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Google Missed The Boat On Buying Twitter. “Hasn’t Been Interested Since They Committed To Google+” -Fred Wilson

admin2 — Mon, 21 May 2012 19:45:03 +0000

Google got the chance to buy Twitter, but the search giant passed, says Michael Arrington. “Google hasn’t been interested in buying Twitter since they committed themselves to Google+” says Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures founder and former Twitter board member, in his fireside chat this morning with Arrington at the TechCrunch Disrupt New York conference . Now Google+ is widely seen as a ghost town, and not buying Twitter could be a mistake that haunts Mountain View for years to come. Wilson has one of the most envied portfolios in venture capital , with Union Square Ventures getting in early on Twitter, Zynga, Etsy, and Tumblr. But the future might not be as bright. “I don’t think I’m going to be very good at investing in the next big thing. I don’t come from it. I didn’t work in it. The next thing isn’t going to be evolutionary. It’s going to be something completely different.” Arrington poked Wilson about writing “Silicon Valley could become the next Detroit” in a recent AVC blog post . Wilson explains “I didn’t mean to say [that]. Silicon Valley is the center of the digital revolution. But if there’s another revolution, [like] the teleportation revolution, and teleportation is invented in Mumbai, Silicon Valley might not be the locus of the next big thing.” Google Lost The Flock On the war for the future of social, Arrington asked “Do you think Facebook is overvalued?” Despite the newly public company’s share price dropping over 10% from its Friday close price, Wilson defend Mark Zuckerberg’s creation. “Markets come and go, good companies survive. The price of Facebook stock is not that important. Mark built an incredible platform and organization. I don’t think it matters that much if it’s trading at $25 or $50.” But Arrington pressed “is it going to be a half-trillion dollar company?” Wilson admitted “They’re going to have to grow into that.” Google had a big opportunity to compete with Facebook, but that’s passed. Arrington cites a rumor that Twitter CEO Dick Costolo took the company to Google saying it was raising this big a round at this valuation, and gave the search giant a chance to acquire Twitter, but ”Google pooh-poohed it”. After the chat, Arrington told me this was when Twitter ended up raising $200 million at a $3.7 billion valuation, so the price Google would have had to pay could have been around there. Wilson, who’s Twitter investment and former board seat must have made him familiar with the discussion, said Google decided to build social, and hasn’t considered buying something as big as Twitter in the space ever since. Google+ is off to a slow start, at least in terms of people actually using it, not just signing up. But Twitter might not have been the right fit. Google needed a social layer that could integrate into all its product, not just a micro-blogging platform. Still, Google is now a distant third in social, and Twitter’s off the table. Wilson says Twitter’s founders and board are now deadset on it staying independent. What’s The Value Of Angels? “I’ve never seen angels being lazy” says Wilson , refuting Ben Horowitz’s claim that angel investors make too much money for too little work. Wilson released a flood of insights into Facebook’s valuation, and the future of Silicon Valley “Venture capital is not the most risk-taking part of the equation. We wait until things are more developed” says Wilson. He trusts angels and the early legwork and diligence they do. “I don’t know where ‘lazy’ comes from. They’re probably the most important part of the capital stack because they believe in entrepreneurs before VCs do.” [Image Credit: Joi Ito ]

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Google Missed The Boat On Buying Twitter. “Hasn’t Been Interested Since They Committed To Google+” -Fred Wilson

Sure, Draw Something. Just Not The Prophet

kram412 — Sun, 20 May 2012 19:53:03 +0000

Pictures of the Prophet Mohammad have always been a highly contentious issue — they’re not explicitly prohibited in the Qu’ran but many Sunni Muslims forbid the idea, while others do not seem to mind as much. Among the latter group are those who feel that banning such images is a restriction on freedom of expression. The issue at the center of the Pakistan-blocks-Twitter story today has been reported to be around a viral activist campaign that’s been running for the past few years to point attention to this. But as with the actual blocking of Twitter itself in Pakistan — there has been no official Pakistani government statement about what is actually behind the current Twitter block at the moment (here is a screenshot of an alleged email ordering the block to ISPs with no specific reason behind it) – it’s hard to pin down exactly what content was actually sent around that caused the block in the first place. And at least one group is raising the question of whether this blockage could be related to the government testing an image filtering service — something with wider-ranging implications. A Prophet-drawing campaign started on Facebook in 2010 with a specific page, Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, created in response to the TV show South Park getting some heat for depicting the Prophet. The EDMD page was eventually taken down; but not before resulting in a temporary Facebook block in Pakistan. This year, according to Wikipedia , EDMD was specifically geared at sending pictures around via Twitter, to protest the arrest of Saudi poet/journalist Hamza Kashgari for writing “insulting” tweets about the Prophet. However, there are a number of Facebook pages that come up when one searches for “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” — not clear whether any of these are “official.” And at least one Pakistani blogger/activist (and, yes, dentist) Awab Alvi has raised the point that there may be no direct blasphemy accusation involved today at all. In a blog post Alvi explains: Ever since the reports emerged we have asked affected users to help test the site from their ISP connections and within minutes we had hundreds of reports The traceroute shows a very interesting fact, the block is at the DNS level, the url is not resolving right from the get go… My gutt [sic] feeling is that PTA is just testing their URL Filtering system, we had reports of them testing some image servers on facebook last week, and it disappeared by the evening. PTA choose Sunday to avoid any legal backlash exploiting the courts day off…. …The civil society has to its credit a stay order on the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority preventing them from blocking websites obtained on 19th April 2012 which can be used against them. Once they get through these testing days I am sure it can be later used as and when needed. Though the argument presented by PTA is that it needs this technology to crack down on Terrorism related issue, but one may never know when it can be used for political censorship Regardless of what is really behind today’s Twitter block, the issue of not being able to easily access the social network clearly touches on a sensitive point in Pakistan around freedom of expression: watch #twitterban to see how people in Pakistan and elsewhere are responding to the story. We have contacted the Ministry, Facebook and Twitter to try to get more information on this.

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Sure, Draw Something. Just Not The Prophet

Report: Pakistan Blocks Twitter Over Blasphemous Content, Facebook Complies?

vertical8 — Sun, 20 May 2012 15:58:26 +0000

Another day, another example of a country making it harder for its people to use the web and some of its most effective channels of communication. There are reports coming in from Pakistan that it has become the latest country to ban the use of Twitter. According to the blog Dawn , the chairman of Pakistan’s telecommunications authority has today imposed the restriction because of blasphemous content: it reports that Chairman Mohammad Yaseen blocked the site today “because Twitter refused to remove material related to a competition on Facebook to post images of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.” Facebook, apparently, has complied with the request, says the blog. Others are now starting to report the same circumstances, and below the break we have a screenshot of how accessing the site looks from one of our readers in Lahore who says he “cannot access the site at all.” Getting blocked in Pakistan is particularly ironic because the two, paired up, played a major role in one of the most important news events to be broken in recent history: the raid and demise of Osama bin Laden, which was tweeted by at least two people watching the raids as they happened in the mountains of the country. This is a developing (and slightly confusing) story: just yesterday, about 12 hours ago, Senator Rehman Malik, of Pakistan’s People Party, tweeted that nothing was getting blocked: “Dear all, I assure u that Twitter and FB will continue in our country and it will not be blocked. Pl do not believe in rumors,” he wrote. We have contacted Twitter and Facebook for their responses to this story. Update : more details coming in from Pakistan’s Express Tribune : The request to block the site was made by the Ministry of Information and Technology, it says, citing the competition on Facebook. The ministry, apparently, made several requests to Twitter, which responded that it “cannot stop any individual doing anything of this nature on the website.” Directives to block the site were sent to ISPs in several parts of the country, including PTCL Broadband and Wi-Tribe. It also reports that Twitter is still accessible by mobile using secure browsers like Opera, as well as proxies and VPNs like Vtunnel. [original report continues] This is not the first time that Twitter has been blocked in the country: a similar ban took place in 2010 for the same reason. That lasted for two weeks. The move underscores how susceptible social networks remain to higher powers in government. And Pakistan is not the only country to pull something like this. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are still officially forbidden in China (although millions use it anyway using VPNs — virtual private networks), with the bans often having strong political overtones around people expressing contary opinions. Developing countries with big populations represent some of the biggest potential growth opportunities for scale-oriented social networks — when they can get used. Even developed countries like the UK have floated ideas about how to restrict the flow of information on social networks — this was something that came up last summer during the London riots and the role that some believed services like BlackBerry Messenger played in gangs getting organized to loot. Update 2 : One of our awesome readers in Lahore, Waqas Ali , sent us this screenshot: Ali also played a role in a campaign in the country to keep Facebook from getting banned. He says that he cannot access Twitter at all right now but that a friend is able to use the Opera Mini browser to access the site. [Image: Farooq on Flickr]

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Report: Pakistan Blocks Twitter Over Blasphemous Content, Facebook Complies?

Study: Twitter Sentiment Mirrored Facebook’s Stock Price Today

blogger — Sat, 19 May 2012 04:48:00 +0000

Facebook’s IPO was obviously the single most discussed topic on Twitter today. The good folks over at social media data platform DataSift monitored what Twitter users were saying about the IPO throughout the day and came up with some interesting conclusions. Turns out, the ups and downs of how Twitter’s users felt about the stock pretty much mirrored the price of Facebook’s stock as the day progressed. Basically, DataSift notes, every time the volume of negative chatter on Twitter increased, Facebook’s stock price dropped within 20 minutes. “So if people had traded based on signals today to buy/sell Facebook stock,” the company told us,”they might have done quite well.” To create this graph, DataSift recorded 95,019 interactions from 58,665 authors over a period of 6 hours. Most interactions, of course, took place right during the early hours after Facebook’s stock started trading (and took an immediate dive from $42 closer to $38). The company also saw a second and much smaller uptick in interactions toward the end of the day as well. For the most part, of course, this is just a fun exercise in tracking Twitter data. It’s worth noting, though, that quite a few recent studies that looked into the connection between Twitter posts and stock prices found that there is at least a slight correlation between Twitter sentiment and volume and stock prices. You can find a bit more of DataSift’s data, which also takes a closer look at the total volume of posts about the Facebook IPO, here .

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Study: Twitter Sentiment Mirrored Facebook’s Stock Price Today

Twitter Wants An Interest Graph: Now Tracking Your Browsing To Make Follow Suggestions

Budowniczy425 — Fri, 18 May 2012 02:19:43 +0000

Twitter does a lot of things right, but it still hasn’t solved the problem of turning its noise into signal. After joining Twitter, it can take a lot of following and unfollowing scores of accounts before you’ve curated a stream that makes sense for you. With its platform growing fast, Twitter is looking to make the onboarding process a little easier (and more personalized) for new users, which is why it announced today via its blog that it will begin serving users tailored suggestions of who they should follow. Twitter is calling its new personalization features “experiments,” (in other words, they’re in beta), which will manifest for users in several ways. The first being that it will show new users a list of recommended accounts, which will be accompanied by a timeline that features tweets from those recommended accounts. New users (who are part of the beta testing) will see the list as soon as they sign up, but will not be required to follow their suggestions. For those of us already using The Twitters, if you’re a lucky winner, you’ll begin to see Twitter’s suggestions in the “Who To Follow” box on the left side of your homescreen. From what we can tell, the box won’t be altered from its current placement/design, but will instead just start showing more relevant suggestions. To see who Twitter will recommend for you, check out their preview page here . So, how exactly is Twitter going about serving you these recommendations? The suggestions are “based on accounts followed by other Twitter users and visits to websites in the Twitter ecosystem,” meaning that Twitter is culling the data that it receives from other websites that are utilizing its buttons/widgets, identifying the accounts that are most followed by people who visit those sites, and recommending it to you based on similarities with those users in your own Twitter activity. Twitter will be offering the ability to turn this functionality off. This comes with the context of the announcement earlier today that Twitter will be supporting Mozilla’s “Do Not Track” feature, which allows users to opt-out of those pesky third-party cookies, including … wait for it … those used in advertising. This morning, that seemed just a symbolic gesture on Twitter’s part, because they weren’t really tracking you anyway. With the addition of their follow recommendation engine, now this move makes perfect sense, and is obviously timed perfectly. Now Twitter can just say that, hey, if you don’t like it tracking your activity, turn on Do Not Track. As to who’s supporting: Firefox, Safari and IE9 already have some form of Do Not Track features built-in, but it seems that only Firefox is really evangelizing. However, all three browsers should be compatible with DNT, and allow for opt-outs. There is more information about Twitter’s integration with Do Not Track reflected in its privacy policy , so, as mentioned, if you’ve got it enabled in one of those browsers, you won’t see any tailored suggestions. With the heightened interest and concern over the way social networks (and beyond) are using our personal data, this is a smart move on Twitter’s part to ensure users that it’s taking transparency (and privacy) seriously. The other important piece of this is that people who are new to Twitter will see an option to tailor their feeds based on the sites they’re visiting from twitter, accompanied by a “learn more” link, whereas current users will find a “personalization” section added to their account settings. Users can disable personalization at any time, which prevents Twitter from collecting information on your activity, and as the blog post adds, “You can even choose to turn off tailored suggestions from the preview page (which shows some suggestions we’d make for you).” What’s really interesting here is that this is the first sign of Twitter getting serious about building its own interest graph, as if you’d ever get tired of all this “graph” talk, right? But this is the social network’s first big move that shows it following in the footsteps of Facebook, as the more personal info they collect on your interests and activity on their platform, the more info there is to feed targeted advertising and tweets. For more, check out Twitter’s blog post here , and current users c an test out preview here . Do Not Track info here. Do Not Track info here. Additional reporting from Frederic Lardinois

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Twitter Wants An Interest Graph: Now Tracking Your Browsing To Make Follow Suggestions

Verizon: If You Want To Keep Your Unlimited Data, Pay Full Price For Your Next Smartphone

kram412 — Fri, 18 May 2012 01:55:11 +0000

Verizon CFO Fran Shammo ruffled a few feathers yesterday when he mentioned at an investor conference that every one of their customers would be on one of the carrier’s new data share plans . In an effort to clarify his meaning, Verizon sent a statement to a handful of news outlets today that shines a bit more light on how they plan to make this situation work. First thing’s first — Verizon still intends to make those pesky (for them, anyway) unlimited data plans a thing of the past, they’ll just be doing it more gradually than originally anticipated. That said, subscribers currently clinging to their unlimited data plans can actually keep them in certain cases. If you’re a customer who just upgraded from a 3G to a 4G device with that older data plan intact, congratulations — you’ll be able to hang on to it until the next time you waltz into a Verizon store to upgrade your smartphone. Furthermore, customers who pay the full outright price for their handsets will be able to keep their unlimited plans as well, though that’s hardly anything new for them — by buying the device outright, you’re able to dodge another multi-year contract extension. As far as Verizon seems to be concerned, you’re fine unless you take them up on the offer of a discounted device (and the contract that goes with it): “When we introduce our new shared data plans, Unlimited Data will no longer be available to customers when purchasing handsets at discounted pricing.” That little “discounted pricing” proviso is an interesting one — does that mean customers would be able to hold onto those unlimited plans if they opted to pay full price for devices from now on? It certainly seems that way, though I can’t imagine too many people would be eager to take them up on that deal considering how damned expensive smartphones are without that nifty little subsidy to help out. Still, the option seems to be there for anyone who doesn’t mind spending gobs of money to prove a point.

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Verizon: If You Want To Keep Your Unlimited Data, Pay Full Price For Your Next Smartphone

Twitter Now Putting Tweets In Your Inbox With A Weekly Email Digest

A D M I N — Tue, 15 May 2012 00:41:33 +0000

Not content just to be your source of 140-character communications on the web, in its desktop app and on your mobile device, Twitter is now trying to creep into your email inbox. Twitter announced on its company blog Monday that it is launching an email digest, which will highlight Tweets that you might not have otherwise seen. The email digest, which will start appearing in users’ inboxes over the next few weeks, is designed to emulate the “Discover” tab in Twitter’s mobile apps. The idea is to feature the “best” content that appears on the network, even if it was written or promoted by folks you don’t follow. Users can see which of the people they follow might have favorited or retweeted messages that appear in the digest, by clicking on “View details.” They can then favorite, retweet, or reply to those tweets themselves. Frankly I’m not sure how valuable this weekly email digest will be… After all, what’s the life span of the average tweet? Then again, that’s probably the point — by sending out a best-of weekly digest, Twitter is extending the relevance of messages which might have otherwise gone unnoticed. And hey, if you don’t like it, you can always turn it off .

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Twitter Now Putting Tweets In Your Inbox With A Weekly Email Digest

Wholesale Wireless Service Provider LightSquared Files For Bankruptcy

ACMAir — Tue, 15 May 2012 00:33:21 +0000

Thing have looked grim for upstart wireless service provider LightSquared ever since the FCC officially withdrew their conditional approval to build out the terrestrial part of their LTE network, and now it seems like it may all come to an end. After the demise of their partnership with Sprint , the resignation of CEO Sanjiv Ahuja, and the laying off of nearly 45% of their employees , Bloomberg reports that the Virginia-based company has just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy today. For those who haven’t followed the entire sordid series of events, LightSquared was formed in 2010 with the intention of creating a wholesale 4G LTE network that other companies could tap into or resell as they desired. They hoped that they would be able to cover somewhere 260 million people in the United States once the network had gone live, but persistent issues like interference with GPS and regulatory headaches meant the service was never able to make it off the ground. The news doesn’t come as much of a shock considering that LightSquared backer Philip Falcone admitted to considering filling for bankruptcy back in April, but the company has since been issued a few stays of execution from their lenders in an attempt to give them enough space to turn things around. The company noted that they had assets and debts in excess of $1 billion each, but The Verge got their hands on LightSquared’s bankruptcy filing, in which the company breaks it down a bit further. Among the most highly-owed creditors are Boeing Satellite Systems and and Alcatel-Lucent, who are owed $7.5 million and $7.3 million respectively. As always though, LightSquared is putting a brave face on. CFO Marc Montagner said in a statement that the “voluntary Chapter 11 filing is intended to give LightSquared sufficient breathing room to continue working through the regulatory process that will allow us to build our 4G wireless network,” though it’s tough to imagine how much more headway they can make in this condition. What strikes me as more likely though is that LightSquared will have to liquidate all the assets and sell off their spectrum holdings (perhaps to Dish), and I imagine we won’t have to wait long to see what happens next.

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Wholesale Wireless Service Provider LightSquared Files For Bankruptcy

The Importance Of Social Media In Elections: Mostly Hot Air

blogger — Sat, 12 May 2012 08:14:35 +0000

If social media mattered in elections, Ron Paul would have a realistic shot at being the Republican nominee and Barack Obama would be on track to crush Mitt Romney in the biggest landslide in American history. Despite the hype over follower counts, a new study shows that there’s no credible evidence that Twitter can be used to predict how elections will turn out. “It can be concluded that the predictive power of Twitter regarding elections has been greatly exaggerated,” writes computer science professor, Daniel Gayo-Avello, in an unusually strident rant (for an academic). Gayo’s conclusions are intuitive: social media users are an unrepresentative slice of voters, and tweets may not accurately reflect how voters behave. And, his principles apply not to just Twitter, but to all social media. In reality, much of a candidate’s social media “fans” are a composition of individuals who are not swayed by campaigns: reliable supporters, opposition spectators, and the growing army of non-voting 20-somethings. Let’s look at the numbers: Paul has five times more Facebook fans than Rick Santorum (950K vs. 189K) and about 50% of the current front runner, Mitt Romney (1.67M). Yet, Santorum narrowly lost to Romney, and Paul lost by a landslide to both. In other words, the number of social media followers has little correlation with electoral wins. Aware that raw follower count is an empty campaign asset, social scientists have attempted to analyze whether social media “sentiment,” or tone of the discussion, can reveal how much a candidate is liked, and therefore which candidate would win an election. According to arguably the top social media analytics firm in the industry, Crimson Hexagon, Paul outperformed all of his conservative counterparts as measured by total volume of Twitter mentions. Twitter chatter around Paul was of 26% of the total political conversation in the run up to the New Hampshire primary, while, Mitt Romney, the actual winner, had 22%. Paul, too, had a slight popularity advantage, with relatively more positive comments about him then his duller opponent (12% positive and 14% negative for Paul vs. 9% positive vs. 13% negative for Romney) Why is social media such a false temptress for campaigns? First, Twitter is largely a shouting match among a small percentage of of hyper-vocal users: 50% of the most influential tweets are produced by the top 0.05% of users and most users are inactive [PDF]. And, the lopsided political demographic of Internet users doesn’t end with Twitter. For instance, the legalization of marijuana continues to haunt President Obama whenever he’s asked questions from an Internet audience (whether on YouTube or through the giggly Twitter representative of Jimmy Fallon ). And, while, yes, the war on drugs is an important issue to discuss (read: please don’t send me hate mail), we get the false sense from the Internet community that legalizing marijuana is more pressing than the combined threat of a recession, terrorism, a broken education system, and a nuclear-armed Iran. In other words, the “vocal minority” drowns out the voices of the “silent majority.” Second, while young people dominate social media, they vote in negligible numbers. “If no one under the age of 30 had voted, Obama would have won every state he carried with the exception of two: Indiana and North Carolina,” write Chuck Todd and Sheldon Gawiser in How Barack Obama Won. More than any other generation in the past century, Gen Y is inundated with a peculiar brand of politically engaged, non-voting citizen , who would rather pitch a tent in Zuccotti park than schlep to a polling booth on election day (side note: are you listening Occupy Wall Street?! This is why the Tea Party is kicking your political butt). So, when election day comes around, arm yourself with some healthy skepticism against amateur statisticians stoking the social media hype. For example, In 2010, the Facebook politics page put out a misleading post, “ Facebook Fans Help Predict More Than 70% of Key Races .” The statistic is technically true, but correlation does not equal causation. Politicians with more Facebook fans are likely more popular with voters anyways, not because they had a crack social media team who could boost their fan count. Additionally, while 81% of Senate candidates with more Facebook fans did win their race, 83% of incumbents also won re-election. Incumbents are simply more popular, both because they have the advantage of political office and because opponents want to follow their social media feeds by “fanning” their page. In this case, Facebook fans are paraded around as a key variable, when, in fact, Facebook fans are likely a symptom of popularity, not the cause. This isn’t to say that social media is an inconsequential player in the political landscape. Candidate Barack Obama did more than broadcast press releases in 140 character chunks; he engaged fans, pioneered tools for organizing, and inspired a culture of viral artistry. However, since 2008, the world hasn’t seen much in the way of election innovation. Ultimately, it isn’t who’s listening, but who’s acting. [Top image via researchgirl/Flickr .]

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The Importance Of Social Media In Elections: Mostly Hot Air

Twitter Buys Personalized Email Marketer RestEngine To Deliver Best Tweet Digests

vertical8 — Fri, 11 May 2012 02:04:24 +0000

Twitter has just finalized a deal to hire the team and buy the technology of RestEngine , a personalized email marketing service, which could help Twitter deliver email digests of great tweets you’ve missed. The deal fits well with Twitter’s recent talent acquisition of Summify, which creates these kinds of personal news digests. RestEngine had been powering re-engagement emails for social game companies like Crowdstarthat enticed users to start playing again by telling them what their in-game friends had been achieving. Three of four founders will be joining the flock, and the company’s technology will come along with them. RestEngine’s founder Joe Waltman called this is an acquisition since Twitter’s gaining both employees and tech, though Twitter views it as an acqui-hire. Co-founder Joe Waltman won’t be moving to Twitter as he tells me his entrepreneurial spirit is too strong and he’ll be working on new projects after a vacation. It looks like Twitter’s got a plan to get more of its inactive users tweeting again. Here’s the full-statement RestEngine is showing on its homepage: “We’re very excited to announce that the RestEngine team is joining the Twitter flock! Just over two and half years ago we founded RestEngine to help social app publishers send targeted one-to-one emails based on a subscriber’s social graph. It’s been an incredible journey where we had the opportunity to work with some of the leading social app publishers. With our customers, we’ve iterated on our social marketing automation platform while defining a new set of best practices for this brand new world of outbound social marketing. We’re thrilled to now focus our email skills and marketing automation know-how on a much larger scale at Twitter.” The note was signed by all four team members @jaberant (Josh Aberant, co-founder), @joewaltman (Joe Waltman, co-founder) @Soren_Berg (Soren Berg, developer), and @mikelinca (Mike Lin, web/UI developer) As for details of the deal, Waltman tells me it was signed two weeks ago but RestEngine just got confirmation that everyone who wanted to join Twitter would be hired. He wouldn’t tell me what Twitter paid for the boostrapped company, but these deals are typically structured to give anyone joining some cash but more equity in order to retain them, while paying out a mid-size lump of cash to founders who are going their own way. Waltman says his engineers are very excited about the move, especially because they hadn’t worked at a big company and are looking forward to the mentorship and advice Twitter will give them. As I wrote when I first covered RestEngine back in July 2010 , the company helped Facebook game companies in particular to deliver high open-rate emails. They’d include a recipient’s score, energy level, which friends were playing, and their next in-game tast to create a sense that a user was already invested in the game, and they’ll have plenty to enjoy when if they return. With time it expanded from serving game companies like Kaboom and RockYou to serve other web services like Ustream and SocialWeekend. I’d heard Twitter was interested in surfacing the best content from a user’s network, but didn’t want to move away from the unsorted firehose stream it’s known for. Summify and RestEngine could help it accomplish this through the email medium rather than cluttering Twitter’s clean interface. Those emails could show the most retweeted, @replied, or favorited tweets by people you follow. Until now, emails from Twitter have mostly been dry “this person followed you” alerts, but soon they could become something you actually want to open. Twitter now has over 140 million active users , but over 500 million registered accounts. RestEngine’s emails could bring some of those birds back to life.

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Twitter Buys Personalized Email Marketer RestEngine To Deliver Best Tweet Digests