Twitter hoping to tweet all the way to the bank

Bosses at Twitter think they’ve solved the site’s major problem: how to make cash without alienating the user base.

The company has confirmed it will offer premium accounts where businesses pay a subscription fee to access extra services, but maintains that the existing system of free accounts for all will remain unchanged.

Co-founder Biz Stone told Reuters he believed firms would pay to access services which will help them get “even more” value out of Twitter.

The firm isn’t saying anything else about what services a premium account would include. One possibility is that it would include getting priority access to Twitter’s servers, making such users less likely to see the dreaded “fail whale” that appears when the site is overloaded. That would be stretching the promise to maintain services to free account users: the functionality would remain unchanged, but the reliability would potentially deteriorate.

It’s also possible Twitter could be thinking of offering features such as an enhanced search or monitoring service. But it’s tough to see how the site would make those marketable without restricting the access that existing third-party services such as TweetDeck and Twirhl currently enjoy.

The news comes as Twitter announces it’s first significant revenue stream, a sponsorship deal with Microsoft. In return for its payment, the Microsoft branding will appear on ExecTweets, a site which carries a stream of Twitter posts from leading business executives.

Twitter has denied its received any cash from people who appear on ‘Suggested Users’, a list which appears alongside the site’s tools for finding existing friends on the service. As appearing on the list greatly increases the number of people following your messages, it would be a valuable opportunity for anyone using Twitter as a promotional tool.

However, Stone says spots on the list are not for sale. Instead the firm uses an automated program for identifying users with lots of followers who post regularly. Staff then check these results and pick out those which they believe people will genuinely be most interested in.





CallCatalog.com tries to throw the book at unwanted callers

By Sterling “Chip” Camden
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

I hate the telephone.  As far as I’m concerned, the only reason why it ever succeeded as a communication medium is because we didn’t have email (and the only reason we’re still using email is because we don’t yet have anything better).  You might argue that the phone is superior to email, because you can pick up nuances from the speaker’s voice — but I find that advantage outweighed by several other factors:

  • The phone is non-visual (at least, for now).  Even though email doesn’t show me your face either, it does show me your words.  I can run my eyes back over them as many times as I need in order to process your meaning.
  • Email is disconnected.  I don’t have to respond to your statement within seconds.  I can take my time to think about what I’ll say.
  • The telephone interrupts.  It demands my attention now (unless I turn the ringer off).

That last bullet is even more deadly when the interruption comes from someone you don’t want to talk to anyway.  And even (or maybe especially) if you add your number to the National Do Not Call Registry, telemarketers and other phone-spammers never tire of punching it in — and they seem to have a telepathic sense of when you’re eating dinner, taking a shower, or engaged in… um… other activities you hate to have interrupted.

A web site called CallCatalog seeks to provide some relief from the phone hounds.  It’s a crowd-sourced repository (that’s a fancy term for “users supply all the data”) of telephone numbers that originated calls that recipients didn’t want to receive.  You can then take the caller ID from your own harassing call and search CallCatalog’s database to get as much information about your caller as other users have supplied.  You can also add your own comments, or report a new number that’s not already in the database.

When reporting an incident, you’re asked for your name or nickname.  No sign-up is required, so these reports are essentially anonymous.  Seems to me that invites gaming — just key in your competition’s phone number and report them as harassing.

As you can see in the image above, CallCatalog uses a CAPTCHA to attempt to thwart spammers (wouldn’t that be ironic if they got spammed?).  Furthermore, I noticed that CallCatalog’s moderators have removed some external links that users put in the comments — which also discourages spam.

The site includes three blog-like pages (meaning, they get new items added periodically) related to telephone privacy: News, How To, and Videos.  Unfortunately, none of these pages offer a feed.

Optimistically, this site serves as an example of how the Internet can be used to aggregate information to empower users.  But realistically, I have to wonder how useful this information can be.  Most of the entries I perused were along the lines of “Who are these people?  Make it stop!”  Will finding out that you’re just one of ten thousand people whom a particular caller is hounding help you to take action against them?  Or will you have to be satisfied with the knowledge that at least you’re not alone?

Space shuttle Q&A leads to video game Discovery

If you asked 100 adults which question they’d most like to ask an astronaut, probably 95% of the responses would involve bodily functions. But American children have a different question: Do astronauts play video games in space?

That was the first question asked by a group of schoolchildren who joined Barack Obama for a live link-up with the crew of the Discovery shuttle which is currently orbiting Earth. The reply came from one crew member that:

We can, in fact. And in fact a few years ago when I was up here for six months I had a video game that I used to play in my spare time. Unfortunately, we don’t have much spare time. So we can, we have a lot of laptop computers. But for the most part we stay real busy doing real work.

The chat also revealed that the crew receives a daily electronic e-mail including all the latest NCAA March Madness results.

It will come too late for the crew of Discovery, but NASA is working on a game titled Astronaut: Moon, Mars and Beyond. The CEO of one of the firms involved in the game, Information in Place, says it could help spark interest in sciences, mathematics and technology: “When [students] see that they can use these skills to build something – like a space shuttle or a greenhouse – then they understand why it’s important.”

NASA certainly seems happier dealing with children than adults at the moment. It’s still deciding on how to deal with the results of an online contest it ran to name a new wing on the International Space Station. The leading option suggested by NASA, ‘Serenity’, wound up 40,000 votes behind the top write-in suggestion ‘Stephen Colbert’.

Official: Guitar Hero gets DJ edition

It’s been a badly kept secret, but the games-playing world now has the first official confirmation that there will be a DJ-based spinoff from the Guitar Hero franchise. The game’s site has just launched, though it doesn’t tell us anything other than that it will be available for X-Box, Playstation and Wii.

The game will be competing with Scratch: The Ultimate DJ by 7 Studios (pictured below). That game has more details publicly available: there’ll be a controller based on a turntable and, while the heart of the game will be similar to the concept of Guitar Hero and the like, there will be more room for improvisation.

The rival games will also be doing battle to get the involvement of celebrity DJs.  Both DJ Shadow and DJ Z-Trip are expected to be involved in DJ Hero, but Mixmaster Mike is already signed up to Scratch.

DJ Hero will be one of the first tasks facing Dan Rosenweig, a former Yahoo executive who has taken on the role as president of RedOctane. That’s the Activision division responsible for the Guitar Hero series.

Rosenweig’s jump was only confirmed yesterday, but he’s already spoken about his work. He told The Hollywood Reporter that as far as the franchise goes, “the present is awesome, but the future is significantly bigger.” He noted that DJ Hero will be coming out “at the end of the year”, which presumably means it will be aimed at the Christmas gift market.

DJ Hero comes as Activision recovers from news of a $72 million loss in the last three months of 2008, despite the company producing four of the ten best selling video games. Analysts believe the hugely successful music-game genre may have reached its peak and firms could struggle to find new ways to make money from fans. Figures for both January and February show sales of music games across the industry down by around a third, despite an overall rise in game sales.

Vulcans Will Beam to Star Trek Screening

spockThe town of Vulcan, Alberta, has about 2,000 residents. They are, of course, Vulcans. The Vulcan Tourism and Trek Centre has been lobbying for the town to host the premiere of Star Trek XI for a couple of years now. Paramount said no.

Leonard Nimoy, the only original cast member who will appear in the new film, sided with Vulcan, going so far as to lobby for the town. The problem is that Vulcan, Alberta has no movie theater! They have a space-themed water park and a Vulcan starship. They’ve even hosted a Star Trek convention, but still no movie theater. A compromise has been reached between Paramount Pictures, Nimoy, and Vulcan. The plans now are to have a special advanced screening for 300 Vulcan residents in Calgary, probably on May 6th. They will be brought in by bus, as the Vulcan starship is currently inoperable. The Alberta premiere will be on May 8th. Nimoy calls the compromise “logical”.