game business, is completely out the window. And so if you start to think about what we do, which is, we create rule sets for competitions, you think, well, hey, if I can build a video game without any of the single player aspects to it, just a pure tournament title, and we could bring some of the intellectual property around what you need to do for a game like that to make it great, and we have an installed audience to buy it. DD: Okay. MB: Yeah, so we've thought a lot about it. DD: Great. And so, what is your take on the explosive growth in mobile gaming? You see all these iPhone games that are coming out… MB: Yeah! DD: Do you see MLG trying to tap that market? MB: What's interesting about gaming and competitive gaming is that the consumer behavior is the same across segments. I don't care if you're a 40-year-old woman playing Scrabble Online or Word Womp, Puzzle Games, Bejeweled, or, you're an 18 year-old guy playing Halo – You approach it differently, but the basic idea is: You're playing a game because you want to keep track, and you want to know where you stand, and you want to get better. And that is a common thread, through iPhone games, through cell phone games, through casual PC games, through more hard core, it's all the same. So I think for us it's just a question of building… Our brand is very associated with young men, and that purity is part of why the business works. So, yeah, I think we'll get there one day, but we want to be really careful for the brand to kind of give us permission to do that over time. So it'll probably be a little while. DD: Gotcha. And then, the typical ending question, where do you see MLG in 5 years, 10 years? MB: The beauty, I think, of our company, is that we understand what the model is. It's major live events, big broadcast, big media, online competitions. And I think that model is going to continue. What's really exciting for us this year is that we'll be re-launching our online properties. And the greater data integration and some of the deals we've done with the publishers that enable data directly from the game–you have your results updating your MLG profile automatically–those kinds of things are going to unlock a new area of growth in that part of the business. But by and large the model is pretty straightforward, and we're just gonna keep pushing. DD: Well, judging by everyone who's in attendance, it looks like this is another very successful tournament. MB: Yeah, I think so. We've been lucky to be able to grow really really quickly through the downturn. We're twice as big this year as we were the year before and we'll be twice as big next year. So especially in this economy we feel pretty fortunate. DD: Thanks for taking the time to talk to me. MB: You bet! Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Crunchies Are Coming, The Crunchies Are Coming! Posted: 11 Nov 2009 03:51 PM PST
Yes, this is the time of year that we stop bickering among ourselves as bloggers, and come together to honor the startups, products and entrepreneurs who make our lives so much fun. The Crunchies Awards celebrate the best technology accomplishments of 2009. There are 18 award categories to recognize accomplishments across a variety of fields and roles. And to keep things fresh, we have a few new award categories this year too. Our focus is start-ups, but big companies and products can be winners too.
The Crunchies Committee will choose five finalists per award category based on the submitted nominations and the company accomplishments made during 2009. Popular voting will open on Monday, December 21 and run through midnight pst, Wednesday January 6, 2010. The full rules are here. You can vote up to once per day in each category. The Crunchies Awards will be held live Friday January 8, 2010 at 7:30 pm the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. We promise a memorable evening with the community to celebrate our accomplishments of 2009 and look forward to a bright 2010.
Who were some of our winners from 2008?
Facebook won the Crunchie for Best StartUp of 2008.
Friendfeed won the Crunchie for Best New StartUp of 2008.
Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone from Twitter won the Crunchie for Best Founder(s). Pictured here with award benefactor, CRV’s George Zachary. The full list of finalists and winners from 2008 is here. 2007 is here. Expect another great after-party to follow in City Hall’s grand Rotunda through midnight with lots more fun and games. As always, sponsors great and small make our events possible, so contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde if you want to participate in the awards ceremony or after-party festivities. If your press, please contact Daniel Brusilovsky for credentials.
Make someone's year. Nominate a company for a Crunchie today. Photo credits: Marc Salsberry Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Online Advertising Stops Falling, Thanks To Search Posted: 11 Nov 2009 03:38 PM PST
After two straight quarters of annual declines (aka, the Great Ad Recession of 2009), it looks like online advertising revenues stabilized in the third quarter. The combined online advertising revenues of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL rose 1.2 percent to $8 billion. While the online advertising industry is not out of the woods yet, it might be stabilizing. At least it is for Google, which was the only one of the four horsemen of Internet advertising to see its ad revenues rise in the quarter (up roughly $400 million from both last quarter and last year). Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft were all down on both a sequential and annual basis. (All the individual company figures are in the table below). Google benefits more from search advertising and is less exposed to display. The question now is whether display advertising will follow the recovery already being experienced by search advertising. Since these four companies account for such a large portion of total Internet advertising, looking at their combined advertising revenue numbers serves as a good indicator of the health of the overall online advertising industry. I like to keep track of the combined total every quarter These numbers represent global advertising revenues, and include network revenues paid to affiliates through AdSense and Yahoo's ad network. Google's licensing revenues for Google Enterprise Apps have been stripped out. For Microsoft and AOL, I include only the advertising portions of their online revenues as reported in their quarterly earnings statements. Microsoft restated revenues for its online division last quarter, largely due to the divestiture of Razorfish, so the overall numbers changed a bit from previous posts. Below is a table with all the numbers: Online Advertising Revenues (in millions)
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| Facebook iPhone Dev Quits Project Over Apple Tyranny Posted: 11 Nov 2009 03:04 PM PST
Facebook developer Joe Hewitt, the man behind the immensely popular Facebook application for iPhone, has just tweeted that he’s done with the project: We reached out to Hewitt for more details, and he attributed his decision to quit the project entirely on Apple’s tyrannical App Store approval policies:
I couldn’t agree with Hewitt’s sentiments more, and it’s a breath of fresh air to see such a prominent developer quit the App Store. Apple has built some truly fantastic products, but their approach to the App Store is frightening — especially given the fact that other platforms may see the iPhone’s success and start adopting a similar model. Hewitt’s move is a big deal, because he has essentially been the one-man show behind the iPhone’s most popular application of all time. Hewitt has been quite vocal about his opposition to Apple’s ridiculous App Store approval policies — in a post last August, he wrote that “the review process needs to be eliminated completely.” And to be clear, Hewitt is still at Facebook, though he can’t talk about the next project he’s working on. Be sure to check out our TalkCrunch interview with Hewitt back in 2007, back when he had just launched the social network’s iPhone web app (note that the native iPhone app wasn’t released until summer 2008). Hewitt joined Facebook in 2007 when it acquired Parakey, the company he co-founded with Blake Ross. Hewitt is also known for helping create the Firefox web browser as well as the popular Firebug development plugin. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Free Streaming May Soon Be History: Spotify Delays U.S. Launch, MySpace May Move To Pay Model Posted: 11 Nov 2009 02:08 PM PST
2009 is the year of reckoning. The European launch of Spotify, which offers users free streaming music on demand, was an affirmation of the trend. Soon Spotify would launch in the U.S., too, the company said. Things are changing. Spotify is now saying that they must delay their U.S. launch. They don’t want to launch here with a paid-only model, and the big labels are signaling that they won’t have it. From the NYTimes last month, quoting Sony Music: “We like Spotify as our partner in Europe, but we would like them to move more toward a paid subscription environment.” And that isn’t the only bad news. MySpace Music is “almost certainly” going to severely restrict free streaming to users, say multiple sources, and move to a paid model. “They are spending $20 million/month on streaming royalties, and that just isn’t sustainable,” said one source with knowledge of MySpace’s relationships with the labels. Other sources have said that MySpace’s royalty payments are much lower, but don’t deny that the service is a cash hole. MySpace won’t comment on this story, but they have a deadline to all this. The Google search deal is up next year, and $300 million/year in revenue will evaporate. Changes need to happen soon. The last payment of $75 million is due on June 20, 2010. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| HP Acquires 3Com For $2.7 Billion Posted: 11 Nov 2009 01:30 PM PST
HP is acquiring network infrastructure manufacturer 3Com for $2.7 billion. 3Com provides networking, switching, routing and security components. HP says the acquisition will further its data center strategy “built on the convergence of servers, storage, networking, management, facilities and services.” The acquisition of 3Com also help to expand HP's Ethernet switching offerings, add routing solutions and significantly strengthen the company's position in China thanks to 3Com’s strong presence in China. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2010. It seems that HP struck back with a huge acquisition of its own after rival Cisco went on a shopping spree recently. Cisco responded to HP’s acquisition with this statement:
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
In a world where Facebook and Twitter dominate the headlines, it’s easy to forget that other social properties, like 
Plenty of 
Seattle based 
Most of you have probably seen 
It’s a big night for 
So the timing was right today for MOG to release a first teaser 
Despite starting Blogger, 
The job is hardly done for Twitter in this regard. The success of search has led to a massive influx of spam, which Twitter now 
For example, as I alluded to above, imagine if you want to do a Twitter search query but want to tailor the results to a specific area. You might say that was possible before because of the location information in users’ profiles, but that is hardly real location information. I could say I’m in China, for example, and no one would know that I’m not. With geotagged tweets, a whole new layer of information about happenings in particular places is possible. And Twitter clearly knows this, as it has just 
To the first point, Twitter is doing more or less what Yammer CEO David Sacks laid out 
And that’s another important thing to note in all of this: Nothing is stopping you from retweeting the old way. But that raises a different problem. Because of that, we’re likely to see a bifurcation of the Retweet. Some will do it the new way, some will do it the old way. In fact, it seems perfectly plausible that people may start to use the two types of Retweets for different reasons.
Since Twitter has started Operation: Features, I find myself visiting the actual site all the time now, whereas before I would often use a third-party client. More importantly, I find my overall usage has kicked up a notch. That’s the key. Twitter has known about the problem where people would sign up and then not continue using it, all of these things should help. (Maybe none more than a small new feature: That damn new tweet notification box, which has me refreshing every few seconds.)
This past weekend, thousands of gamers descended upon the Anaheim Convention Center to spectate and compete in one of the biggest video game competitions of the year, put on by 
Let the trumpets sound and the games begin. It’s not the Oscars or the Olympics, but it is the commencement of the 
Starting today, 
“My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple’s policies.” – Joe Hewitt
2008 was the year of free streaming music. When 
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