Twitter users ticked off over feed settings tweak

by Caroline McCarthy, CNET News, May 13, 2009

Twitter has made a small update that's left many avid users scratching their heads--to put it lightly.

A post on the Twitter blog explains the situation. Previously, Twitter users had been able to choose between two settings for viewing the feed of accounts that they follow: to turn on "@-replies" from members whom they follow directed to members whom they don't follow, or to leave those off and hence see fewer "tweets" that may not be relevant to them personally.

So, if I follow Twitter user @rafe, but I don't follow Twitter user @josh (sorry, dude), and I selected the second option in my Twitter settings, it would not show up in my Twitter homepage feed if @rafe posted a tweet that said "@josh: Why did you eat all that pizza I ordered?"

Now Twitter has opted to stop giving users the choice, and is automatically not displaying @-replies directed to people you don't follow. You can still see them on individual members' profiles, but they don't come to your attention in your main Twitter feed.

Twitter called this a "small settings update" on Tuesday, and explained that "receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don't follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today's update removes this undesirable and confusing option."

But many active Twitter users have retorted that seeing replies sent to people they don't follow is a way that they meet new contacts on the microblogging service--and that Twitter is effectively blocking communication. None too pleased, they've set up a hashtag (Twitter's equivalent of a keyword) called "#fixreplies" to further the conversation on Twitter.

On Wednesday morning, "#fixreplies" was the top "trending topic" on Twitter, and new Twitter Search results for the term are coming in by the dozen.

User revolts are common on popular social networks--just look at the Digg DMCA snafu or pretty much any Facebook redesign--but this is the first time that Twitter has had to deal with a big one. And it's in a difficult spot right now.

Traffic has exploded recently in the wake of an Oprah Winfrey seal of approval (among other things), but these millions of new users aren't loyalists yet. There are already signs that Twitter users may be even more fickle than the average social-network member. A small move to tick them off could be a serious blow to the service.

It'll be interesting to see how Twitter handles this one.

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Ning Apps Bring A New Dimension Of Flexibility And Power To The Social Network Platform

by Jason Kincaid, TechCrunch, May 6, 2009

Ning’s social network-building platform is getting a huge boost today, with the private beta launch of Ning Apps, a new suite of applications and features that Network Creators will be able to deploy across their networks with only a few clicks. The news has been a long time coming - network administrators have long been asking for features that could enhance their networks. But because of the nature of Ning, which houses hundreds of thousands of unique social networks, Network Creators were often requesting totally different things. Now they’ll be able to make everyone (or nearly everyone) happy.

At launch, Ning Apps is offering 90 new features to Network creators, built by 52 different developers that encompass a wide variety of web services. Network creators will now be able to integrate live video chat through TokBox, condunct contests with Wildfire, and create Wikis. Even better: network admins will be able to easily integrate monetization options, selling merchandise through Cartfly and tickets through Amiando and other ticketing apps.

Ning is likely going to be a very enticing platform for developers, too. Unlike social networks like MySpace, when a Ning network creator chooses to deploy an application, they have the option of deploying it to all of their users at once. And with some networks reaching more than 500,000 members, that translates into a huge jump in users. The applications are based on the OpenSocial standard, with some modifications to make them suitable for network-wide deployments. Still, even these changes are pretty minor - Ning says that developers have been porting their applications from other social networks in just two to three days.

Access to applications is beginning to roll out to a small number of Network Creators tomorrow, and will be available to everyone by the end of the month. At launch, all of the applications will be free to install (though some of the apps that involve money, like Cartfly, will take a revshare at the time of transaction), but Ning may well decide to deploy premium applications in the future.

Before now Network Creators have had access to some added functionality through third party applications. But Ning didn’t support these, and some of them were eventually removed from the site entirely. CEO Gina Bianchini says that Network Creators installing applications through Ning Apps can have ‘absolute confidence’ that the applications will work as advertised.

Aside from the launch of Ning Apps, things seem to be going quite well for Ning. The site recently saw the creation of its 1 millionth network (of which 200,000 are active), and is seeing 85,000 to 100,000 new users per day across all of its networks.

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http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/06/ning-apps-bring-a-new-dimension-of-flexibility-and-power-to-the-social-network-platform/

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What Does @ Really Mean?

By Jesus Diaz, Gizmodo, May 5, 2009

You use it every single day. In English it's called the "at sign." The Italians call it "snail." The Spaniards, "arroba." The Slavs, "monkey." But what did @ really mean 473 years ago?

On May 4, 1536, Francesco Lapi—a Florentine merchant who at the time was in Seville, Spain—used the symbol @ in a letter, the first ever known instance of a document containing it. It didn't had a domain name after it, however. Back then, he was referring to the number of "amphoras" that were shipped in three vessels which departed Spain on their way to Rome, Italy. An "amphora" was a commercial volume measure of those times. The document you can see above says:

There, an amphora of wine, which is one thirtieth of a barrel, is worth 70 or 80 ducats.

In Spanish, the word for that measure was called "arroba," which is the name the @ symbol still receives today in that language. Later, the symbol was conserved in typewriters' keyboards: People kept using the at sign through the centuries, and it was common in commercial accounting where it meant "at the price of."

It was in 1971 when Ray Tomlinson saw the symbol and thought it could be good to append the mail server host to the name of the person receiving an email:

I chose to append an at sign and the host name to the user's (login) name. I am frequently asked why I chose the at sign, but the at sign just makes sense. The purpose of the at sign (in English) was to indicate a unit price (for example, 10 items @ $1.95). I used the at sign to indicate that the user was "at" some other host rather than being local.

And the rest, as they say, it's history. I don't know about you, but from now on I would be saying jesus amphora gizmodo dot com every time I have to tell my mail address. It just sounds so much better. Or better yet, jesus monkey gizmodo dot com. Yes. Definitely this one. [NYT Blog]

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