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  • Name: Eric Weitner
  • Location: New York
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  • Web: amplify.com
  • Bio: Web technologist, proud father of two, jedi aficionado. Director of Development and one of the founders of Amplify.com and Clipmarks.
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Eric Weitner's Recent Activity

recommended Liz Christina's clip
Google Beaten by Facebook
recommended Ed Webb's clip
This is ill
recommended Hugh Briss's clip
Study shows that people ignore Twitter results on Google
recommended Daniel Durrant's clip
Exposure to letters A or F can affect test performance
recommended Eric Goldstein's clip
Some call it curation. We call it Amplify (via @AlexSchleber)

Categories

Twitter is driven by power users

The 90:10 rule in effect, I guess.

Amplify’d from mashable.com
A study conducted by Harvard Business Review reveals that most Twitter users don’t actually use the service much, or even at all. In fact, 10% of active users are responsible for over 90% of all Tweets.
25% of Twitter users don’t tweet at all, while 50% of users tweet less than once every 74 hours. Active users, on the other hand, tweet a lot, which makes Twitter a lot more like Wikipedia than an average social network
twitter-research-1
See more at mashable.com
 

“The year the media died”

Theme song about the death of the traditional ad industry … in the tune of American Pie … “Tech has taken us for a ride” … classic, jargon dense, and pretty smart.

Amplify’d from gawker.com
See more at gawker.com
 

Twitter stops showing your @replies to non-followers

Seems like Twitter is borrowing a move from Facebook here.

Amplify’d from gawker.com

Technically, Twitter has stopped displaying what the site’s power users call “@replies” — messages broadcast in public, but directed at a specific user — when the viewer doesn’t also follow the message’s target. Twitter users will still see conversations, but only when they happen entirely within their social circle.

For the attention-deficited social butterflies of Silicon Valley, this is a horrible development: They can no longer ignore their existing friends in favor of constantly finding new ones.

But for the mass market Twitter hopes to tap, this is a great thing. New users find Twitter overwhelming and confusing; some 60 percent drop out after signing up, according to Nielsen, which means Twitter is proving far less capable of retaining an audience than Facebook or MySpace. These Twitter quitters mean that Twitter’s growth lies on the edge of a knife. While its traffic numbers are growing at an unheard-of pace, it could lose its audience all too easily.

Read more at gawker.com
 

Post to Twitter using only your thoughts

Ok, this is simultaneously pretty amazing and absolutely terrifying.  Bookmarklet??  I hear Derek is working on moving orange lines with his thoughts.

Amplify’d from wistechnology.com
MADISON - In early April, Adam Wilson posted a status update on the social networking Web site Twitter - just by thinking about it.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineering doctoral student, Wilson is among a growing group of researchers worldwide who aim to perfect a communication system for users whose bodies do not work, but whose brains function normally. Among those are people who have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), brain-stem stroke or high spinal cord injury.
“We started thinking that moving a cursor on a screen is a good scientific exercise,” says Justin Williams, a UW-Madison assistant professor of biomedical engineering and Wilson’s adviser. “But when we talk to people who have locked-in syndrome or a spinal-cord injury, their No. 1 concern is communication.”Read more at wistechnology.com
 

The Web Trend Map

This has been going around the past couple of days, but absolutely worth a clickthrough to the original PNG (I clipped a link to it below).  The breadth of successful web brands and their interconnectedness, as represented as subway format.  Pretty interesting.

Amplify’d from valleywag.gawker.com
Sure, the fourth “Web Trend Map” from branding firm Information Architects is a nifty piece of graphic design. But that’s not what makes it viral.
It’s the human impulse to try and find one’s brand, or one’s employer’s, among the “most influential” that turns the bastardized Tokyo subway map into self-promulgating piece of marketingRead more at valleywag.gawker.com
Amplify’d from informationarchitects.jp
Download: For the final feedback round, we only offer a PNG (2.6MB).Read more at informationarchitects.jp
 

Ambiently - web discovery engine via a bookmarklet

Pretty interesting new service, def chek out how Tweet It functionality is incorporated into the relevant content that is returned.

Amplify’d from www.readwriteweb.com
Ambiently is not actually a search engine, it’s a “web discovery engine.” What’s the difference? A search engine answers your manually typed-in query with a list of links, but a discovery engine provides relevant content directly related to the web page you’re currently viewing.

Naming aside, what’s interesting about this search tool is that it’s not a destination site you have to remember to visit. Instead, you activate your searches by just clicking on an Ambiently bookmarklet to launch a page of related links.

See more at www.readwriteweb.com
 

Who’s really tweeting?

Quick and interesting read on who or what is behind some celebrities on Twitter, including 50 Cent, Briney Spears, Keith Olberman, and Chistopher Walken.

Amplify’d from valleywag.gawker.com

50 Cent, né Curtis Jackson III, has hired a Web ghostwriter, Chris Romero, also known as Broadway, to post updates on the message-broadcasting service for him, the New York Times reports.

What we have here is a rapper with a stage name who relies on another guy with an extra moniker to represent his real, authentic self to fans. Is your head spinning yet?

Wall Street Journal editor Julia Angwin likewise recently figured out the point of Twitter: It is not about living your life with friends in real time. It is about promoting your work to gullible strangers.

That’s the grand irony of Twitter: Even the real people on the service are fake. They are their own simulacra. No one actually lives their life 140 characters at a time. What we do is turn ourselves into works of fiction. Who’s real? Who’s not? Who cares?

Read more at valleywag.gawker.com
 

Has Facebook Jumped the Shark?

Interesting article, and all of the reader’s reactions to the resdeign seem unanimously negative.

Amplify’d from valleywag.gawker.com
Has Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg been driven mad by envy? In his effort to redesign his social network in the image of Twitter, he may well end up destroying everything good about it, users say.
But as people get used to the latest changes, they’re starting to realize that this redesign is simply, objectively bad.

Facebook actually introduced status updates before Twitter even launched, a fact few people now remember among the wave of Twitter hype. But the sites have long differed in their presentation of updates. Twitter shows all your friends’ updates in an undifferentiated fashion; try to go back more than an hour or two, and you get lost in the noise. Until now, an algorithm has ruled Facebook’s presentation of updates, so only the most interesting bits show up on a user’s “news feed”; not all updates show up, but the vital ones do.

Read more at valleywag.gawker.com
 

iPhone competitor?

Amplify’d from valleywag.gawker.com

Bono is a founder of Elevation Partners, the Silicon Valley private-equity firm named after the U2 song. And Elevation just sank another $100 million into Palm, the troubled smartphone maker. Palm, which waited too long to switch its product lineup from electronic organizers to souped-up cell phones and whose Treo smartphone is showing its age, lost more than $500 million in the most recent quarter. Bono’s firm now owns 39 percent of Palm.

Read more at valleywag.gawker.com
 

Web Notes, new web annotation service

Amplify’d from venturebeat.com

Yet another web annotation service is launching today. WebNotes is releasing virtual highlighting and sticky-note tools designed to help people track and annotate online content. The tools let users highlight text on, or stick notes to, web pages. They also let users organize their annotations into files and share those files with others via email or PDF.

Read more at venturebeat.com