Here’s USV principal’s Fred Wilson’s comment, via email: “Union Square Ventures is very fortunate to be able to add Andy Weissman to our partnership and we think he is a perfect fit for the entrepreneurs we want to work with and the sectors we want to participate in.” (More below.)

That will cause a small ripple in startupland, because Weissman was the one steering Betaworks’ investment portfolio. His partner John Borthwick handled the operational parts of the business, which has founded and/or nurtured startups like Summize, TweetDeck, Chartbeat and Bitly.

With Weissman’s departure, Betaworks’s focus will change. “Though we will continue to do seed stage investments, our primary focus will be on building the core capabilities of the companies that we acquire and grow in-house,” Borthwick said told his employees via email today. Betabeat first reported the news.

What Borthwick didn’t explain in his email is that he and Weissman had previously planned on raising a “sidecar fund” that would essentially split Betaworks into two businesses: An operating company run by Borthwick and an early-stage VC shop run by Weissman.

But that plan was discarded this summer, at least in part because of opposition from Betaworks’ investors, who include RRE Ventures, Intel, AOL and the New York Times. Investors argued that they had put money into a company where investing was only a component of the plan, not a full-time occupation; by raising a new investment fund, they argued, Betaworks would essentially be competing against some of its backers.

People familiar with the company say that the plan’s collapse didn’t lead directly to Weissman’s departure. But the backstory does provide context to his move to become a full-time venture capitalist.

When Weissman lands at Union Square, he’ll have plenty of money to work with. The firm, which has made a series of lucrative bets in high-profile Web 2.0 start-ups including Twitter, Zynga, Foursquare and Tumblr, is in the midst of raising a new $150-$200 million fund.

Four-year-old Betaworks, which now has more than 80 employees, ought to have plenty of money to work with, too. In addition to the $28 million it has raised to date, the company has also been able to turn some of its investments into cash via secondary market sales.

Most notably, it has recently sold Twitter shares it acquired in 2008, when the company bought search engine Summize. That alone should provide a nice cushion for Betaworks if it needs it: Twitter’s value has shot up from $100 million to $8.4 billion over the last three years.

And speaking of ripples, here’s one I’m guessing Weissman may enjoy:

By definition, this is an “acqhire.” Twitterfeed was essentially a one-man operation, and now that man — Mario Menti — is a Bitly employee.

But in this case, Bitly is also buying Twitterfeed’s small but important set of customers. The company has some two million users, who publish in the range of five million posts a day. Twitterfeed already used Bitly to automatically shorten those Web addresses, but now Bitly can lock that business up, or at least try to do so.

That’s important when big players like Twitter, Facebook and Google are increasingly looking to lock up or at least restrict the data they let out of their own ecosystems.

Bitly may also try to migrate some of Twitterfeed’s customers to SocialFlow, a more sophisticated Twitter publishing tool, which, like Bitly, is also a start-up built by the Betaworks guys.

At least that’s what worked for the news channel on a single day this spring. That’s according to SocialFlow, a start-up that specializes in Twitter analysis and distribution.

SocialFlow says that on May 25, these were the top five keywords that drove traffic from the @FoxNews Twitter account to its FoxNews.com site:

• Crime
• Casey Anthony
• Murder
• Obama
• IMF Chief

The Anthony trial dominated lots of news outlets and Twitter conversations for a few months, so it’s not a huge surprise to see related terms generating attention among Fox’s online audience.

But FoxNews Twitter followers were interested in other scary stuff beyond the Anthony trial. Other popular keywords included “boy found dead,” “kidnapper” and “global terror.”

All of this data comes from a report SocialFlow has produced that looks at what works on Twitter for several different news sites. Here’s how Fox News’s top five keywords compared to the ones that worked for the New York Times, Al Jazeera English and the Economist. (Fox News, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp.)

And here’s a “word cloud” that includes more terms that worked on that single day:

The point of the SocialFlow report isn’t to draw any conclusions about different news sites’ audiences — you can do that on your own. SocialFlow is really trying to illustrate that different news sites’ Twitter audiences respond to different stuff, at different times, in different ways.

And SocialFlow says it can figure that stuff out, and then help sites’ Twitter feeds decide what and when to publish. (Disclosure: AllThingsD has recently started with working with SocialFlow for Twitter feeds like this one.)

SocialFlow is yet another Twitter-centric project from Betaworks, the New York-based investment group and start-up hatchery, which uses data from both Twitter and Bitly, the Betaworks-created URL shortener/data warehouse.

It seems to me that if SocialFlow works as advertised, it’s exactly the kind of the thing that Twitter would want to own for itself, to bolster its nascent advertising program. My hunch is we’ll come back to this one later.

That’s because traditional analytics tools don’t always give an accurate understanding of social media traffic. For instance, when users click on links from desktop and mobile clients rather than browsers, many analytics tools label this as “direct traffic,” which is supposed to mean people who went to your URL independently of clicking on a link to it somewhere else. Strauss describes this measurement technique as “arcane.”

And more broadly, unlike other referrers such as the Web sites for Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and StumbleUpon, Twitter doesn’t rewrite or tag its outgoing links or frame linked Web pages to maintain attribution and/or a consistent experience and/or prevent phishing. (Though Twitter has started doing some of this with its t.co URL shortener.)

So, for instance, it’s much harder to know when a link shared on Twitter was then syndicated to LinkedIn, where it was clicked. And in that case, both Twitter and LinkedIn should share some credit for what Suster calls “last mile social media attribution.”

Strauss and Suster, of course, are pitching awe.sm, which helps customers track links for $15-$50 per month. AllThingsD, for example and as a disclosure, uses similar enterprise tools from bitly.

Strauss concludes that Twitter gets credit for less than 25 percent of the traffic it actually plays a part in driving (see chart above). He writes:

• only 24.4% of clicks on links shared on Twitter had twitter.com in the referrer;
• 62.6% of clicks on links shared on Twitter had no referrer information at all (i.e. they would show up as ‘Direct Traffic’ in Google Analytics);
• and 13.0% of clicks on links shared on Twitter had another site as the referrer (e.g. facebook.com, linkedin.com).

Photo from Flickr user buzzsnap.

Until now. Technology vet Peter Stern, whose last start-up ended up being acquired by Facebook, is bitly’s first official CEO.

He’s taking the reins from Betaworks CEO John Borthwick, who helped hatch bitly as one of his incubator’s projects and has overseen it since, while juggling lots of other balls at the same time.

Stern founded Zenbe, an email start-up that Facebook “acqhired” last fall, but most of his résumé predates the Web 2.0 era: He was co-founder of online brokerage Datek Online, and prior to that he helped build “cool electro-optic sensors and devices, most of which are classified.”

Bitly doesn’t make a whole lot of money helping publishers shorten their Web addresses, but it does get its hands on lots of data about stuff people share with each other on the Web. Just how valuable all that data can be is an open question, and in the past the company’s name has been floated as an acquisition target for Yahoo et al.

The fact that the Betaworks guys have hired a full-time manager for the company suggests that they’re not selling anytime soon. It’s a good bet that they’ll work to use that data in interesting ways. The first example we’ve seen has been in the News.me iPad reading/aggregation app, which bitly owns and powers.

Good news for people like me, by the way, who like the News.me concept but don’t read that much on their iPad: Stern says a version for Apple’s iPhone is in the works.

Includes shout-outs to Tumblr, Vimeo, bit.ly, YouTube, Groupon:

Bit.ly has now raised about $14 million in a couple of years, but so far has only a nascent revenue stream: About 4,000 different companies have white label versions of Bit.ly’s URL shortener (the New York Times, for instance, uses Bit.ly to create addresses like this: http://nyti.ms/bm8lk2). But only some of them pay for that service, at a rate of $1,000 a month.

The real business, which Betaworks CEO John Borthwick says the company will begin to build out with its new money, is turning Bit.ly’s data set into money.

People clicked on six billion Bit.ly links last month, Borthwick says. And he imagines that all sorts of folks, from Google (GOOG) on down, would be willing to pay to license the data.

It’s worth noting that Yahoo (YHOO), among others, has been doing some tire-kicking around the service–maybe more, depending on whose story you’d like to listen to.

Other investors in this round include OATV, Mitch Kapor, Founders Fund, SV Angel, Joshua Stylman, Peter Hershberg and David Shen. The New York Times (NYT), as I have previously written, picked up a piece of Bit.ly this summer as partial payment for its work in in News.me, a yet-to-be-launched social news service for Apple’s (AAPL) iPad.

That’s the second time the paper has picked up a piece of Betaworks in the last year. In March, the Times invested in the the New York-based holding company/incubator/investor itself, as part of a $20 million funding round alongside investors like AOL (AOL) and Intel (INTC).

Betaworks CEO John Borthwick wouldn’t disclose the value of the Times’ stake in bit.ly, which has raised about $4 million so far. But the equity represents payment for the initial work the Times R&D group has put into the project, which they handed over to Betaworks this summer. Betaworks also paid out some cash as part of the transaction. No comment from the Times on the deal.

So what is News.Me, anyway? Borthwick won’t elaborate beyond what he told the, um, Times yesterday: It will be social and newsy and cool and it will start out as an app for Apple’s (AAPL) iPad when it debuts later this year.

But the bit.ly connection is an important and obvious clue here: Since Web surfers use bit.ly to shorten a gazillion links a year in order to pass them on–technically, it’s some 30 billion so far in 2010–the bit.ly guys can mine all sorts of data about which Web surfers are interested in a certain story, and which stories a Web surfer’s friends may be paying attention to. You can connect the dots from there.

And assuming bit.ly is a core part of News.Me, it makes it a little less likely that Betaworks will sell off bit.ly anytime soon. But plenty of people think Betaworks has entertained thoughts of selling, though Borthwick insists that the company is not for sale. At one point Google was said to have kicked the tires on the service, and executives at Yahoo have thought hard about the service as well, sources say.

He makes a lot of traffic–and that traffic doesn’t go away.

While some of you (all of you?) wait for James’s ESPN non-news conference tonight, here’s some data to chew on, courtesy of bit.ly, the Web link shortening folks, and betaworks, bit.ly’s Web incubator parent.

Betaworks’ Isaac Greenbaum has spent the past day analyzing this bit.ly link–http://bit.ly/apxlxx–that James posted yesterday via Twitter. Here’s what the traffic from that link, which takes you to James’s personal Web site, looked like in the first hour after he posted it (click image to enlarge):

The big spike isn’t unusual for a popular bit.ly link. The impressive part, Greenbaum says, is how much traffic the link continued to generate after the first rush. Even now, he says, a day after the posting, the link is generating some 50 clicks a minute. That’s a torrent for a day-old link.

More data (click to enlarge):

What’s really interesting here is that while James is big on Twitter, he isn’t that big–he’s just under 320,000 followers for now. That’s in part because he just went on a couple of days ago, and in part because he never got the “Suggested User List” nod from Twitter that generates those crazy one million-plus follower numbers.

But most of the people who do get on that list eventually figure out that no one really has that many people reading their tweets–they just have a lot of people following their account. And most of them aren’t really “following” at all. Big difference.

So Greenbaum’s real takeaway is that all of James’ Twitter followers are really, really interested in what he has to say. Yep!

But here’s my own prediction, made without the benefit of any analytics at all: People will start becoming a lot less interested in what James has to say in a few hours.

[Image credit: Craig Hatfield]

Try Betaworks instead. That’s my translation of the holding company’s pitch, which seems to be effective. Yesterday, it announced that it had raised another $20 million in funding led by RRE Ventures and Intel (INTC); other new investors include AOL (AOL) and the New York Times (NYT).

Betaworks previously raised about $8 million from the likes of the Pilot Group, Ron Conway, Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer and AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, who bought in when he was still selling ads for Google (GOOG).

Betaworks is essentially a bet on “real time” companies in general and Twitter specifically. The New York-based outfit has invested in or built a couple dozen companies, almost all of which have something to do with social media. And many of them have direct links to Twitter.

The biggest Betaworks hit to date is an investment in Twitter itself: The company helped fund Summize, a real-time search engine Twitter bought in July 2008, back when the microblogging service was valued at a mere $100 million. Betaworks took its payment in Twitter equity, and that decision has worked out very nicely so far.

Other prominent Betaworks projects are Twitter plays as well. Twitter uses Bit.ly, the URL shortener Betaworks built and then spun off. And Betaworks funded TweetDeck, the most popular Twitter client, which also uses Bit.ly as its default URL shortener.

The risk, of course, is that there isn’t enough there there to support all these companies, which are very much in the Web 2.0 “users first, revenue later” model. As CEO John Borthwick puts it: “We’re either building a mountain or digging a hole.”

But Borthwick has an excellent pitch–the accent helps–which I got to hear when I dropped by his office yesterday. Co-founder Andy Weissman, alas, was AWOL. But if you want to hear his take, he maintains an excellent Tumblr (another Betaworks investment).

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100312/is-betaworks-building-a-mountain-or-digging-a-hole/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100309/twitters-new-security-strategy-rewriting-some-users-links/ http://allthingsd.com/20100309/twitters-new-security-strategy-rewriting-some-users-links/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:04:53 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=17204 Beset by phishing attacks and other scammy behavior, Twitter is taking a step I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else before: The social messaging service says it may change the text of its users’ messages in order to protect them.

Specifically, Twitter is going to rename links that users send to one another via direct messages, which allows the company to track them and shut them down if they turn out to be malicious. You’ll be able to identify the renamed links, because they’ll be shortened using a “twt.tl” prefix.

In typical Twitter fashion, the company has a blog post that explains the change, but in somewhat vague and hazy terms. As best I can tell, what Twitter is really doing is rewrapping some links that users send with its own code.

This doesn’t appear to change the core characteristics of the link–publishers and marketers who use the bit.ly link shortening service, for instance, will still be able to track the data generated by their links. But it does give Twitter the ability to track bad behavior.

If you want to view the move in a positive light, you can think of it as the tag an airline slaps on your luggage when you check it–the only changes to your message are superficial. Or, if you’re so inclined, you could shiver just a bit at the thought of a messaging service changing any part of your message, no matter how trivial.

Twitter only announced the change this evening, but the company appears to have been testing it for some time: Searching Twitter for “twt.tl” turns up shortened links going back several days. As best I can tell, this one–what appears to be the retweet of a direct message from a marketer–is the first one to show up in public:

There’s a good chance many or most Twitter users won’t see the shortened links–if you’re not sending or receiving direct messages, you may never see one, period. But Twitter seems to leave the door open to expanding the program to regular tweets as well: Its blog post says the company has “focused [its] initial efforts” on direct messages and email.

Just to be clear, I checked with Twitter spokesman Sean Garrett via email. Here’s our exchange:

Q: But to be clear: Do you reserve the right to change links in regular tweets?

A: This is our focus right now.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100309/twitters-new-security-strategy-rewriting-some-users-links/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091202/bit-ly-inks-malware-spotting-deals/ http://allthingsd.com/20091202/bit-ly-inks-malware-spotting-deals/#comments Wed, 02 Dec 2009 09:00:17 +0000 Andrew LaVallee http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=18576 As popular as link-shortening services are, security experts have been warning users that they put themselves at risk of malware infection by using them, since a suspicious-looking Web address just becomes another Bit.ly or TinyURL link once it’s shortened.

On Monday, Bit.ly announced partnership with several security firms, including Websense (WBSN), Sophos and VeriSign (VRSN), that it said helps to address that.

The three of them will provide malware and spam-detecting services designed to keep fraudulent links from making their way into Bit.ly URLs, which in turn are used extensively on Twitter, email and social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091202/bit-ly-inks-malware-spotting-deals/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091125/trying-to-save-the-webs-shortcuts/ http://allthingsd.com/20091125/trying-to-save-the-webs-shortcuts/#comments Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:00:11 +0000 Andrew LaVallee http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=18364 The Internet Archive and more than 20 Web companies are banding together to preserve the historical records of the abbreviated Internet addresses that are passed around on services such as Twitter.

Services such as Bit.ly and TinyURL allow consumers to convert a lengthy Web address into a miniaturized one. They have soared in popularity in recent years with the advent of Twitter, which limits users to 140 characters per post. Shortened links are also used in emails, text messages and updates on social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Bit.ly, for example, says consumers use its site to shorten 40 million Web addresses a day. However, since most link-shortening services are unprofitable start-ups, archivists and Internet users worry that if one goes under, its links would stop directing users to the correct, longer Web address.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091125/trying-to-save-the-webs-shortcuts/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090810/an-oversized-ruckus-about-tiny-web-addresses-bitlys-bigfoot-offer-to-the-rest-of-the-business/ http://allthingsd.com/20090810/an-oversized-ruckus-about-tiny-web-addresses-bitlys-bigfoot-offer-to-the-rest-of-the-business/#comments Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:31:41 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=9746 Are you up in arms about the impending demise of tr.im, one of the many services that shorten long Web addresses? Here’s a possible solution, offered by bit.ly, the industry’s bigfoot: A nonprofit archive/graveyard for tr.im’s tiny addresses, along with anyone else who wants to participate.

John Borthwick, who funded bit.ly via his Betaworks investment group, explains the details of his offer here, along with a bit of pro forma condolence for the demise of his competitor: “Sad day yesterday to see tr.im announce that they are shutting their doors, after failing to make a business of a nice service with a great URL.”

To me, that sounds a bit like a mafia don shaking his head a tad wistfully after hearing that one his old rivals got bumped off, then sending a big bouquet to the funeral. And I think that the tr.im team, as well as some of bit.ly’s other competitors, may take it in the same vein.

UPDATE: I spoke to Eric Woodward, CEO of Tr.im’s parent company Nambu Networks. As I thought, he’s uninterested in working with Bit.ly, either directly or via 301works, the third party archive Borthwick has proposed. His response: “Why would I want to upload all my of data to Bit.ly?” When I suggested that this might be a good move for his users, he allowed that it still might happen — if he can’t find a buyer for Tr.im. And that’s a distinct possiblity: Woodward said he has been looking for a buyer for the past few months, without success.

But Borthwick’s proposal also sounds like a good one to me. I’ll let the wiser Webheads explain whether it’s a real solution for the problem that tr.im’s failure will create for the Web, namely, the notion that lots of Web addresses, shortened for use in social Web services like Facebook and Twitter, will stop working one day.

And if you do think it’s a real problem and not just an annoyance for the service’s users, as well as for Web sites that got referral traffic from the service, then someone’s going to need to think of something. We’re going to see more of this.

That’s because if there is any business at all in URL-shortening, it’s going to be a scale business that ends up in the hands of a couple competitors, max. Just like search. And that means that dozens of mom-and-pop competitors (here’s a visual snapshot, taken last fall, of 117 URL-shorteners) are going to fall by the wayside.

Right now Bit.ly looks to be the Google (GOOG) of URL-shortening, and there is some griping that it got that status unfairly, via a deal with Twitter that made it the service’s default shortener last May (type a long Web address into the message box on Twitter’s Web page, and the service will automatically convert it into a bit.ly link–like this). Not true, says Borthwick–the Twitter deal helped, but it’s not responsible for the majority of Bit.ly’s traffic.

But there’s no reason for Borthwick, Bit.ly or Twitter to be defensive about the deal. If Twitter wants to pick a preferred vendor/partner/developer for any or all of its services, it should do so. It’s not going to do that very often; one of the main reasons that Twitter has taken off is the ecosystem of developers who have built innovative stuff using the service’s open architecture, and it won’t want to discourage that.

And if Twitter wants to work with someone it’s already doing business with–prior to Twitter’s most recent funding round, Betaworks owned a sizable slug of Twitter’s stock, via Twitter’s acquisition of Betaworks portfolio company Summize a year ago–there’s no problem with that, either.

In any case, the Bit.ly/Betaworks guys have other things to worry about. They still need to figure out how to take the data stream they’re mining from all those tiny Web addresses they’re making and do something useful/valuable with it.

Then again, so does Twitter.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090810/an-oversized-ruckus-about-tiny-web-addresses-bitlys-bigfoot-offer-to-the-rest-of-the-business/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090626/michael-jackson-is-dead-jeff-goldblum-is-alive-can-twitter-tell-the-difference/ http://allthingsd.com/20090626/michael-jackson-is-dead-jeff-goldblum-is-alive-can-twitter-tell-the-difference/#comments Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:00:45 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=8649 Big day for Twitter yesterday. News broke, and people promptly turned to the service to spread the word. It’s a story that’s becoming increasingly familiar.

Except…I have this nagging concern.

Like a lot of you, I first learned about Michael Jackson’s death Thursday via Twitter. But at the time, I wasn’t convinced I was learning about it.

I saw tweet after tweet on my BlackBerry declaring the superstar dead. I was mobile, and my Web browser wasn’t working, so my Twitter stream was my only source of information, and I was grateful for it.

But in the first hour the story broke, I was never sure what the source of the information was. And so I never knew whether I should believe it.

Turns out that some of the Twitterers I followed had seen a report, first published at 5:20 Eastern time by TMZ.com, Time Warner’s (TWX) gossip powerhouse. But even if they linked to TMZ, I couldn’t tell that at a glance because they used URL-shorteners like bit.ly that obscured the Web addresses.

And many other Twitterers didn’t bother to explain where they’d heard the information at all. It was just fact. They were right, of course. But were they sure?

In some folks’ eyes, these qualms I have about accuracy and sourcing make me an old media dinosaur. So says a pal who’s worked as a reporter at three big, prestigious old media outlets. Here’s a bit of a missive he sent me via Facebook:

Twitter delivered the news first and fastest. Yes, it was from tmz; but who actually went to tmz.com? I didn’t. I read it on Twitter… and stayed there to read more. Did I turn on CNN? No. Just read the tweets.

This is really bad for old media: Twitter is the water cooler. It is the center of the conversation. Almost every media outlet wants to be the center of a conversation. They’re suddenly failing.

But I don’t think it’s that binary. Twitter and old media are complementary, and the former certainly has less value without the latter.

I eventually got to a Web browser and looked around the Web for other sources confirming Jackson’s death. When I couldn’t find them, I came back to Twitter.

At 6:15 Eastern time, the Los Angeles Times reported that Jackson was dead, citing its own sources. After that I knew that Twitter would primarily be repeating the LAT’s report and those that followed it, so I bailed.

That worked out well. Staying clear of Twitter for a while Thursday night meant I didn’t have to read about Jeff Goldblum’s death. Which never happened, of course. But that didn’t stop Twitter users from repeating the story, over and over.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090626/michael-jackson-is-dead-jeff-goldblum-is-alive-can-twitter-tell-the-difference/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090518/twitter-app-investors-still-writing-checks-stocktwits-raises-a-round/ http://allthingsd.com/20090518/twitter-app-investors-still-writing-checks-stocktwits-raises-a-round/#comments Mon, 18 May 2009 10:00:51 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=7450 Nope, Twitter still hasn’t trotted out a business model yet–a couple of sponsorships from the likes of an AT&T (T) don’t cut it. And that may or may not be a problem for potential acquirers like Google (GOOG) or Microsoft (MSFT). But it’s a nonissue for a growing number of start-ups hoping to succeed simply by positioning themselves in Twitter’s general vicinity.

Today’s example: StockTwits, a day trader-meets-Twitter site that just raised $800,000 from venture capital firm True Ventures. It’s not a ton of money, but StockTwits doesn’t need a ton of money. The site, which launched last fall with an $800,000 angel round, employs all of four people.

And it’s yet another bet that investor Howard Lindzon has made in Twitter: He’s also put money into bit.ly, a Twitter-centric url-shortner, and Tweetdeck, a useful Twitter client, alongside incubator Betaworks, which in turn invested in the StockTwits angel round. Cozy! (Cozier: Lindzon was an early investor in Silicon Alley Insider, my former employer).

Like all of those companies and just about every other company that’s trying to make money from Twitter, StockTwits doesn’t have any kind of formal relationship with Twitter. It doesn’t need one: If you want to take advantage of Twitter’s data and users, you can just plug right in for free via its open API.

As a wise man once said: “All of [these companies] are part of the burgeoning ecosystem that revolves around Twitter, which powers all of their companies by letting them plug into its data stream. In exchange, all of these companies make Twitter more successful, by bolting on frills and features to its bare-bones service.”

Name aside, StockTwits may be less dependent on Twitter than any of the other Twittery start-ups. StockTwits users employ Twitter to pass along investment ideas, but beyond that, it’s a fairly straightforward stock message board, the kind we’ve seen since the first Web boom.

Lindzon and co-founder Soren Macbeth plan to make money via ads and by publishing newsletters/blogs on behalf of some StockTwits users, (two of whom are already selling their investment advice for $60 a month). Basically, Twitter is a lead-generator for the site.

Come to think of it, that could be a business for the Twitter team. Right?

Here’s a video interview I shot with Lindzon last week in which he declined to hand out any stock tips of his own. Presumably he’ll rectify that today.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090518/twitter-app-investors-still-writing-checks-stocktwits-raises-a-round/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090404/weekend-update-40409/ http://allthingsd.com/20090404/weekend-update-40409/#comments Sat, 04 Apr 2009 19:36:24 +0000 Oliver J. Chiang http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=16055

Welcome once more to Weekend Update! I’ll be filling in today for your regular host, Beth Callaghan, who’s on vacation.

And what sane person wouldn’t be, after the slew of Silicon Valley silliness inspired by April Fools Day this past week? Digital pranks were the name of the game as Google (GOOG) and others heaped so many tepid hoaxes upon us that we wanted to call April Fold so as to quickly end this round of gags.

But no bag of tricks was needed for one Web site to April Fool itself into crying wolf about an imminent Google (GOOG) acquisition of Twitter, when a real story around the corner was aboutGoogle turning Turbo Tax tweets into ads.

Meanwhile, one of the biggest jokesters of them all, The Onion, won one of the biggest awards in journalism, a Peabody, meaning that the best sense of humor goes to that panel of judges. And to Stephen Colbert, who was willing to entertain (for a while) Twitter spokesmodel Biz Stone’s biz-model-less thoughts in an interview on “The Colbert Report.” Also on BoomTown this week: Facebook’s former CFO Gideon Yu is out, as was a leaked memo from Mark Zuckerberg about Yu’s departure and the company’s situation.

A sense of humor is certainly an invaluable feather to have in your cap these days. Digital Daily wrote about the most recent doom-and-gloom predictions and events to happen in this econalypse, like analysts’ predictions of YouTube losing $470 million in 2009, the barren IPO-less wasteland VCs are bemoaning and a major global slump in semiconductor sales. Other headlines weren’t quite so dreary: Google’s foray into VC land, the folks at BlackBerry HQ celebrating surprisingly good fourth-quarter results and the world’s worst-kept secret, the anticipated merger between IBM (IBM) and Sun (JAVA).

There was a similar mix of dark clouds and silver linings over at MediaMemo. The National Collegiate Athletics Association forced Twitter and partners AT&T (T) and Federated Media to take down one of its first ad campaigns, “March Tweetness,” crying copyright foul. Also running afoul with big companies in legal waters, free music Web site Seeqpod filed for bankruptcy. And video site Veoh laid off a significant amount of staff and kicked out its old CEO, replacing him with founder Dmitry Shapiro and refocusing the company on its “Video Compass” browser plug-in.

Online video is generally a turbulent space these, but the waiting is the hardest part for Hulu when it comes to the rumored Disney deal in which Disney (DIS) seems to be playing the field. Other gems of the week were URL-shrinking Web service bit.ly’s raising of $2 million and media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s Kindle envy.

In a new Mossblog, Walt Mossberg gives us his first impressions of the BlackBerry App World store in which Research in Motion (RIMM) takes a bold step into what was formerly the sole domain of Apple (AAPL). In Personal Technology, Walt reviews a network hard drive from Western Digital (WDC) that makes the technology gloriously simple for everyone. And in Mossberg Solution, Katherine Boehret takes a look at several laptop trays, designed to protect the–ahem–family jewels and family members in general from laptops’ scorching undersides.

Finally, our exciting Woz-watch, after many weeks, has come to a sad end: Steve Wozniak was voted off “Dancing with the Stars” this week after one misstep too many. Down, but not out, the Apple co-founder swore that the “geeks shall inherit the earth”… just not the dance floor, any time soon. Please.

More next week.

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