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Apparently You People Don’t Really Care About Twitter Downtime

Michael once wrote that Twitter may not have to worry about uptime any more, explaining, “I now need Twitter more than Twitter needs me.” And, a few months and countless hours of downtime later, it looks like most of you feel the same way. The early adopters may have migrated to Friendfeed, but the masses appear to be content to stay and take their punishment at Twitter.


Hitwise has just released their latest Twitter usage data, and despite a reliability record that many would describe as an “epic fail”, the service is showing a surprising amount of resilience. Twitter’s share of returning visitors (users that return to the site more than once in thirty days) has held steady at around 55% since March. Twitter has seen near-constant downtime and disappearing features in that time, but nobody seems to mind. At least, not enough to try out one of the other microblogging services.

The site has also seen impressive growth, rising from around .0004% of all internet traffic in January to .0024% in July - the nearest competitor only sees about 1/10th of that traffic. These numbers also neglect to account for the many Twitter users who use the site through its API using 3rd party programs, so we can expect Twitter’s lead to be even more significant.

In effect, we’ve been telling Twitter that no matter how badly it screws up, we’ll stay loyal, simply because our friends are already on the service.


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Getty Images Begins Licensing Flickr Photos

Getty Images, one of the world’s largest media licensing companies, has partnered with Flickr to add a broader selection of pictures to its online catalog. Getty will hand-pick a number of Flickr members to participate in the program, with a goal of acquiring thousands of images in the next few months.

Getty editors will use a set of tools jointly developed by the two companies that will enable them to easily scan through Flickr photos to find the best of the crop. Each selected member will have their images licensed through a special Flickr-branded section of Getty’s site, and will receive portions of the licensing fees collected by Getty (there is no set payout structure - each selected participant in the program will need to negotiate their own deal with Getty).

Flickr members will likely try to do anything they can to become a part of the program, which stands to offer them both wide exposure and compensation for their work. Unfortunately, there’s currently no way for a Flickr member to apply to become a part of the program - they need to be “discovered” by Getty’s editors. It’s also hard to tell how lucrative the deals will be for photographers, as Getty has yet to form any partnerships.


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Vivaty Brings The 3D Web to Your Browser, Starting With AIM and Facebook

Move over Second Life. The 3D Web is starting to make inroads into the plain old browser. By “plain,” I mean only Internet Explorer on Windows machines—which for now is what you need to experience Vivaty Scenes. But at least it’s a start. (Firefox support on PCs is coming in a few weeks, but Mac support is being pushed off further).



Vivaty Scenes is launching today in public beta on AIM and in Facebook. These are realistic rooms that act as virtual personal environments—a 3D version of your personal page. You can set the theme, decorate with furniture and other virtual goods, and chat with the avatars of friends who enter your room (they need to install the app as well). The best part is that you can bring in photos from Flickr and Facebook, or videos from YouTube and display them on screens in your room. You can play MP3 songs as well.


The graphics are a cut above what you’d find in pre-teen virtual-world social networks like Club Penguin, Habbo Hotel, or Cyworld. They are more along the lines of Second Life or a Sims videogame. Vivaty is backed by Kleiner Perkins and Mohr Davidow. It raised $9.2 million in August, 2007, and a $200,000 seed round before that. Says CEO Keith McCurdy:

We are enabling full-featured 3D experiences inside a Web browser, instead of a separate application like Second Life. Every virtual environment—we call them scenes—is a URL.

That could be a game-changer if Vivaty’s platform takes off. It is deep linking into the 3D Web. Since they have regular URLs, each 3D scene can be linked to from the regular Web. Even objects within each room can each have their own URL. That is what is exciting about Vivty Scenes. It is extending the Web to 3D environments. Vivaty Scenes work only with AIM and Facebook for now, but they can work with other services such as iGoogle, My Yahoo, or as standalone Web pages.

Here is a demo video that shows what you can do in a Vivaty Scene. Remember, this is all browser-based.



McCurdy used to be the VP of worldwide technology at Electronic Arts, where he started Ultima Online. But he thinks that treating virtual worlds like a big online videogame is a mistake. Making a dig at the parcel approach used by Second Life to distribute and develop virtual land, McCurdy notes:

If you wanted to build the original 2D Web, you wouldn’t build it knowing the exact size of every Webpage. The beauty of the Web is that it is an unknown number of links.

While Vivaty is hosting all the rooms to begin with, its technology is architected to become distributed, like the Web itself. Vivaty Scenes are created using standard Javascript and PHP, and can be hosted on standard Web servers. McCurdy doesn’t want to create another walled garden. He wants to bring the Web into the 3D world.

The way he plans to make money is to become the virtual “cash register” for all the virtual goods he expects will be traded between Vivaty users. He also thinks there are obvious advertising opprotunities, including videos on the in-room screen, posters, and billboards, virtual product placement. It would be similar to videogame advertising, except that it need not be disconnected from ad campaigns on the Web.

The big money, though, could be in branded scenes and Websites. For instance, today Target is launching its own Vivaty-powered Facebook application called the Target and Coke Zero Virtual Dorm Room. It’s a back-to-college thing where students can play around with furnishing and decorating their own rooms. The gallery of virtual items features products that can be found at Target, of course.

This sorts of virtual-world advertising hasn’t worked that well because it was disconnected from the regular Web and people’s social networks. Vivaty hopes to prove that, given the right context, this kind of branding can thrive. We’ll see.





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OctroVideo for Windows Mobile — Stream live video using your Windows OS phone

Octro, Inc (developers of OctroTalk) has released OctroVideo for WM phones. You can stream live video and your buddies can view this video anywhere around the globe. All you need is Windows OS phone with built-in camera.

Download and install OctroVideo application from Octro. Register at Octro. Launch OctroVideo application on your phone. Select the menu Stream to begin streaming. Your buddies will enter your user name and can view video at video.octro.com.
 
 

European Mobile VoIP Startup Nimbuzz Raises $15 Million

Mike Butcher at TechCrunch UK reports:

Word has reached me that Netherlands-based Nimbuzz, the mobile VoIP and IM startup that extends into social networks, has raised $15 million in a second round led by Naspers/MIH, with Nimbuzz’s other major existing investor Mangrove Capital Partners also participating. It’s already had $10 million from Mangrove (the original Skype investor). Apparently deals with 10 major social networks and three operators are already on the table. The latter see these kinds of apps as a way of boosting data use and therefore revenues. The cash will be used to extend to Windows Mobile, iPhone and Android. They are looking at a million registered mobile users so far.

Nimbuzz offers free mobile VoIP, conference calling, IM and group chat and photo and file sending across multiple IM communities, including Skype, MSN, Google Talk, Yahoo!, AIM, Jabber and ICQ, plus 23 social networks, including apps/widgets for Facebook and Myspace.

Read the rest of the entry.

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19-year-old Botnet Author to Plead Guilty

A 19-year-old botnet author from Wyoming has agreed to plead guilty. admitting that he created the Nugache Worm to steal user names, passwords and account numbers from infected PCs.

Jason Michael Milmont of Cheyenne, Wyoming created the trojan that was spread through AOL Instant Messenger and Limewire. Once an unsuspecting victim clicked on the trojan, their PC became a part of the botnet. At any given time, Milmont had anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 computers in his control.

Nugache had a keylogger and could sniff sensitive data like passwords stored in Internet Explorer. He used the information to make purchases with victim's credit cards, and concealed the theft by changing the compromised accounts to use Skype phone numbers that he purchased.

Milmont is facing a maximum of five years in federal prision and an fine of $250,000.

Let this be (yet another) lesson to you all -- don't click on links, even when they're sent from friends! Be sure you know what it is first, and that your friend actually meant to send it.

Read more about it at The Register or Wired.
 
 

Conversations Come To A Screaming Halt On Twitter; Users Simply Move To Friendfeed

A key feature of Twitter has been down most of this week: Replies. The core Twitter service itself is alive, but the team took the Reply feature down on Tuesday when the service started to slow. As of now, Friday afternoon, Replies are still down.

Disabling certain features is Twitter’s recent attempt to keep their frail architecture from failing completely. They tried it out during Apple’s recent WWDC keynote and it worked, so they’re clearly using this approach more often now to deal with problems.

But here’s the problem - Replies was the wrong feature to turn off (whether there was a choice in the matter or not). The beautiful thing about Twitter is that spontaneous, diverse conversations erupt that are almost synchronous, or chat like (see our post about Quotably, which pulls these conversations out and highlights them). Conversations are what makes Twitter magic.

But that magic is created by the simple Reply feature - when you add “@TechCrunch” to a Twitter message, it tells me you are saying something directly to me, to start a new conversation or reply to an existing one. Without Reply, Twitter turns into a one way telephone conversation. Pulling the feature out is equivalent to a frontal lobotomy - Twitter is still walking around, but there’s a blank stare in its eyes.

So why aren’t people screaming about the feature being gone? Because this time, they’re just heading over to Friendfeed to have those very same conversations. Friendfeed for most users was just a place to bookmarks all their activities on other social networks. Now, more and more, it’s a place that people start conversations. The early adopters got that a while ago. Now, the not so early adopters are using it as a Twitter replacement, too.

This message, for example, is one that I would have written to Twitter if the Reply feature was working. Instead I posted it to Friendfeed, and the conversation picked up without a hitch.

If I was Twitter I’d be very worried about Friendfeed. Their young competitor seems to have zero stability problems, and is quietly in the process of pulling away all the special parts of Twitter.

Twitter was mentioned on yesterday’s Daily Show (at about the 10:00 mark). Let’s all hope that when we look back, that mention by Jon Stewart didn’t mark Twitter’s peak, just as Friendfeed ascended.

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Microsoft Launches 30-Day IM Talkathon

Microsoft has kicked off a 30-day i'm Talkathon, ostensibly to raise awareness for their i'm MAKING A DIFFERENCE campaign which donates a portion of ad revenues from Windows Live Messenger and Hotmail to various charitable organizations.

The i'm program was kicked off in March 2007 and to date has raised over $1.5 million for ten well-known charities.

The i'm Talkathon features a fictional 20-something named Parker Whittle. "Whittle" will be trying to IM with as many people as possible over 30 days, and is promoting his Talkathon through a blog, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, a variety of other social networks, and of course email and IM.

To join the promotion and "instruct" Microsoft to share a portion of the ad revenue generated as you chat, you need to add the special i'm symbol to your display name in Windows Live Messenger. There are ten special codes, each tied to a specific charity, so you can direct where you want the money to go.

I think Microsoft is on to something. They are giving people a reason to tolerate advertising in their IMs by appealing to their sense of social responsibility. It doesn't require much effort to "join" the i'm campaign, and it just might make people feel a little bit better about Microsoft (whom some people feel is a Big Evil Corporate Giant).

Anyhow, in case you run across anything about the i'm Talkathon, now you know what it's all about.
 
 

TripSay Rolls Out Improvements, Expands Private Beta

TripSay, the site that uses social recommendations to guide users through the plethora of travel information on the web, has introduced a number of new features that it hopes will improve the site’s accuracy and encourage collaboration.

The site now features leaderboards that should encourage users to become “experts” in their region, which will be essential if it hopes to generate worthwhile content. Users now also can create groups, where they’ll be able share information and travel plans with trusted friends.
TripSay competes with countless other travel sites, but tries to differentiate itself by offering fewer, but more targeted, recommendations.


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Powerset Unveils iPhone-Optimized Wikipedia Search

Powerset, the natural language search engine that partially launched in May, has released a mobile version of their site that allows users to quickly search Wikipedia from their iPhone.

Since the release of the iPhone a number of sites including iPodia and Wapedia have released optimized versions of Wikipedia (though none actually made by the online encyclopedia). These sites reformat Wikipedia articles to better fit the iPhones screen while shrinking (or removing) images to conserve bandwidth.

What sets Powerset apart, and may make it the premier way to look up information from the iPhone, is the search engine’s ability to find both the relevant article and the exact passage that pertains to the search query. Even through the iPhone sports a relatively large screen, browsing through large amounts of text can still be a pain, which makes this feature even more valuable.
Powerset has lofty goals, aiming to use their natural search technology to overtake traditional search giants like Google. So far the company is only using Wikipedia for search results, so it’s hard to tell how well the technology will work once Powerset finally indexes the web, but for the time being it may well be the best reference tool on the iPhone.

You can watch a brief demo in the video below:


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