» Twitter

Today Twitter has announced a new "daily deal" called @earlybird Exclusive Offers, this will be time-sensitive deals on products and events that will appear on the @earlybird Twitter account. People can follow that account to get access to the deals.

The idea borrows from private and limited-time sale sites, like Gilt, Groupon and Woot (which Amazon.com recently acquired), a recent trend in online shopping. It also takes advantage of what companies like eBay, which attributes volumes in sales to posting deals on the Daily Deals, are already doing.

The deals could be on products, like iPods or diapers, or on events, like concert tickets or travel. In a post on a company blog, Twitter hinted that it could filter deals by category, like apparel or gadgets, in the future. Twitter stressed that it would be selective about which deals were offered and “try and make these deals interesting and of value to you.”

The retailers will determine the price of the items and how many are available. Twitter will earn money from the sales. It is experimenting with different models, like a cut of each sale or a fixed price per deal, said Sean Garrett, a Twitter spokesman. The retailers will collect shoppers’ credit card numbers and otherwise fulfill the transaction.

Many of you use Twitter to stay on top of timely, relevant information, and lots of businesses are already sharing special offers on Twitter. We believe that surfacing deals through the @earlybird account will help you discover the best of those deals, as well as find and follow accounts that consistently provide exceptional value.

Twitter @earlybird Exclusive Offers are special time-bound deals, sneak-peeks, and events that are promoted by the official Twitter @earlybird account. We partner with select advertisers and retweet offers that they have crafted only for the Twitter community. Our advertising partners determine the terms of the offer, including availability, amount, and price. As with other forms of advertising from Twitter, we are focused on bringing value to our users and will keep your interests in mind as we develop this program.

How does @earlybird choose these deals?

Every couple days, our Earlybird at Twitter HQ lays a golden egg. Inside this wondrous egg is a piece of parchment with the day’s magical deal.

Seriously… how do you get these deals?

Ok, ok, we partner with advertisers to choose exciting deals we think our users (that’s you!) will like. If you have suggestions of a product/event you want to see featured on this account, feel free to @reply to @earlybird.

Does Twitter make money from this?

Yes, we earn revenue through our relationships with advertisers. Our focus will be to try and make these deals interesting and of value to you. We take pride in being selective about the type of deals we highlight and hope they will be an exciting way to start your day.

This explains it all, I simply am not able to communicate it better. I said it too that social media relevancy must come with some defects. These are all areas for improvement in our use of these tools. I love the freedoms that social media has made common to us all as a vehicle. But this is too damn funny not to post here on ColderICE.com

Today during his talk at South by Southwest (SXSW) Twitter CEO Evan Williams announced the new @Anywhere platform for Twitter. Williams company pulled in more than $25 million last year with partnership with Google and Microsoft. Twitter has been the darling of the news and social networkers for the past year and a personal favorite of mine too.

The new @Anywhere platform will allow followers to interact DIRECTLY from a third party’s site without leaving that site. So guess who was on the list as an early adopter? eBay! Yep, you know eBay is down for whatever as long as you don’t leave their site, so this one is right up their alley…BRAVO!

Williams said he wants to help lower the barriers to adoption and now users can follow content from site providers without exiting their site. He said this will help sites gain more followers and have your fans on Twitter talk more about your content.

As you know I am a HUGH follower of all things social networking for business, I am going to be all over this stuff and hope to have more information as it develops. Until then, below is the blog post from Evan on the Twitter blog in full…

When we designed Twitter, we took a different approach—we didn’t require a relationship model like that of a social network. Keeping things open meant you could browse our site to read tweets from friends, celebrities, companies, media outlets, fictional characters, and more.

You could follow any account and be followed by any account. As a result, companies started interacting with customers, celebrities connected with fans, governments became more transparent, and people started discovering and sharing information in a new, participatory manner.

We’ve developed a new set of frameworks for adding this Twitter experience anywhere on the web. Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com. Our open technology platform is well known and Twitter APIs are already widely implemented but this is a different approach because we’ve created something incredibly simple. Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript. This new set of frameworks is called @anywhere.

When we’re ready to launch, initial participating sites will include Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube. Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page—and that’s just the beginning. Twitter has proven to be compelling in a variety of ways. With @anywhere, web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more value with less heavy lifting.

Brent Leary and myself got into a great discussion about how some pretend to have influence simply because they have a few followers.

Listen to this episode of B.S. Walks NOW!
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Show Notes:

1:20 Outlook for 2010 in Business is optimistic
2:10 National Retail eCommerce numbers beat expectations
3:52 Amazon Kindle e-book sales crush it
5:20 The Apple iPad reviews
8:27 Lessons from Conan O’Brian from Tonight Show
12:00 The Appearance of influence with social media
15:03 The @Wiseman23 Twitter threat 
17:23 Tit-for-Tatter-Twitterers
18:00 Measuring Influence
18:00 Brian Clark (Copybloger.com)
18:39 Guy Kawasaki on Twitter
18:50 Oprah Winfrey on Twitter
19:07 Bill Gates on Twitter
19:30 Chris Brogan/Liz Strauss/Gary Vaynerchuk
23:30 Man vs. Wild
25:10 Levar Burton

Brent recently blogged on this topic with a post called Please Stop Automatically Equating Number of Twitter Followers With Real Influence

So can Twitter make you appear to look influential in a short amount of time? Apparently so, because people will give you the time of day if you have thousands of followers. Can you automate the process of appearing influential on Twitter? Absolutely – I’ve seen people’s followership rise quickly.. people I’ve never heard of before (regular non celeb types), even when they weren’t tweeting all that much…mostly through using some kind of service.

— Brent Leary

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I just downloaded and am playing with this new Windows native Twitter app. It is no secret but I kind of despise the Adobe Air platform. It sucks up memory like a vacuum and has to be rebooted just to release it back.

So Seesmic announced the Preview version Partnered with Microsoft, engineered for Windows and optimized for Windows 7, this preview version of Seesmic for Windows combines the best features from of our ever-popular social application and provides it to you in a native Windows environment.

Fully functional with Twitter, we continue to make Seesmic for Windows a simple yet powerful client application:

• Manage and posts from multiple twitter accounts
• View aggregated Home, Replies, Private and Sent columns.
• Create and save searches
• View your Twitter lists and create your own groups
• Create unlimited columns
• Enable choice of multiple image and url shortening services
• Manage notification of your messages.

Utilizing the best of what Windows 7 has to offer, Seesmic for Windows provides users managing Twitter the best experience available:

• Drag and drop to add user lists
• Sleek and Smooth User Interface
• Increased performance
• Full panel Twitter user profile
• Tabbed view of Accounts and Twitter lists

As with our other Seesmic Products, we continue to listen to your thoughts and feedback on this preview version of Seesmic for Windows and will do our best to release as often as possible.

You can get the preview version of Seesmic Desktop by signing up here:

http://seesmic.com/team.html

Review some quick video tips here:

http://help.seesmic.com/forums/29258/entries/80120

By Cliff Aliperti

Set it and forget it, right?  That’s the kind of simplicity we all want these days, and Storytlr.com has definitely filled that need for me in pulling together everything I do online.

Founded in 2008 Storytlr comes to us from two person team based out of Belgium and the Netherlands.  From the Storytlr Presskit:

Storytlr is reinventing the personal page by bringing together life-streaming, blogging, and social interactions. It lets you create, aggregate and mashup web content into a highly personalized page. Link it to your own domain, style it, share it. This becomes the place where you define your online identity.

Prior to finding Storytlr I’d been pointing people to my Google Profile to show off all I do online.  Now I definitely believe you should still have a Google Profile because, well, it’s Google, and no matter what you do online your Google Profile is always going to show up on page 1 when someone Googles you.

But that’s just a portal to what you’re doing.  I’d also tried mashing together my online presence with a Tumblr site.  While I like what Tumblr does I prefer the way Storytlr does it:

Beyond pulling in multiple blog posts, Tweets from multiple Twitter identities, my Stumbles, Google favorites, videos, and even eBay listings, what I love about Storytlr is that it allows me to arrange the page exactly how I want to present it to you.

It’s fast and it’s easy to set up.  I think I mention I did mine in one night and it took me about an hour and a half.  It imports all of your old info from the selected sites, allows you to organize it, archive it, and even back it up (worried about lost Tweets?  no more). 

Besides pulling in info from everywhere you are online you can also post links, videos, audio, blog posts direct to your Storytlr site.  There’s simple Disqus integration for commenting and making your site itself more social.

You can even set it up with your own domain name, which gave me the excuse to break out the oh-so-vain cliffaliperti.com.

The most amazing part of Storytlr…it’s free!  Actually, I even prefer the tabbing and organization to the price because (shh, don’t tell them) I’d definitely pay for this service. 

The following video is just under 5 minutes, but it’s enough time to give you a quick walk through both the front and back ends of my Storytlr site.  Have a look:

Sign-up here: Storytlr.com

So many functions you want in a video making tool are missing. Even when you pay hundreds of dollars (and trust me, I have) for video software, you often come up short for making good video masking. I wish I would have found ManyCam a long ago, but I was not that fortunate. I could have saved a fortune on video processing software had I only known.

What is ManyCam?

• Use your webcam with multiple programs simultaneously.
• Add text to your webcam video window with any application.
• Add cool animations to your video window.
• Show your local day and date in your video window.
• Add live CGI graphics like fire and water effects.

Please Rate My Video with 5-Stars DSR’s

While ManyCam does NOT record video you can use services like YouTube or Viddler.com to capture the recording for you and then down load it from there to use for other purposes or just link to them and embed from there.

ManyCam will work with LIVE broadcasting on sites like Ustream.tv or Justin.tv so you can actually do desktop capture LIVE!!! Now that alone is worth the price of admission folks. We got a hot one right here!

Keep in mind that this is a FREE tool and as such it may not work for every setup and PC environments with all software. I have not had issue with it working with my tools, and will be testing this LIVE on this Thursday nights show, so be sure to tune in TONIGHT at 10:30 pm et or so for Late Night Beta w/ ColderICE and watch how this thing does in a real world environment.

As it stands right now out of the gate, I have to give this one 4 Ice Cubes (out of 5) This is a killer freebie with fun interface that offers many possibilities

ColderICE Rating 4 Cubes (out of 5) :

So yesterday we got a taste of life without email for a while. Yes, the beloved epicenter of communication around these parts is GMail. Today GMail went down HARD for over 2 hours in our offices. This outage was not limited to the free Gmail users, it actually affected the Google Apps users both paid and free as well.

This is the 2nd time this year that Gmail has gone down (last time on May 14th) and both times I immediately went to Twitter to see if it was just me or was it industry wide. Well about 10 minutes into the outage there were thousands of tweets showing up about it. It started to trend on Twitter in just minutes! Within the hour I started to see the Twitter fail whale pop up periodically as well.

It seems that when Gmail went down, people in turn went in droves to Twitter to either find out more information or use that service as a replacement communication vehicle during the outage. So much traffic that it actually was slowing Twitter down and turning off some of the API functionalities. This is incredible!

Jennifer Van Grove did a report on Mashable about how the world turned to Google itself for answers to the outage. 18 of the top 20 US searches on Google were queries related to the Gmail outage.

The widespread outage caused a frenzy which led to me creating this video about "the weakest link" in cloud computing…

Please Rate My Video with 5-Stars DSR’s

WTF is going on? I get up this morning to check in on my favorite social site, Twitter, and poof, it is gone!

Yep, this morning Twitter has acknowledge on its status blog that the site is DOWN.

So OK, then I decide to go for the backup site, Facebook.com and I can not get it to LOAD either. But Facebook is not completely down, but it too is having some issues.

So what the hell is going on? Does this have something to do with Paula Abdul leaving American Idol?!  Stay tuned…

Well I had so MANY positive comments yesterday from all the Mythbuster fans, I figure I can wring one more use out of the reference, LMAO. I have been hearing all the rumors about how Bing jump to prominence in such a short time that it became bigger thank CNN, Digg and even Twitter in no time. Well, the folks at Go-Digital.net put the myth to the test.

According to Go-Digtal.net Microsoft actually redirected all of its traffic from Live.com and MSN.com to the Bing URL which accounts for all the hyper traffic.

Using  another web site to prove this, this graph shows how MakeoverSolutions changed its name to DailyMakeover.com to show how this looks on a Compete.com charting. This is what it looks like when a site changes domain names and redirects all traffic from the old site.  By next month Compete will show the same “X” formation graphing for Live.com vs Bing.com

,

This current chart already shows the decline from Live.com’s traffic stats after being entirely redirected to Bing.

So once again, this myth is…