New microsyntax for Twitter: three pointers and the slasher
Like text messages, the constraints inherent in the tweet medium inspire creativity. Chris Messina, who documented the hashtag syntax, comes up with a new character-saving idea: the slasher or slashtags. A slash followed by a compact vocabulary to help metadata. The first three “words” in this vocabulary are via, cc and by.
First, I’ve decided to migrate from encapsulating my metadata in parentheses to using a slash delimiter (”/”), which, for shits and giggles, we’ll call “the slasher”. This saves you ONE character, but hey, those singletons add up!
A Liberal, Accurate Regex Pattern for Matching URLs
Gruber attempts the impossible.
This pattern attempts to be practical. It makes no attempt to parse URLs according to any official specification. It isn’t limited to predefined URL protocols. It should be clever about things like parentheses and trailing punctuation.
Twitter Starts Charging in Japan
Twitter’s Japanese partner, Digital Garage, is running an experiment in Japan where it will allow Twitter users to charge others to read their updates. Twitter acts as the middle man and takes a cut of the charge—reportedly 30%—with the rest going to the charging Twitter user. It looks like Twitter will offer both subscription and pay-per-tweet options.
This is a classic information broker approach, so what kind of users will take up Twitter’s brokerage offer? With Twitter’s broad reach, low priced subscriptions could provide good returns. Running this experiment in Japan makes sense, as the Japanese are more used to paying for web content than people in the western world. TechCrunch lists a few more reasons why this has more chance of working in Japan. In the west, it might make more sense to charge the account owner, rather than the follower, and provide premium tools of some kind.
The mobile data apocalypse, and what it means to you
A very interesting piece on the future of mobile data. The conclusion of the piece is that the cell data network is in trouble, and there’s going to have to be some serious cooperation between parties which have historically not been good at cosying up together.
But in the last year or so, the attitude has shifted dramatically from "no one is using mobile data" to "oh my God, there's so much demand for mobile data that it'll destroy the network." A lot of this attitude shift was caused by the iPhone, which has indeed overloaded some mobile networks. But there's also a general uptick in data usage from various sources, and the rate of growth seems to be accelerating.
The premise that there are cell data network issues certainly rings true for me: I’ve noticed in Bristol that it’s rare for my iPhone to find more than a trickle of bandwidth from the cell network. So I hope this problem gets proper attention, and fast. —via @timbray
Talking of social network revenue models, Ethan Zuckerman talks about the funding models for social networks, and how advertising isn’t likely to be a panacea for funding internet ventures in general. It’s an involved article, but worth reading if you’re at all interested in the business and research of the web.
Internet advertising works extremely well in the context of a search engine. Many searches are intended to lead to transactions, so matching a paid ad to a query is sometimes a good user experience. Advertising can work well in the context of niche content – a website focused on cross-country skiing is a great place to advertise to cross-country skiiers, and there’s a decent chance they’re going to be interested in learning about your ski wax. Ads on sites like Facebook work much less well, and while targetting those ads based on demographics may make them more effective, that targeting doesn’t fix the core problem: people are using social network sites to communicate, not to consume content, and they don’t want to be bothered by ads when they’re communicating.