TWiST #188 News

At the TC Disrupt conference on Tuesday, Twitter gave the audience and press a preview of their new publisher analytics platform, helping content creators understand how their readers are interacting with the Tweet button on their site, as well as t.co formatted sharked links. (Up until now, Twitter provided analytics data to advertisers only, but not publishers.)

The service is still private, but Twitter said it would be available to the public soon. They also promised that the data will be clean, and won't integrate spammy tweets.

Twitter will also show you all the Tweets that were sent from the Tweet button on your site, as well as any Tweet that was sent with an inbound link to your site. From the analytics platform you can retweet these Tweets as well as respond to these users.

During the presentation, Twitter's Director of Web Business Development April Underwood announced that 3 million sites are currently using the Tweet button, and that 100 million active users are now sending 230 million tweets per day. As well, Twitter is driving 100 million clicks per day to various sites around the web, with 95% of those links utilizing the Twitter t.co format.

QUESTION: Think this will take off with publishers, or will we still need some sort of larger-scale social media analytics solution? Have faith that Twitter can manage to pull out spam and bot data from their analytics? And if they can do that, why not do it site-wide?

SOURCE: TechCrunch

As part of a plan to become more competitive with Google and AdSense, rivals Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft are planning to band together and begin selling ad inventory on one another's sites. The three hope to convince big Web properties to share some of their ad inventory as well, and to get big ad holding companies to funnel some of their purchases through the consortium

The idea, according to people who attended a meeting with a group of top Web publishers and ad buyers: Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL have agreed to sell each others "Class 2 display" inventory — graphic ads the companies can’t sell on their own and would normally hand over to ad networks.

If, say, AOL has a big order for a certain kind of ad impressions, it will fill it with its own inventory as well as with what’s available from Microsoft and Yahoo. The plan doesn’t require exclusivity from any of the players, nor does it prevent any consortium member from working with any ad network, ad tech company or Google itself.

QUESTION: This isn't the first time companies have tried banding together to better compete with Google - Jon Miller of NewsCorp tried for a similar arrangement in 2009, and in May, Yahoo purchased 5to1, which had a similar plan to unite major media publishers in an ad coalition. Think they'll finally succeed this time?

SOURCE: AllThingsD

YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have purchased bookmarking site Delicious, and have now started sharing some details about their plans for the site in an interview with the New York Times.

The duo plan to overhaul the site's design and the tagging/organizational system, refocusing Delicious as a place where users can share links around trending topics, along with reviews and tips. The monetization plan is to sell focused ads based on the data collected from shared links. The new Delicious will open up to the public later this year.

QUESTION: What will these guys have to do to make Delicious relevant again? Why didn't Google snap up Delicious and get in on all this social search data?

SOURCE: The New York Times

Microsoft kicked off its BUILD developers conference with a preview of the first version of the new Windows - so far codenamed "Windows 8" - giving away tablets called the Windows 8 Developer Preview to everyone in attendance. The tablets themselves were built by Samsung, and based on the company's Series 7 tablet that currently runs Windows 7. Response was generally positive, with Boy Genius Report in particular lauding the new system and arguing that it ushers in "the post-post-PC era."

Microsoft also announced that applications will be available to the public through the new operating system's "Windows Store." The Store was not actually previewed, but it apparently will include new third-party apps along with programs "you know and trust on Windows." No word on how this will integrate with the Windows Phone 7 marketplace.

QUESTION: Think Microsoft can out-Apple Apple, building a tablet that's as fun as easy as the iPad but powerful like a PC? Will developers be eager to start designing apps for yet another operating system?

SOURCES: ThisIsMyNext and BGR

Yesterday Facebook announced their new Subscribe feature, taking a page from Google+ and Twitter about the concept of "following" people, as opposed to making friends. Clicking "subscribe" on another Facebook user will allow you to see their public updates in your news feed, without necessarily identifying them as a friend. (Likewise, Facebook users can now control what information to share with which groups of friends, or with the general public, including subscribers.)

QUESTION: Too complicated? Will Facebook users really want to go back and reconstruct their social graphs now, taking into account the difference between a subscriber and a friend?

SOURCE: Business Insider