Mobile has truly become an essential platform for Twitter , bolstered by the convenience afforded by the ubiquity of wireless connectivity and the steadily dropping prices of mobile phones. As such, many third-party Twitter clients and apps have sprouted from this side of the Twitterverse, carrying varying functionalities and value added services on top of [...]
Mobile has truly become an essential platform for Twitter, bolstered by the convenience afforded by the ubiquity of wireless connectivity and the steadily dropping prices of mobile phones. As such, many third-party Twitter clients and apps have sprouted from this side of the Twitterverse, carrying varying functionalities and value added services on top of the 140-character architecture.
To further push mobile Twitter use, the microblogging and messaging tool launched its official app for the Blackberry and acquired Atebits to retcon Tweetie as Twitter for iPhone within the same week last month. Now, hot off the heels of its obvious thrust to dominate the mobile space, Twitter has let out another in-house developed app and this time, it’s all set to target Google’s developer-friendly mobile operating system, the Android.
This was announced by Twitter’s Leland Rechis this week on the official Twitter blog. He stated that sharing becomes second nature on machines as it does in person when apps work well with each other and that Android performs optimally in that regard.
As you can see from the screenshots we’ve included, usage is as straightforward as it can get, with Twitter capabilities implemented across other apps. Rechis further explains that sharing links and photos with your Twitter contacts are simple—by finding the share button in your favorite app and then tapping on Twitter on the menu list.
“Reading tweets is easy in a bunch of places on your phone.” Rechis likewise adds. “Quickly access your timeline with the home screen widget, view a tweet location on a map, and see your friend’s latest tweet in your phonebook, GoogleTalk list or any application that uses Android’s QuickContact bar.”
As with most Google-hinged product or feature roll outs, the code behind Twitter for Android will also be open sourced so we’ll probably see new independent developer-prompted feature tweaks and enhancements even before 2.0 comes out. Similarly, different variations of the Twitter API implemented on third-party apps for the Android are also definitely expected.
The Twitter for Android app is now available at the Android Market for mobile phones with Android 2.1 (aka Éclair) at the helm which pretty much covers anyone using the Motorola Droid, Google’s own Nexus One and the latest slew of HTC smartphones. No word though whether the app will be developed further to also support the other Android phones with version 1.6 (Donut) or 1.5 (Cupcake), however, their owners can instead use Twitter’s rudimentary mobile site by heading on over to http://mobile.twitter.com for the meantime.
fring just released its latest Android version. Brand new version includes a new buddy list look, brand-new profile screen and the long-anticipated dialer, among other improvements.
The new buddy list features your friends’ picture and mood line (from either fring or Skype), as does your call screen.
The new version comes with a new personalized profile, where [...]
fring just released its latest Android version. Brand new version includes a new buddy list look, brand-new profile screen and the long-anticipated dialer, among other improvements.
The new buddy list features your friends’ picture and mood line (from either fring or Skype), as does your call screen.
The new version comes with a new personalized profile, where you can upload a picture & edit your mood, your email address and phone number, all at the click of a button.
Following a huge user demand, we’ve added a dialer screen (including DTMF), so you can dial in numbers during a SIP/ SkypeOut call.
The version also includes voice improvements and many bug fixes. The new version is available for download here.
Google sent out an email to most of their advertisers a few days ago, explaining that they are launching click-to-call on mobile devices with full HTML browsers (e.g. iPhone, Android, Palm WebOS). It appears that this will be started automatically and as soon as Google launches this, I and other advertisers will have their phone numbers show up on mobile devices and be charged a cost-per-call when used.
In fact, the cost-per-call will be the same price as you would pay for a cost-per-click.
What if you do not want to participate? Easy, “remove the phone number from the business listings included in your campaigns targeting mobile devices,” said Google.
Here is a picture of the email Google sent their advertisers:
Google sent out an email to most of their advertisers a few days ago, explaining that they are launching click-to-call on mobile devices with full HTML browsers (e.g. iPhone, Android, Palm WebOS). It appears that this will be started automatically and as soon as Google launches this, I and other advertisers will have their phone numbers show up on mobile devices and be charged a cost-per-call when used.
In fact, the cost-per-call will be the same price as you would pay for a cost-per-click.
What if you do not want to participate? Easy, "remove the phone number from the business listings included in your campaigns targeting mobile devices," said Google.
Here is a picture of the email Google sent their advertisers:
Seesmic has acquired Ping.fm, you can now update 50 social networks using Seesmic+Ping.fm from email, chat, sms, Blackberry, Android, web, Windows, OSX and much more soon.
Ping.fm has more than half a million active users who post daily from any device just by sending an email, a text message or chat – simple tools that existed [...]
Seesmic has acquired Ping.fm, you can now update 50 social networks using Seesmic+Ping.fm from email, chat, sms, Blackberry, Android, web, Windows, OSX and much more soon.
Ping.fm has more than half a million active users who post daily from any device just by sending an email, a text message or chat – simple tools that existed since the early stages of the Internet are available on all connected devices. This is why Ping.fm is extremely easy to use and access – just send an update and it can touch on 50 social networks including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Ning, WordPress, TypePad, Yammer, Status.net and many more.
Ping.fm posts 200,000 updates a day and has 500,000 registered users. Rapidly gaining more and more members, Ping.fm is growing at a very fast pace and will help Seesmic reach this year’s goal of one million updates a day in 2010.
Ping.fm co-founders, Adam Duffy and Sean McCullough, are joining the Seesmic team full time and will keep improving Ping.fm as well as integrating it with our Seesmic applications. The number one request from Ping.fm users is to have more powerful clients support postings to their social networks, so they should be pleased to know Seesmic applications will be adding this functionality.
Seesmic is also welcoming ping.fm angel investors as shareholders and advisors Joi Ito (@joi), Reid Hoffman (@quixotic) who was already a Seesmic shareholder and Mohamed Nanabhay (@mohamed).
The Ping.fm acquisition enables Seesmic to deliver faster its vision of becoming your default application to stay in touch with your friends and constantly managing your online social presence. Seesmic applications got more than 3.5 million downloads and hundreds of thousands of daily users.
A WebmasterWorld thread reports that when you try to login to Google AdSense using your Android device or an iPhone it rendered the reports all weird. I tried to reproduce this on my side, but I am currently not able to.
What many are reporting is that the report seems to load in an iframe below the login box, after you login. Let me quote one of the reports:
I typed my username and password.
The report appeared just at the place where I typed in username and password.
It seems like the report is in a not scrollable IFRAME starting at the position of the input for username and password
I think I am not having the issue because I am logging in automatically. Google AdSenseAdvisor replied to the thread saying:
I’m investigating. I’ll let you know when I hear something back.
Thanks for flagging this.
We have no ETA for a fix or even a solid confirmation what type of bug this is.
A WebmasterWorld thread reports that when you try to login to Google AdSense using your Android device or an iPhone it rendered the reports all weird. I tried to reproduce this on my side, but I am currently not able to.
What many are reporting is that the report seems to load in an iframe below the login box, after you login. Let me quote one of the reports:
I typed my username and password.
The report appeared just at the place where I typed in username and password.
It seems like the report is in a not scrollable IFRAME starting at the position of the input for username and password
I think I am not having the issue because I am logging in automatically. Google AdSenseAdvisor replied to the thread saying:
I'm investigating. I'll let you know when I hear something back.
Thanks for flagging this.
We have no ETA for a fix or even a solid confirmation what type of bug this is.
If you are living under a rock, you might not have heard this yet, but then why would you be reading this site? The buzz over the weekend was that Google confirmed they will be building and distributing a real Google phone. Right now, Google has Android which is the Operating System for many of the “Google phones” currently out there. But the hardware is developed by someone else.
It appears that Google is designing their own device on the hardware level. Which, I guess, would compete directly with the iPhone – which is what is currently happening with the HTC, Droid and comparable devices.
Anyway, that is all I have to say about this. You can read the news stories on Techmeme and then join the forum discussions.
If you are living under a rock, you might not have heard this yet, but then why would you be reading this site? The buzz over the weekend was that Google confirmed they will be building and distributing a real Google phone. Right now, Google has Android which is the Operating System for many of the "Google phones" currently out there. But the hardware is developed by someone else.
It appears that Google is designing their own device on the hardware level. Which, I guess, would compete directly with the iPhone - which is what is currently happening with the HTC, Droid and comparable devices.
Anyway, that is all I have to say about this. You can read the news stories on Techmeme and then join the forum discussions.
Update: Google reached out to me and asked me to try a new app to scan it, such as Barcode Scanner for Android of QuickMark for iPhone. I tried it and both QuickMark and Barcode Scanner return my business. So a poor quality QR scanner will return a bad listing. I guess technically, this is not a Google bug.
We are aware of Google Maps listings being hijacked, that is nothing new. But remember Google is sending out favorite places decals? Well, I got mine today and I decided to try it out.
Guess what? When you scan the QR bar code it takes you to a different business!
Update: Google reached out to me and asked me to try a new app to scan it, such as Barcode Scanner for Android of QuickMark for iPhone. I tried it and both QuickMark and Barcode Scanner return my business. So a poor quality QR scanner will return a bad listing. I guess technically, this is not a Google bug.
We are aware of Google Maps listings being hijacked, that is nothing new. But remember Google is sending out favorite places decals? Well, I got mine today and I decided to try it out.
Guess what? When you scan the QR bar code it takes you to a different business!
I’m not going to do a full live-blog, because it’s going to be well-covered by:
- Danny Sullivan
- Jason Kinkaid
- Kara Swisher
among others. You can also register and watch the event as a webcast.
Search by Voice
Marissa Mayer did a brief intro, then brought up Vic Gundotra. Vic is going to show a series of mobile demos [...]
Marissa Mayer did a brief intro, then brought up Vic Gundotra. Vic is going to show a series of mobile demos emphasizing that phones have senses (ears, voice, eyes) via their sensors. He showed the progress on Google’s mobile app by doing “pictures of barack obama at g8 summit” as a voice query and it nailed it. Then Vic did the query for [mcdonalds in beijing]–and it nailed it. Announcement: support for Google Voice in Japanese. In 2010, many more languages will be supported. Vic showed a demo of “talk in English, run voice recognition, translate into Spanish, then do voice synthesis in Spanish.” So basically a Babel fish.
Location
Vic showed customized suggest in Mobile. With a location of Boston, Massachusetts, [re] gives [red sox], [red sox schedule], and [restaurant week boston] as suggestions. In San Francisco, [re] suggests [rei] instead. Demos are coming fast and furious now. Vic just demoed “products in stock near me” on a mobile phone. Now Vic is demoing “Near me now” at search pagethat tells you interesting stuff. I know this neighborhood and it nailed the nearby businesses. A new version of Google Mobile Maps for Android is coming out today and if you long-press on a map, it will offer to show you stuff near you (businesses, the Computer History Museum, etc.).
Search by Sight
Vic is announcing Google Goggles. You can take pictures of physical landmarks, bottles of wine, CD covers, bar codes, a bunch of different things. It looks like it tries to recognize (do OCR) on text in images. Vic took a picture of a landmark from Japan and it told the name of the shrine.
Marissa is back up and introduces Amit Singhal.
Real-time search
Amit is talking about how information used to spread. In old days, people would ask their elders “Are these berries safe to eat?” The childen who listened to their elders would grow up to be grandparents themselves. The printing press changed the communication from one-to-one to one-to-many. The web brings it to many-to-many. Google is announcing real-time search today. Amit is emphasizing that relevance matters a bunch. He makes the strong point that Google has 11 years of experience with ranking based on relevance, not just based on sort-by-date.
Woohoo, my tweet about real-time search showed up in the results.
To get to real-time search, you’ll click the “Show options” link above the search results. Then you’ll see a “Latest” option. Looks like there’s also an “Updates” link to restrict it to updates from sites like Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. Example of see that a vaccine was out from a tweet a few seconds ago.
Realt-time search works on mobile (iPhone, Android) too. Google will add really-hot topics to the Hot Trends page to see these real-time updates.
Amit is talking about the infrastructure–lots of stuff has to happen to index this stuff and rank it well. Amit says Google is processing “over a billion documents a day” from the real-time web.
Amit talks about the four pillars of search: comprehensiveness, relevance, user experience, and speed/freshness. Amit is re-emphasizing that relevance matters and that speed/freshness is really one of Google’s strengths. We’ve worked on increasing our freshness
Amit closed with: “Light can travel around the world in 1/10th of a second, and we won’t rest until the speed of light is the only barrier to getting good search results to you.”
Marissa: two new partner announcements. Facebook is providing some updates. MySpace is also providing updates.
Q: Face recognition in Google Goggles?
A: Not doing facial recognition
Q: Advertising opportunity in real-time search?
A: Amit is answering. Twitter and others have added tremendous value to the web (ski conditions in Truckee, traffic in Bangalore). He believes there will be opportunities there for everyone over time, but isn’t too concerned right now.
Q: Sources in real-time search?
A: Over 1B pages a day are being processed. Not just Twitter, but a fresh press release or a blog post. Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku, etc.–looking to add MySpace and Facebook
Q: Availability in non-English?
A: First launch in English (Canada, India, US, UK). In Q1 2010 the plan is to add many new languages.
Q: from Dave McClure: Can I prioritize based on my friends?
A: Amit: localization, personalization, and social search can absolutely improve search quality.
Q: Facebook vs. MySpace?
A: Marissa: MySpace sending all public updates. Facebook will start by sending updates from Facebook Pages.
Q: What if you didn’t have a partnership with someone?
A: Marissa: Our goal is always comprehensiveness. We’d always look
Q: Danny: Can you clarify any financial terms?
A: Marissa: We can’t disclose any financial terms.
Q: Danny follow-up: Murdoch seems to have strong opinions. Are you sure you can’t say anything about the terms?
A: We can’t confirm.
Q: Any sources not allowed?
A: We’re happy to get any source of real-time and let the algorithms decide which updates are relevant.
Q: Same relevancy algorithms applied, just faster, or are they different?
A: At least a dozen new technologies to make real-time search as well as it does. Not exactly the same algorithms, but many of the same insights apply. Experience helps.
Q: As Android takes off,
A: Our desire is to reach our customers on whatever platform they’re on.
Q: Will real-time search be the death of journalism? Does that make Google the most powerful company in the world?
A: Amit: Journalism has its role and it will always have that role. There will always be a need for insight and the value that is added by journalists. Regarding the second point, our goal has always been to bring timely, relevant, useful results to users. It’s about user empowerment.
A: Marissa: We want to get people off our site and to the native source of information on the web.
A: Gabriel Stricker: Yet another channel to drive traffic to news and web sites.
Q: Philosophy of universal search?
A: Users don’t want the mental overhead of remembering “Oh, I have a image-y query, I’ll go to images.google.com.” We want them to be able to type anything into the search box and Google will return relevant results.
Q: Ryan Singel: You mentioned getting people off of Google quickly. Other companies (Yahoo/MSFT) seem to want to create pages based on the information and keep people on-site.
A: Marissa: The web thrives on openness and we want to encourage that. The exception might be entities where you want to tell people about that entity. But we want the web to prosper.
Q: Stephen Shankland: Any way to put truth into the equation, not just relevancy?
A: Amit: This is a really tough problem. We emphasize quality and relevance, which often brings the truth out.
Q: We host real-time information on our site. How can we talk to you?
A: Catch the PM after the event, but the general answer might involve an API down the road. Seemed more like speculation by Marissa than a promise.
Q: How does PageRank factor in?
A: Amit: PageRank is one of over 200 signals that we use in ranking. Lots of new technologies (e.g. language modelling) also developed for real-time search. Marissa: PageRank is about authoritativeness. There are similar signals (retweets, replies) in the update space.
Q: Someone wants to turn off scrolling in real-time updates?
A: Amit: They added a pause button based on dogfooding feedback. They continue to experiment and could change the UI in the future. [Personal note: Real-time search won't trigger for a ton of queries, only when it's believe to be helpful. That was one of the technologies they had to invent (when does a search deserve the freshness of latest-search). So scrolling makes sense to me because it emphasizes the hotness of the search.] Marissa: they may tweak it over time.
Q: Niall Kennedy: Geo? Will Galileo change things?
A: Vic: Depends on the source of the data. Fallback from GPS can be cell tower or A-GPS.
Q: Niall: Good coverage internationally?
A: Vic: Coverage has increased by an order of magnitude over the last year.
Q: Support in Google APIs?
A: Too soon to say.
Q: When will this be live?
A: Vic: Japanese live today. Google Goggle already available now. Coming weeks: “Near me now” on mobile home page. Product search: a few weeks beyond that. Demo of real-time translation: more like Q1.
A: Amit: Real-time search begins roll-out today, finishes over the next few days. Go to google.com/trends and click on “Hot Topics” panel on the left.
Q: Technology behind Google Goggles? How do you decide when a picture really is the Empire State Building.
A: Hartmut: Uses unsupervised learning as a reflection of what’s on the web.
Q: Not just text and status updates?
A: Amit: Excited about expanding quickly beyond just status updates toward relevant real-time results.
A: Marissa: MySpace already looking at non-real
Q: Real-time product inventory? (questioner works on similar idea)
A: Sometime in Q1. Current partners are Best Buy and Sears?
Q: Ryan Singel: How different is web index from real-time index.
A: Amit: Our web index can be updated in minutes or seconds quite easily. New tech is update receiving and real-time merging into the index. Amit seems to be saying that the intent is for everything to be as unified as possible under the hood.
Google has posted a video about realtime search too:
This is old news, back in August Google told us they are now crowdsourcing traffic data in order to provide better and more accurate traffic reports on Google Maps. Let me quote Google:
When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you’re moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers.
Why do I bring this up now? Well, a Google Maps Help thread has one Google Maps user asking how Google has traffic data for local streets? He said, “Just curious as to how google maps aggregates the data for traffic conditions of local surface streets, not freeways. Is it through the sensors in the streetlights?”
Useful, but a tad scary. I tested it on some of my local roads that I know are always congested and it does indeed work.
This is old news, back in August Google told us they are now crowdsourcing traffic data in order to provide better and more accurate traffic reports on Google Maps. Let me quote Google:
When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you're moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers.
Why do I bring this up now? Well, a Google Maps Help thread has one Google Maps user asking how Google has traffic data for local streets? He said, "Just curious as to how google maps aggregates the data for traffic conditions of local surface streets, not freeways. Is it through the sensors in the streetlights?"
Useful, but a tad scary. I tested it on some of my local roads that I know are always congested and it does indeed work.
Gone mostly unnoticed, Google has updated their Gmail and Google Calendar interface on iPhone and Android mobile devices. Google did announce a new mobile news look for these devices, but no word on the Gmail interface.
I spotted this update via the Google Mobile Help forums, where Googler, Ethan, confirmed the update. He said:
Gmail updated its look & feel in the browser on Android and iPhone devices today. Some of Google’s other mobile apps, like Calendar, have also gotten the new look. Other than the ‘re-skinning,’ features are unchanged for now.
Here is what the new ’skin’ looks like on the iPhone:
Gone mostly unnoticed, Google has updated their Gmail and Google Calendar interface on iPhone and Android mobile devices. Google did announce a new mobile news look for these devices, but no word on the Gmail interface.
I spotted this update via the Google Mobile Help forums, where Googler, Ethan, confirmed the update. He said:
Gmail updated its look & feel in the browser on Android and iPhone devices today. Some of Google's other mobile apps, like Calendar, have also gotten the new look. Other than the 're-skinning,' features are unchanged for now.
Here is what the new 'skin' looks like on the iPhone:
