5 O’Clock Roundup: Twitter adds built-in retweet, Facebook programmer quits iPhone app
(Tonight’s roundup is foreshortened so we can go meet with attendees at i9 NewTeeVee conference.)
Twitter finally added a built-in retweet button today – Co-founder Evan Williams posted a long blog entry explaining the company’s thinking. Twitter users suffered from bugs and t
In short, they’ve built an automated retweeter that avoids the truncated text, confusing avatar/text mismatches, and river of redundant retweets in the ad-hoc manual retweeting ecosystem that users had concocted.
They’ve used internal metadata and an API, plus I’m sure they reviewed every whiny complaint a lot of users might have. Twitter has temporarily disabled the feature due to some unspecified bugs, but when it comes back, let us know in the comments if it works for you.
Wall Street gossip network lights up in response to H-P’s $2.7B acquisition of 3Com – Volume in 3Com's November call options were 17 times the four-week average, according to Bloomberg News. OptionMonster writer Jon Najarian pointed out that November call options are expected to provide a 3.5x return in one day.
Facebook iPhone programmer quits, blames Apple — “My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple's policies,” developer Joe Hewitt wrote of his decision to abandon his role and move onto another Facebook project. “I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process” for his work, which requires him to submit his work to Apple to be approved for download in the iPhone App Store. For all the developers climbing over each other to get  rich at the App store, many simply find Apple’s mysterious and final review process insulting.
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Deutsche Telekom considers T-Mobile USA IPO
about 3 days ago - No comments
It’s no big secret that Deutsche Telekom hasn’t been very pleased with the performance of its American wireless arm, T-Mobile USA. In September, we reported that the German telecom giant was considering a merger with Sprint — shortly after T-Mobile UK merged with Orange to create the largest wireless company in [...]
Publishers line up against Amazon’s $9.99 e-books
about 3 days ago - No comments
The ten-dollar e-book may soon be gone, replaced by the fifteen-dollar eBook.
Last week, VentureBeat broke the news that Amazon had removed all Macmillan titles from its U.S. site and its Kindle downloads. You could look up the books, but you could only buy them from third party [...]
Mippin brings news and social media aggregator Buzz Deck to the iPhone
about 3 days ago - No comments
Mobile developer Mippin is bringing their popular news and social media aggregator application Buzz Deck to the iPhone. The application was originally developed for Android, and was also a winner of Google’s 2009 global app challenge.
Buzz Deck’s big claim to fame is its collection of auto-populated topic [...]
Seesmic adds multi-account support for Android
about 3 days ago - No comments
Seesmic, a client for reading status updates across Twitter, Facebook and other services, just launched an update to its Android app that supports multiple accounts.
It also remembers your position in the timeline, so you don’t have to miss incoming tweets. There are a couple other little fixes [...]
Siri launches an iPhone personal assistant that actually works
about 3 days ago - No comments
The “personal assistant” label gets attached to a lot of websites and applications, but it’s always an exaggeration. Usually the service in question can only tackle a small slice of what a human assistant would do, such as organizing your emails. Plus, you can’t just tell the app what you want, [...]
Facebook co-founder’s Asana gives a peek at Lunascript
about 4 days ago - No comments
Asana, the workplace productivity startup from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, just released a sneak peek at the new programming system underlying its product, called Lunascript.
It’s an in-house programming language, named after Moskovitz’ cat, that the company claims will cut 90 percent of the [...]
Analyst | Email will lose ground to social networks
about 4 days ago - No comments
Gartner recently published a list of five new predictions about “social software” that show mix of optimism and pessimism about whether these tools will be embraced by businesses.
The most grandiose prediction is the first — that by 2014, social networking services will replace email as the primary [...]
Is Facebook becoming a portal? Now 4th largest source of traffic to news sites
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New data from Experian Hitwise suggests that Facebook users are treating it increasingly like a portal — they’re using it as a source of news. Just under a year ago, less than 0.5% of visits to news and media sites came from Facebook, according to Experian Hitwise. Last week, 3.5% of [...]
A pretty chart of top apps for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry
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Mplayit, maker of the mobile app catalog that lives inside Facebook, will release a report later today that lists the top games in their collection. Tetris, The Sims 3, and Wheel of Fortune are among the winners. So are Tap Tap Revenge and Rock Band.
On Mplayit, users [...]
Facebook helps the news industry, but it’s no white knight
about 4 days ago - No comments
Facebook is assuming its rightful place in the Internet ecosystem as a significant distribution channel for media properties.
Hitwise reported today that the social network now drives the fourth largest amount of traffic to media properties behind Google, Yahoo and MSN. Facebook’s public relations team also has started [...]








