Facebook Application Development

Twitter’s having a rough day. It was down for nearly an hour earlier today, and now, many users are complaining that their Avatars have been replaced by an egg, the Avatar given to newcomers who have not yet uploaded their own picture.

Naturally, users are tweeting in droves complaining, trying to find out if they are showing up as an egg to their friends and making terrible egg-puns.

Digg, which in its heyday was effectively run by its power users, is dying. Wikitravel is probably joining it: two-thirds of its admins want to jump ship to the greener grass of the Wikimedia Foundation. Who in turn have their own people problems–a stubborn gender gap and a diminishing number of active admins. Meanwhile, across the Web, people are asking “Is StackOverflow being ruined by its moderators?”

There’s a common thread here. Site starts up; site scales; a power-law minority of its users become its key community, and if/when that community withers, the entire site is endangered. The examples above are edge cases who explicitly assign admin rights to unpaid users, or take the power law to its extreme. But they indicate a larger point.

Like it or not, we live in the Age of Social Media, and the wars for dominance have just begun. Facebook bought Instagram as a defensive move. They’re clearly in Google’s sights–and before you laugh, bear in mind that Google+ traffic is apparently up 43% since December and now surpasses LinkedIn’s. Path is gunning for Facebook too, whether they admit it or not. App.net just set its sights on Twitter. Meanwhile, Reddit is rampant, Pinterest just erupted out of nowhere, and Quora continues to underachieve.

But how do you conquer an enemy social network?

[Update 7/20/12 1:31 p.m. PT - An earlier version of this story said that Sponsored Stories in the Facebook feed outperformed Twitter's in-stream Promoted Tweets, however, TBG has issued a correction to its report. TBG's data comes from Promoted Accounts, which … Continue reading →

This week, Kellan Elliott-McCrea launched a new Twitter search engine called “oldtweets” to a bit of buzz. As the name implies, this tool finally lets you pull up tweets from Twitter’s early days, specifically its first year up-and-running. That means tweet IDs 1 to 20,000,000, to be exact, which occurred during parts of 2006 and 2007. And you guys, this is the most fun I’ve had on the Internet all week.

Now, we all know the infamous first tweet from co-founder now CEO Jack Dorsey: “just setting up my twttr,” but with oldtweets, you can actually pull up a history of Twitter’s early adopters’ first communications. And so, for the heck of it, that’s just what we did, starting with the Twitter co-founders themselves.

Twitter finalized a major overhaul of its mobile site today aimed at users on feature phones and older browsers. In a blog post, the Twitter design team wrote that they built a “lighter-weight, faster client that looks and feels like twitter.com and our mobile apps.”

The new site is much cleaner and is very similar to the browser and app interfaces, allowing the company to deliver the best version of its product across more platforms. This comes on the heels of yesterday’s release of new Twitter mobile apps for iOS and Android.

The results of Twitter’s nine week project brings mobile support to thirteen different browsers for thousands of different devices. On the blog, the team writes about working to provide users with a “consistent experience on any device.” The new site can scale from screens as small as 240 x 240 pixels up to desktops. In an effort to accomodate slower networks and different browsers, the site is optimized for browsers with javascript turned off and offers page sizes that are up to 63% smaller than the old version.