twitter posts

Have you ever wanted to create an archive of tweets? Perhaps of your own, or a subject, so that you can analyze trends, see who tweets or retweets a particular keyword the most, or even filter by source. Well that's where The Archivist comes in.

Brought to you by Mix Online, a self declared 'opinionated group of designers and developers at Microsoft,' The Archivist is available in two flavors: a Windows-based client or a browser-based Web app. The free service allows you to search, analyze or download, via an Excel document or ZIP file, all the tweets that have a set of user definable keywords in them. Using the term 'downloadsquad' for instance, the Web app produces graphs and pie charts to display tweet volume, the number of tweets versus retweets including 'downloadsquad,' the top words, users and URLs associated with the search term, plus the top source, be it Twitterfeed, TweetDeck, Web, etc.


As you can see above, 'downloadsquad' is most commonly associated with the word 'Android' at the moment -- given our recent coverage of some high profile Android news that's hardly surprising. But that kind of analysis could be really helpful for brands, sites or even celebrities -- to be able to see what people associate with them. Searching for Nathan Fillion for instance, shows that Twitter currently thinks he should take the part of Nathan Drake in a movie based on Uncharted. Of course you could have found this out using Twitter's own search, but combining that with powerful analytics provided by The Archivist, could give you real insight into why and how prominent the search results really are. You can even sign in with your Twitter account and save an auto-updating archive, which can then be compared with other archives of your creation.

So if you've ever wanted to analyze a Twitter trend, see what people are saying about you on-mass or want to compare keyword usage, then the free service provided by The Archivist is well worth checking out using either the Web app or the Windows-only client.

Hey, Twitter fans! With Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 just launching, it's time to take a look at Twitter on this new mobile platform. Microsoft has posted a brief live demo of the app, as well as a video showing off some of its features. If you're thinking about making the switch to Windows Phone 7, and Twitter is important to you, this is well worth checking out.

Twitter for WP7 uses the side-swiping "pivot" interface that will be common to many Windows Phone apps. That means you can flick sideways to switch from your stream to replies, DMs, nearby tweets and more. Microsoft seems particularly proud that they've pulled in Top Tweets and made them available even when you're not signed into Twitter. That sounds right in line with Twitter's new "we're not a social network, we're a news source" philosophy.

Visit Microsoft's Channel 9 for the latest demo of Twitter on WP7 (you'll need the Silverlight plug-in), and check out a quick promo for the app after the jump.

I initially wanted to review TweetDeck for Android back in August, but ruefully I discovered that it only works with Android 2.1-and-later devices! Now, however, via the power of hacked Russian ROMs, I am using Android 2.1. Without further ado, then, TweetDeck for Android.

Android apps with sensible interfaces are few and far between. Interfaces can vary so much between apps that it becomes both a chore and a challenge to switch between apps. You might have a choice of one billion free apps, but why bother if it hurts your brain to use them? When one app has tabs across the top, another has them on the bottom and yet another uses side-swiping -- well, it almost makes me wish I had an iPhone. And that's a desperate place to be, gentlemen.

TweetDeck opts for my personal favourite of tabs-on-bottom (easier to reach with your thumb!) and side-swiping -- and boy does it look and feel good. TweetDeck for Android, along with default support for Twitter, also lets you connect to Foursquare, Buzz and Facebook. That means I can stick to just one awesome app interface... hooray!

Here at Download Squad, we're always on the lookout for cool little mobile apps that are both fun to use and useful. Sometimes that involves tickling our creative side and that's where Instagram comes in. Instagram, like many other apps available on the iPhone, allows you to take an image and apply effect filters to it. Some like 'Lord Kelvin" age your photo, others such as "Inkwell" desaturate it turning it black and white. Instagram comes packing no less than 11 filters, but what really sets it apart from others like Hipstamatic, is the inclusion of photo sharing.

Sharing

Of course export to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr and even Foursquare is a cinch, but Instagram also has its own photo sharing stream. It allows you to upload and share photos with followers and friends who also use Instagram. You can find fellow users by searching your address book on your iPhone, through Facebook or Twitter, or by searching for Instagram usernames within the app. Once you add your friends, you follow their stream just like Twitter, but instead of 140 characters and the odd image, you get a stream filled with beautiful and creative images -- well that bit depends on who you're following, so I guess it's not guaranteed.

A Twitter for Web video is an interesting concept, but short vids don't seem to catch on the way short text does. 12seconds.tv, probably the best-known quick video service, apparently didn't have much luck making the concept profitable, because they're shutting down on October 22nd. 12seconds says traffic to the service hasn't grown much since it launched 18 months ago. Seesmic tried a similar "video Twitter" concept a few years back, before becoming a regular old Twitter client, but they gave up when users just weren't interested.

So, what's causing these services to flop? Sol Lipman, 12seconds CEO, told Mashable that building an app on top of Twitter just isn't as viable as it was two years ago. Twitter has started to cherry-pick its favorite partner apps, and everyone else is either out of luck or outright replaced by similar functionality from Twitter itself. Twitter hasn't launched its own video service yet, and Lipman stops short of blaming Twitter for the failure of 12seconds, but the truth is that apps built on Twitter have a very limited audience. Around 80% of Twitter's traffic still comes from the Web interface.

In a big personnel move at Twitter, co-founder Evan Williams is stepping down as CEO. @ev has been one of the faces of Twitter, along with Biz Stone, but he's ready to focus more on product development and hand the reins of Twitter over to COO Dick Costolo. The change makes a lot of sense: Ev didn't get into Twitter to monetize, he got into Twitter to build something cool.

Costolo has done a great job figuring out how Twitter can make money, so he's the right CEO to lead the company forward into its new, more profitable form. Meanwhile, Ev will be free to do nothing but brainstorm and build new ideas for Twitter itself, or maybe invest in something new, like Twitter cohort Jack Dorsey did with mobile payment app Square.

Twitter is one of those build-a-great-service then figure-out-how-to-make-money-later startups. We've seen many companies try this strategy lately, with some succeeding and some failing. Evan Williams, one of Twitter's three co-founders (with Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone), has been its CEO for the last two years since Jack Dorsey stepped aside to take up a role at e-commerce startup Square. Dick Costolo, previously Twitter's COO, has now taken over from Williams to focus the company on its Promoted Tweets business model. According to CNet, Costolo has been the driving force behind the Promoted Tweets idea -- and it's his greater business experience that makes him ideal for the role according to Williams. Ev himself will refocus on product strategy and vision, and that can be seen in the new Web-based Twitter interface in which he was instrumental.

With Twitter still struggling against security and service related issues, let's hope that they can find a viable business model to support the service, which now carries 90 million tweets a day and the musings of important people such as Justin Beiber, who apparently uses 3% of Twitter's server capacity at any one time. Marvelous.

Like every modern mobile device, the iPad is only as good as the apps you have running on it. Sure, Apple's entry into the tablet market comes packing a decent Web browser, mail client, and photo viewer, but with apps at your side, the iPad can be transformed from an expensive couch-browser into a truly useful tool. So, for those of you who've just bagged yourself a shiny new iPad, or if you're just looking for some decent apps, I've got a few gems to pass your way.

Instapaper

Whether you've got an iPad 3G or not, there's one save-it-for-later app that everyone should have on their iPad and that's Instapaper. Brought to you by Marco Arment (one of the guys behind Tumblr until recently), it's been a staple of many an iPhone and iPod touch. Being a universal app, Instapaper will work on any iOS device that you happen to have, but it truly comes into its own on the iPad. Using an interface that simply gets out the way of the content and a presentation style that makes reading an absolute pleasure, Instapaper is a real gem of an app. As an added bonus, you'll also find that Instapaper is widely integrated into many other apps on iOS and the desktop, including Reeder and the official Twitter apps, making saving content for later a breeze.

Instapaper (Universal) - $4.99 [iTunes]

It's been a busy week for Twitter itself, so I'll (mostly) lay off the third-party Twitter client news in this edition of Twitter Tuesday. Hit the jump for all the latest updates from Twitter -- including some hope for those of you who don't have access to the shiny new Twitter web interface yet.

A 17-year-old schoolboy from Australia has taken the blame for the onMouseOver JavaScript Twitter exploit that caused havoc for a few hours on Wednesday.

Disclaiming innocence, Pearce Delphin -- who has the coolest name in the world -- says that he only discovered the vulnerability. "I did it merely to see if it could be done ... that JavaScript really could be executed within a tweet," he told AFP via email. The self-replicating worm came later, with the Guardian reporting that it was originally crafted by Masato Kinugawa and refined by Magnus Holm. Within hours, many mutations appeared -- shortly after, the Twitter offices in San Francisco groggily awoke, and the exploit was swiftly fixed.

Most importantly, however, Pearce says that Twitter knew about the problem for 'months.' It's not clear whether Pearce is talking authoritatively -- he might simply be stealing someone else's thunder -- but I'm sure Twitter will be quick to respond if he's wrong.

Update: Twitter actually fixed the bug last month, but seemingly made another change recently that brought it back.

So, we've seen Twitter for iPhone, Twitter for iPad, and a new Twitter Web interface. Where's our Tweetie for Mac update? Twitter is finally releasing some details about what developer Loren Brichter -- hired by the big T to revamp Tweetie into Twitter for iPhone and create the official iPad app-- is doing with Tweetie for Mac.

Here's the deal: Tweetie for Mac won't become an official Twitter client. After all, Twitter just went through the biggest revision ever to its Web interface, making it look an awful lot like Mr. Brichter's iPad app, and they want desktop users to flock to that new website. So, Tweetie is just a side project for Loren, still developed under the banner of his still-sort-of-existent software company, Atebits. He won't be making any dough on it, though, because (according to Twitter), it's going to be made free.

That's good news for everyone except folks who bought the Mac software discount bundle MacHeist on the promise that they'd be let into an early Tweetie 2 beta and given free licenses for the new version of the app. Well, they'll still be getting free licenses ... but so will everyone else who wants to use Tweetie 2.

Posterous and TwitPic have been in an ongoing battle over Posterous' efforts to release an app that lets you pull your TwitPic photos into your Posterous blog. After the first attempt, TwitPic blocked Posterous entirely, and threatened to sue, so Posterous took down the app. Now it's back, though, as an Adobe-Air-based export tool that TwitPic can't block (yet).

The new tool lets you sign in via your Twitter account, which ought to get around TwitPic's current method of blocking Posterous by IP address. There's no telling when or if TwitPic will come up with a new method of stopping Posterous, or whether it's even worth their time at this point. The new export tool can theoretically export your photos to Flickr, Facebook and other locations on the Web, but it's only set up to work with Posterous by default.

[via TheNextWeb]

While I'm as excited as the next guy about Twitter's new Web interface, one shortcoming that I'd really like to see fixed soon is Twitter's lack of archiving. If you're not aware, once you get over 3,000 tweets on Twitter, you'll find that your oldest tweets start to disappear. Apparently, Twitter isn't purging them, and they still have them somewhere in their database -- but at that point, they are no longer exposing them to the public. In other words, you can't get to them.

Tweet Nest is a new product that you can install on your Web server that will back up all of your tweets, and it offers an attractive interface for searching through them and viewing the media that you've linked to. It's like your own personal archive of your tweets.

To me, this makes perfect sense, and it's a much more graceful way of archiving your tweets to your blog, rather than relying on syndication as some people do. Tweet Nest is well designed, reasonably easy to install (if you're comfortable with Web software), and nice to look at.

And did I mention that it's free?

The site's layout is now split-screen (much like in Twitter's official iPad app) with a smorgasbord of site features available in the right pane and your stream on the left. Basic navigation has mostly moved from the right side of the screen to the top, and keyboard shortcuts and unlimited scrolling have been added for your tweet-reading convenience. The biggest news is inline image and video support, with all major Twitter pic sites (plus heavy-hitting video sites like YouTube and UStream) supported.

This is all in keeping with Twitter's new "we're not a social network" philosophy, putting the focus on reading and viewing the site as real-time news, and aiming to be as viewer-friendly as possible for people who don't have Twitter accounts.

[via Switched]