The Twitter ecosystem is busy as always, so rather than try to write 20 posts to cover everything purely for SEO benefit, I thought I’d round up three things which stood out:
Stocktwits has gained $3 million in another round of financing for the social and microblogging network for the stock market. It’s interesting that the service has spun out of Twitter, building its own platform and Adobe Air desktop application which came into life in September. In addition Stocktwit.tv seems to be taking off.
Rather than building your own social network from scratch, perhaps a more realistic plan is to build community on the main Twitter site, before spinning off as Stocktwits have done – a technique that would work on any social network…
URL shortener Bit.ly (as set as the default shortener on Twitter, and heavily used by yours truly) has announced a partnership with security firms including Websense, Sophos and VeriSign to help address the problems of spam and malware-spreading shortened links which are otherwise difficult to spot (Bit.ly already offers a plugin to expand links before you click on them). That adds onto Twitter’s malware detection, and Bit.ly’s spam filtering.
For reference, Bit.ly shortens 35-40 million links a day, and apparently spam links make up less than 0.5% of that number…
And finally, fellow url shortener Cli.gs has been bought by social bookmarking site Mr Wong. That’s good news for users, and also for the White House, which uses Cli.gs. The reason for the sale is given as the time and effort needed on behalf of the founder – something which makes sense in the context of Bit.ly’s 40 million links a day!