Twitter

In December I wrote a post titled It’s Not About Having The Most Friends, It’s About Having The Best Friends . Since then I’ve been systematically modifying my social networking behavior and cleaning up my various social graphs. As a significant content generator in a variety of forms (blogs, books, tweets, videos) and a massive content consumer, I found that my historical approach of social network promiscuity wasn’t working well for me in terms of surfacing information. ...

I noticed something when I tried out two apps (Mingly and Cobook ) this morning – they each immediately asked to connect me to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter during their onboarding process. And, by using my Gmail as the starting point / authentication, they connected me to G+. Microsoft is conspicuously absent from this. I’ve noticed this many times in the past but when you onboard yourself in two contact-related apps in the same morning and there is no Microsoft anywhere, there’s something going on that’s important. I wonder if this will change with Office 365 – I hope Microsoft is building a trivial to use oauth to O365 so it’s easy to connect to, along with a good sync API. ...

I’m going to participate in a Twitter chat tonight (#BEONFIRE). It’s a new initiative by @pistachio and @redheadwriting . Their first guest last week was @FAKEGRIMLOCK who, as usual, was ON FIRE. It’s happening from 8pm – 9pm Mountain (10pm – 11pm Eastern). There’s a real time Twitter chat up or you can just follow me and participate by tagging things with #BEONFIRE. Either way, I’ll be answering any and all questions via Twitter for an hour tonight. ...

Over the past month I’ve been systematically cleaning up my social graph. It took me a while to figure out how I wanted to do this, as I’m a very active user of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and Google+ along with a bunch of applications that leverage these various social graphs. Historically, I’ve been a very promiscuous friender, accepting almost all friend requests. While this strategy worked fine for me for Twitter (since I didn’t have to do anything, and could deliberately choose who I wanted to follow) this didn’t work for any of the other services. Specifically, Facebook had become basically useless to me, LinkedIn’s activity feed was pointless, Foursquare scared me a little, and Google+ was just a cluttered mess. ...

Jeff Clavier is hanging out with Amy and me in Paris for a few days. We had an incredible dinner last night at L’Arpege – we’d been there once before with another friend (Ed Roberto) about five years ago and it was even better than we remembered it to be. We got home five hours after we started dinner which included an epic cheese course and two dessert courses. ...

I recently wrote about how well things are going at Gnip . Here we are just a few weeks later and my friends at Gnip continue to generate goodness in several different directions. Today Gnip announced it has partnered with Twitter and the U.S. Library of Congress to manage the receipt of all historical data from Twitter and facilitate its delivery to the Library of Congress. This news builds off a release from the Library of Congress back in April where LoC announced that they will digitally archive every public tweet from Twitter’s inception and will continue to archive new tweets going forward . LoC has hinted that the archive will have an “emphasis on scholarly and research” endeavors. ...

I’ve had a number of interesting conversions about the intersection of the virtual and the physical world since I wrote the post Did Someone Ruin Foursquare For Me Yesterday? Kashmir Hill in Forbes did a quick email interview with me titled Venture Capitalist Gets Creeped Out by Foursquare which captured a few new thoughts and I spent some time the other night at a TechStars Mentor dinner talking with Alex Rainert, the head of product for Foursquare, who had spent some time digging into this issue to try to figure out what was going on. ...

I’m super proud of my friends at Gnip . Last week they announced that they had closed another $2m investment from Foundry Group and First Round Capital and signed a deal with Twitter to become Twitter’s first authorized data reseller. Via Gnip, you can now get three new premium Twitter feeds in real time for non-display use: Twitter Halfhose (50% of the full firehose) Twitter Decahose (10% of the full firehose) Twitter Mentionhose (all @replies and retweets that mention a user) Gnip provides access to over 100 other social media feeds but has spent a lot of time in the past six months optimizing and tuning their system for Twitter-related data. ...

In the last few days there have been a large number of posts about two platform companies – Apple and Twitter. These posts covered a wide range of perspectives (a few of the better ones are linked to below) but fundamentally came down to the tension between a platform (e.g. the iPhone OS or Twitter) vs. third party developers that build applications on top of the platforms. Several of the Twitter related posts include The Twitter Platform’s Inflection Point, Twitter and third-party Twitter developers, and Developers In Denial: The Seesmic Case Study. Several of the Apple related posts ones include and Adobe Vs. Apple War Generates Rage, Facebook Group , Why Apple Changed Section 3.3.1 , Steve Jobs response on section 3.3.1 . If you missed the leads to the story, Apple made a major change in their TOS and Twitter launched an official Blackberry client and acquired the Tweetie iPhone client , rattling their developer community. And Twitter Officially Responds To Developers and Tries To Calm Fears. ...

I hate spam. Over the years I’ve been an investor in a number of companies that address the spam problem, including Postini and Return Path . I’ve also been involved in lots of other companies in the email ecosystem and spam has always been something I’ve paid close attention to. I’ve thought hard about Blam (Blog Spam), Spim (IM Spam), Skam (Skype Spam), and SMam (SMS Spam). A few times in the past I’ve thought about Twam (Twitter Spam) but Twitter has done a good job so far of dealing with most of the nasty stuff, the most visible being the porn-follower twam that they somehow managed to beat back (or that I’ve successful ignored). ...