Have you ever wondered where the top web startup executives live? Well I know I havent! Anyways Biz Stone the Twitter co-founder is selling his two-bedroom home in the Berkeley Hills. The Twitter co-founder didn’t say why “it’s time to move;” maybe to live closer to Twitter HQ in San Francisco, or maybe he’s just outgrown this artist’s hovel.
The two-bedroom cottage lists at less than $600,000, making it practically a shack by the standards of the Bay Area tech elite, who can easily pay seven figures for a basic, single-family home in their favored neighborhoods. Sure, it was designed by modernist architect William Wurster, but where is a tech mogul going to park his helicopter?
Its official, Facebook, the social network that started out as a noting based at Harvard has now grown to have over 250 million active worldwide members. Astonishing.
The momentous figure was officially announced on the official Facebook blog by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Just a few months ago they celebrated reaching the 200 million mark by launching the non-profit organization Facebook for Good. Now however, they are changing tactics for what should be a huge blowout party –they’re doing nothing except carrying on with their work.
Apparently, they are now trying to make the service more accessible on mobile devices as the growth of Facebook is now largely coming from international countries where people are more likely to access the social network on their mobile devices like the iPhone or Blackberry.
“Today as we celebrate our 250 millionth user, we are also continuing to develop Facebook to serve as many people in the world in the most effective way possible,” Zuckerberg wrote. “This means reaching out to everyone across the world and making products that serve all of you, wherever you are–whether through Facebook Connect, new mobile products and the other things that we are building.”
As we have seen with Twitter, failure to keep the ball rolling can lead to growth rates dropping like a rock. Facebook seem to be doing a good job. The next six months will be a challenge because as a ball gets bigger, its harder to roll.
There has been a lot of talk around Verified Accounts on Twitter lately. @OfficialJonah, which billed itself as the official account of Superbad star Jonah Hill, was outed last night by the actor himself on the Late Show With David Letterman. Hill told Letterman that he’s “never been on the website Twitter nor will I ever be on the website Twitter.”
Twitter has taken off like a Chinese Firework in the last few months. It wasn’t long before other started to cash in by creating their own Twitter using sites with a twist. For example, we reviewed Trazzler in June and a host of other twitter inspired sites.
Now we have TwiPho.net . Upon seeing the URL, I assumed it was twitter on your phone and I didn’t really see the originality of it all. Then I jumped on in and discovered it was Twitter Photo. Basically, this is a platform whereby people can submit their photos (usually taken at events, news stories etc on mobile phones) and submit them to the service.
Then when a user goes on (such as me) and types in say … Michael Jackson, I’ll be shown the latest Photo Tweets like hundreds of people gathered around the Millennium Stadium in the UK holding candles. Developed by Mark Goddard, it’s still in the Beta phase and as such operates on a small scale in comparison to its older brother.
Where as in Twitter tweets come in on the second, tweets only come by on a specific subject such as Chuck Norris or Dog every few minutes (or even hours depending on how specific you search terms is).
I can’t see it catching on as photos don’t have the same simplicity adored by fans of Twitter. However, it’s a cool website with easy-to-use functions. It serves a purpose – the Flickr of Twitter.
There are so many Twitter sponsored tweets businesses popping up all over the net at the moment. The first players were Be-A-Magpie, but im still yet to see much of an adoption for this service. The newest player in the market is SponsoredTweets. SponsoredTweets is a service that does exactly what it says on the box and it is bough to you by the slight dodgy team over at Izea. Izea have launched many services that have caught the eye of the blogosphere and SponsoredTweets is no different.
SponsoredTweets allows early adopters to currently signup and via a special URL (click here for the URL), and then choose whether they want to get paid per tweet or per click. Currently the service is only picking up as many twitter users as possible and they will soon be launching the platform to advertisers.
Im really not too sure if sponsored tweets actually works, because most twitter users dont like sponsored tweets in general, but it is kind of appealing to advertisers. Only time will tell.
Koobface malware found his way to infect thousands of Twitter users in the last days, increasing of course the number of Twitter updates giving messages like “My home video [url]“. The URL mentioned is listed randomly, all directing the traffic to a Koobface site.
Twitter’s reaction was fast and already suspended most of the users infected to avoid the virus from spreading. TrendMicro blogged about this and is already giving their users the solutions if they were infected.
This is apparently the second attack given by Koobface in Twitter, the first one used only three different TinyURLs with infected users; this malware mutation gave the infection a longer life than the previous one, that also appeared on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster and LiveJournal.
There’s no question about it, when you are that big, you will always have attackers and damage control will be needed.
We at Crenk scour the net for stories, apps, humor pieces, and useful additions for your productivity and websites. Here’s a quick something that a lot of us on Twitter have been looking for, a classy badge.
Lots of sites out there offer Twitter badges that you install and more often than not they can take up valuable real estate on your site, so here’s a nice SITE that can help you instantly create a very unobtrusive “Follow” badge for your site that users can click on, while saving space on your site.
It’s not an issue for everyone, but I thought it would be useful for some.
While social networks are great at connecting people and bringing them together for various aspects, sometimes a nice site is what you’re looking for. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and such just don’t server your needs, and perhaps you’ve tried the Ning communities to no avail.
For those of you out there that are collectors of various things such as stamps, bottle caps, dolls, coins, or just about anything else, Colnect is for you. This social networks brings togethers collectors from around the world to buy, sell, trade, and share stories and locations with people. This niche specific network is amazingly popular, so if you’re a collector and missing that special, cornerstone piece to your collection, perhaps this network can help you complete your empire!
A couple of days ago Techcrunch was the first to partner with Tweetdeck (the Adobe Air Twitter application) and launch their own version of the very popular twitter application. However, now they arent the only ones to do so in the technolgy news space, Mashable has entered into a new Tweetdeck partnership.
Techcrunch Tweetdeck
Mashable Tweetdeck
So which technology based Tweetdeck will you be using? More importantly im wondering why we dont have a Crenk tweetdeck version available yet! Well maybe one day.
Well yes, the name says it all AutoTweeter is the application that tweets automatically, what did you expect?
Uses a “tweetfile” (like a clean text file) where each line is considered a tweet; so you can set your tweets in this file and schedule the time where each tweet will be published. It is intended to have the usability for “quote of the day”, “joke of the day”, “did you know”; for that you can have different tweetfiles to use at different times of the day.
The configuration and usability is quite simple and intuitive:
Even though this type of application it is not related to the “twitter spirit”, to instantly share your status or information, still will help users that are trying to increase their number of followers and get more publicity by having a tweets constantly published.
It’s a recession out there, but it’s also summer. Holidays, shortbreaks and long weekends litter the calendar. What to do? Trazzle of course!
Many websites are catching the twitter bug and beefing up their websites with tweets . If there was ever a time to jump on the pigs back it was now. Trazzler was no exception. It’s a travel website offering reviews, news and profiles of places and attractions from the four corner of the globe. Now, they have introduced Trazzler Buzz.
Trazzler Buzz allows people to tweet cool deals they seen for hotels, flight, B&Bs and anything else remotely related to travel. I think this is actually a good place to start your travel planning as you get unbiased deals from real people.
For example, a couple of the good deals I spotted when I logged in this morning were:
New York City 4.0 Star Hotel, $169.0/nt Times Square – Theatre District: Wed Jul 22 2009 – Thu Jul 23 2009 http://rubyurl.com/MDvt
Frankfurt 5.0 Star Hotel, $64.0/nt Frankfurt: Sat Jul 18 2009 – Sun Jul 19 2009 http://rubyurl.com/CexF
There are some links which are quite obviously spam or just the hotels themselves trying balance the books but they are few and far between. For the most part you’re getting great offers shot at you left right and centre. And let me tell you, I don’t mind having money saving deals thrown my way. From previous experience of running around travel agents and browsing never ending travel websites, Trazzler is a breath of fresh air. In addition, because it’s updated in real time using the twitter system your getting a constant stream of ‘great offers’, ‘discounts’ and ‘low air fares’. Trazzler is useful and innovative – just the kind of thinking we need in an economic depression.
Its official, 
Twitter has taken off like a Chinese Firework in the last few months. It wasn’t long before other started to cash in by creating their own Twitter using sites with a twist. For example, 
[url]“. The URL mentioned is listed randomly, all directing the traffic to a Koobface site.
Well yes, the name says it all 
It’s a recession out there, but it’s also summer. Holidays, shortbreaks and long weekends litter the calendar. What to do? Trazzle of course!
