Social Networking

Google’s adding an intriguing new feature to its Twitter search options –- the ability to “replay” a moment in time to see what people were tweeting about a given topic at any point between the present and the advent of the microblogging tool. In a blog post, Google explains that this could be used to “explore any topic that people have discussed on Twitter. Want to know how the news broke about health care legislation in Congress, what people were saying about Justice Paul Stevens’ retirement or what people were tweeting during your own marathon run?” ...

Twitter has just announced a new feature and API for desktop applications: users streams. The revelation was made by Twitter’s Director of Platform Ryan Sarver at the Chirp conference. The new API is focused around pushing out data to desktop applications in real time. There will no longer be rate-limits for data on desktops — tweets, retweets and all other updates will be streamed directly to the desktop. ...

Earlier this year we predicted that Twitter would use geotagging to identify physical places via Twitter, and today Evan Williams announced at the Chirp conference that the company is doing just that with its new Points of Interest feature. The feature doesn’t appear to be live yet, but soon users will have the ability to click on a place name — included in geotagged tweets — to view the particular place on a map. Next to the map, Twitter users will see a stream of nearby tweets, giving them a real-time view of what’s happening in a particular place at a particular time. ...

In kicking off Twitter’s Chirp developer conference, the company finally revealed its long mysterious registered user number, and it’s surprisingly large (based on some prior outside estimates): 105 million, or to be exact, 105,779,710, according to a slide showing behind Co-founder Biz Stone during his opening remarks. The growth’s not over either — Twitter says its still adding 300,000 users per day. Moreover, as many have speculated, most of Twitter’s traffic — 75% of it in fact — comes from third-party clients and applications. ...

Aiming for one billion Twitterers by 2013? Twitter’s International Team Lead Engineer Matt Sanford has blogged on the company’s site that Twitter is seeing growth of over 60 percent in registrations outside the U.S. After setting up a Spanish language capability in November, the microblogging service saw a huge surge in registrations in Latin America, Sanford said. Sign-ups in India also spiked early in the year after several politicians and Bollywood movie stars began Tweeting. ...

Next week, FarmVille players will have the ability to grow peanuts, thanks to ad agency Saatchi and Saatchi and an Israeli candy brand. We’re told this is the first time a FarmVille crop has been directly linked to a brand. Saatchi Interactive in Tel Aviv is working on a rollout campaign for Elite Taami Nutz, a peanut-filled variant of a popular Israeli chocolate bar. ...

Apparently, Facebook isn’t the only online sphere where ninjas are becoming a problem — The LinkedIn Blog reports that the job title “Ninja” has become more and more popular since 2002. According to LinkedIn, those who deem themselves “ninjas” tend to work with computers, social media, design, customer service, advertising and finance, and — as you can see from the chart below — their ranks have been steadily growing since the dawn of the century. ...

Now we know for certain: Twitter is working on a major redesign of its web interface. Twitter’s lead designer has just revealed a taste of what’s to come. Doug Bowman, the head of Twitter’s design team, posted a teaser picture displaying the new interface. While it doesn’t reveal much, it does show that the profiles are being overhauled, and so are the stats that are displayed on profiles. ...

One month ago we heard about the official Twitter app for BlackBerry, which has been in the works for quite some time now, bringing features such as automatic URL-shortening, easy photo-sharing, push and message list integration and search filtered by geolocation. Today, the first public beta of the app is available in the BlackBerry App World. Based on the feedback from closed beta testing, the developers have added several additional features. These include notifications of new tweets and @replies/mentions, support for lists, profile editing and persionalization settings, and changing the font size and style. You can get Twitter for BlackBerry here. How do you like it? Please, share your opinions in the comments! ...

It was only a matter of time before the merest of “iPad” mentions on sites such as Twitter would result in autospammed messages like this: These bots will fire a message claiming “we need someone to test and keep one iPad” (or simply “Free iPad here”) to anyone discussing the latest gadget to hit the streets, sending you to various promotional sites like the one below: ...