Twitter to introduce live video-tweeting

Twitter users may soon be posting real-time video tweets in addition to text tweets under plans to modernise the site.

The upgrade, which is being discussed by Twitter’s founders, will enable Twitter users to upload brief video snippets to their profiles directly from mobile phones, laptops and other devices.

Third party sites Twiddeo and Tweetube already allow Twitter users to post video tweets but only by creating links to their sites.

Both Twideo and Tweetube have so far failed to gain as much popularity as similar external service Twitpic.

Twitter’s founders hope by adding live video-tweeting it will help boost its prominence as a fashionable social-networking tool again.

In recent weeks both British singer Lily Allen and Hannah Montana actress Miley Cyrus have snubbed the site by closing their Twitter accounts. Allen’s last tweet read: “I am a neo-Luddite, goodbye.”

Some of Britain’s biggest tweeters include Stephen Fry with 810,000 followers, Sarah Brown, the prime minister’s wife, with 840,000 followers, and rock group Coldplay who have more than two million followers. Sarah Brown’s Twitter following is already believed to be five times larger than the entire membership of the Labour party.

Although many tweets describe mundane activities, the site has played a role in news events. Twitter was an active platform for protesters during the Iranian elections and in January, a ferry passenger was the first person to post pictures of people being rescued from an airliner in New York’s Hudson River.

Twitter has also been used as a campaign tool by Barack Obama and British politicians in support of the NHS.

The site has yet to make a profit or find a way of making money but has been valued at £603m. Twitter has 54 million users around the world every month.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Yahoo GeoCities Dies This Month

If you happen to be one of the early adopters of the Internet, chances are high that you might have come across at least one whacky Geocities’ hosted website. The once dominant, free web hosting service was home to the first websites of a host of users – who later became techies and moved on to other platforms.

In fact, even before the term “blogging” was coined, Geocities was the place to be back in the 90’s if you needed a place to voice your opinion – in your own maverick style, of course! Geocities pages was the MySpace of the 90’s with the a plethora of absolutely whacky user web sites complete with an overdose of primary colours and glittering text hosted on it.

Originally created by David Bohnett and John Rezner back in 1994, Geocities was bought by Internet giant Yahoo in the late 90’s in an astronomical $2 billion dollar deal. That was in 1999.

Fast forward to 2009 and almost 10 years after the buyout, Yahoo seems to have had enough and is on the verge of shutting down Geocities. It was in April 2009 that the first signs of Geocities breathing its last came to fore. Yahoo just gave its users a hint that the service will be shut down and that people might want to “relocate” their stuff to other locations – preferably Yahoo’s own hosting service. While they had not given a last date back then, three months later, Yahoo has finalized Oct. 26 as the day when one of Internet’s most used, and loved website goes offline. Forever.

To state that Geocities is a part of the world wide web history would be an understatement. As CNET writer Don Reisinge said that the closure of Geocities is definitely marks the ‘end of an era’ – and we can’t help but agree. But life goes on! So long old, friend!

Popularity: 12% [?]

Twitter, one of the top social networking website, unveils new frontpage

Micro-blogging service Twitter has unveiled a new frontpage featuring a prominent search box in a bid to attract new users.

Twitter is co-founded by Mr. Biz Stone. He, in a blog post about the redesign, said it was intended to demonstrate “the power of Twitter as a discovery engine for what is happening right now.” The search box will allow Web surfers who have not signed up for Twitter to plug in a query and see the latest real-time messages, known as “tweets,” about the subject of their query.

Stone said this would hopefully inspire people to then sign up for Twitter, which allows users to broadcast messages of 140 characters or less to other members.

“Twitter has moved from simple social networking into a new kind of communication and a valuable source of timely information,” he said. “We have a lot of work to do when it comes to the quality of our search results and trend analysis,” Stone acknowledged.

“But repositioning the product to focus more on discovery is an important first step in presenting Twitter to a wider audience of folks around the world who are eager to start engaging with new people, ideas, opinions, events, and sources of information,” he said.

The redesign does not affect the Twitter homepage seen by current users of the service, only the introductory page at Twitter.com seen by Internet users who have not yet signed up for the service.

Popularity: 2% [?]