Techy Labs » Twitter

Twitter Announces Fast Follow Feature

Rishabh — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 09:23:24 +0000

Twitter just announced a fascinating new way for mobile users (even those without a Twitter account) to quickly and easily start following the short message bursts of the Twitterverse. With the new "Fast Follow" feature (say that three times fast), anyone can text "Follow @rish404" (or any other username) to Twitter at 40404 and they will instantly start receiving SMS alerts for that user’s tweets.

What is more impressive, however, it that those without an account of their own can still receive alerts and can even sign up right from their phone via SMS. While this is a simple feature add for Twitter, it is a brilliant move that will get more people trying the service.

Now with Fast Follow, anyone can start following tweets as easy as they vote on American Idol or donate to the Red Cross. Now business, organizations and even people can say, "Follow me on Twitter by texting ‘Follow @chcameron’ to 40404," and people will know what that means and how to do it. There is much more familiarity with SMS short codes than there is with signing up for Twitter and following people that way.

Twitter CEO Ev Williams’s Chirp Keynote

Rishabh — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 17:18:18 +0000

Twitter is just having it’s developer conference and the CEO Ev Williams is on the stage. Since I’m a twitter addict, I can’t help LIVE blogging the thing. Here’s the keynote:

Twiterrific helped Twitter realize that there’s hope from third parties.
Twitter gets 3 Billion requests a daythrough the API
Growth: 1,500% per year
175 employees
“We’re out of chaos now. It feels good. And what this means is more organized and capable company that you can rely on. It also means we can give you more guidance than we’ve been able to before”.
“The open exchange of information has a positive impact on the world”.
First is infrastructure: Scalability, quality of service, rapid development are key. This is where we’ve spent a lot of our time. In the last few months we’ve made tremendous progress. We have FlockDB which stores 13 billion edges, we started open sourcing in the last few weeks. Another project is Snowbird, which is moving to Cassandra for tweet storage.
Second priority: Friction-free: Twitter is too hard to use.
We’ve known this (that it was too hard to use) for a long time but we were growing to fast to address it. If you type “I don’t get” into Google, second result is “I don’t get twitter”. (First is “I don’t get drink I get awesome”).
Goal: Fast, obvious, easy.

Google Chrome: What Twitter Thinks About Your Website

Rishabh — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 13:58:35 +0000

Another excellent add-on for Google Chrome, twitter reactions. Now a days, twitter is the most important medium to get your blog/website noticed. But what about, if you want to know people’s reaction and what’s going around in twitter about your website? This add-on is just what you need.

What Twitter Reactions simply do is search twitter in real time about the talks that are going about your brand, website or blog. With this nifty add-on, you can track what people and twitter think about your website.

Download Link | Twitter Reactions Extension

The Evolution Of Twitter

Rishabh — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 16:13:11 +0000

After the recent launch of Twitter Engineering Blog, it seems that the team is in a little innovative mood. That’s because, Ben Sandofsky, who is one of the team member of the engineering team, has rolled out a video featuring how twitter evolved over the internet.

The video covers the entire journey of twitter from a project, to the most popular social thing today on the internet. Watch out for the timeline on the lower right portion of the video.

For the geeks: The video was made using Code Swarm, which is a software tool that is used to visualize data.

Twitter Introduces “Hovercards”

Rishabh — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 05:35:32 +0000

Twitter has been around for quite a long time and so are zillions of twitter apps. But what exactly makes us use those twitter apps instead of the twitter web interface? Simply because twitter web interface fails to give those “additional and cool” features which are only given by twitter apps.

To bring it’s web interface a step further, twitter has just introduced Hovercards. Understand hovercard, step back in time and think what all you had to do if you came across and interesting tweet and want to know more about that person?

Click the person’s avatar on twitter timeline
Wait for his profile page to read
Check out his bio

But now, with Hovercards, the process has been shrunk into a single step. You have to just hover (place your mouse) upon an avatar and all the info about the person would popup. This indeed is an awesome timesaver!

PS : Not all of you would be seeing hovercards all of a sudden. Twitter has planned to roll out the feature in stages. So, be patient and we’ll keep you updated