twi5.com - spoilt for choice

Posterous launches an API for sharing images

2009-04-17T19:54:00.000-07:00

Posterous has launched their API for app developers to integrate Posterous into their apps. The service mainly targets twitter apps (well, its the twitter apps that use the most APIs' around!)

As usual, to stick to their EASY motto, Posterous has made the API exactly similar to TwitPic API. Since TwitPic is the site by choice of hundreds of twitter app developers, Posterous wanted an easy transition for these developers.

I've seen that a lot of my twitter friends are on Posterous as well. So this would be a good thing for all such users. The idea of having all the uploaded images on your own blog is simply amazing!

You can read the official Posterous blog about the API and check out the API documentation here.

Posterous plans to extend support for other media such as audio, video and other files through the API soon.

Twitter changes Replies to Mentions

2009-03-31T10:11:00.000-07:00

Twitter waited a bit too long to implement this feature. But better late than never!

The Replies section has been spruced up and reads as @username instead. From now on you can expect to see all mentions of your username (tweets containing your username not only at the beginning but anywhere in between) to be available under the @username section.

This new feature not only gives web users a reason to rejoice, but it also makes twitter app developers' work a bit easier. Until now, every app developer (if they wanted to display tweets containing your username anywhere in it as an @reply) had to make use of the twitter search API along with the regular twitter API for retrieving all your replies. But not any more!

Twitter's Awesome new Pagination!

2009-03-18T19:54:00.000-07:00

I do not know when this was introduced, but I found it out today. The old pagination in twitter expected us to click the 'Next' button.

'Next' is passe now. I noticed twitter has added a 'More' button at the bottom of your timeline and on clicking it the next page results would be displayed in the same page! Now that's what I call AWESOME!

This small but significant improvement is making me love the twitter web interface more than ever! And considering the last two modifications which were a step towards monetizations (read them here and here), this is a welcome change.

I spotted a new feature on my twitter homepage!

2009-03-16T18:00:00.000-07:00

Did you see the latest change that has happened to your twitter homepage?

If you look carefully, below the area where your follower and update counts are displayed, you can now see a small info box which gives you meaning of various words!

As you can see, there's a definition for "twitter search" here!

Now that seems interesting and as I mentioned in my previous post, this again could be an excellent way to monetize twitter!

But the big question is, how many would really be using the plain old twitter web interface and not adopting to some of the super Adobe AIR clients such as TweetDeck or Twhirl?

One small "Feature" for twitter, one giant leap towards "Monetization"!

2009-03-05T17:37:00.000-08:00

Twitter has enhanced its web interface and integrated twitter search with the main site.

Whats more exciting is that twitter seems to have taken a giant step towards Monetizing itself! When you go in for search, the results page would display "Featured Users" on the right sidebar. This as far as I can tell is the way twitter is planning on monetizing itself for now.

Of course, this is not the end but the beginning of many monetization ideas we would see from twitter in the days to come.

Whatever twitter plans to do with the monetization part of it, the search engine integration seems to be a neat option right now. You can check out trending topics, enter the keywords you want to search and get results in an interface that is completely integrated with the twitter web interface.

I particularly liked the results page as its not the same as we see at search.twitter.com. The sidebar displays user names that match your keyword, Featured Users, Trending Topics and something called as Nifty Queries.

Apart from search, you can also see direct links to your Profile and Settings under your username on the homepage.

To sum it all, the new enhancements on the twitter page simple ROCKS!!

Find more such buttons here

Update 1 : Like all things twitter, lots of users (including me) experienced an empty blue page at times while using this new search feature. You type in the query and hit search and you just see a blue page! Don't worry, it's not the blue screen of death ;o) A couple of page refreshes displays the search results.

Update 2 : Going by what a fellow twitterer said, I guess the new twitter Search functionality hasn't been propagated to all the twitter profiles. If you don't see the search feature, don't panic. Check back after a few hours. You should see it by then!

The official Google twitter accounts

2009-02-26T09:39:00.000-08:00

Google has its own official twitter account now and it's attracting lots of new followers every minute!

You can catch all tweets related to Google by following @google.

Some of the other official google site accounts are:

@blogger

@googleapps

@googlereader

@googledata

@youtube

@app_engine

Twitter gets $35 million!

2009-02-14T10:33:00.000-08:00

The twitter blog claims that twitter has secured a fresh round of funding from Peter Fenton from Benchmark and Todd Chaffee from Institutional Venture Partners

Whats surprising is that twitter wasn't really looking into fresh rounds of funding at this stage. So what made them go for this?

TechCrunch says that the funding is in excess of $35 million! Why would anyone ever refuse such an offer :-)

Lets hope the good folks at twitter buy some more servers and we see less twitter fail whales in the future.

twi5.com

2009-01-20T07:58:00.000-08:00

twi5 is a repository for twitter apps.

twi5 aims to profile all the COOL twitter apps so that all twitter enthusiasts can easily find any twitter app that they have been searching for.

Being a repository doesn't mean that we'll have all and every twitter app ever created. Thats just too lame a thing to do.

You can rather do a Google Search than come to some site for that.

We plan to evolve over time. We plan to profile only those apps that are fit to be used by all the nice twitter users.

Wish us luck.

Do check out twi5.com