Twitter has updated its iOS and Android apps today, as well as its mobile site, to include more interesting content to keep you tapping and exploring as you perform searches. As we noted last month, Twitter has started to surface older tweets in its search results. Today, that experience will become more prevalent in Twitter’s mobile experience.

In addition to tweets that might have some age to it, your search results will now include topics and user suggestions based on your query. Since Twitter is a real-time service, this is no easy task.

A few video services have gotten the axe, and the app now has native support for traditional Chinese language. It’s nice to see Twitter combine some sweeping discovery updates with a maintenance release in time for SXSW.

It’s a small tweak, but I’m enjoying the addition of the tweet staying visible when you tap a link, providing some context as you venture off of the network. You can make it go away by tapping the web page:

Here’s the list of updates for Twitter for iOS and Android:

• As you search you’ll see more topic and user suggestions for your query, based on what’s happening in real time. You’ll also see these suggestions when adding a hashtag or username as you compose a new Tweet.
• Top Tweets from big moments in the past pop out when you search for a given term. For example, searching for “election” might highlight Tweets from several months ago.
• When you open a web page you can now see the related Tweet for more context. Just pull the tray icon up or down to see or hide the Tweet.
• It’s easier to see long conversations in the Tweet details view, which now shows all of the replies to any Tweet
• Pull-to-refresh in Discover shows a new, smoother animation
• Support for traditional Chinese
• Uploading videos vie Mobypicture, Vodpod and Posterous is no longer supported
• Additional bug fixes and improvements

Here’s a look at what you might find when doing a search:

The only old tweet I saw with the “election” search was a promoted one, hopefully that won’t be the case for all of your searches. As the discovery experience gets better, Twitter can hopefully trap those non-tweeters into clicking more links and following more people.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

TweetDeck, the feature-rich Twitter client that Twitter acquired in 2011, will soon mostly exist as a web-based service, and the native Mac and Windows apps will play second fiddle to the web and Chrome apps. The company is shutting down the AIR-based version of TweetDeck for desktop and will remove the Android and iPhone apps from their respective mobile stores in May. In addition, the TweetDeck team announced today, it will also “discontinue support for our Facebook integration.”

TweetDeck will continue to support its native apps for Mac and Windows, but the clear focus will be on the web and Chrome apps, which, the team writes, will “provide the best TweetDeck experience yet.” The web-based apps will also be the first to get new features, “followed closely by [the] Mac and PC apps.” Given the clear focus on the web apps, it may just be a matter of time before the native apps will also get the ax.

Twitter clearly remains committed to TweetDeck as a tool for power users, and today’s announcement notes that the team doubled in size over the past six months. Most users already use TweetDeck on their desktops and Twitter on mobile. The current versions of TweetDeck for AIR, iPhone and Android still use version 1.0 of Twitter’s API, which is about to be retired over the next few weeks. The apps Twitter is retiring today haven’t been updated in a long time, so in some ways, the writing was already on the wall for them anyway.

The discontinued support for the Facebook integration is only mentioned in one sentence in the announcement (“We’ll also discontinue support for our Facebook integration”), but we have asked Twitter for more details about this and will update this post once we hear more.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Twitter didn’t have the best day yesterday. In fact, it hasn’t been having the best week with regards to keeping its service running without issues. Today’s announcement might explain a little bit about why the site has been acting oddly, because whenever Twitter introduces new code or features, it affects the site beforehand.

The company announced today that it has tweaked its embeddable tweets product to include more content. Why would you embed tweets? Well, the company frowns upon screenshots, especially when you’re including a tweet in a post.

In addition to embeddable tweets, Twitter also serves up widgets of streams, which they launched last September.

Here’s an example of an embedded tweet:

Happy Birthday to @MPRnews The original station, KSJR, in Collegeville went on the air today in 1967. twitpic.com/bxbzyb

—
Cathy Wurzer (@CathyWurzer) January 22, 2013

Today, we’re introducing several enhancements that make embedded Tweets more engaging, useful and fast:

More content and context. Embedded Tweets display photos, videos, article summaries and other content shared in a Tweet, just like you see on twitter.com. You can also view retweet and favorite counts to better understand engagement, and we’ve made some tweaks to the design so that embedded Tweets are easier to read.

Faster loading. You’ll see Embedded Tweets show up faster on the sites you visit.

Embed with ease. It’s now even easier to embed a Tweet on your own website. Just click the “More” button in any Tweet on twitter.com, and then select “Embed this Tweet” to enrich your blog posts or pages. You can do the same on TweetDeck.

To embed a tweet, all you have to do is grab the code that Twitter supplies you by clicking “more” when you’re on the landing page of the tweet, and drop it into your page or blog post.

It’s difficult to serve up content on other people’s sites, as you don’t know the conditions of their web servers and page speeds. This definitely has something to do with Twitter’s slowness over the past few months. For example, if the largest website in the world were to embed just about any tweet, that’s a load that Twitter is serving up.

This definitely isn’t trivial. By preserving the original content, links and source of a tweet, media outlets can do a better job at sourcing news stories from Twitter. I’ve seen doctored screenshots in the past, which were passed off as original tweets. Without a link back to the tweet itself, readers are left to decide whether it’s trustworthy. With embeddable tweets, this isn’t an issue, as you can simply click through to see the original on Twitter’s site.

By providing more “content and context,” you can decide whether to click on a link within a tweet, much like you can on Twitter’s site. There’s nothing worse than clicking on something and not having a great payoff for your time. This feature is one of the reasons that Instagram pulled its support of Twitter Cards, wanting people to link to the original Instagram web page, rather than getting to see the photo for “free.”

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Twitter today has upgraded its Tweetdeck for Mac app, which now offers the same features that Chrome users received in mid-December. This includes “typeahead” and PeopleSearch additions, as well as the “embed this tweet” function, and more. The company says there are over 90 fixes and tweaks with this version, making it the largest update Tweetdeck for Mac has seen since October’s overhaul of the app’s design and personalization features.

For Chrome users, today’s upgrades will be familiar. “Embed this tweet,” for example, arrived December 12 to the browser, offering users easy access to copy the embed code directly from a tweet in Tweetdeck in order to paste on a website or blog. This option is available in a drop-down from the “More actions” menu on the tweet, next to the reply, retweet and favoriting buttons.

The search improvements – typeahead and PeopleSearch – came to Tweetdeck for Chrome in mid-December as well, the former being a smart, autocomplete option that helpfully provides suggestions of possible search terms, with user suggestions below. You can also click over to the Users button to see all the user account matches (aka “PeopleSearch”) from here, too.

Now these features are available for Mac users, as is a new option that allows you to reduce the multi-column window to just two columns. This is nice compromise for those who usually prefer the simplicity of the standard Twitter for Mac user interface, but who may occasionally want access to the larger dashboard Tweetdeck offers, or its other advanced options like filters and notifications.

Thanks to last fall’s update to the user interface, too, Tweetdeck no longer has to be viewed in the harsh, darker color scheme it had previously offered – it can now look more like Twitter’s main Mac app with a white background instead.

The updated Tweetdeck is a free download from the Mac App Store.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We’re seeing chatter on Twitter that Instagram photos are not showing up in Twitter streams anymore. This is obviously interesting considering Instagram’s recent moves to remove support for Twitter cards last week. We’ve reached out to both Facebook and Twitter for confirmation.

Basically, when users push an Instagram photo to Twitter, instead of a cropped photo, there is just a white space in the Tweet, and a link to the web-version of the photo on Instagram. Here’s another example.

Last week, Facebook-owned Instagram decided to turn off support for Twitter Card functionality for its photos. Basically, you would no longer see the full images; rather, you’d see a cropped version.

Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom said at LeWeb that this was done to drive more traffic to the web experience for Instagram. Instagram recently revamped its entire web presence and wants to create more engagement on its web platform.

Of course, this latest issue could be some sort of temporary glitch, or an issue with Twitter Cards. On Friday, we started seeing full Instagram photos back in Twitter streams, but this was a regression. And some users are reporting the ability to see Instagram photos in Twitter streams.

As our own Michael Arrington wrote last week, the move itself is not good for users in the long run.

Adding more fuel to this fire, Twitter is reportedly planning to build Instagram-like photo filters into a new version of its mobile app.

We’ll update the post when we hear back from Facebook and Twitter.

Photo Credit/Mike Isaac

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Oprah hasn’t been shy about her love for the MS Surface. In early November, she claimed that it was one of her favorite things. This morning, she tweeted that she has bought 12 for Christmas gifts. She sent that using Twitter for iPad.

The Surface is on Oprah Winfrey’s list of 48 favorite things, with other gadgets such as Beats by Dre Powerbeats. As always, lists like this need to be taken with a grain of salt. Microsoft has spent $1.5 billion on Windows 8 promotion. Jessica Alba, Oprah, Gwen Stefani and others have endorsed Windows 8 and/or Windows Phone 8.

Oprah’s tweet is a good opportunity to examine the state of the Twitter apps for Windows RT. Arguably, the Surface is a new product and there wasn’t a good Twitter client for the Surface when it launched. But if you look hard enough, you will find Rowi, MetroTwit and Tweetro. Twitter shut down the latter after hitting the 100,000 user-login token limit, as it was a Twitter client replicating the core experience.

It raises an important issue. Twitter hasn’t released an official Twitter client in the Windows Store yet, but it remains one of the most popular apps on other platforms. The fact that Twitter hasn’t released an official modern UI style app shows that big app developers are still not allocating the same resources to Windows Store apps. According to the company, it’s a work in progress:

#Windows8 needs a great Twitter app. So we’re building it. Looking forward to sharing it with you in the months ahead.

—
Twitter Mobile (@twittermobile) October 30, 2012

But Windows 8 and Windows RT apps are two different things. Windows RT only runs on ARM-based devices and doesn’t support legacy Windows apps. It remains to be confirmed whether Twitter’s app will actually run on the Surface.

Even if Oprah has never used a Surface or insists on using official Twitter apps, she can still use the Twitter website — especially if she only needs to send one endorsement tweet for the Surface. And yes, the tweet would look the same even from her iPad. Now it makes her look like a sell-out.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Not to be outdone by Facebook’s new mobile share button, Twitter has just added an option to “Share this tweet via email” so you can send content to less tech savvy folks. The button appears in the ‘more’ menu alongside reply, favorite, and retweet. It could be a powerful way to spread the service and convince new people to sign up. It’s rolling out over the next few weeks.

Twitter explains “sometimes you want to share with another group, like your college roommates or your parents or a friend who isn’t yet on Twitter.”

Once you click the button on the web it will bring up an in-line email composer. On mobile it appears to pop up your native email app.

Twitter has made a huge push over the last year to increase mainstream awareness of the service. Televised sporting events often feature related tweets or calls to publish your own, and Twitter was all over the Olympics. Commercials and billboards sport hashtags, and Tweet buttons are featured around the web.

But Twitter wants the people seeing these to actually sign up. It doesn’t need them tweeting. It’s happy to have passive content consumers. But Twitter wants to be able to serve them targeted ads so it needs them signing up. What better way to get grandparents and the technologically apathetic to join than having their friends and family show off content from the service?

If everywhere you look you see that little blue bird, from your TV to your email inbox, eventually you’ll surrender and sign up.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This weekend, Nick Bilton of the NYT wrote an interesting piece called “Disruptions: Seeking Privacy in a Networked Age” about his experience at a recent dinner party he threw for friends. The crux of the article is that his friends used social tools to let everyone know where they were and what they were doing. This led to a few uncomfortable moments for Bilton, such as this:

I certainly didn’t tweet or share information like that on Facebook, but many of the 15 people in attendance did.

I know that because a few days later, on a work-related call, someone else — who has never stepped foot in my house — told me how much he “just loved” the lamps hanging above my kitchen table.

I’ve had this happen a few times, meaning someone on a work-related call, usually someone in PR, will point out something that I said on Twitter and use it to start a conversation with me. Sometimes it’s really awkward, but then I remember that I tweeted it in the first place, so it’s fair game. What Bilton is talking about is a shift in decorum amongst friends, ie: “When is it ok to share, and when should things be “off the grid”?

His piece definitely got me thinking, and I don’t think Bilton was condemning his friends or crying about the tools that we have at our disposal on the Internet. However, this seems to be something that you should really have a conversation with your friends about, not the world. Having said that, I’m writing this today to push the ball forward, since it’s already a public topic.

Know when to say when

Bilton says:

Over the course of the three-hour dinner, my friends posted seven photos on Path, sent six Twitter messages (five with photos), six photos on Instagram and two people checked in on Foursquare.

My immediate thought was “So what?” If my friends are happy when they’re visiting my home and their way of expressing it is to share it with their friends, whom I may or may not know, then so be it. Sure, I understand that Bilton would like some privacy, but at the same time, what does privacy mean? Does it mean that people don’t give out your location? If so, then I totally agree. My house is a foursquare venue, but doesn’t give an exact address.

As far as the tweeting and Instagraming, that’s how people share joy. Key phrase is share. Sometimes friends can’t be everywhere, and even if you’re at an “exclusive” dinner for 15 friends, that doesn’t mean that their life completely stops. Their mom is in Jersey, their friends are in Austin and they enjoy sharing the love they have for what they’re doing or who they’re with.

I’m ok with this, honestly.

Before there was the Interwebs…

Look, before the Internet “happened”, specifically mobile apps and communication, people still told tales of parties and dinners that they attended. The only difference is that this was on a delay. People still took pictures and chronicled the happenings in their pretty little heads. It just wasn’t posted for posterity, and I can understand how that makes some people uncomfortable.

However, that’s a conversation to have with your friends. A real conversation to have. If you are uncomfortable with someone sharing photos of your lamp in your kitchen, then say so. These people are your friends, after all, and if they don’t understand, then they’re not your friends.

Bilton snarkily suggests that he might need to take further measures next time:

I may have to resort to posting an old piece of technology called a sheet of paper with the message (in less than 140 characters): “Please don’t check in on Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, Path, Myspace or any other service. #thanks!”

If you have to treat your home like a newsroom, then that sucks. If your friends need that much of a smack in the face not to divulge your deepest darkest lamp secrets, then you need to either have the discussion or find new friends. Moral of the story, people like to share. They always have. Is it easier now with apps and stuff? Sure, but it’s not a massive shift in behavior or something to get uptight about.

Or ya know, write about it in the New York Times.

@thatdrew @om is that a euphemism?

—
Veronica Belmont (@Veronica) October 15, 2012

Love you Nick, can’t wait to see those lovely lamps. I’ll bring the tigers.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

For you hardcore Twitter users, the main app just doesn’t cut it. You need multiple windows and notifications and more windows and stuff like that. For me, I enjoy the simple original web version of Twitter, but what do I know? Today, TweetDeck for all platforms, except iOS, was updated, and you can now go check it out and rejoice.

The app has just hung out there for the hardcore users with no real visual enhancements after Twitter acquired the company behind it. Last year, the company overhauled the back-end, but it received no new coat of paint. That changed in a big way today by letting you change your app theme and fonts. If you want to read tweets in Comic Sans, now you can. I’m kidding, you can only change the font size.

Here’s what the team had to say:

Today we updated the TweetDeck app on all our supported platforms – web, Chrome, Mac and Windows. The update is live now on web.tweetdeck.com. If you use the Windows app, just restart to trigger an auto-update. Chrome app users should restart Chrome to update the app and the updated Mac app is available now in the Mac App Store.

This update makes TweetDeck easier to use with design enhancements, personalization options and the addition of several frequently-requested features.

Here’s a look at the freshness:

It’s light and airy, but I’m still not going to use it. For me, TweetDeck is the perfect app for people who want to pay attention to everything without paying attention to anything. By that, I mean they like noise. I try to cancel the noise out as much as possible and use Twitter as intended, in real-time. If I miss stuff, I trust that my friends will retweet it.

Don’t like the new look? Go back to the darkroom:

Having said all of that that, give TweetDeck a whirl and let us know what you think in the comments. I like consistency, and this refresh is pretty much that for Twitter’s suite of goodies.

Also, I think I just coined the phrase “Twittery.” Maybe. Or not.

[Fence credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I’ve been waiting for this moment all day, so I want to thank Twitter Comms for finally giving me the opportunity to write this post. Apparently and unsurprisingly, tonight’s Presidential debate gave a spirited group of passionate Twitter users plenty of fodder to Tweet about, leading to the most Tweeted about political event of all time.

Pat yourself on the back, Tweeters. Tonight, you’ve once again made history.

Any time some major event happens on the television, Twitter makes some big announcement about its latest record milestone. It’s always phrased differently, but the idea is the same. Tonight’s debate might have been the “most tweeted about event in US political history,” but every few weeks we’re treated to some other most tweeted about event. The most tweeted about Nascar race. The most tweeted about Super Bowl. The most tweeted about MTV-sponsored awards show.

Tonight’s debate was the most tweeted about event in US political history, topping the numbers from the RNC and DNC.

— Twitter Comms (@twittercomms) October 4, 2012

It’s to the point where it doesn’t really matter what people are talking about on the Twitters — it’s just they’re talking a lot, and that means Twitter is important. And so once again we’re served with another self-congratulatory Tweet from Twitter Comms — and soon, a self-congratulatory blog post about how influential Twitter is in today’s day and age.

Well, here’s what I think. The day that we stop caring about how many Tweets per second people Tweet will be the day that Twitter actually matters. The day that it no longer has to pat itself on the back is the day that it will have truly reached its maximum cultural impact. It’ll just be something that people do, and we won’t have to think about how much they’ve done it. It will just be.

And as for how this relates to the elections, well — some pundit is going to come along with some social media research with sentiment analysis telling us “Who Won The Debate On Twitter.” Bullshit. Twitter doesn’t have a vote.

But you know who does? People who don’t actually Tweet, and probably won’t start before November.

Also, this:

Technically, Twitter’s archives don’t go all the way back to the Civil War, so total Gettysburg Address live-tweets can only be estimated.

— Tim Carmody (@tcarmody) October 4, 2012

And this:

shocking – even more than Jimmy Carter tweets? RT @ezraklein: Tonight's debate was the most tweeted about event in US political history.—
chris dixon (@cdixon) October 04, 2012

Article courtesy of TechCrunch