Twitter Wants An Intere...

Twitter does a lot of things right, but it still hasn’t solved the problem of turning its noise into signal. After joining Twitter, it can take a lot of following and unfollowing scores of accounts before you’ve curated a stream that makes sense for you. With its platform growing fast, Twitter is looking to make the onboarding process a little easier (and more personalized) for new users, which is why it announced today via its blog that it will begin serving users tailored suggestions of who they should follow. Twitter is calling its new personalization features “experiments,” (in other words, they’re in beta), which will manifest for users in several ways. The first being that it will show new users a list of recommended accounts, which will be accompanied by a timeline that features tweets from those recommended accounts. New users (who are part of the beta testing) will see the list as soon as they sign up, but will not be required to follow their suggestions. For those of us already using The Twitters, if you’re a lucky winner, you’ll begin to see Twitter’s suggestions in the “Who To Follow” box on the left side of your homescreen. From what we can tell, the box won’t be altered from its current placement/design, but will instead just start showing more relevant suggestions. To see who Twitter will recommend for you, check out their preview page here . So, how exactly is Twitter going about serving you these recommendations? The suggestions are “based on accounts followed by other Twitter users and visits to websites in the Twitter ecosystem,” meaning that Twitter is culling the data that it receives from other websites that are utilizing its buttons/widgets, identifying the accounts that are most followed by people who visit those sites, and recommending it to you based on similarities with those users in your own Twitter activity. Twitter will be offering the ability to turn this functionality off. This comes with the context of the announcement earlier today that Twitter will be supporting Mozilla’s “Do Not Track” feature, which allows users to opt-out of those pesky third-party cookies, including … wait for it … those used in advertising. This morning, that seemed just a symbolic gesture on Twitter’s part, because they weren’t really tracking you anyway. With the addition of their follow recommendation engine, now this move makes perfect sense, and is obviously timed perfectly. Now Twitter can just say that, hey, if you don’t like it tracking your activity, turn on Do Not Track. As to who’s supporting: Firefox, Safari and IE9 already have some form of Do Not Track features built-in, but it seems that only Firefox is really evangelizing. However, all three browsers should be compatible with DNT, and allow for opt-outs. There is more information about Twitter’s integration with Do Not Track reflected in its privacy policy , so, as mentioned, if you’ve got it enabled in one of those browsers, you won’t see any tailored suggestions. With the heightened interest and concern over the way social networks (and beyond) are using our personal data, this is a smart move on Twitter’s part to ensure users that it’s taking transparency (and privacy) seriously. The other important piece of this is that people who are new to Twitter will see an option to tailor their feeds based on the sites they’re visiting from twitter, accompanied by a “learn more” link, whereas current users will find a “personalization” section added to their account settings. Users can disable personalization at any time, which prevents Twitter from collecting information on your activity, and as the blog post adds, “You can even choose to turn off tailored suggestions from the preview page (which shows some suggestions we’d make for you).” What’s really interesting here is that this is the first sign of Twitter getting serious about building its own interest graph, as if you’d ever get tired of all this “graph” talk, right? But this is the social network’s first big move that shows it following in the footsteps of Facebook, as the more personal info they collect on your interests and activity on their platform, the more info there is to feed targeted advertising and tweets. For more, check out Twitter’s blog post here , and current users c an test out preview here . Do Not Track info here. Do Not Track info here. Additional reporting from Frederic Lardinois

Balloonduck: Where Pint...

We first wrote about Balloonduck back in March . At the time, the social network was accepting invite requests prior to a full launch, so as to avoid empty room syndrome. But today is the big day: Balloonduck has hit 1,500 invite requests and is now officially live. If you perchance haven’t heard about the service, it’s basically a Pinterest-style Twitter, but with questions being the main content. Users can post a question about anything really — it can extend as far as curiosity will allow — along with a picture, at which point other users can perhaps share their expertise with an answer. Of course, this is yet another social network to deal with, but I don’t see it as a full-time obligation the way that Twitter and Facebook are. You can simply visit the site whenever you’re a curious cat, and (instead of dying) you’ll likely learn something new from another user. But better than the idea itself is the user interface. It seems somewhat Pinterest-influenced in that images are large and center stage, despite the fact that most question and answer networks are text-based. This adds a new level of beauty to what could end up looking like a Quora. Almost all scrolling is also horizontal, which distinguishes the site from other social networks that remain wholly vertical. Since the beta launch, Balloonduck has also added user profiles, offering space for a picture and a couple lines about where you’re from, how old you are, your gender, and your profession. Balloonduck is currently accepting invite requests, and will continue to release invites every few hours, so if you’re interested in asking some questions, head over to Balloonduck now and ask for an invite. Click to view slideshow.

Twitter Now Honors Mozi...

Mozilla’s Do Not Track feature, which allows users to tell websites that they would like to opt-out of being tracked by third parties, is starting to gain some traction among both users and publishers. According to new data shared by Mozilla today , 8.6% of Firefox desktop users and 19% of mobile users now turn this opt-in feature on. The latest company to announce  that it will honor Do Not Track is Twitter. As Do Not Track isn’t so much a technical solution that just blocks tracking cookies and more like a gentlemen’s agreement between sites and their users, its success completely depends on being supported by publishers and developers. As for the major browser developers, Microsoft and Apple are already on board (and IE9, it is worth noting, already offers a somewhat more aggressive “tracking protection” tool). Google, too, plans to support Do Not Track later this year and Opera is building it into its upcoming Opera 12 release. A number of major online companies, including our parent company AOL, as well as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have already pledged support for Do Not Track. For Twitter, which doesn’t rely on tracking and third-party advertising as much as other sites, pledging support for Do Not Track was probably not a very hard decision. The Federal Trade Commission’s CTO, Ed Felten, just mentioned Twitter now supports Do Not Track. We applaud the FTC’s leadership on DNT. — Twitter (@twitter) May 17, 2012

Twitter Allows Firefox ...

Twitter may further separate itself from the social media crowd by doing something that some might think is anti-social media (at least from a business point of view). That something is allowing users to opt in to a ‘Do Not track’ mode when using the Firefox browser. The New York Times Bits blog reports It’s no secret that Facebook is worth about $100 billion because it collected personal data about its users. A lot of data. Although Twitter tracks its users too — albeit in a much less aggressive way — the company has decided to take a different route. It announced Thursday that it is joining Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox Web browser, and giving its users the ability to opt-out of being tracked in any way through Twitter. Twitter is doing this by enabling the Do Not Track feature in the Firefox browser that enables people to opt-out of cookies that collect personal information and any third-party cookies, including those used for advertising. The Do Not Track functionality will only work if a Web site agrees to acknowledge it. Couple this action with Twitter’s recent vigorous resistance to turning over information about a user who was part of the Occupy Wall Street ‘movement’. Because Twitter’s focus is more about the news and information that a user passes along vs. the user itself, they can play thins kind of user friendly game MUCH more easily than Facebook can. Facebook is completely dependent on the individual characteristics and data of users so advertisers can decide who they want to target. Twitter, on the other hand, is driven by keywords and hashtags which are different forms of determining what a Twitter user may or may not want to see with regards to ads. Has Twitter found a way to further differentiate and distance itself from Facebook and even Google in the privacy realm? If yes then they have scored a rather large coup. Let’s face it, no matter what happens in Friday’s IPO Facebook will always be positioned as a necessary evil by users. This love / hate relationship is one that makes Facebook more susceptible to the whims of the individual especially if they are feeling wronged by the service (and, of course, another viable social option exists which is a big question mark). Twitter is saying “Hey, it’s cool if we don’t have more data on you than you would like us to have.” and that is like a blast of fresh air in the day and age of ‘nothing is sacred or private in the online world.” Twitter is already different but this makes it more so and that is a very good thing for them and for users. What’s another advantage of Twitter’s move in this direction. Well, how about having the news be “announced” by a high ranking official of the FTC? Yup, that’s the government telling an Internet company “Nice work!”. To Twitter that is priceless. Carolyn Penner, a spokeswoman for Twitter, said in a statement, “As the Federal Trade Commission’s CTO, Ed Felten, mentioned this morning, Twitter now supports Do Not Track.” Ms. Penner added: “We applaud the FTC’s leadership on Do Not Track, and are excited to provide the benefits of Do Not Track.” Twitter has been laying low as of late which isn’t hard to do in this Facebook IPO feeding frenzy. Maybe we should already start to ignore the IPO and see what the competition is doing? After all, unless you are getting rich from this IPO it should be business as usual and, despite the hype, there is much more to the social marketing world than just Facebook. Thank God for that.

News Discovery Site Pri...

Startup Prismatic claims to show you news related to “what you’re actually interested in.” Starting today, users can to reveal those interests to others with newly launched profiles. When I first heard about Prismatic, my kneejerk reaction was, “Oh God, another Flipboard competitor.” Making matters worse, the company is building a website first and doesn’t have a smartphone or tablet app yet, which is awfully unsexy. But co-founder and CEO Bradford Cross says the company’s is pursuing a genuinely new approach to the problem, which is why it’s sticking to the Web for now and remains invite-only. So what does the bit about “actually interested in” mean? Cross says that if you look at Flipboard and the hordes of competitors, they’re mostly showing you content that’s already in your social stream — on Twitter, that means you’re just seeing headlines from people and publications that you already follow. Some startups claim to take a broader view, but Cross says that if you look at the content that gets highlighted, it’s still stuff from your Twitter feed. (I haven’t taken a close enough look at other apps to back this up, but I can say that the content usually isn’t different enough or better enough to lure me away from Flipboard.) In large part, he says that’s because they’re trying to bolt social discovery onto existing products. Prismatic’s technology, on the other hand, is more topic-based — it looks at what you’ve been sharing on social networks to determine your interests, then recommends topics and publications for you to follow. Hopefully, you’ll start finding content that you would have missed otherwise. The new profiles provide a way to share and find that content. Each profile includes a visualization of all your different interests. You can see co-founder Aria’s visualization Haghighi above — the more you interact with a topic, the larger the bubble. There’s also a stream of stories showing the news that you’ve interacted with recently. This creates a more social way to find new interests to follow and stories to read. It can also tell you something new about your friends. For example, Haghighi and I were acquaintances back when we were both undergraduates at Stanford, but his Prismatic profile was almost a revelation. Given his interest in science fiction and comic books, including a giant profile image of Batman and highlighting content about author China Mieville, I realized that we should totally be best friends. (I’m not sure about that whole computer science thing though.) Some of this information could probably be inferred via Facebook profile and likes, but Prismatic is putting interest information and news-sharing front-and-center — which should also make you feel more comfortable sharing news in a context where you don’t have to worry about annoying your friends. Prismatic profiles have just gone live for every user with more than 10 interests (so I need a few more interests to activate mine). The company has raised $1.2 million in funding from Battery Ventures, Javelin Venture Partners, and undisclosed angels. You can request an invite here .