Raja Jasti’s Blog - Renaissance Thinking

March 30, 2009

Are tweets coyrighted?

Filed under: Internet, Media — Tags: , , — Raja @ 8:46 am

Mark Cuban, the owner of dallas mavericks, asks this question.

Here is a question for all you legal scholars out there.  Is a tweet copyrightable ?  Is a tweet copyrighted by default when its published ? Can there possibly be a fair use exception for something that is only 140 characters or less ?

I got to thinking about this when I tweeted about an NBA game.  I tweeted to the people who follow me.  While I never asked that they not distribute it to other tweeters,  i did not give anyone permission to republish my tweets in a commercial newspaper, magazine or website.

So when an ESPN.com or any other outlet republishes a tweet, have they violated copyright law ?

Is twittering the process of publishing in 140 characters or less, or is it a private communications to those that follow you ? Even if you dont block outsiders from seeing it ?

You could also extend this to Facebook. Do you own your status update ? Is it a private communications between you and friends, or is a published work ? If a newspaper or website wants to publish your status update, do they need permission first ?

I would think for copyright purposes a tweet would be same as a blog post. It is copyrightable and can be quoted without taking the permission of the tweeter.

March 26, 2009

Youtube gets on twitter bandwagon

Filed under: Internet, Media, Trends — Tags: , , — Raja @ 9:13 pm

Youtube has added twitter option to its videos.

Everybody’s doing it. Even YouTube has succumbed to Twitter mania. Below every video if you click on the “Share” link you will find three options: MySpace, Facebook, and now Twitter. You can expand the box for even ore sharing options, but those are the main three and Twitter was just recently added.

Clicking on the Twitter button opens a pop-up window that takes you to your Twitter account and fills in a Tweet telling your followers to “check out this video,” along with the title and URL. The URL is not shortened, but YouTube is working on that. (Youtube URLs are short anyway, so it is not a huge issue).

This is a good move and a no brainer. I am surprised that it took so long for this to happen. It probably has to do with Google being careful about not helping twitter to grow there by becoming more expensive for it to acquire. Now that twitter is growing like weed, google probably decided to leverage it instead. Good move. I would expect other video sites follow suit.

March 25, 2009

Pro twitter accounts coming?

Filed under: Internet — Tags: — Raja @ 5:44 pm

SAI says that twitter has confirmed that it plans to offer pro paid accounts that offer additional features.

More revenue for Twitter on the way: The company confirms — for the first time we’ve seen, at least — age-old theories that they’ll sell commercial accounts to power users or companies using Twitter.

In exchange for a fee, companies could get “more features” on Twitter, the WSJ reports. Twitter cofounder Biz Stone tells the WSJ that the company recently hired a product manager to help develop those accounts, but doesn’t specify what the extra features will be or when the accounts will launch.

It is a matter of when not if twitter will introduce paid accounts.

March 23, 2009

Twitter bandwagon

Filed under: Internet, Media, Trends — Tags: , , , — Raja @ 12:09 pm

Businessweek will be integrating tweets into its comments.

Business Week is syncing the comments on its social-networking site to Twitter, making it among the first major media companies to harness the popularity of the microblogging service.

Federated Media is launching exectweets.com to help you follow the tweets from business execs. Why would you want to do that? :)

AOL and Yahoo will be integrating twitter like functionality, also known as life streaming, into their web service.

The growing popularity of Twitter and Facebook’s news feed functionality has made everyone embrace life streaming — essentially a way for us to broadcast our daily digital lives via photos, videos, postings and status updates — as a way to consume information. In a matter of months, expect both Yahoo and AOL to come up with their own news feed offerings, likely to be embedded in their more popular web services. While Yahoo’s working on a life-streaming product called Yahoo Updates, AOL’s new offering, which takes a cue from Facebook Connect, is being called “Site Social” internally.Unlike Facebook or Twitter, which are taking advantage of their own social graphs, Yahoo is likely to introduce “life streaming” into its very popular email service. Other details about this service are yet to be revealed, but Yahoo has been working on making its email more social.

Similarly, AOL will leverage its instant messaging client installed base to introduce its own version of life streaming. Essentially, the new AIM client would adopt a tab-like structure where one of the tabs would be like your plain old AIM friends lists. A new tab will be used to life stream information that will come into the client from various sources.

March 22, 2009

Enterprise twitter

Filed under: Internet, Trends — Tags: , — Raja @ 8:38 pm

Salesforce.com has integrated twitter into its CRM offering.

Salesforce’s CRM for Twitter allows enterprises to search for tweets about their companies, products and brands. Here’s how it works. First, Salesforce CRM searches within the Service Cloud for any tweets that are relevant to a company. Then, the company can capture and monitor the conversation, creating a database in the Service Cloud that keeps track of all subsequent conversations about the company. The Service Cloud also allows enterprises to tap into company-wide online communities, creates connections to existing social networks and the blogosphere, provides SEO tools, shares the social network knowledge with business partners, and integrates customer service operations into the cloud.

Social media such as blogs, social networking, wikis, and tweets are slowly finding their way from the consumer to the enterprise. There are some companies such as yammer and present.ly that are trying to be twitter for businesses. But it may very well be that twitter for businesses is well.. twitter.

March 16, 2009

Twitter OAuth Support in Beta

Filed under: Internet, Technology — Tags: — Raja @ 7:27 pm

Twitter has released its OAuth support for public beta. This allows 3rd party application developers to access user account info without having to requiring the users to handover the credentials to them.

Mike Arrington also reports that twitter is experimenting with text ads.

March 13, 2009

ABC to Interview McCain - On Twitter

Filed under: Internet, Media, Trends — Tags: , , — Raja @ 2:26 pm

ABC News will be interviewing John McCain on Twitter.

One of the biggest complaints about Twitter is that its 140-character limit is simply not enough to say what you need to say sometimes. Of course, this limit works both ways — it can also stop people from going on for too long about something. And that’s something that politicians are known for. So in a way, an interview with a politician conducted entirely over Twitter almost makes sense. Almost.

And that’s exactly what ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos is planning to do next week. On Tuesday, Stephanopoulos will interview senator and former presidential candidate John McCain for his show, “This Week.” To conduct what the network is calling the first “twitterview,” both the questions and answers will be sent out via Twitter, bound by the 140 character limit.

The interview, which can be “seen” at noon eastern standard time on Twitter, will last between 10 and 15 minutes. Of course, to see both the questions and the responses, you’ll need to follow both Stephanopoulos and McCain. Stephanopoulos will be soliciting questions to ask McCain over Twitter as well.

 

Twitter seems to be going main stream big time. Mike Arrington says all these mentions in the media is helping twitter see an explosive growth rate of 55% month-to-month in Februalry 2009.

March 12, 2009

Twitter is a permission marketing platform

Filed under: Internet, Trends — Tags: — Raja @ 7:33 pm

Here is an insight I had today. I think the key to cracking the code on twitter monetization is to view it as a permission marketing platform. If you look at a tweet as a unit of enagement then following is the act of giving permission to be engaged.

So twitter should think themselves as a permission marketing platform and optimize around that activity. This can be very easily monetized.

If someone from twitter is reading this, I hope this nugget is helpful to you.

Something fishy with twitter

Filed under: Internet, Media — Tags: , — Raja @ 10:23 am

I registered a few accounts to use them for some product ideas that I have and they were all suspended the same day without any notification. I sent them an email stating that they are not spam and that I plan to use them for legitimate purposes and requested them to remove the suspension. It is a week and they are all still suspended. This whole thing is very fishy as the product ideas I have may be somewhat related to their future product plans. I wonder if this has anything to do with it. Or is it just overagressive filtering and slow/bad customer service?  I suspect it is the later. I will let you know how this thing plays out.

If any of you have experienced similar problems with twitter please share your experiences with us.

BTW, these suspended accounts all have generic names so there is no issues with brand conflict with twitter or any other company.

On a related note, Techcrunch asks how much does a twitter suggested slot worth? Jason Calacanis offers $250,000 for a top 20 slot for 2 years. This suggested list should be relevant to the users else it will ruin the user experience and it will make a bad first impression. Twitter needs to be careful with this feature.

Mike Arrington has a post on the value of twitter traffic. The gist of it is that the followers you get by being on the suggested list will not have a good click through rate, so they are not really valuable to you. This basically supports what I said above that relevance is important just as in google search ads. If the suggested list is not relevant to the user it helps no one.

March 11, 2009

Facebook’s twitter clone

Filed under: Internet, Technology — Tags: , — Raja @ 2:27 pm

Facebook announced integration of real-time updates to its user homepages. This clearly looks like a move to clone twitter functionaliy.

Facebook tried unsuccesfully to buy twitter for $500M back in november 2008. Twitter seems to be gaining real momentum recently and on its way to crossing the chasm from silicon valley techies to main stream users.

I would bet that google and facebook would love to buy twitter though they may not find the price tag to their liking. They can buy other companies such as friendfeed but there is only one twitter.

Twitter is increasingly seen as a realtime search engine and a complement to google’s search business. Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently commented in his interview with Charlie Rose that they are not looking to make any acquistions because he thinks the prices are still too high. He seems to be under the impression that prices of companies woud drop as the economic reality hits home. He mentioned that google is generating a lot of cash which they are keeping safely in highly secure banks. So he clearly feels cash is king and wants to wait for the right time to pounce.

Facebook also may find twitter out of their price range and would like to neutralize the growth and success of twitter. Integrating twitter like functionalitty is a move in that direction. Facebook, like twitter, is still looking for an effective way to monetize their users. This adds to the risk of facebook acquiring twitter.

I think twitter has established a strong first mover advantage and it is going to be hard for any company to threaten its place. I don’t think facebook integrating twitter like functionality will make too much of a dent in twitter’s growth. The horse has already left the barn. I would like to see twitter stay independent and figure out its business model and continue to innovate.

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