Showing posts with label twitter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label twitter. Show all posts

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Twitter’s Geolocation API Appears To Be Live. But Most Of You Are Lost.

IMG_0561I noticed something interesting tonight. In the new build of Tweetie 2 (not out yet), a bunch of little red location markers started appearing next to tweets in my stream. Knowing that this new version was built using Twitter’s new Geolocation APIs, I inquired if this mean they had been turned on. Sure enough, they have, developer Loren Brichter just confirmed after talking to Twitter.

But there’s a slight problem. Apparently, the reason these geotags are showing up for all tweets (even those not actually geotagged) is that the documentation was a little unclear on how to handle non-geotagged tweets, Brichter says. The result is that every single tweet is tagged with a location somewhere just off the coast of Africa, south of Ghana. Either this is Atlantis, the Island from Lost, or we have a problem. [Update on the location below]

Brichter is aware of the issue and has already resolved it, and has resubmitted Tweetie 2 to the App Store for approval. Since no one officially has Tweetie 2 yet, this probably doesn’t affect you at all. But you have to wonder if other Twitter app developers were confused by this as well. If so, we could see a lot of apps with some wonky geolocation data.

Twitter hasn’t yet responded to my request for more information. It’s not clear if they meant to turn this on tonight. We do know that they had originally planned to launch it last week at the Twitter Conference in LA, but it wasn’t quite ready yet.

Earlier today, Twitter announced the new Lists feature, which will also feature an API. And of course, everyone is waiting for the Retweet API as well.

Update: As our apparently geography major readers have informed me, the area just off the coast of Ghana is lat/long 0,0. This makes sense — there is no location data attached to these tweets, so apparently they default to 0,0.

IMG_0562 IMG_0563

Friday, September 18, 2009

Twitter Closing New Venture Round At $1 Billion Valuation

Fast growing startup Twitter will soon be joining a select group of startups with private venture round valuations of $1 billion, we’ve heard from multiple sources. CEO Evan Williams disclosed the round to employees at a recent all hands meeting.

The company will raise around $50 million, we’ve heard, although the final amount of the raise is apparently not yet locked down.

Twitter raised $35+ million earlier this year in a round led by Benchmark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners. That round valued the company at $250 million.

The company has raised a total of around $55 million to date, and sources tell us they have approximately $30 million left in the bank.

Update: A source tells us that New York based Insight Venture Partners is the primary investor in this round.

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

twitter company profile

Twitter

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message. The company has been busy adding features to the product like Gmail import and search. They recently launched a new site section called “Explore” for external and third party tools that interact with Twitter and a new visualization tool called Twitter Blocks.

The service was started by Obvious Corp, who also started Odeo.

In April 2008 Twitter launched Twitter Japan in partnership with Digital Garage.

Milestones

  • 6/23/08 — Hires Rudy Winnacker and John Adams, two new Operation Engineers 6
  • 6/9/08 — Survives iPhone 3G Stevenote 7
  • 6/9/08 — Twitter partners with Summize to cover Apple news. 8
  • 5/28/08 — Launches a status blog to communicate to users better about issues with the service. 9
  • 5/7/08 — Twitter Starts Blacklisting Spammers 10
  • 4/24/08 — VP Lee Mighdoll Leaves Twitter 11
  • 4/23/08 — Chief Architect Blaine Cook Leaves Twitter 12
  • 4/22/08 — Twitter Japan Launches 13
  • 4/16/08 — Twitter helps bust American man out of Egyptian jail 14
  • 7/15/06 — Twitter Launches 15
  • 3/21/06 — First Twitter 16

General Information

Websitetwitter.com
Blogtwitter.com/blog
Twitter@twitter
CategoryConsumer Web
Emailpr@twitter.com
Employees29
Founded3/06
DescriptionSocial networking and microblogging

Offices

San Francisco, USA
539 Bryant Street
San Francisco, CA, 94107
USA

People

Product Development
Co-founder & Creative Director
Distributed Systems Architect
Engineer
Operations Manager
Senior Operations Engineer
Operations Manager
Operations Engineer
Lead of User Experience Team
Engineer
Board Member
Engineer
Director of Engineering and Ops
Co-Founder, Chairman
Advisor/Investor
Engineer, User Experience Group
Co-Founder, CEO
General Counsel
Chief Scientist
board of directors
Director of Search

Acquisitions

Values of n, 11/08 1
Summize, 7/08 2

Funding

Competitors

Digg, Pownce, ZYB, Jaiku, Zannel, mocospace, Chatterous, trymehere, Twitturly, TwitterFone, LetsProve, Plurk, Adocu.com, InGameNow, Posterous, Next2Friends, Hictu, kwippy.com, spotengine, Present.ly, Me2day, Xumii, Collecta

Screenshots

Twitter screenshot
Above: Twitter Home Page July 2009
Uploaded: 7/25/09
Twitter screenshot
Above: Twitter Homepage as of July 28, 2009
Uploaded: 7/29/09
Twitter screenshot
Above: Twitter search results page as of July 28, 2009
Uploaded: 7/29/09


courtesy: crunchbase