140Char

You can now get the official Twitter for iPad application if you own one of the Apple tablets, and it’s got some unique features to enjoy.

It’s been designed for consumption of content via the larger screen, including a series of expandable and retractable panes for the pane interface. Tap on a tweet, and a pane will open and depending on the content in the tweet, you’ll see a video, photo, news story, or another tweet, and you can keep tapping, opening new panes and getting new content according to Bechis on the official Twitter blog.

Videos play inline, and you can have them load while you’re browsing the timeline, as well as viewing them full screen. And if you pinch a tweet, you’ll see details about the author and the list of options to reply, retweet etc. A two-finger pulldown will show the entire conversation about a tweet.

It normally takes a few hours for a new application to go around the worldwide iTunes stores, so if you can’t access it yet, just give it a little time, and share your thoughts and feedback below…

Despite the changes to the Terms of Service for Twitter which removed in-stream advertising on 3rd party clients and appeared to clamp down on ad networks, Twitter now has an informal partnership with Twitter-based ad network 140 Proof (h/t Techcrunch).

140 Proof will sell ad inventory for Promoted Tweets alongside it’s own inventory. As a network, it receives a user ID list and public information (with no names), which is then used to allow advertisers to bid on targeted advertising. Targeting includes keywords in tweets, followers, device location, platform, who they follow etc.

Advertising clients include Infiniti and Bing. The official statement is:

Twitter continues to experiment with different forms of advertising, promotions and other commercial initiatives, optimizing for user value. The work we’re planning with 140 Proof is one of those experiments. The 140 Proof relationship is not a formal partnership, and we are not sharing revenue. That said, we’re always happy when companies help advertisers better use and understand the Twitter platform.

This suggests Twitter really is trying everything to see what sticks – including partnering with networks which previously they seemed to be closing around. Interestingly, this is another advertising network which rewards the platform and the application layer, but doesn’t have any involvement or reward for the content creators and targets.

Writing about a Hello Kitty themed Twitter iPhone app is probably just about justifiable as an example of exactly how mainstream Twitter and the 3rd party developer community have gone as the microblogging platform has expanded.

I haven’t downloaded it or tested it myself, but the feature list and reviews show a competent basic iPhone Twitter client, with the all important option to select one of 3 Hello Kitty skins, and embedding one of a selection fo 40 images in your tweets, which appear alongside the message for other Hello Kitty app users, or linked for non-Hello Kitty aficionados.

So if you fancy spending £2.39 on a Japanese Hello Kitty iPhone app, then you can choose the original, or its sequel with 3 new skins and 45 more images.

(HT @ianbetteridge)

Every year, the editors of Technology Review (published by MIT) pick their ‘Young Innovators Under 35’ and this year, Tumblr founder David Karp is one of the 35 featured.

The reasoning is that the huge scale of blogging has seen many people struggle to keep their sites updated, but the microblogging format of Tumblr means that of the 6.5 million registered users, 85% post more than 20 times a month on average.

Tumblr launched in 2007, adding 75,000 users in the first two weeks. Now it adds 750,000 new users per month, and revenue mechanics have begun, including charging for promotion spots for blogs, and for premium page layouts.

Back in 2008 Technology Review honoured another microblogging figure in their list – Jack Dorsey, for Twitter, back when it had just 2 million users.

The influx of new names at Twitter continues with the confirmation that two new employees have joined from News Corp and Google respectively.

Adam Bain was the President of Fox Audience Network, and will be joining Twitter as the new ‘President of Global Revenue’. His former role was monetizing digital properties including Myspace and IGN.

Brent Hill was Google’s former head of financial services in the Midwest, and will be the new Director of Sales for the Central (United States) region. He’ll join previous hires Dan Coughlin (East Coast) and Amanda Levy (West Coast).

So that’s Bain from News Corp, Hill from Google, Coughlin from Facebook, Levy from Yelp, and Google’s lead Android evangelist Sun Hu Kim. Not a bad talent pool to be collecting at Twitter, and a sign of exactly how attractive it is to be working at a site which has experienced a lot of growth and interest, and is now about to really push at the monetisation of the business.

The Tumblr staff blog has just been updated with the news that the service has now had one billion posts made on it, since launching under 4 years ago.

That’s pretty good going – so good in fact, that the team behind Tumblr didn’t plan to accommodate such a large number on the rolling post count on their About page!

Either way, it’s definitely a moment to celebrate for the team. Tumblr occupies a space in between the traditional blogging platforms such as WordPress and Blogger, and the character-limited world of Twitter and Plurk by allowing quick and easy blog posting. And although it has a very close rival in terms of functionality in Posterous, it’s not only continued to grow as the far larger of the two services, but features such as the ‘ReBlog’ option have been influencing changes on the far older and more established WordPress, for example.

Tumblr now has 7.2 million users, generating over 5.2 million posts per day.

If you’re a Tumblr user, share your blogs and experiences of using the service below.

Yiying Lu is the designer and illustrator whose work appears whenever Twitter has had a reliability issue. Originally designed as a greeting for friends overseas, the image that became the ‘Fail Whale’ was found on iStockPhoto by the Twitter team and chosen to represent the efforts of the team to achieve scalability.

If you want to find out more behind the image ( originally called ‘Lifting a Dreamer’), then there’s a text interview with Mashable, or take a look at the embedded video below of an interview with John Stauffer from Ogilvy PR.

Ever struggled to find the Twitter account related to a webpage or company when you’ve been looking at their site or an article about them? Some brands have worked hard to ensure their relevant social network links are prominently displayed, but it’s not always guaranteed – and it’s definitely not included if an article on another site mentioned them.

That’s the problem that Tweetbeat firsthand aims to solve. It’s a browser extension available for Firefox, Chrome and now Safari to coincide with Safari 5.0.1, and it’s pretty lightweight.

Developed by Kosmix, it works in an incredibly simple fashion – once the extension is added, visiting a webpage, and an icon displays next to each mention of a name linked to a Twitter account – and if you hover on the icon, it shows the most recent tweets in a handy pop-up.

It’s definitely a timesaver, and although you can’t follow or reply directly yet, I’m sure that’ll arrive soon if enough people start using it.

The options also let you list websites as exceptions, so you won’t see the icons if you’re in your email account for example.

In fact, the only issue is that it automatically picks up the Twitter accounts by a direct match to the username. That means a link from a mention of the US nation, goes to the US Airways account @US.

It also means it doesn’t work if your name and Twitter username are different – e.g. Dan Thornton and @badgergravling.

The obvious reason is that there’s no easy way to create those links, but it does mean that there are still times when you have to go hunting for Twitter accounts. In fact, it might also work well as a WordPress plugin (or whichever CMS you use). That way it could not only pick up the straight name lists, but you could manually set links for non-obvious accounts, which could even be fed back into the system to work across all the other iterations.

But overall it’s definitely a timesaver and worth installing in whichever browser you are using…

If you’re looking forward to the Tweetdeck application for Android devices, then you probably know how good it can be as a Twitter client.

And if not, then you might want to check out this 20 second video posted by founder and CEO Iain Dodsworth – one of the strengths of Tweetdeck as a client is that it syncs all your social networking accounts. So look how quickly you can sign in and access your multiple personas:

Previous Tweetdeck coverage on 140Char:

Tweetdeck among winners at Shorty Awards.

Tweetdeck installed as staff Twitter client at Sky News

Tweetdeck adds new features

Twitter is continually hiring new staff at the moment, but the latest two key hires are pretty impressive.

Dan Coughlin spent four years at Facebook as Director of Media Sales, following a similar role at Yahoo, and time spent at MarketWatch and Doublelick. Meanwhile Amanda Levy joins from Yelp, where she oversaw West Coast Sales and a staff of 100 people having been the first salesperson the company hired.

Both will report directly to COO Dick Costolo, with Coughlin as Twitter’s new Director of Sales for the Eastern (U.S) region, and Levy as the Director of Sales for the West (U.S) region.

They’ll both be building teams to support the ‘Promoted Suit’ – Twitter ads including promoted tweets, promoted trends, and the apparent chance of ‘promoted users’ – which would allow people or companies to pay for more followers. Plus more experimentation – some of which will be made public, and other trials carried out discretely.

Twitter’s recent hires include:

Twitter hires Google’s lead Android evangelist, Sun Hu Kim.

Twitter hires 140th employee

Twitter hires Robin Sloan, Mark Otto and Dan Webb.

If Twitter was cash rich a year or so ago, the ever-increasing wage bill is going to be an added incentive to make their attempts to monetise pay off. It was just February 2009 when the suggestion was that the then 20 employees could be paid for $100,000 for 15 years before running out of cash! Of course, with that being investment funding, there was always going to be a need to pay back the investment in earnings of an acquisition – and that time is going to get ever closer…

Update:

Turns out, thanks to a pretty awesomely-worded response by Twitter’s Sean Garrett, that @twittershout is actually:

‘not a product. It’s an internal account where Twitter employees “give props” to each other.’

And while it’s probably not the best idea for me to try and assume anything at the moment, I’m guessing that the close links to @twitternotified indicate it’s linked to the same thing.

So there you go…

Original post….

Two new accounts on Twitter indicate two official new services from the leader in microblogging.

Both accounts were spotted by notable blogger Louis Gray, who spotted and wrote about both twittershoutout and twitternotice.

TwitterShoutout:

There’s no official word on what appears to be a private official account which carries only the description: ‘Contribute your shoutouts to peeps’, and follows only two accounts – Twitter’s internal employee account @teamteam, and @twitteernotice. It also seems to be followed by only verified Twitter employees.

That, a Twitter medal icon, and the recent inclusion of suggestions to follow, led Louis to speculate that this could be the start of some type of recommendation system, with ‘shoutouts’ contributing to your reputation in some way.

TwitterNotice:

In similar fashion, @twitternotice features a description saying ‘You’re on Notice!’, with an avatar of Uncle Sam pointing his finger at you (presumably it’s aimed primarily at American users?). The account name is ‘Minus One’ suggesting that it could be used for reputation rating and ranking, and this could then be used to highlight problem accounts and put them on notice.

Louis spotted a number of Twitter employees being followed: a support team member, a business analyst, legal counsel and someone from the communications team. So there’s legal and support to enforce the rules, and business and comms to ‘handle the fallout’ as Louis describes.

Twitter’s new strategy?

It seems as if this continues Twitter’s apparent shotgun strategy – spraying a buckshot of various ideas everywhere and seeing what hits the target. We’ve already had promoted tweets, media and business guides, sponsored items in trending topics and Twitter clients on mobile. Oh, and @earlybird.

Now there could be the combination of user powered recommendation and reputation building and monitoring built into the system.

It’ll be interesting to see if the educated guesses are right, and if so, what mechanic and incentive there might be for users to contribute (the end of #followfriday ?)

It also intimates that the Wisdom of the Crowd will decide whether users are reputable or not, to some extent, meaning that anyone outside of the societal norm on Twitter could find themselves being censured in some way. The worry here is that despite numerous people arguing against it, follower counts continue to be the public indication of success for a lot of people, and those accounts with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers could wield an unhealthy amount of influence in certain situations.

But we’ll have to wait and see what happens, and whether Twitter can get the balance right between increasing the ability to filter out spammers and other malicious users (the existing spam measures and account can’t have been succeeding too well), and ending up destroying the openness and individuality which has always marked out Twitter as a social network with relatively few rules on how it can be used – large crowd of followers or small group, sharing items of interest or just chatting, etc, etc. Let’s hope this doesn’t result in homogeneity of Twitter usage, although it could open up opportunities for English-language Twitter rivals.

It appears Posterous is experiencing big problems at the moment as a result of a conentrated Denial of Service attack.

The site itself is completely offline, as are all Posterous blogs. The team behind the service are currently using Twitter to update people as best they can, via the @posterous account.

At the time of writing (22.31 UK time), Posterous has been offline for around an hour. Apparently the team are working hard to get back online with new IP addresses.