jotabl is an interesting blend of social media. Sign up to receive your free shoutbox which you can embed into your website. Messages can then be posted in two different ways:

1. A user can include the URL to the shoutbox in their tweet, jotabl will pick this up and place it in your shoutbox.
2. A user can leave a message by signing in via Twitter, with the option to have the message tweeted for them.

With jotabl you have a full admin system that allows you to remove messages and block Twitter users from posting messages.

The shoutbox has now become more personal thanks to jotabl.

The DiggBar, even though small in size, is big in value and comes complete with the ability to digg posts, view total diggs, check out a varied sampling of comments, and see total page views (not just Digg views). The left-hand side of the DiggBar also includes options to favorite content, view more content from the source you’re looking at, and take a glimpse at related or random Digg content in a the dropdown preview window.

The Twitter crowd loves this and services such as twiggit have already implemented this as a short URL for your tweets.

The DiggBar will expose a lot of new people to Digg and will also increase Digg’s overall traffic substantially – unlike other short URL services, Digg doesn’t simply redirect to the longer URL. It keeps you on Digg and shows the site being pointed to in an iframe wrapper. You can get to the underlying URL by clicking on the X button on the top right.

But Digg didn’t stop there. They’re also using DiggBar for all stories on Digg as well. So all those home page stories that send massive amounts of traffic around the web are now redirecting right back to Digg, too. That keeps all that traffic in the Digg ecosystem, to the detriment of the sites being linked to.

Watch this short video from Kevin Rose (founder of Digg) or test it out by typing digg.com/ in front of any page URL.

Adapted From: TechCrunch & Mashable

When will the firehose be ready?

By late January, early February 2009. For at least Q1 2009, the “firehose” (the near-realtime stream of all public status updates on Twitter) will only be available to a small group of trusted partners. The firehose is a stream HTTP solution; a client connects to it and the stream begins, ceasing only when the client disconnects. Once we’re confident in the stability of the service, we’ll add partners on a case-by-case basis. We may allow a wider selection of clients to consume subsets of the public stream (that is, updates from a collection of user IDs or matching specific search terms). We do not intend to allow anonymous, unregulated public access to this stream for any number of legal, financial, and technical reasons.

Now, the translation:

Real soon now, especially now that FriendFeed has a quarter of our page views with a stunningly familar hockeystick of growth, we will release the firehose to trusted partners. Trusted means those vendors who will agree not to allow access to… see below. The firehose is the full stream of our data that has been blocked from its contributors since May, 2008. Once we’re sure it is stable, we’ll continue to make it available while adding what must be semi-trusted cases. It’s also possible we’ll deliver a subset of the firehose (analogous to somewhat pregnant) defined as Track on identities and keywords. The keyword here is “may”. Finally, we won’t allow anonymous unregulated access, period. That is, even though we have numerous partners and untrusted startups currently recording Twitter notices and storing them for unregulated anonymous access since Twitter began.

FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor appeared on NewsGang Live Friday, and told me relationships with Twitter continue to be good. The two companies are working through some problems with the rate limiting curbs introduced by Twitter several weeks ago, but Taylor anticipates a resolution shortly. Several third party Track projects, most notably including Dustin Sallings’ TwitterSpy, have been disabled due to the 20,000 API call limit imposed. Sallings is blunt in this FriendFeed thread:

They’re going to offer a friendfeed-style HTTP firehose to a limited group. My suspicion is that that group will be limited more by how threatening a business is than even by how much twitter’s traffic may be reduced by such a partnership. I might be wrong, but the only ideas they seem to have for making money from their business involve removing value their customers want.

Meanwhile, Taylor says FriendFeed is moving forward with enhanced realtime tools to help model Twitter and other data. Rooms will gain new controls for aggregating multiple streams, a major search-related announcement is coming later this week, broader filtering and track functionality awaits a several-month rewrite of some parts of the core architecture, and most importantly, FriendFeed will continue to employ an open, inward and outward-facing data strategy. This is in sharp contrast to both Twitter and Facebook, who allow ingress but limit outbound flow.

There are several efforts underway to work around or via the back channel with Twitter to reengage track services. Services such as Twhirl that have released betas with “track” support may fall into both categories, but eventually Twitter will find a happy medium where monetization will begin to flow. In the meantime, FriendFeed continues to offer a more conversational and flexible model, making it a significant competitor for user contributions. Even now, it’s trivial to maintain a Twitter presence via FriendFeed that would require a fundamental change in developer relations to undermine.

Now that Twitter has achieved a certain stability and clarity in its rate-limiting strategy, the next phase will focus on identifying and rationalizing its trusted partners. The fundamental value proposition of track – the filtering of micromessages based on a combination of identity and conversational context – can now be achieved in FriendFeed with greater fidelity and, soon, realtime alert mechanisms that allow more personalized and affinity-powered flow regulation. The result: time-efficient information at the center of the user experience.

Over time, Twitter’s huge audience size and mainstream media acceptance will become less significant, forcing Twitter to name its price for its unique value even as it is watered down by more flexible tools and micro-community adoption of its competitors. Regardless of the anger in the community, which clearly has been discounted as a small minority in Twitter’s game plan, the clarity of Twitter’s rate limiting and brute force approach in managing its developer community now stand in sharp contrast to FriendFeed’s approach.

Original URL: http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/02/01/twitter-comes-clean/

The first phase went live tonight with an e-mail module allowing users to check on AOL, Yahoo, and Gmail accounts from the top right-hand of AOL.com and expanded left-hand navigation to various points within AOL. Over the next few weeks, AOL will add an innovative global status update for major social services—write your status once and it shows up on Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, Twitter at the same time—and the ability to follow multiple social net activity through one module from AOL’s front page. Bill Wilson, AOL’s EVP of programming, walked me through the new front page.

The changes don’t stop with e-mail and social nets. Some are skin deep as AOL introduces new color schemes and a more stylish approach, swapping muted pastels for options that include black backgrounds. (Screenshot here.) It may sound purely cosmetic but it gives the portal a new look and feel even tough the basic structure remains the same. On the top left, people can add their own links. AOL Radio will get a top spot. AOL.com also will incorporate “engagement modules” or pop-up players for video, photo galleries, polls and the like that can be moved to other locations on the page to watch video while reading email or the like.

It is an insanely long page but Wilson insists that their click maps show users scroll “if you provide value in the middle of the page as well as the bottom.” Much more detail after the jump.

More on e-mail
Hovering over an e-mail service after login shows the latest messages; composing messages or viewing all mail in an account takes the user off the page. Microsoft’s Hotmail poses a problem though; it can’t be accessed or previewed through AOL.com so AOL is providing a link that can be inserted in one of the module email slots—and a link to Microsoft feedback so people can ask for the feature. In addition to being more open, AOL hopes the e-mail aggregation will help recapture some of the user attention it lost before people leaving the ISP were allowed to keep their AOL addresses. Make it possible for Yahoo e-mail users to scan their inbox from AOL.com and they may stick around.

Leveraging acquisitions
Some of the new content on the front page comes from integrating AOL’s acquisitions. For instance, local news, something AOL hasn’t highlighted before, will be powered by Relegence, the financial news and info technology firm acquired by AOL in late 2006. Relegence, which pulls news and info from more than 3,000 sources, is already powering AOL’s finance, sports and entertainment coverage. Wilson says the portal avoided local news until now because news from nearby big cities tended to overwhelm the result. AOL will use Relegence to provide real-time news pegged to zip codes: “We’re really going to lean into local here.”

– An RSS reader in a module at the bottom will start default categories but can be supplemented by user choices. Recent acquisition Sphere will provide related content from the web; it was integrated quietly into AOL News last week and will be launched across AOL’s network.

Personalization not the goal
Wilson: “We’re not trying to create a replacement for myAOL or iGoogle or My Yahoo. … Based on our experience, personalized sites range usually to under 20 percent of the mainstream. If you look at My Yahoo, it does 20 million where My Yahoo does 90 millions; myAOL is roughly 8 million where our portal is about 48 million. Here, we’re trying to create an experience of great scale for the masses.” Beginning in Q109, though, the front page will start to respond to use. “If you as a user never click on finance news, we would swap that module out and provide you a different module based on things you do click on.” For instance, someone who clicks on style but not finance might get a style feed.

– The e-mail aggregator, social net module and other new features will be available eventually for myAOL.

Advertising
AOL is keeping the 300×600 display ad introduced for the Olympics and is testing placement for sponsored link ads from another acquisition, Quigo. The ads currently are integrated in various modules but the new look has them bundled together on the bottom left. “We’re constantly working with Quigo to determine the best placement for monetization but also leveraging that with the consumer experience.” The engagement modules “are all going to be highly customized from a sponsorship standpoint with rich media. We’ve been sharing that with TV networks and movie studios and some of the CPG as well as retailers.” That’s new advertising in the middle of the screen that doesn’t exist today. Will it pay off in revenue? The inventory being added should provide a boost.

Original URL: http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-redesigned-aolcom-front-page-will-feature-third-party-content-cross-soc/

The site can be seen at http://twiggit.org/

Techcrunch recently spoke to an individual who is familiar with the technical problems at Twitter as well as the challenges that lay ahead for the startup. He re-iterated his belief that the problems lay not with Blaine Cook (the former head of engineering who was shown the door), nor with NTT (their host) but with the early lack of understanding of how complex their problems would be.

The issue is that group messaging is very difficult to achieve at a grand scale. Other large sites such as Wordpress and Digg are mostly dealing with known problems, such as how to serve a large number of pages or a large number of images. Twitter is unique in that it needs to parse a large number of messages and deliver them to multiple recipients, with each user having unique connections to other users.

Social networks have similar complexity issues, but they only usually need to route a message to a single user (or at the most to a defined group). Even so, social networks like Friendster struggled for years with technical and scaling issues. Twitter is specifically dealing with text messages, and in most cases with active users those messages are very frequent and go out to hundreds of contacts (or followers, as they are referred to in Twitter). Every new Twitter user and every new connection results in an exponentially greater computational requirement.

Some of the best web applications are able to efficiently solve very complex problems to produce simple results for users (Eg. Google). The success of these applications is due to the innovative efforts by developers to solve large technical challenges, where they have often had to break new ground for solutions. For Twitter to reach a similar point of reliability they too will need a very comprehensive, ground-breaking solution.

The source that I spoke to also commented on how ill-prepared the Twitter team were and are for their current and future challenges. The small team contains a handful of engineers, with only a person or two committed to infrastructure and architecture. He goes on to point out that at Digg the team for network and systems alone is bigger than the total engineering team at Twitter, and that at Digg they are lead by well-known “A-list rockstars”.

The problems at Twitter are often attributed to their use of RubyOnRails, a web development framework. Twitter is almost certainly the largest site running on Rails, so fans of the framework and its developers have been quick to deflect the criticism and point it back at the engineers at Twitter. Utilizting a framework that has never conquered large-scale territory must certainly add to the risk and work required to find a solution. As an out-of-the box framework, Rails certainly doesn’t lend itself to large-scale application development.

Rails enabled Twitter to be developed quickly, to get to launch quickly and then to improve with new features relatively rapidly also. But the old adage of “Good, Fast, Cheap – pick two” certainly applies and Rails would do itself no harm by conceding that it isn’t a platform that can compete with Java or C when it comes to intensive tasks. Twitter is at a cross-roads as an application and Rails has served its purpose very well to date, but you are unlikely to see a computational cluster built with Ruby at Apache any time soon.

What we see at Twitter today is a very useful and popular service, but one with very complex underlying technical challenges to overcome. Twitter will require not only a new architecture approach and a big injection of the best minds they can find ($15 million can help), but will also need a little patience from users and those of us observing.

Original URL: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/22/twitter-at-scale-will-it-work/