The Twitter API Wiki was updated with this news yesterday, and describes how OAuth is used.

Twitter could potentially build on this service to offer an interface with its API in the same way that Google and Facebook’s ‘Connect’ services do – but critical to this will be the issue of security, which has been an Achilles Heel for Twitter in the past, and the recent worm attack will have done little to enhance confidence in the service.

According to Dow Jones Newswires, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said on Thursday he would be happy to pursue an advertising deal with Twitter.

Having previously dismissed Twitter as a “poor man’s email” system, Schmidt seemed to shift course during a call with analysts:

“It’s an incredibly useful thing,” he said of Twitter’s instant communications capability.

He said the question was how a real-time update service could make money, adding that a logical strategy would be to “hang advertising products, whether it’s a text ad or video ad, off of it.”

“I don’t know personally their strategy, but it strikes me that’s a logical strategy for them to pursue and something we would be happy to pursue.”

Adding an RFID reader to an iPhone allows all sorts of possibilities, and this video shows how everyday objects can trigger a video related to that object.

iPhone RFID: object-based media from timo on Vimeo.

In the example, with an RFID reader attached to the iPhone, when holding the iPhone in close proximity to a certain object, that object tells your iPhone to play a particular preloaded clip.

There might be any number of nice applications where content could be pushed to a phone to act as, say, a flexible museum guide, or instruction manuals or videos could be played to remind you how to program your washing machine, or even cook a particular dish.

Originally Found by Gizmodo

Sun Microsystems’ Startup Essentials are Giga sponsors of The Next Web Conference, and their Startup Rally series kicks off tomorrow in Amsterdam.

‘Spotlight’ Video Elevator Pitches

However, they have not forgotten how many startups entered but did not make it to the final cut, nor how many talented startups are visiting The Next Web Conference, so they have arranged a ‘Spotlight’ facility at the Sun Startup Essentials Stand, where startups can film their own elevator pitch, which will then appear later the same day on http://blogs.sun.com/startups, along with a paragraph of information, allowing the startup to reach a global audience for free.

Startups can also sign up to the Sun Startup Essentials programme, which offers support, community, events, and even discounts on Sun hardware to help support their development.

Sticker Photo Competition

As if that were not enough, Sun also have two rather nice prizes on offer for the best photos of a Sun Startup Stickers stuck to “willing volunteers“!

What do you have to do ?

1. Visit the Sun Startup Essentials stand and get your Essential sticker(s) *
2. Find willing volunteer(s),** and take a photo of them with sticker(s) – remember the more creative the better! (See Hermione demonstrating below)
3. Twitter your pictures, using the hashtags #sunstartup #tnw – upload by 3pm Friday 17th April

Hermione Way demonstrates how to stick your startup sticker

So how do you win?
To win EveryCity On-Demand Hosting —

• Twitter the most individual photos, of separate people, wearing the stickers or

To Win an iPod Touch —

• Take the most interesting/creative/imaginative photo, as judged by the panel of experts

Good luck!

Conditions: * Stickers are limited to x10 per person. Be creative when re-using them! ** Competition entrant must gain permission from persons being photographed * Stickers should be removed and discarded responsibly after photos have been taken.

Twitter is a fairly boring place if there’s nobody interesting you are following – but it’s always been an issue to find interesting people.

Tweepz is a new site, currently indexing just over 2 million twitter users (follow @tweepz to be added to the database) that aims to make finding people who interest you an easier task. Tweepz not only lets you search by geography, biography or name, but also aims in future to index the content of Twitter users’ nominated URLs, thus offering a great deal more scope towards returning meaningful search results.

Options in Tweepz’ search at present include looking in a Twitter users biography, pinpointing their stated location, by the name used (as opposed to username) and as free text, with results immediately sortable by relevancy, number of followers, or number being followed.

An excellent feature to narrow down searches is the ability to filter down to include, or to exclude, by the number of followers, divided into percentile ranges, so you can readily find the top 8.3% of those with ‘kilt’ in their bio who have over 1000 followers. Language is also (not always perfectly) identified, so you could pinpoint, or exclude, say Spanish-speaking individuals. There is also the ability to identify what are termed ‘extracted entities’ where an identifiable seamtic object such as a city, institution or product is aligned with twitter profile. RSS feeds for specific queries are available, as is the simple ability to tweet the results you are seeing.

After the enlightened suggestion of Marjolein Hoekstra, I spoke to Tweepz’ Dutch developer, Jochem Prins when he was in Scotland, and he revealed that the project was part-time, but fully supported by his employer exalead, and was designed to demonstrate some of the company’s capabilities.

An advanced query layer is due to be released (get more news by following @tweepz) , but you can currently search with operators such as ‘followers< =1000‘ to narrow down results from the initial simple query page. Enhancements I might expect as the site develops might include linking to Twitter to allow a ‘click-to follow’ facility when interesting individuals are found, and it would be useful to having the ability to store and re-run search results, but for now, Tweepz is a robust, uncluttered and flexible way to find relevant individuals who use Twitter with layered and filtered accuracy.

Getting actual contact from web sites has always been a troublesome area for three important reasons – people hate filling in forms, people are wary of getting a lot of marketing junk when they fill in forms, and those forms can’t always integrate easily with a customer / lead management database.

These are three problem areas that Leadjini plans to solve with one solution. Firstly, it allows you to set up and embed custom enquiry forms onto your web site easily. Secondly, it allows those filling in the forms to remain anonymous from the company they are contacting (using leadjini as the intermediary). Thirdly, it allows clever management of contacts through a web-based database and contact management system.

The service is currently in beta, but is fully functional, and there are a range of different service levels at different monthly costs, including a single-widget free account. I set up an account in 30 seconds, created a widget and added it to a blog in less than five minutes, and was able to see the results of completing the form there instantly, with an email straight to my inbox, and in my online lead manager.

The lead manager is relatively simple at present, as no sorting, exporting or filtering are currently in place. Some enhanced form options might be desirable, but the ‘anonymous enquiry’ option may certainly serve to increase response rates for certain types of enquiries. The issue of form spam is not currently addressed with any captcha or other ‘human-only’ devices, and this may be a stumbling block for some.

However, Leadjini certainly works well, and checked out perfectly in three separate browser tests. It is a fast, easy and painless way to gather contact details reliably from a web page, and then have them stored in an easy to access and simple to update online database. More sophistication might be required of the lead manager, but I have to assume that is likely to be catered for in further releases, and in paid options.

Every year, the Tokyo Underground map is used as the basis to redraw a map of the web by IA Inc, mapping the 333 most influential web domains and the 111 most influential internet people. The result is stunning, and fascinating.

Thie map is in its ‘final beta’ stage, meaning you can still add comments and criticism to amend the map’s final appearance before it goes to print. It is available to view as a large scale 2.6Mb PNG file on Flickr.

Only 1,000 maps will be printed – you can reserve a copy here by sending an email.

Purifyr strips web sites down to their basics and gets rid of irrelevant clutter – ideal for mobile browsing or printing, and for speeding up your experience on slow or shared connections. Click to Take a look at how we look naked. Purifyr strips out headers and footers, and removes advertisements.

Click and drag this Purifyr bookmark and drop into your browser toolbar to use the Purifyr service on any web page you visit.

Purifyr also has a full API to allow you to make free use of the service. Cost options for faster processing include hosted use of the service, and they also offer the service for use behind firewalls, helping to save on data costs and improving the ‘semantic’ or ‘meaning’ value of web content.

Today, Digg, recognising this trend, has created an instantly activated toolbar that works from any browser, instantly. But it’s not a toolbar you need to download – it’s far cleverer than that – and quite brilliant, in my view.

The key: It’s stunningly simple to invoke – just type ‘digg.com/’ in front of any URl in your browser – for example

digg.com/http://thenextweb.com [click to invoke dig toolbar]

and the Digg toolbar is invoked, along with creating a shortcut URL to whatever content you are viewing. Logging in to Digg through the toolbar keeps you at the same reference point, and you can share via Facebook, Twitter or Email with the option to see a random ‘Dugg’ page – and of course you can Digg content. Or just click [X] and it’s gone. Try it.

This makes Digg nine characters away from any URL – just type ‘digg.com/‘ as a prefix and you’re there. Clever. Easy. Simple. Memorable. Powerful. Well done, Digg.

We have a confession. The Short Change Venture Capital’s MicroFundr™ Fund, which we announced yesterday, was an April Fool. It was a fake, it was a hoax, it was some scam, it was our joke. We got you. Well, we got most of you – there were a few doubts.

Anatomy of a hoax…

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten of The Next Web and Ville Vesterinen of ArcticStartup cooked up the central concept on the afternoon of 31st March, and mailed the outline to fellow conspirators. David Petherick worked on a fictional press release (reproduced below), from which Ville Vesterinen and Zee Kane worked to create separate blog entries. Meanwhile, David created the graphics and account for @microfundr on Twitter, and took a screenshot of the first instructional Twitter message to be used in the blogs from the Next Web and Acrtic Startup. TechCrunch UK & France couldn’t join in the fun, as they were busy on the road in Silicon Valley, but the story still had enough legs, and Ville and Zee published within a few minutes of each other in the early afternoon of April 1st.

• Arctic Startup Blog 1st April: MicroFundr, First Pan-European VC Fund, Will Use Twitter For Funding Process
• The Next Web Blog 1st April: Announcement: MicroFundr, an innovative new Pan-European VC Fund is born.

The story spreads…

Within a few minutes, retweeting of the stories started, and the @microfundr twitter account had gained over 100 followers by early evening, and currently stands at 119 followers. At least one person tweeted that “here was a story that was NOT an April Fool”. Oops. We were starting to believe it ourselves as we saw the story rippling out across the twitterverse and blogosphere.

We don’t wish to be cruel and name anyone who retweeted, or went as far as to send a URL with the hashtag #twit14 (TWIT 1st of the 4th), but a search on twitter for “microfundr” or “#twit14” is rather revealing. I’m afraid that, like Google, Twitter seems never to forget.

Letting you down gently

All followers of the twitter account will now be followed (according to our story, the sign that they are receiving a green light to pitch via 13 tweets for MicroFundr™ funding) and will see the following tweet “We are sorry to announce that @microfundr is an April Fool joke. Gotcha!” with a link to this blog. We will keep the account running for a while, as it seems a shame to bury what’s starting to look less like a joke and more like a good idea.

Quotes from the Perpetrators..

Ville Vesterinen:
“The VC industry could do with some innovative new models. Even if having a smaller fund means smaller management fees. We apologize to those startups for raising false hopes, but at the same time hope that Angels and early stage funds will take note and look at Twitter not only as a bygone investment opportunity, but also a useful tool for their trade. ”

Zee Kane
“Mr Kane is unavailable for comment.”

David Petherick:
“Boris’ initial email quoted Albert Einstein “Anyone who doesn’t take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either.” So after that, the release almost wrote itself, and I came up with the term microfundr in a flash, checked it was available on twitter, along with the hashtag #twit14 being unused, and within about 20 minutes, it was all in place. A quick twiddle in Fireworks gave me an avatar and icon (I even have an animated gif file) and the release was a solid base of ‘factual foundation’ for Ville and Zee to spin out from.

I think Boris’ interview with Andrew Keen from the ‘launch dinner’ conducted that same evening in Amsterdam was the real cherry on top, and Ville in Helsinki and Zee in London did a great job interpreting the release, and keeping their tone ‘straight’.

I just wish the fund was real. We could certainly start a €14 Euro fund (fourteen) – that might show up some great startups!”

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten:
“The huge amount of feedback to our ‘joke’ was so positive and encouraging that halfway through the day we started regretting that our project wasn’t real. Maybe we should seriously consider looking into making MicroFundr a reality. They say reality is stranger than fiction, but maybe we can turn fiction into reality one day.

Isaac Asimov famously said “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I’ve found it!), but ‘That’s funny…’. MicroFundr™ certainly was ‘Funny’ but for many people it seemed to feel more like an ‘Eureka!’.”

Andrew Keen:
“I’m very small myself…”

Andrew Keen @ Small Fund Launch

Small Change’s Microfundr Press Release in Full

EMBARGO: 08:00 UTC April 01, 2009

Small Change Venture Capital: First pan-european VC fund MicroFundr™, aimed at small, mini & micro businesses, will use Twitter for funding process

AMSTERDAM, HELSINKI, LONDON & PARIS, April 01, 2009: Small Change Venture Capital are launching with MicroFundr™ which will invest up to €14,000 Euros (USD $18,500) in Micro blogging start-ups. The Invest Fund raised just under €14 million (USD $18m) from an anonymous group of small banks and informal investors. A joint group of European blogs, including The Next Web (http://thenextweb.com), ArcticStartup (http://www.arcticstartup.com), TechCrunch UK & Ireland (http://uk.techcrunch.com) and TechCrunch France (http://fr.techcrunch.com) today announced the launch of the MicroFundr™ investment fund aimed at European small, mini and micro start-ups.

“With the current economic climate, the rise of micro blogging services and a global focus on details, the time is right for a small money fund. The blogs involved will invest money, advertising space and attention in the form of blog posts for start-ups with no more than 2 employees, and modest goals.” said Dick Vogels, VP for Small Change Venture Capital, based in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

“To be eligible, start-ups are required to have a turnover of no more than €140,000 Euros per year (USD $185,000), and should aim at an exit worth no more than €14 million (USD $18.5m). Business plans can be submitted via Twitter in no more than 14 tweets using the tag #twit14, with their first tweet to simply include a link to the startup company’s web site.

“If the twitter account @microfundr starts following the startup on twitter, a further 13 tweets will be accepted from that startup, as part of the application process. The shortlist of those to follow will be judged every 14 days by a panel of the partner Blog owners and Small Change executives, and we expect to have our first funding in place for 14 startups, totaling up to €196,000 (USD $259,000), within 28 days. Our backers all agree that ‘Small teams, modest dreams, high volume but low cost services and minimal turn-over are the keywords of the future.’

“These small startups are the key to growth in this economy, and the unique nature of this fund, along with the unique, rapid, web-enabled method of accessing funds, means it has an immediacy and straight-to-the-point focus that engenders a new breed of entrepreneur and a new type of micro-company. Our investors are confident that they will reap rapid rewards from the unique nature, speed of access to funding, and the clarity of equity participation that MicroFundr™ will employ.”

Further details will be announced on Partner Blogs, and there will be a series of tweets every 14 days from the @microfundr twitter account, with the first announcement of shortlisted startups due to be confirmed on 14th April 2009.

Contacts:
Avril Duncan-Price or Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten
Email: avril.dp.microfundr@gmail.com or boris@thenextweb.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/microfundr or http://twitter.com/boris
Tel: +31 6 4200 4200

– Ends

Apologies to those who were duped. We really almost wished it were real too. Watch out for us next year…