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Facebook Google Twitter

Who Will Buy Twitter – Facebook or Google?

Apparently, both Google and Facebook are holding talks with Twitter with regards to its sale. Twitter, the very famous microblogging site which started in 2006 had actually grown phenomenally in its initial years. It is estimated that Twitter would quote a price of 8-10 billion dollars. Estimates are that Twitter only managed to make 45 million dollars in the year 2010. Also, Twitter has hired more employees and acquired new data centers. Due to this, Twitter has supposedly lost a fair amount of money. It is also being estimated that the turnovers of twitter in 2011 are only going to be 11 million dollars utmost.

Now, if Facebook were to acquire Twitter, it is most likely that the only genuine competitor that it ever had up to now would be gone with a swift blow. If Google were to acquire it, it would certainly look to expand Twitter, as they have failed miserably with Buzz.

Let’s wait and see which giant gets the cherry!

Categories
android Twitter

Twitter 2.0 App For Android Phones

The Twitter app 2.0 for android based phones has been released. The new Twitter app 2.0 just comes in the wake of time as all the Android users up to now have been using third party applications that gave them options like Twidroid and Tweetdeck for staying updated. But, these third party applications were no good and twitter has realised the importance of having their own App and have released the new app 2.0.

This new app loads faster, is bug free, possesses a new user interface (UI) and also allows a smooth scroll allowing users to browse through various columns within the app. The swipe left and right options are present for both retweeting and replying to a tweet. Along with these cool updates, Twitter has also included autofill which would deal away with the various typing difficulties.

But, this app is only for Android 2.1 and higher users.

Categories
Software and Apps Twitter

Twitter iPhone App Push Notification For Messages And Mentions Added

Twitter has announced an updated version of their iPhone app that, among other things, brings push notification for @mentions and direct messages. The new version 3.2 of the iOS app is now available for download at the App Store.The official changelog for the app reads,

iPhone:

  • Improved display of shortened URLs
  • Correctly load reserved Twitter.com paths, such as http://twitter.com/newtwitter
  • Fix connection error caused by a device clock being set incorrectly
  • Additional retina graphics
  • Enable geotagging in your account with one tap

iPad:

  • Inline media
  • Manage saved searches
  • UI improvements

If you do not own an iPhone, you can instead choose to receive these push notifications via SMS. With the Twitter app for Blackberry already having this feature enabled, the company has said that Android and Windows Phone 7 users will be getting this functionality on their platforms very soon.

Categories
Social Media Twitter Web

Twitter Promoted Accounts Adds New Revenue Line To Microblogging Service

Twitter’s monetization model has always been a closely scrutinized affair and with the microblogging service yet to show revenues commensurate with its user growth, the company had recently announced a change of guard with COO Dick Costolo taking over as the CEO of Twitter.

Close on the heels of the announcement, Twitter has also launched a new monetizable feature – Promoted Accounts. Based on the long-tested Promoted Trends feature, the new feature will promote the advertisers’ Twitter account to targeted users who may be interested in the advertisers’ offering. Carolyn from Twitter writes on the blog,

“When an advertiser promotes an account, Twitter’s algorithm looks at that account’s followers and determines other accounts that those users tend to follow. If a user follows some of those accounts, but not the advertiser’s account, then Twitter may recommend the advertiser’s Promoted Account to that user. For example, a lot of people who follow several gaming-related accounts also follow @xbox. If someone follows gaming-related accounts, but not @xbox, Twitter may recommend @xbox to that person.”

That sounds pretty weak to me. A promoted account is only shown to users who are already following several related accounts. In that case, wouldn’t the advertiser’s account be offered as a suggestion to the user in any case? Will that mean that the advertiser will be paying for something that they can get done for free anyway? An alternative would be to target users by geography or age group (which the Twitter database does not have at present) and let advertisers reach out to those users who they may not be able to target otherwise.

Having said that, this is still in testing phase and it will be interesting to see how the functionality pans out moving forward.

Categories
Twitter

New Feature To Allow Users To Buy Twitter Followers?

ReadWriteWeb has an interesting piece of news that could possibly indicate that a new pay-per-follower monetization model is on the cards. This follows reports on TechCrunch of a new feature on Twitter search that prominently displays Twitter user accounts on search results.

Marshall Kirkpatrick speculates if this could eventually allow users to advertise their user accounts on Twitter search to gain more followers. The business idea is not entirely innovative. Facebook has, for a long time, let brands to advertise their fan pages to users in order to win fans.

However, RWW’s speculations points more towards a CPA model whereby brands/accounts only pay for every follower gained. It is not clear if these Twitter user accounts shall be promoted beyond the search pages. Also, it is not clear if third party Twitter clients like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck will be offered a share of the revenues based on referrals from these clients.

Nevertheless, this could be an interesting new way to monetize without having the user to bounce away from Twitter’s website.

Categories
Twitter

Create Help Desk Tickets Directly From Twitter With Zendesk

Zendesk, the popular SaaS based help desk application developer, has announced an update to their service offering that will provide customers with new Twitter integration features. With the availability of these new features, enterprises may be able to create Zendesk tickets directly from Twitter conversations, record subsequent conversations as part of ticket resolution and also enable the customer support team to share specific Twitter conversations with colleagues over an internal platform.

The new features also enables enterprises in brand reputation management. Zendesk customers may now set their software up to look out for brand mentions across Twitter conversations and prioritize these mentions based on the user’s follower count. This will enable brands to cater to complaints from highly influential Twitter users on a first-come-first served basis.