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Buying ads on Twitter is about to get easier for small businesses as the online messaging service adds a key piece to its moneymaking model.
Twitter is unveiling a long-awaited automated system that will enable advertisers to manage their marketing campaigns and budgets without having to deal with sales representatives.
Before Twitter opens the system to all comers later this year, the self-service approach announced Thursday will only be available to advertisers who accept or use American Express cards
To get the ball rolling, American Express Co. will buy $100 in Twitter ads for each of the first 10,000 qualified businesses in the U.S. that sign up at http://ads.twitter.com/amex. The ads, which Twitter calls "promoted products," will begin appearing within the flow of users' messages in late March.
Flipping the switch on self-service advertising is the latest sign of Twitter's ambition to build a powerful online marketing vehicle in the mold of Internet search leader Google Inc., by far the Web's most profitable company, and online social network Facebook Inc., technology's fastest-rising star.
It marks another stepping stone toward an eventual initial public offering of stock from Twitter, which has attracted more than 100 million users since its creation nearly six years ago.
The timetable for Twitter's IPO remains a mystery, although CEO Dick Costolo said in an interview Thursday that the company's decision won't be influenced by how well Facebook fares in its stock market debut this spring.
"I don't look at what other companies are doing," he said. "We don't think in terms of building this company for a particular IPO date. We are trying to build this company for the long term."
The company, which is based in San Francisco, isn't in desperate need of capital, having raised at least $700 million last year.
Twitter also probably needs a little more time to prove its financial... newsfactor.com »
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Proponents of online privacy and freedom of expression now have a new problem to worry about. On Thursday, Twitter announced that it was giving itself the ability to "withhold content from users in a specific country," while still making that content available to users in other countries.
In a posting on the company blog entitled "Tweets still must flow," the company said that it hasn't yet used this ability, but, "if and when we are required to withhold a Tweet," it will make an effort to inform the user and mark when and why the content has been withheld.
'Different Ideas' about Expression
The company said that, as it continues to grow internationally, it is moving into countries that "have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression." It cited such examples as a ban on pro-Nazi content in France and Germany, and bans in many countries on content relating to intellectual property piracy.
Twitter has become a key tool in social change movements, such as the Arab Spring uprisings and Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, and the idea that Twitter could selectively ban tweets is drawing protests.
Some users, who are posting messages with the hashtags #TwitterBlackout and #TwitterCensored, have indicated they will not use Twitter on Saturday, in protest of the new policy. One organization, called Demand Progress, has called on Twitter to "keep fighting for an enabling freedom of expression -- not rationalize away totalitarianism as a legitimate 'different idea.' "
The company said that, in an effort to expand its transparency about the withholding of tweets, it is expanding its partnership with an organization called Chilling Effects, on whose Web site it will post such things as Cease and Desist notices requiring Twitter to remove content relating to intellectual property piracy.
'A Business Decision'
Chilling Effects is a joint project... newsfactor.com » | Twitter Inc. and Japan's biggest homegrown social networking site mixi Inc. joined forces Wednesday to strengthen their ground against a rapidly expanding Facebook.
For Twitter, the partnership with a local social network could point to a new strategy as the San Francisco-based microblogging service seeks to accelerate global growth. Japan is the company's second-biggest market after the U.S. and has served as a key international testing ground of sorts.
Japanese was Twitter's first foreign language platform, and it opened its first overseas office in Tokyo earlier this year. In April, the company hired James Kondo in Japan as its first international country manager.
Kondo said he didn't know if Twitter would forge similar partnerships in other countries. But the company is keen to see what happens with the experiment, which launched with a limited Christmas-themed application, he said.
"This is going to be an interesting case," he told The Associated Press. "We're going to see what works and what doesn't work, and we're going to build on top of that as opposed to throwing out something that may not work."
For mixi, the announcement couldn't have come at a better time.
The seven-year-old Tokyo-based company had been the dominant social networking platform in Japan. Despite its massive popularity elsewhere in the world, Facebook failed to make much of an impact in the country. That is, until this year.
Data released this week from Nielsen NetRatings Japan showed that mixi stood in third place behind Twitter and Facebook in terms of unique visitors in October.
More than 14.5 million users visited Twitter, and 11.3 million went to Facebook, according to the Nielsen report. In contrast, about 8.4 million visited mixi. Google's social networking service was a very distant fourth.
Facebook has surged over the last year in Japan, in part due to the popularity of the hit movie "The Social... newsfactor.com » |  (Reuters) - Twitter has acquired a start-up company that makes software to improve security and privacy for smartphones and other mobile devices.
Reuters: Internet News » | It's among the most recognized brands on the Internet and a bona fide cultural phenomenon, with as many as 400 million monthly users and a brand-new $800 million funding deal -- one of the largest ever.
It's also been the scene of recent high-level comings and goings and enough gossip to fuel a soap opera. And when it comes to users, estimated revenue and general buzz, Facebook is eating its lunch.
So whither Twitter, the high-flying social media network whose legions of die-hard fans are nearly equaled by its skeptics? Can the microblogging site become a big business, or does the turmoil at the top in the past few months reflect a company in trouble?
"Ever since we started Twitter, there's been chatter, and from the beginning it's been negative," said Biz Stone, one of its three co-founders -- and one of two who've left since the spring. "I believe that when people are talking about your product or company, it signals that they care."
He and other Twitter insiders insist the co-founders' musical chairs -- Jack Dorsey's 2008 replacement as CEO by Evan Williams, Williams' own loss of the top job last fall, Dorsey's March return as executive chairman, Williams' simultaneous departure and finally Stone's exit to join Williams at a new venture -- is little more than the natural shuffling of personnel as the company evolves.
They also say a focus on the founders overlooks the bench of executive talent new CEO Dick Costolo has recruited from the likes of Google, Pixar, eBay and Palm.
Still, the company's leaders face weighty challenges: how to better make money from the service's voluminous and fast-growing user traffic; how to banish for good the notorious "fail whale" icon that appears when the site is overloaded; and how to help users better navigate some 200 million daily "tweets."
Bill... newsfactor.com » | Mashable - Twitter has acquired comment tracker turned social analytics platform BackType for an undisclosed amount.
On the BackType blog, the company says the team and IP will move to the Twitter platform group. Here, the BackType team's focus will be on "developing tools for Twitter's publisher partners." Yahoo! News: Internet News » | NEW YORK (Reuters) - Square, the mobile payment service started by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, secured $100 million in a financing round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Reuters: Internet News » |
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