Hearst Corporation is rumored to be buying digital ad company iCrossing for $375 million. iCrossing would earn additional bonuses if reaching certain targets. “While going through the process of evaluating iCrossing’s position in the market, we have spoken with, and entered into, non-disclosure agreements with many companies,” stated iCrossing spokesperson Dana Mellecker. Hearst is the parent company of 15 newspapers and 14 magazines. [Reuters]
Whether you realize it or not, every single tweet that is being sent out has a set of instructions or rules integrated into the back-end. The instructions are known as structured metadata that are part of an annotations.
Here’s another way of looking at it. When you send out a tweet, there is a unique ID number that is associated with the tweet that gets noted. Where the tweet came from is noted (i.e. the web, TweetDeck, Tweetie, Hootsuite, Seesmic, etc). The time it was created is noted. Even the longitude and the latitude of every tweet is noted if the user opts in for that feature. These tweet properties have a special character name within Twitter’s database that is being accessed by developers through the use of APIs.
The reason why knowing this is a big deal is because Twitter will soon be allowing developers to create their own Annotations and have them created on the fly when reporting tweets being sent out. Annotations are expected to be available this fall.
So what are the existing character names that developers can access through APIs and what do they do? Raffi Krikorian, a member of the API/Platform team at Twitter created a map of Twitter Status Objects and posted it on his Posterous account. Below is the document he created, hosted on Scribd.
In this viral video, the Red Bull skydive team pulled off an interesting stunt. About 5,000 feet above mountains in Styria, Austria — Paul Steiner climbed out of a glider plane that was going over 100MPH and slid down to another plane that was flying below him. The plane above him flipped upside down so that the tail fin was right above Steiner’s head. Steiner reached his arms up to grab the tail fin so it looked like he was linking the two planes. After that Steiner jumped off and did a skydive. These Red Bull guys are extreme! This video has well over 300,000 views and was uploaded on April 8.
Over the weekend Mark Zuckerberg updated his Facebook status by saying “Just checked in some code and unit tests for f8.” f8 is developer conference hosted by the social network company where they announce progress made at the company and new features that will become available. Blake Ross asked Zuckerberg what the code was about, but he said that Ross would have to wait until f8. Ross was one of the core developers behind the Firefox browser. Ross joined Facebook after the social network company acquired his startup Parakey. [TechCrunch]
Alyssa Milano was on Jimmy Kimmel Live explained a tweet that she sent out about being on the show. She wrote that she was nervous on Twitter, said Kimmel was “dreamy,” and used the hashtag #DontJudgeMe. Check out the video below. [Mashable]
Austin Ventures has invested $1.6 million Spredfast. Spredfast has a social media analytics platform. Spredfast’s dashboard works on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, WordPress, Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, Lotus Live Connections, Drupal, etc. Spredfast’s basic services are free, but premium services cost $100 per month. [ReadWriteWeb]
GMail Software Engineer Adam de Boor wrote about a new feature this past week. GMail now has a drag-and-drop interface for attachments. Currently it is only supported on Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox 3.6. Adam said that the feature will be added to other browsers when they start to support this feature. [GMail Blog]
Dodgeball co-founder Alex Rainert has joined Foursquare as the chief product officer. Rainert and Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley founded Dodgeball together.
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