Twitter Search is great, especially when you know the tricks. But what if you happened to live in a country where another microblogging service also has a large following. Most readers from Scandinavian countries will recognize this, since Jaiku is still pretty big there. You don’t want to execute those complicated search queries on multiple search engines. Allround Swedish blog company Twingly launched a solution last night.
With their brand new search engine, you can search updates in Twitter, Jaiku, Identi.ca, Bleeper.de (German), Bloggy.se (Swedish) and the archives of long gone Pownce. “It’s therefore”, Twingly’s Anton Johansson writes, “we call it the first federated microblog search because our goal is to indexing all microblogs from all services”.
The engine experienced some slow downs right after their launch, but is working fine now. I love the clean design and the subtle logos of the different microblogging services. Here’s how it looks like when you have results from three different services:
For those who have an instant “Where’s FriendFeed?!” reflex, the integration is on its way.
For everybody whose interested in the Northern European tech scene, Arctic Startup is a great source. Of course, we cover the basics, but Antti Vilpponen and his team don’t leave any details uncovered. Oh and yeah, most of the times we grab the highlights from their blog. Yep, guilty.
No more cupcakes?
Like this one: Ville Vesterinen reports that the loyal Finnish Jaiku community slowly turns its back to the Google-owned microblogging service. He noticed a Jaiku discussion (in Finnish) where the symbolic rats jumped off the sinking ship.
Who can blame them? I hear from several sides that, just like Pownce, Jaiku had some issues which nobody resolves. Before you know it, my co-editor Zee is dancing on your grave because you didn’t listen to your users.
Vesterinen points out several painful issues: feeds aren’t coming through and the SMS service has been disabled for three days now (sounds familiar). But the major reason: you’re missing out on a whole lot of interesting conversations when ignoring Twitter.
Written on 1st December 2008
35 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
The chances are you’ve heard about Pownceshutting up shop and frankly I am delighted! I’m delighted not because I enjoy witnessing companies fail but because it’s about time Pownce members tried bigger and better services. Services who really listen to their users and create tools which actually enhance the web experience for them.
I’ve been a member of Pownce since day one and at one point, a devoted member and daily visitor. However, as time went on, reccurring bugs weren’t fixed, feedback wasn’t acted on, other services launched, original members abandoned ship and eventually, so did I. I did return every now and again to see if things had improved but more often than not I was met with a blank white page which seemed to be a never ending problem (if you’re a Pownce member, you should know what I mean).
The team behind the service is joining SixApart and Pownce is closing in 2 weeks, and in my opinion – good riddance to bad rubbish. Hopefully two weeks will be enough for any remaining ever-faithful Pownce members to find better services and no, I don’t mean Twitter.
Good luck to Leah Culver, Mike Malone and everyone else involved.
Written on 18th November 2008
2 COMMENTS Andrew Hyde, Startup Enthusiast, Power User of Many Things, Community Organizer
Startup tarpipe is aiming to simplify the workflow of posting on social media sites. Their API enables users to do progressive things with their content in single actions. You can upload a photo from an email, have it post to a few such as uploading a photo, announcing this action with a tweet, sending an IM to a friend and send an email (and can do so at the same time). It does this without forcing the user to install a desktop or mobile application.
The big question for me is in how it will be used, and how it will differ from just creating a social media power user megaphone. I can see some people setting it up so that their Twitter, Pownce, away message, Jaiku, Flickr, Friend Feed, Tumblr and Plurk update every time they see fit, which would create an almost embarrassing echo chamber.
They are strong advocates for open source, and with their API can imagine some creative uses. Currently, I see uses that are neat (use IM to update your twitter) to useful (uploading your photos to several places) but don’t see a use of their API that absolutely shines. Yet.
According to Fast Company these are the most influential women in Web 2.0. From left to right: Leah Culver (Pownce), Rashmi Sinha (Slideshare), Dina Kaplin (blip.tv), Marissa Mayer (Google), Cyan Banister (Zivity), Lisa Stone, Jory Des Jardins, and Elisa Camahort Page (BlogHer), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Gina Bianchini (Ning), Kaliya Hamlin (OpenID), Mena Trott (Six Apart) and Arianna Huffington (The Huffington Post).
The article is definitely worth reading and explains “What she’s done”, “How she got there” and “What to learn from her” for every woman on the list. It is hard to measure influence of course but there is no doubt these are the 13 most ‘famous’ female online entrepreneurs.
Who do you think is worth their title most? Who is REALLY the most influential? Let us know:
This morning, I heard Identi.ca mentioned more than a few times in comments on Twitter, the microblogging service that’s having problems staying reliable as its popularity grows.
Identi.ca is, as the name perhaps suggests, almost identical to Twitter in the way it works. At this stage, it has a few things missing to limit its appeal – you can’t search for other users, you can’t use other applications to monitor it, and it has no current API to hook in and expand it. But a look at the FAQ section on the site reveals some interesting news:
The software we run, Laconica, is still in its early stages,
and many features people expect from microblogging sites are not yet implemented. Some important ones that are expected “soon”:
SMS updates and notifications
A Twitter-compatible API
More AJAX-y interface
Maps
Cross-post to Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, etc.
Pull messages from Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, etc.
Facebook integration
Hashtags
Image, video, audio notices
Automatic url-shortening
Multilingual interface (using Gettext)
Behind the service is the Canadian Control Yourself, Inc., whose blog of July 2nd also added: –
…Identi.ca’s underlying software is available under an Open Source license. Identi.ca is also the first service to support OpenMicroBlogging, a standard for exchanging short messages between microblogging sites. Identi.ca also makes public user data available under a Creative Commons license in standard formats.
The key element, in my view, is an Open Source code base, so as more developers contribute to developing that, and with identi.ca could using the de facto microblogging standard, then the scalability issue that Twitter has been struggling to overcome might be more readily solved: Replicate that software, and place the capability ‘in the cloud’. Tweet!
The Open Flow Track sessions at Supernova 2008 just beg for a flood of buzzwords. You can’t avoid them when you’re discussing topics like Social Graph’s, Network business models and Bottom-up distribution Openness. Words like “collaborative”, “engage”, “social networks”, and “OpenID” keep flying around in Room 4 of the Wharton West.
That didn’t go unnoticed by the moderator of the Bottom-up distribution Openness panel Jeremy Keith (Adactio), so he decided to give a funny twist with a customized Buzzword Bingo page.
Leah Culver (Pownce), Chris Messina (Citizen Agency), David Recordon (Six Apart), and Tantek Celik thought of it as very funny and happily played along – although Leah didn’t immediately realized that every attendee had a different card. After Keith reminded her in a witty way that having different cards is quite vital for playing the game, he explained that you can refresh the page as many times as you want. He has even built a buzzword generator.
Leah Culver talked about starting Pownce.com, how they came up with the name and the idea, the whole story about their API, how networking helps entrepreneurs, her reason for being in San Francisco and more interesting insights. Then she also takes time to answer some questions from the audience. Anne Helmond wrote a post about Culver’s talk and gave it a legendary title: Leah Culver and the magical unicorn: A Pownce story. The presentation is titled “Start a Webapp in 5 steps”.
Pownce, the “Send stuff to your friends” application and web service, announced some new features late yesterday, and most of the world has woken up to these today.
The official blog announcement from Pownce is brief, and says little more than “Tonight we launched the new feature of sharing files to the public… In addition, we’re happy to announce that we’ve increased the base file size limit for all Powncers from 10MB to 100MB!”
So you can share files not just with your fans and friends, but with everyone – and you can upload 100Mb of files – room enough for a few videos and audio files, and Pro members have a tidy 250Mb of space. Nice. And I think Pownce have simplified the thrust of their offering by saying “we let you share stuff with your friends”. (more…)
Written on 20th January 2009
9 COMMENTS 
Written on 1st December 2008
Written on 18th November 2008
Startup 
Written on 12th November 2008
Written on 3rd July 2008
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
