The Next Web

Find people you know (and fake users) on Twitter

Written on December 24, 2008 – 1:04 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Some people I value highly weren’t in the list of people I follow on Twitter yet. But this morning, I found them all. I started following 52 people. I gotta thank the Twitter team for this, as they’ve relaunched the “Find people you know” feature. And, like Adam Ostrow from Mashable says, “it’s blazing fast“.

Within thirty seconds, Twitter imported my whole Gmail address book. There are a few things I noticed:

• First of all, a lot more people than I expected are active on Twitter. This probably goes for you too, so you can imagine the viral boost Twitter will get.
• Secondly, some fake twitter accounts were revealed. I noticed that one guy even posted Twitter updates for a Dutch political party
• I miss one thing in the address book finder: the date of the last update. I don’t want to follow someone who hasn’t updated for four months. That’s just clutter. And I don’t want to check every user manually. Help me out Twitter!

You can either search for someone’s name, or import your address book from GMail, AOL, Hotmail, and some other major email networks.

I hope you like that post!

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Adam Ostrow, address book, friend finder, mashable, twitter

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Pulse integration with Mac is just the beginning

Written on January 16, 2008 – 6:50 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Pulse is now available for your Mac Address Book and takes care of all your syncing needs. The Plaxo service wants to stay an ‘useful social application that helps people stay connected’. In order to live up to that mission, integration with the Address Book was necessary, according to the press release: “Since most of our members are busy professionals, it’s not enough to enable communication just within the Pulse website; we need to bring Pulse – and the unified address book underlying it – to the communication tools, services, and devices that they use.”

Isn’t that against the trend of moving workspace from the desktop to the browser? We asked John McCrea, VP of Marketing. His answer: “We are working toward a vision of the ’social web’ in which the social graph is able to turbocharge any site, application, or device with users to take their local piece of the social graph with them wherever they go.”

So it’s basically a way of making sure that people have access to their contacts wherever they go. Until full wireless Internet coverage isn’t a dream anymore, this sounds like a plausible reason.

Yet I do think that this whole syncing thing also is a way to tempt people to move their workspace to online applications, such as Pulse. By giving people the feeling that their stuff ALSO remains on their computer, they’re willing to give the online application a try. So this won’t be the last integration tool we will hear of in the near future. What about Google Calendar syncing two-ways with iCal?

address book, Apple, google calendar, ical, plaxo, pulse, sync

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