Twitter comes clean

Twitter developer manager Alex Payne has updated the Twitter FAQ with the actual, real, honest story on the return of Track to its users. First, the relevant text:

When will the firehose be ready?

By late January, early February 2009. For at least Q1 2009, the “firehose” (the near-realtime stream of all public status updates on Twitter) will only be available to a small group of trusted partners. The firehose is a stream HTTP solution; a client connects to it and the stream begins, ceasing only when the client disconnects. Once we’re confident in the stability of the service, we’ll add partners on a case-by-case basis. We may allow a wider selection of clients to consume subsets of the public stream (that is, updates from a collection of user IDs or matching specific search terms). We do not intend to allow anonymous, unregulated public access to this stream for any number of legal, financial, and technical reasons.

Now, the translation:

Real soon now, especially now that FriendFeed has a quarter of our page views with a stunningly familar hockeystick of growth, we will release the firehose to trusted partners. Trusted means those vendors who will agree not to allow access to… see below. The firehose is the full stream of our data that has been blocked from its contributors since May, 2008. Once we’re sure it is stable, we’ll continue to make it available while adding what must be semi-trusted cases. It’s also possible we’ll deliver a subset of the firehose (analogous to somewhat pregnant) defined as Track on identities and keywords. The keyword here is “may”. Finally, we won’t allow anonymous unregulated access, period. That is, even though we have numerous partners and untrusted startups currently recording Twitter notices and storing them for unregulated anonymous access since Twitter began.

FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor appeared on NewsGang Live Friday, and told me relationships with Twitter continue to be good. The two companies are working through some problems with the rate limiting curbs introduced by Twitter several weeks ago, but Taylor anticipates a resolution shortly. Several third party Track projects, most notably including Dustin Sallings’ TwitterSpy, have been disabled due to the 20,000 API call limit imposed. Sallings is blunt in this FriendFeed thread:

They’re going to offer a friendfeed-style HTTP firehose to a limited group. My suspicion is that that group will be limited more by how threatening a business is than even by how much twitter’s traffic may be reduced by such a partnership. I might be wrong, but the only ideas they seem to have for making money from their business involve removing value their customers want.

Meanwhile, Taylor says FriendFeed is moving forward with enhanced realtime tools to help model Twitter and other data. Rooms will gain new controls for aggregating multiple streams, a major search-related announcement is coming later this week, broader filtering and track functionality awaits a several-month rewrite of some parts of the core architecture, and most importantly, FriendFeed will continue to employ an open, inward and outward-facing data strategy. This is in sharp contrast to both Twitter and Facebook, who allow ingress but limit outbound flow.

There are several efforts underway to work around or via the back channel with Twitter to reengage track services. Services such as Twhirl that have released betas with “track” support may fall into both categories, but eventually Twitter will find a happy medium where monetization will begin to flow. In the meantime, FriendFeed continues to offer a more conversational and flexible model, making it a significant competitor for user contributions. Even now, it’s trivial to maintain a Twitter presence via FriendFeed that would require a fundamental change in developer relations to undermine.

Now that Twitter has achieved a certain stability and clarity in its rate-limiting strategy, the next phase will focus on identifying and rationalizing its trusted partners. The fundamental value proposition of track – the filtering of micromessages based on a combination of identity and conversational context – can now be achieved in FriendFeed with greater fidelity and, soon, realtime alert mechanisms that allow more personalized and affinity-powered flow regulation. The result: time-efficient information at the center of the user experience.

Over time, Twitter’s huge audience size and mainstream media acceptance will become less significant, forcing Twitter to name its price for its unique value even as it is watered down by more flexible tools and micro-community adoption of its competitors. Regardless of the anger in the community, which clearly has been discounted as a small minority in Twitter’s game plan, the clarity of Twitter’s rate limiting and brute force approach in managing its developer community now stand in sharp contrast to FriendFeed’s approach.

MySpace ad deal lets members use copyright video

Instead of trying to take down all copyright-protected videos that its members post, MySpace will let certain clips stay – and give the creators of the original content a cut of the revenue from advertising that will be attached to the snippets.

MySpace and online video ad technology company Auditude planned to announce a partnership Monday with Viacom Inc.-owned MTV Networks that will let ads be placed in clips of the network’s shows that users upload to MySpace. These include Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” and MTV’s reality show “The Hills.”

MySpace generally tries to keep such clips off its social network along with other copyright-protected content that users post. The News Corp.-owned site removes clips at the request of the videos’ copyright owners. Google Inc.’s YouTube has a similar policy, although Viacom is suing YouTube for allegedly profiting from clips of Viacom shows posted online.

Now MySpace will take a different approach with videos produced by partners it makes in its new ad deal.

Under this first partnership, MySpace users will be allowed to upload videos of MTV Networks shows. Technology from Auditude will detect and identify the clip, and overlay an ad on it. Revenue generated from the ads will be shared by MySpace, Auditude and the content copyright holders.

Auditude’s chief executive, Adam Cahan, said the system will tag videos with a so-called “attribution overlay” — a semitransparent bar across the bottom of a video that give viewers information like the episode’s original air date and a link to buy the episode.

One of these will appear for about 10 to 15 seconds near the start of a video, and be followed by an ad.

The overlays and ads are expected to start showing up on MySpace in the coming weeks, and MySpace and Auditude predicted that new ad formats and ad partners will soon follow.

But will users be bothered by having ads tacked to videos they post to their MySpace pages?

Jeff Berman, MySpace’s president of marketing and sales, thinks people will prefer that to having copyright-protected content filtered out entirely.

Halloween 2.0

It’s nice to see the web 2.0 culture embracing Halloween – here are some of the sites that showed their appreciation for it…

 

 

SourceForge announces hosted applications

SourceForge.net, a longtime provider of open source code and applications, has announced a new service for developers that provides virtualized access to open source apps. With the new Hosted Apps service, you’re able to install an app within your own web space, and it’s managed by the SourceForge team in a dedicated and secure web space, including any necessary maintenance like updates and patches.

The New Hosted Apps Service
At this time, there are only three applications available in the new hosted format:

• LimeSurvey
• MediaWiki
• phpBB

However, any existing application can now be enabled as a hosted app, too. This can be done from the new “Hosted Apps” Project Admin page, a link to which can be found under the “Admin” project navigation menu.

According to Ross Turk, director of community at SourceForge, “developers can be much more productive when they don’t have to worry about maintaining their infrastructure, and this new offering allows them to use the tools they know and like without the burden of maintaining them.”

Benefits Of Hosted Apps
This service was actually launched quietly a few weeks ago, as SourceForge insiders may already know. The announcement was then made via a forum posting which clued in members to the new service. But since the news only hit the mainstream channels today, we imagine this means that they’re now ready for primetime.

That earlier announcement touted several benefits to using Hosted Apps, including the following:

• Eliminates the overhead of deploying supported applications; simply opt-in and begin using the application right away. No need to deal with config files and install procedures.
• Served from a dedicated database and web server pool, separate from the project web servers — so you don’t need to cope with the security limitations of project web’s shared hosting environment, or project web’s outbound mail and connectivity restrictions.
• They maintain the application code for Hosted Apps and will deploy updates as they become available from the vendor. This should reduce the risk from vulnerabilities found in the Hosted Apps and eliminate a major administrative burden (installing updates) to projects.
• They perform regular backups of the Hosted Apps data, but also provide you the ability to easily make application backups on-demand.
• They perform application testing, tuning and monitoring to ensure Hosted Apps operate properly. If service faults occur, they respond and fix the issues. If defects are found in the application (either through our own testing or through end-user report), they will repair the defects or raise the defect to the vendor for repair.
• All Hosted Apps make use of our centralized authentication infrastructure (users login with their SourceForge.net usernames and passwords) but retain the permissions (authorization) of the application (so, for example, existing users of MediaWiki will find permissions handling exactly as they expect).
• Since this offering is centrally managed, any improvements they make either to the infrastructure or to the Hosted Apps themselves will immediately become available to all projects. The Hosted Apps offering reduces their overhead for adding major new functionality to their offering, since all applications share common integration points and common infrastructure.
• Since Hosted Apps are available under an Open Source license, this centralized service has the potential to rapidly increase the user base of Open Source applications and drive high quality feedback for the further improvement of those applications.

Celebrate the launch of twiggit

twiggit is an automated service that lets your friends on twitter know what articles you digg. Every so often the service checks for the last article that you voted for on digg, and updates your twitter status to reflect this. There are a number of options include the ability to only tweet the articles you submit rather than digg, pause the service at anytime, change the frequency of when to check digg and completly remove your twiggit account.

The site can be seen at http://twiggit.org/