Twitter begins integrating advertising software

Twitter Inc said on Wednesday it is opening up its platform to third-party advertising management software, taking another step to establish its ad-based business model ahead of an initial public offering.

The ads application programming interface, or API, would allow advertisers to connect their existing ad management software to their Twitter account to automate ads on the micro-messaging platform.

Twitter said that it would begin by integrating with ad software by Adobe Systems Inc, Salesforce Inc, Hootsuite, SHIFT and TBG Global.

"With the Ads API, marketers now have more tools in their arsenal to help them deliver the right message, to the right audience, on the desktop and on mobile devices — all at scale," Twitter product manager April Underwood wrote in a blog post.
Under pressure to show growing revenues, Twitter in recent years has ramped up its ad-serving capabilities while building a sales staff to woo corporate marketers. The firm said last year it would allow marketers to target Twitter users based on a profile of their perceived interests and by location.

Twitter makes money every time a user clicks or retweets a "promoted" message paid for by an advertiser. The new API would allow great automation for advertisers, who previously had to manually write every promoted tweet.

In 2013, Twitter's ad revenues are expected to grow nearly 90 percent to $545 million, according to eMarketer which noted that Facebook Inc experienced similarly rapid growth after opening its API to advertisers in 2011.

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Tweet with the LivesOn app even after you die

 

If you were wondering what would happen to your social networking account once you passed away, fear not. An app called LivesOn is expected to launch in March. The tagline of the app is, “When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting.”

LivesOn uses a special algorithm that tracks the user's trends and Twitter feed. The data is then used to determine content that the user would write himself or retweet and the app then tweets or retweets the link. Anyone who signs up for the service is asked to nominate an executor who will have control of the account, just like a will.

Dave Bedwood, creative partner of Lean Mean Fighting Machine, the London-based ad agency that is developing the app told the Guardian, “It divides people on a gut level, before you even get to the philosophical and ethical arguments. It offends some, and delights others. Imagine if people started to see it as a legitimate but small way to live on. Cryogenics costs a fortune; this is free and I'd bet it will work better than a frozen head.”

Dead Social is one more app that gives users the ability to send messages after their death through social networking services such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Whatever happened to leaving an old fashioned letter? P.S. I Love you anyone?

Some may think of the service as keeping their memory alive where as others may think of it as down right creepy that they see updates and tweets from a person whose funeral they attended recently.

What do you think? Does it make sense to keep your social networking account live even after your death?

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Hackers Targeted Twitter User Data

Twitter Inc. on Friday said it had detected "sophisticated" unauthorized attempts to access information from the short-messaging service used by more than 200 million people.
In a blog post, the San Francisco company said it identified this week computerized attacks that may have accessed ...

Anonymous hackers attacked Twitter this week and may have gained access to passwords and other information for as many as 250,000 user accounts, the microblog revealed late on Friday.
Twitter said in a blog post that the passwords were encrypted and that it had already reset them as a “precautionary measure,” and that it was in the process of notifying affected users.
The blog post noted recent revelations of large-scale cyber attacks against the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, but unlike the two news organizations, Twitter did not provide any detail on the origin or methodology of the attacks.

Anonymous hackers attacked Twitter this week and may have gained access to passwords and other information for as many as 250,000 user accounts, the microblog revealed late on Friday.
Twitter said in a blog post that the passwords were encrypted and that it had already reset them as a “precautionary measure,” and that it was in the process of notifying affected users.
The blog post noted recent revelations of large-scale cyber attacks against the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, but unlike the two news organizations, Twitter did not provide any detail on the origin or methodology of the attacks.

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Twitter launches video-sharing app for iPhones, iPod

 Micro blogging platform Twitter has launched a new service which will allow people to share video snippets from iPhones or iPods.

Perpetually looping videos clips up to six seconds each can be shared using Vine or easily embedded in tweets fired off at Twitter.According to Vine co-founder and general manager Dom Hofmann, a free Vine application became available worldwide at Apple's App Store on Thursday, News24 reports.

Click here to download Vine

Twitter bought the small team at Vine, a start-up based in New York, in October, prompting talk the messaging service intended to do for smart phone video what Instagram did for pictures.

Twitter, in December added Instagram-style smart phone photo sharing features after the Facebook-owned service made it impossible for Internet users to integrate its images into tweets.

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Twitter offers users a digital scrapbook of past tweets

 Twitter is offering its more than 200 million users a chance to keep a digital scrapbook of all their tweets.

The tool, announced this week, is designed to make it easier for people to review all their activity on Twitter's trend-setting messaging service.

When it's available, the downloading option will appear at the bottom of each user's settings menu.

Twitter, which is based in San Francisco, said it may take a several weeks, or even months, before everyone gets the feature.

After a records request is made, users will receive an email on how to download their personal archive. For Twitter's earliest users, the records date back to 2006 when Twitter started.

Twitter users already have been able to peruse their past tweets by navigating to their personal profile page. But going that route is more cumbersome because it requires scrolling down a page that can sometimes be slow to display additional tweets.

The company said that users who download their entire histories should find it easier to search for particular tweets and organize the messages _ by month, for example.

The new tool also should serve as a reminder that a copy of everything people have tweeted still resides on Twitter's computers.

Other widely used services, such as Facebook's popular social network, also have been creating digital portraits of people's lives as more content gets posted on their sites. Facebook gives its more than 1 billon users the option to download everything they have shared on the service. It has become easier this year for Facebook users to look at their past musings and photos as the service converted people's profiles into a timeline that sorts content by the month it was shared.

Path, another social network founded by former Facebook executive Dave Morin, is also trying to position itself as a treasure chest of memories. A new feature released Thursday in an update to Path's' mobile app allows users to search their past posts on devices running on Apple and Android software. The content can be quickly retrieved by typing in their names' friends, a specific event or time of year, or just a phrase encapsulating a vacation highlight, such as ``hiking in Kauai.''

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Twitter will now let you download your tweet archive

Twitter’s 200 million active users can soon savour or cringe over every single statement they’ve tweeted when the social media company begins sending users their entire archive of 140-character messages.
Only English-language users have this service for now, but Twitter will eventually send a download link containing the full personal archives in one file to any user who asks, the company said on Wednesday.
“Maybe you wanted to recall your reaction to the 2008 election, reminisce on what you said to your partner on your 10th anniversary, or just see your first few Tweets. We know lots of you would like to explore your Twitter past,” Mollie Vandor, a Twitter engineer, wrote in an official blog post Wednesday.
Since Twitter launched the service in 2006, tweets have evolved from a tool for youngsters to chat about frivolous things into a force for social change.

Representational Image. Reuters

It has served as an alternative to government-controlled media, for example, in the Middle East. And during Superstorm Sandy this year, news organizations and emergency response officials turned to Twitter as an essential source of real-time information.
In 2010, the Library of Congress pledged to preserve every public tweet as a matter of record – a significant undertaking, given that some 400 million tweets are dispatched worldwide everyday.
Bookending that archive will be one noted dispatch by Twitter Executive Chairman Jack Dorsey, who is widely recognized as its inventor. Dorsey, ignoring punctuation, brought the service to life shortly after 1:00 p.m. on March 21, 2006 with a supremely pedestrian update about his experimental social network

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