Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

Google Real-Time Search

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

Google is finally rolling out its long-awaited real-time search option.

The search engine will now include some results in real-time on its main results page.

“Our users will get the results as they are produced,” said Google fellow Amit Singhal at an event in Mountain View in California.

How it works? Well, a search for “Obama” would include a constantly updated listing of the “latest results” on Obama pulled from live tweets, Yahoo Answers, news articles, and web pages. Click “pause” and the listing stops refreshing.

Google will offer realtime trends, similar to Twitter’s, and you’ll see the real time option labeled “latest” alongside the current past “day” and “hour”. This new realtime search will also work on both Android devices and iPhones immediately. There is also a way to filter results just to status updates from Twitter, Facebook etc.

Google’s just announced partnerships with both Facebook and MySpace, both of which will see Google pull in any available public data in real-time.

Real-time results will be rolled out to users over the next few days. How can you try real time serch now? Simply search for something and then add the following text to the end of the URL: “&esrch=RTSearch”. The trick doesn’t work for every query, but for searches where there are a lot of results you’ll find a small, frequently updating box somewhere among the first search results.

Source: Google Blog

Marketers Embrace Twitter over Facebook

Monday, August 17th, 2009

Facebook may have recently passed MySpace as the most-visited social networking site in the US, but it’s facing stiff competition for the attention of social media marketers. By some metrics, Twitter is more popular in the marketing world.

Burson-Marsteller, in a July 2009 study of Fortune 100 companies, found that more companies had a presence on Twitter (54%) than on Facebook (29%).

According to the study, which looked at corporate blogs in addition to Twitter and Facebook profiles, about one-fifth of Fortune 100 firms only used one of the three channels. Those companies were overwhelmingly likely to choose Twitter (76%) over Facebook (14%) or blogging (10%).

Companies that used two of the three channels were most likely to have a blog plus a Twitter account (64%).

Burson-Marsteller found that these top companies were using Twitter for several purposes: company news, customer service, marketing promotions and employee recruitment.

Twitter is also beating out Facebook’s popularity among e-mail marketers. Email Data Source found that among the US e-mail campaigns it tracked, links to Twitter became more common than links to Facebook in March 2009.Links to both the social networking giant and the microblogging site rocketed in the first half of 2009, but Twitter’s rise has been more dramatic.

Source: eMarketer

The Twitter Guide Book

Monday, August 17th, 2009

Twitter is a social network used by millions of people, and thousands more are signing up every day to send short messages to groups of friends. But where’s the user manual for Twitter? Where do new Twitter users go to learn about Tweeting, retweets, hashtags and customizing your Twitter profile? Where do you go if you want to know all about building a community on Twitter, or using Twitter for business? How can you find advanced tools for using Twitter on your phone or your desktop? To answer all these questions and more, Mashable assembled The Twitter Guide Book, a complete collection of resources for mastering Twitter. Happy Tweeting!

Facebook buys FriendFeed

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site, said it will buy FriendFeed, netting a group of prized ex-Google engineers in the fast-growing Internet business. FriendFeed, an up-and-coming social media startup, lets people share content online in real time across various social networks and blogs.

The service is similar to, though less popular than Twitter, the microblogging site that Facebook tried to buy for $500 million in 2008, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed on Monday, but Facebook said FriendFeed would operate as it has for the time being as the teams determine long-term plans.

Facebook’s big gain in the acquisition is the engineering talent at FriendFeed, rather than the actual product, which has won critical praise, but lagged in popularity compared to Twitter, said Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang. FriendFeed’s four founders are former Google Inc employees who count well known products like Gmail and Google Maps among their accomplishments.

One bridge between Facebook and FriendFeed might have been Matt Cohler, Facebook’s former management vice president. He joined FriendFeed backer Benchmark Capital last year.

Source: Facebook

Don’t rely on URL Shorteners

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Thanks to Twitter’s rising popularity — and its finite, 140-character message length limit — free URL shortening services have been all the rage recently. But they should not become a critical part of your company’s infrastructure.

Why not? Because there’s no guaranteeing they’re going to work. Most of today’s short URL services are run by small, modestly funded startups that could easily shut them down — or change the way they work. Both have recently happened.

Source: The Business Insider