Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on November 3, 2008 – 1:40 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Twitter can be useful for almost anything. Leaking great tech stories, asking your geeky fiancée to marry you, staying in touch with your voters, or finding the right person for the job… Well, for almost all of these purposes expect the latter.
Biz Stone and Evan Williams are looking for a “Founder Associate”, or, as most people call it, a secretary. Yet this guy or gal has to be ambitious, more specifically, “the ideal candidate is a future entrepreneur or executive who is willing to work hard and do a wide variety of non-glamorous tasks for a year or two in order to get their foot in the door, learn, and make connections.”
You might think this job vacancy would be the perfect opportunity for an interesting Twitter experiment. A first round of job applications of only 140 characters. But no, instead of that, Evan and Biz post a regular announcement on Jobscore. Williams does mention it on his Twitter page, but more like he doesn’t expect his future assistant to be active on the service yet:
In fact, he or she might be. A Twitter Search for “Founder Associate” gives some interesting examples.
Oh well, maybe next time. This little post at least proves that something like a vacancy buzz does exist on Twitter. Why not benefit from that?
I hope you like that post!
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Written on September 18, 2008 – 3:30 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
A little more than 24 hours ago we posted a bookmarklet here titled TwitterKeys and then all hell broke loose. Here is what happened before we launched it and what has happened since.
On Tuesday evening, just as I was getting ready to go home, I noticed a Tweet on Twitter with a symbol in it which I hadn’t seen before. I copy pasted the symbol and Tweeted it:
Sander (@sandervdv) was working next to me and said “Hey, just open your Character Palette. There are tons of symbols there that you can copy paste”. I immediately did and then replied “Very cool, but kind of hard to find. Can’t we just put them all in a floating browser window so you can easily copy paste them while you are Twittering?”. Sander smiled and said “Sure, and I can even write a Bookmarklet so you can easily access it”.
Then I left the office and went home. At 8pm I opened my laptop and found Sander’s Bookmarklet code in my Inbox. I did a quick test with the help of a few Twitter users to see which symbols would work on all platforms and by 10 pm I uploaded the files, wrote a simple post with the details and launched the whole thing by Twittering the following line:
I ♥ this ☛ http://tinyurl.com/5hpf4f ☺
Immediately I noticed people starting to play with the characters and flowers, comets and stars flying all over Twitter. Within a few hours the Twitter founders found out about TwitterKeys and twittered about it:
Biz Stone (Twitter.com Co-Founder & 16,680 followers):
“Trying out TwitterKeys ☺ which helps you put little icons in your tweets ♥”
http://twitter.com/biz/statuses/923898532
Evan Williams (Twitter.com Co-Founder & 18,650 followers):
“♺ @biz’s post about http://bit.ly/twitterkeys. Neat! ”
http://twitter.com/ev/statuses/923901604
Then other famous people started talking about it:
Howard Rheingold (3,908 followers)
“I ♥ this ☛ http://tinyurl.com/5hpf4f ☺ via @bomega”
http://twitter.com/hrheingold/statuses/923879515
Leo Laporte (55,837 followers)
“I ♥ Twitterkeys. ☛ http://snipurl.com/3r09l ☚”
http://twitter.com/leolaporte/statuses/924264132
So within a few hours these 4 Big Twitter users promoted Twitterkeys to their combined 95,075 followers. The result? About 15,000 unique visitors to the original blog post within 24 hours, 60+ diggs, lots and lots of TwitterKeys on Twitter, reviews on 150+ blogs and a nice spike in RSS Feed subscribers…
Today we launched version 2 of TwitterKeys which displays even more characters. If you haven’t installed it yet do it now:
Drag this link to your browser
bookmarks toolbar: TwitterKeys
Here at The Next Web Blog we love to write about people working on Next Web technologies and services. But we also love to contribute a little ourselves from time to time. Hope you like what we do!
Written on August 18, 2008 – 2:38 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Last Thursday, European Twitterazi experienced a bad start of the day. Their beloved micro blogging service would no longer send SMS updates. Smart phone users can still find ways to receive updates about Twitter conversations. Yet people with less sophisticated mobile devices are in the dark now.
My co-editor Patrick suggested that Twitter should offer a pro-account option, so that people would have to pay for SMS updates. But co-founder Biz Stone wrote on the Twitter blog that he didn’t share this opinion:
International billing is a significant project and not something we are comfortable focusing on before we have a dependable offering. It’s not right to charge for spotty service—and we know there are bugs.
How to get SMS text messages updates
Although Twitter still sends updates to 96 percent of its users, the remaining 4 percent is pretty pissed of. Especially in the UK, Twitter users are quite angry. Read for example the comments on this TechCrunch UK post.
The first commenter on the Techcrunch UK post was Paul Bradshaw from Online Journalism Blog. He called it a “stupid move” and was “in a very bad mood”. He even sacrified his Twitter avatar for the cause. But for Bradshaw, it doesn’t end with just being angry. He’s now actively looking for ways to still get SMS messages from Twitter. Here’s his try:
- Via Jaiku: the invite-only micro blogging service from Google still sends SMS updates to all its users. So a solution would be to feed your Twitter account into Jaiku, then create another account that receives the updates from the first Jaiku account.
- Redirect emails to phone: some mobile operators allow you to forward email via SMS messages to your phone. Create a filter in Gmail that forwards Twitter mail to a special email service of your operator
I realize I’ve described the solutions in a rather cryptic way. Did that on purpose, as I don’t want Bradshaw to miss the reward for his work. So check out the step-for-step instructions on his blog.
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