At present it’s a fairly limited offering, indexing “some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres”.
It seems that you can only search for the latest tweets from certain people who have been indexed, using syntax such as “[name] Twitter” or “[name] Tweets” or “@[name]”.
As a concept, it’s a good start though I’m not interested in using any search engine to find anyone’s latest tweets — I use Twitter or one of its desktop clients for that. read more
The method works by using an army of zombie PCs (those that have been compromised by malicious software and can be remotely controlled) and a remote computer server to handle image decoding.
It’s not the first time Microsoft’s system has been compromised, and it likely won’t be the last. Other online accounts aren’t immune either. Spammers need lots of fake accounts in order to send emails and publish splogs. read more
TechCrunch mashed together the online advertising revenues of the big 4, being Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL, for the third quarter. The result? Just 0.6% growth, which is still some $50 million increase, but pale in comparison. Read Erick Schonfeld’s post for graphs and more. Also, don’t miss the blog networks roundtable for some more bloggish thoughts on the current financial situation.
MSN and Endemol have partnered to bring to the UK what they claim is the first ever online interactive sci-fi show.
Kirill takes a linear series of ten three-minute episodes and layers them with blogs, images, video and audio files online, as well as “secret websites”. The aim? “To tell an intricate story of a man on a quest to make contact with a young woman who holds the key to the future of humanity.”
Happily for Microsoft, it’ll push a range of the company’s services too, with the storyline taking place across Vista, Live Search, Live Messenger, Live Spaces and MSN. read more
Microsoft earlier this year committed to delivering a standards compliant browser when they launched Internet Explorer 8 at some undetermined future point.
This week, the promise was broken. It lasted less than six months. Now that Internet Explorer IE8 beta 2 is released, we know that many, if not most, pages viewed in IE8 will not be shown in standards mode by default. The dirty secret is buried deep down in the «Compatibility view» configuration panel, where the «Display intranet sites in Compatibility View» box is checked by default. Thus, by default, intranet pages are not viewed in standards mode.
This is yet another reason why more than five years ago, I switched to using Firefox.
Yet, putting such personal conflicts aside, I predict Twitter will begin selling ads outside Japan, which is no doubt a usability test. American users will see banner ads soon, and don’t be surprised if your message on dining out gets side-saddled with an ad for a local restaurant. And to be fair, Microsoft’s deal valued Facebook at 100 times its then-$150 million in estimated revenues. Similar hyperbole could turn Twitter’s $28 million revenue potential into a $2.8 billion valuation.
But response rates will be low, since other social media, such as Facebook and MySpace, have fared poorly selling stuff to their users. It seems social media users are too busy being social to pay much attention to ads. As marketers see poor results, they will move their ad budgets to other, more responsive ad media. The social media value bubble will be pricked by reality.
The article covers a number of possible revenue streams for the short-messenging service used by millions worldwide… but in the end predicts that they will be acquired by a company like Google or Microsoft as a “hood ornament” to their other services.
The affair has become so large (or bad, depending on your point of view) that non-geeks are even starting to talk about it (at least around this author anyways). But while some argue in favor of the “inevitable merger,” the Microsoft-Yahoo deal (aka MicroHoo) may potentially affect the entire blogosphere–for the worse. read more
The future is clear. The future is here. But is it something that bloggers need to fear?
The new Internet Explorer browser is out, after being highlighted at the Microsoft Mix Keynote event over in Las Vegas.
While the beta browser is not recommended for the masses, geeks and bloggers (or both) will probably want to install it on their machine in order to see if their site passes the “beauty test” (translation: does IE8 make my blog look fat ugly?).
After downloading the browser (which is only for Vista and Windows XP users) I noticed that the beta browser had different effects on different blogs. read more
A recent web server statistics report by Netcraft shows that Apache showed a small gain in market share during the month of December 2007, taking back some of the ground it lost to Microsoft and Google in the previous two years.
Interestingly (for web server statistics, at least) some of that could be attributable to the increased popularity of WordPress. The report singles out WordPress.com as a contributor, though I would have thought standalone implementations of WordPress (via WordPress.org) would also play a significant part.
In mid-2006, Microsoft’s own blogging and social networking platform, Windows Live Spaces, saw a revival which is attributed to the increased usage of Windows Server.
Google’s shift of Blogger to its own servers also enabled it to make modest gains, albeit on a much smaller scale.
It would be foolish to conclude that blogging software alone could be a deciding factor in the market share of web servers, but it does seem to have some significance.
I’m surprised to see 
