Livestreams start boring because broadcasters don’t want to begin the real action until more people have tuned in. That can take a few minutes, even with streams being rapidly distributed via push notifications, tweets, and the News Feed. But by that time, the initial audience may have bounced, and the recorded replay won’t entice viewers […]
Partially confirming earlier reports, Twitter announced this morning plans that will begin to distance it from its strict adherence to the rule that tweets can only contain 140 characters. The company says that, among other changes designed to welcome new users to its service, it will no longer count media attachments and @names in select replies […]
Whistle while you tweet with the new partnership between Twitter and Spotify. Now you can listen to 30-second previews of songs in your timeline and Moments thanks to Twitter’s audio cards that now support Spotify. Twitter first launched audio cards in 2014 with iTunes previews and later worked with SoundCloud. Now the most popular on-demand […]
Online abuse remains the big hairy monster in the room for platforms powered by user-generated content. Twitter especially has had some very sizable and public problems with problem users, taking flak in recent years for being the go-to social media conduit for orchestrated misogynistic campaigns, such as the #Gamergate example. Or more recently for being the training platform where trolls were able to teach Microsoft’s ingenue […]
Mobile publishers need to work with at least a few different ad networks — that’s kind of the whole point of ad exchanges like Twitter-owned MoPub. Today the company is releasing a report that should give publishers a little more context when deciding which networks to work with. For starters, the report says that 53 percent […]
Today Twitter redefined its laws of physics. But while it’s posed as a simplification of the 140-character rule, the change will reshape information density, conversation style and self-promotion in the app. If you want to know what’s happening and why, read TechCrunch’s detailed breakdown of the changes scooped by Bloomberg’s Sarah Frier. Here, we’re going to examine […]
We’re hearing from multiple sources that there’s a new fund coming out of Betaworks, and Twitter is chipping money into it. Twitter is investing at least $10 million in the new fund, according to one source. We don’t know the total size of the venture. In the past, Betaworks has focused on smaller seed investments and has […]
Jason Stirman is part of a select group of early Web 2.0 builders in Silicon Valley. He was there at the beginning of Twitter, jumped with Ev Williams to Obvious Corp and then Medium and is now working on a passion of his – mindfulness for athletes. His new app, Lucid, launches in the App Store […]
Facebook is heaping focus on live video with an entirely dedicated tab for streams, which prioritizes in-the-moment broadcasts, so it’s no surprise to see that Twitter is fighting back in the streaming war with an integration between Periscope, its live-streaming platform, and the Twitter mobile apps. In what the company told The Verge is a test, a […]
For years, Twitter users have complained about the fact that link and photo URLs count against each tweet’s 140-character limit. Now that may finally change. According to a report in Bloomberg, Twitter will stop including photos and links in character counts soon, possibly within the next two weeks. URLs are automatically shortened by Twitter, but […]