DoubleSixx

When we designed Twitter, we took a different approach—we didn’t require a relationship model like that of a social network. Keeping things open meant you could browse our site to read tweets from friends, celebrities, companies, media outlets, fictional characters, and more. You could follow any account and be followed by any account. As a result, companies started interacting with customers, celebrities connected with fans, governments became more transparent, and people started discovering and sharing information in a new, participatory manner.

We’ve developed a new set of frameworks for adding this Twitter experience anywhere on the web. Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com. Our open technology platform is well known and Twitter APIs are already widely implemented but this is a different approach because we’ve created something incredibly simple. Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript. This new set of frameworks is called @anywhere.

Twitter will be part of our favorite sites!

When we’re ready to launch, initial participating sites will include Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube. Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page—and that’s just the beginning. Twitter has proven to be compelling in a variety of ways. With @anywhere, web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more value with less heavy lifting.

Source :

http://blog.twitter.com/2010/03/anywhere.html

AUSTIN, Texas–Twitter CEO Evan Williams took no time in getting to the juicy part of his keynote address at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival on Monday afternoon. He announced the “@Anywhere” platform, a way to pull Twitter links and data onto partner sites and media outlets.

A brief demo of @Anywhere showed off “hovercards” that bring up Twitter information with a mouse-over, let readers or users connect with their Twitter accounts much like Facebook Connect, or explore more specific possibilities, like instantly following a newspaper columnist’s Twitter account by clicking on his or her byline.

“Discovery is one of the hardest challenges,” Williams said. “It’s putting these in context where you’re already aware of them…Twitter is a very easy way to keep in touch.” The company has 13 launch partners, including Digg, The New York Times, MSNBC.com, eBay, Amazon, and Bing. As Williams describes it, “it’s not an ad platform, it’s an ‘@’ platform,” referring to the syntax of using the ‘@’ symbol to denote communication between individual Twitter users.

Williams was interviewed onstage by Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab in what was arguably the most highly anticipated event of the SXSWi lineup. A massive event hall at the Austin Convention Center was filled to capacity, with a line snaking through the hallways half an hour before the talk was scheduled to begin.

The Twitter CEO was sketchier about the details of how @Anywhere will make money, though there are some guesses that big partners will have to pay up for access to the “firehose,” much like its search deals with Twitter and Bing that were announced late last year.

“Inevitably, it’s going to take experimentation,” Williams said. “Google started out thinking that they were going to sell search services.”

A report circulated last month that Twitter was gearing up to launch an ad platform in conjunction with SXSWi, stemming from comments that the company’s head of product management made in a conference panel. Company executives had heretofore been ambivalent as to whether they would start rolling out ads any time soon–or ever.

SXSWi is more or less Twitter’s birthplace: the company made its debut there in 2007, and became an instant sensation with the early-adopter geek crowd. It took about two more years before it could be deemed a legitimate, mainstream sensation, but SXSWi is its home turf.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20000474-36.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — After posting a fourth-quarter loss, Verizon Communications, Inc. said Tuesday it plans to cut about 13,000 jobs this year.

Verizon recorded a net loss of $653 million, or 23 cents per share, compared with a profit of $1.24 billion, or 43 cents a share, a year earlier.

The loss came after the company took a charge of $3 billion for cutting a total of 17,000 jobs last year in both its landline and wireless divisions. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had forecast earnings of 54 cents per share.

Total sales rose to $27.1 billion, up from $24.6 billion in the same quarter last year, but below analyst estimates of $27.3 billion. The company’s fixed-line revenue plunged 3.9% to $11.5 billion from $11.9 billion last year.

Verizon (VZ, Fortune 500) CEO Ivan Seidenberg said on the company’s quarterly earnings call Tuesday that it will slash about 13,000 positions in 2010. The telecom giant previously cut 13,000 jobs from its landline business in 2008 and another 13,000 again in 2009.

Verizon’s total headcount at the end of 2010 was nearly 223,000, with 117,000 employees in the fixed-line business.

The layoffs will not be specific to any geographic area, said Bob Varettoni, a Verizon spokesman.

“We have reduced headcount in many ways: by reducing the number of contractors we use, by offering enhanced incentive separation packages, attrition, and other means,” said Varettoni. “Any layoffs were kept to a minimum because of these measures.”

Separately, Home Depot (HD, Fortune 500) also announced Tuesday that it plans to cut jobs. CEO Frank Blake said in a memo to Home Depot employees the company will eliminate 1,000 jobs nationwide.

“We are a strong company, and we are taking the necessary actions to make us even stronger as our business builds momentum,” said Blake.

Source :

http://money.cnn.com/2010/01/26/news/companies/verizon_layoffs/index.htm

When’s the last time you got an email from a stranger asking, “Are you sure you meant to send this to me?” and promptly realized that you didn’t? Sometimes these little mistakes are actually quite painful. Hate mail about your boss to your boss? Personal info to some random guy named Bob instead of Bob the HR rep? Doh!

“Got the wrong Bob?” is a new Labs feature aimed at sparing you this kind of embarrassment. Turn it on from the Labs tab under Gmail Settings, and based on the groups of people you email most often, Gmail will try to identify when you’ve accidentally included the wrong person — before it’s too late.

If you normally email Bob Smith together with Tim and Angela, but this time you added Bob Jones instead, we’ll warn you that it might be a mistake. Note that this only works if you’re emailing more than two people at once.

While we were at it, we also changed the name of “Suggest more recipients” to “Don’t forget Bob” — the two related Labs features just kind of went together better this way.

If you want to test “Got the wrong Bob?” out, try faking a mistake like this:
1) Think of three people you often email together.
2) Compose a message to two of them.
3) Start typing the third member of the group (for help you can use one of the people we suggest in “Don’t forget Bob”), but then auto-complete on the wrong name.

If you have suggestions please let us know. And if “Got the wrong Bob?” happens to save you from making a really bad mistake, we want to hear about that too.

Source :

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/new-in-labs-got-wrong-bob.html

The initial hype for Google Wave invitations was massive and ended up leaving those who were left out of the first 100,000 disappointed. The good news is that Google has started to send out a larger volume of invitations again after having slowly trickled them out since the launch.

Google Wave’s Steph Hannnon tells us that they are sending out a bunch of invites.

(Credit: Twitter

Google Wave’s Stephanie Hannon tweeted Sunday that Wave had overcome some of its stability issues over the weekend and that they were sending out a lot more invitations. As of Tuesday, “Google Wave” is the top trending topic on Twitter and the results are filled with users (including myself) bragging about receiving their invitations and not surprisingly, others begging for one.

The eBay economy for Google Wave invites has been pretty healthy, with some fetching upward of $80 to $100. This big influx of new invitees, all with 8 invitations each, will probably eliminate a lot of the demand for Wave invites on eBay, much like what happened with Gmail invites.

Full story :

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13515_3-10373785-26.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

After months of talking about Windows Mobile 6.5, Microsoft is announcing on Tuesday that the first crop of phones to carry the Windows Phone brand are ready to hit the market.

A host of new phones running the new operating system are expected to debut between now and the holidays, with many being announced later on Tuesday. AT&T has already announced two Windows Mobile 6.5-based phones–the Pure and the HTC Tilt 2. In all, Microsoft has said to expect more than 30 phones running the OS by year’s end.

(Credit: Microsoft)

With the new operating system, Microsoft hopes to make the case that the devices are not only worthy phones, but also the best option for those who want to take their Windows world with them. The operating system itself features Adobe Flash support, an improved browser, and menus that are easier to navigate with a finger, as opposed to a stylus. Perhaps more interesting are two new services that come along with Windows.

The first, the Windows Marketplace, is Microsoft’s answer to the iPhone’s App Store. It’s somewhat interesting that Windows Mobile has long had more programs than the iPhone–none of which involved approval from Microsoft. But Microsoft has found itself in the position of having to insert itself as middleman to match Apple’s approach.

Users will still be able to buy and download applications directly from developers, but Microsoft apparently felt it had to mimic the iPhone’s App Store in order to help connect less technically savvy users with the thousands of programs that already exist for its phones.

Full story :
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10367699-56.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

The winning design, titled ‘Gesture.’

(Credit: Scott Ard/CNET)

CHIBA, Japan–Out of 2,000 design concepts for mobile phones of the future, the winning entry in Fujitsu’s Mobile Phone Design competition was not the flashiest or most forward-thinking. Instead, the grand prize was awarded to one that featured the most intuitive interface for users. What a concept.

Jin-Gwon Go, a South Korean college student studying design won the equivalent of about $20,000 for his mobile phone concept titled “Gesture.” Of all the finalists, Go’s design was probably the one that took the form of what most people would expect of a mobile phone. Fujitsu said his design stood out because of the gesture-based commands and touchable icons used to operate the phone using only one hand.

Back in May, Fujitsu asked for some input on phone design from anyone who was interested. Roughly 2,000 submissions and four months later, the company unveiled nine finalists on Tuesday here at Ceatec 2009, including Go’s Gesture.

Ceatec is a treasure trove of mobile phone design, thanks to the sophisticated cell phone culture here in Japan. Tuesday is the first day of the show, so be sure to check back throughout the week for more. And for the rest of the finalists, click on the gallery above.

Source :

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-10368240-260.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20