Category Archives: Social Media

Ow.ly Removes Toolbar, Launches Second Shortener

HootSuite’s URL shortener, Owl.ly, no longer puts its controversial iframe toolbar atop shortened links. The toolbar has been known to discourage some potential users from trying the HootSuite Twitter client.

As a compromise, HootSuite is launching a second shortener, Ht.ly, that offers the same toolbar. Users will be given a choice as to which shortener they would prefer.

Choice is a good thing in just about any situation, and like ice cream, one flavor doesn’t fit everyone on the web so now HootSuite users can now choose between two flavors of links — one with a social bar and one without.

Next time you login to HootSuite, you can choose which shortener you prefer — Ow.ly, which from today onward will have no social bar, or Ht.ly, which will have the social bar.

Whichever link shrinker you choose will become your default for all links you shorten in HootSuite, including links created with the one-click Hootlet tool.

In related news, “Ow.ly Pro” is being tested by a certain group of HootSuite users. It is much like Bit.ly’s service, allowing you to have your own short domain be used for your URLs.

Twitter @Anywhere Launches

Twitter just launched their new Twitter @Anywhere platform. It lets you “Integrate Twitter seamlessly into your site with just a few lines of JavaScript,” in a manner that reminds me of Facebook Connect. It provides various enhancements that bring the Twitter experience into your…

Twitter Changing API URLs

Twitter is beginning the long process of changing their API root URLs from twitter.com/ to api.twitter.com/1/. This isn’t of much interest to ordinary Twitter users, but developers will need to update their applications sometime in the coming months. The old URLs will continue to…

What’s the Status on Tweetie 2 for Mac?

Tweetie for Mac is the best desktop Twitter client I have found. I really like it, and the interface has streamlined the Twitter experience for me. Unfortunately, it’s long due for an update. Twitter, as I’m sure you remember, released their “Project Retweet” feature…

Twitter List-Powered “Fan Page” Widget

There’s a really neat post over at Tutorialzine on how to build A Twitter List Powered Fan Page. It’s a little widget, that would go in your sidebar or some similar place, where it would display the Twitter avatars of anyone who wanted to…

The Twitter API is For Twitter

Scott Gilbertson of Webmonkey’s MonkeyBites blog has an interesting post about the Twitter API, more specifically, on how some blog software providers are “borrowing” Twitter’s programmer interface to enable clients such as Tweetie to update your blog. Twitter’s API has spawned hundreds of mashups…

Twitter’s “Contributors” System: Phase One of Their Revenue Model

Twitter is currently developing a new “Contributors” system that will allow multiple users to post to the same Twitter account. Mashable has the screenshots and details about the upcoming feature, and the API developer mailing list has info about the new API calls. Ordinary…

Microsoft Rips Off Plurk

It seems that Microsoft China has ripped off the design, UI and code of Plurk, China’s most popular microblogging service. Microsoft’s “MClub” (club.msn.cn) doesn’t just look uncannily similar, a lot of the JavaScript looks to have been copied and pasted. We were first tipped…

Poll: What Do You Think of Twitter’s New Retweet Feature?

Twitter rolled out their new native retweet feature recently. Few desktop/iPhone clients have added support for it yet via the API, but many users can already use it through the web interface. What do you think of it? Is it a good idea, or…

Slashtags: Adapting Twitter Culture to the New Retweet

Twitter users have on more than one occasion invented their own new functionality for the microblogging service, and the developers have often taken the conventions and integrated them into Twitter’s core feature set. Originally the @reply concept was just that: a user-developed practice that…