Blog of Mr. Tweet

Hi folks, very happy to announce the second version of our Firefox plugin. The first version received great reviews from users and we also received a lot of feedback about what you folks wanted in the next version.

“This tool is very useful! Sometimes I would have to follow people for a few days to find out the information that this plug-in gives me instantly. It makes the decision of whether to follow much easier” - Rebecca Mayo (Review of V1 from Mozilla Website)

V1: Twitter habits and recommendations

In this version, we add on to the goodness of the first version, including features like:

1) Understand a user’s network and tweeting habits at a single glance. See useful information like who he interacts with the most, recommendations he has received, how often he tweets, etc.

Who he interacts with the most

2) Build up relationships by easily recommending him to MrTweet right from his profile.

Recommend awesome people directly from their profile

3) See Twitter search results in Google - an excellent way of getting both types of search results!

Twitter search + Google search = Happiness

4) Enhanced user interface for Twitter.com - threaded conversation, inline pictures, and many more (can easily be enabled/disabled)

Threaded conversations, inline RTs (and others)

Alright folks, convinced that this is goodness manifested yet? If so, head over to the firefox plugin page now!

Dear peeps, over the last 3 months, we have been improving MrTweet according to the hundreds of feedback we get daily via our feedback form and GetSatisfaction.

Here is a summary of improvements we have made over this period:

Revamping Infrastructure To Support Daily Updates: Old time users might recall long periods of suggestions not being updated. We have managed to turn that around completely -Every time you come back to the MrTweet, we will update our suggestions for you.

Updated suggestions everytime you come back

Relevance over celebrities: This is the one we work the hardest on: Fine tuning our suggestions so as to facilitate discovery of relevant folks who share your interests, as opposed to merely popular people. Relevance is a never ending process… but we are trying hard!

Focused on helping YOU find people relevant to your interests

Option for OAuth: Which means you do not need to use your Twitter credentials if you do not want to

Support for OAuth where ever login is needed

New Dashboard: Allows for ease of viewing of your MrTweet suggestions

New Dashboard To Allow You To View Everything In One Place

Make Recommendations In The App: Which means you do not need to tweet out your recommendations

Recommend awesome people in the app itself

We are continuing to make changes based on your feedback, and please let continue to let us know how we can do a better job of being your personal assistant!

One of the most biggest untapped potential of this new social web lies in entrepreneurs using their domain knowledge to create apps that solves real world problems for the verticals they are passionate about.

Tweetminister, an application that aims to allow political professionals to keep updated with the information that matters is one of the first to take a concerted effort in doing so.

Helping Political Professionals Get Started With Ease

With their understanding of the UK political scene, they have created a site that allows political professionals in UK to easily keep up to date with everything that matters without having to set up anything.

LiveWire Screenshot

MrTweet Goodness: Keeping TweetMinister Updated With The Most Influential Folks Automatically

With the ever changing landscape that is politics, with new influential players emerging out of nowhere, the MrTweet discovery technology allows them to retrieve a continuously updated list of influential people in the political scene.

MrTweet Recommendations Inside TweetMinister

This is early days yet of course, but we think this is an prime example of how domain expertise sprinkled with discovery magic can make life for professionals in the domain without any setup work.

If you are a political professional, make sure you check it out and give them more ideas!

Try it here: TweetMinister Livewire

In the most exciting encounter between an owl and a raccoon since the beginning of time,  the co-founder of Mr. Tweet (@mingyeow) met Mr. Seemic (@loic) last week. The meeting ended with Loic pulling out his ever handy Flip Mimo and doing an interview which scared the camera shy mingyeow, probably for life. Check out the video below:

Seriously, Loic has the most energy amongst anyone I have had the pleasure of meeting with. Not to mention Seesmic has tons of great stuff in the works. Be sure to tell Seesmic how you want them to improve their services!

Pacman on Twitter

Link: Flickr

Story of Twitter (so far) - beautifully illustrated, concisely narrated. From Sean Percival of Manolith. Original posting here

The Story Of Twitter, Beautifully Illustrated

 

If you like it, make sure to drop Sean a note!

If you noticed shade of green take over your Twitter stream, do not worry - it is not your eyes. It is a result of a mini movement called Help Iran Election, which grew rapidly from 0 to 20K users using the service to spread awareness of the cause #iranelection in just 12 hours.

Coincidentally, the man behind this great idea happened to be a partner of Mr. Tweet, so needless to say, we grabbed him for an interview for YOU.

I thought it was Greenpeace!

Before we start, I think everyone wants to know more about YOU. Can you give us a bit more about your background?

Me? I guess the best way to describe me is a friendly geek and entrepreneur. I’ve been a developer for a large corporation here in Israel for few years. Did fun stuff there but for the last two years I reduced my position there to part time to finish my cs degree and to do more innovative stuff on the web.

1 user to 20K users in 12 hours. This is probably one of the most coolest ideas I have seen in a long time. How did you come out with the idea?

Well, I saw people changing their avatars manually and I realized it most be a hard process for most common users. I knew it’s possible to update the avatar via the API, so I thought why not help people make it simple and spread the word? The funny thing is the 12 hours ago it was still in development, I gave the link to one person to see how the sites looks like and she clicked on the join link. 30 minutes later I saw 300 people already discovered it and 12 hours later over 20K people joined the cause and more are coming and coming.

Have you been surprised by the response?

I thought it will catch but didnt believe that SO fast. The web these days is truly amazing.

How do you think the Iranian election saga will pan out?

I have no idea. I really try to be optimistic about this, because it seems that the people’s movement in Iran is really strong. And I’m not sure the military will be able to control the situation for much longer, because after all the soldiers are people too and probably have family among the people demonstrating.

As outsiders, what do you we can do? Afterall, awareness is one thing, being actually able to help is another.

I’m not sure what we can do in the “real world” but there are a lot of things we can do in the Internet to help the Iranians spread the word and show what really happens. There seems to be a good guide on Boing Boing for that - link

As an Israeli, you obviously have far more interest in this elections than the most of us. What is the feeling in the Israel about this?

Well, I don’t believe Mousavi is far better than Ahmadinejad for Israel or the world, but the people’s movement that started there because of the elections is the important thing. It really gives hope for a dialogue.

Indeed. And I guess dialogue is the one thing that Twitter is really good at facilitating. What do you think is the real potential of Twitter for the purpose of facilitating social change?

As the platform matures, we see more and more uses of Twitter to faciliate change. What I’ve done is very small compared to the reports of the real pepole in Iran about what’s going on. The fact they have a simple tool to do that is very powerful.

Besides this, you were also one of the co-founders behind Topify, a pretty awesome app for Twitter. What made you put so much faith in Twitter?

I don’t know. Twitter today is like the Facebook platform a year ago - it’s the wild west of the web, waiting for us to be explored. Lots of interesting opportunities and concepts can be tested on it.

Thanks Arik! And remember to turn green to show your support ya?

Last week, we had a lovely time reading your answers to our Mimobot giveaway. We asked for your recommendations on non-profits that are using Twitter brilliantly and received nearly 100 responses! Army wife,  Shirley Brondum (@sbrondum), was the winner of the 8GB Tiki God for recommending @Skipinc as a non-profit who uses Twitter brilliantly. Read what Shirley had to say about Skip Inc here.

This week we will be giving away a copy of The Twitter Book by Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein! Here’s a preview of what you can expect from The Twitter Book:

AND THE WINNER IS: Elizabeth Buie @ebuie, an interaction design and usability consultant! See Elizabeth’swinning question here and be sure to share your thoughts!

Best Answer Wins!

In order to win a copy of The Twitter Book, answer the following question in the comments or on Twitter using the hashtag #ilovemrtweet starting today:

If you could ask the team behind Twitter one question that could help to improve your Twitter experience, what would it be?

Details

This weeks giveaway will end on Friday, June 19th at 12:01 a.m. (3:01a.m. EST). A winner will be chosen on Friday and announced at noon PST (3pm EST).

Since Friday, most of the major tech blogs have been reporting the passing of Rajeev Motwani, who was a Stanford CS professor as well as adviser to many of the most prominent Silicon Valley startups, including Google. He was also the co-authors of several academic papers that would eventually form the basis of Google Page rank.

This is an tremendously sad incident for the tech community, but it struck us here on a personal level as well, because Rajeev has always been a great help to us.

We first met Rajeev last year after an introduction by Howard Hartenbaum of August Capital. He gave us very candid but absolutely spot on advice about what we were doing wrong. One day after that, we changed our entire product direction. It took us a couple more iterations before we created MrTweet, but we always kept his advice close to our hearts.

Earlier in the year, we touched base with him again, and he introduced us to a string of great people, most of whom we are very much still in touch with.

We were about to catch up with him again, but before we could do so, we received this piece of very sad news. Sober reminder that we should never procrastinate on catching up.

Stories like ours are repeated all over the web, with many entrepreneurs and investors lamenting the loss, and remembering how he has helped them. Here are 2 from Segrey Brin and Om Malik. 

For those of you who knew him, Stanford will be holding a public memorial service. We will post it again when we know details of when it is happening.