Twitter Search and Summize Acquisition

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Twitter has taken another step to finally put down the great FailWhale of ’08 by acquiring the real time search service Summize:

Twitter Search
We’re excited to announce that Twitter has acquired Summize—an extraordinary search tool and an amazing group of engineers. All five Summize engineers will move to San Francisco, CA and take jobs at Twitter, Inc. This is an important step forward in the evolution of Twitter as a service and as a company.

Since Twitter’s track functionality has been down, I’ve been a heavy user of Summize (and recommend you do the same through the new search.twitter.com interface).

Here’s to keeping things back on Track on Twitter…

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

Thanks to Hugh McLeod for pointing this out:

Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy: “This is a lightly edited version of the keynote I gave on Social Software at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference in Santa Clara on April 24, 2003

Good morning, everybody. I want to talk this morning about social software …there’s a surprise. I want to talk about a pattern I’ve seen over and over again in social software that supports large and long-lived groups. And that pattern is the pattern described in the title of this talk: ‘A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.’ “

Something to think about as we trounce forward through the murky and undrained swamp of large scale social technologies (especially as marketers)…

YouTube and Google Account Linkage

Of course YouTube is owned by Google (and continually pwnd by narcissistic 16 year olds judging from the comments) so it makes sense that your Google Account (the one used to login to GMail, GCal, Google Docs, etc) should include YouTube.

But I saw this for the first time this evening when visiting YouTube…

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Did I miss something? Isn’t that new?

And if you’re bored, go watch my awesome Kindle videos onmy YouTube channel. I freaking love that thing.

What Is a Social Media Marketer?

I’m still dubious of the term “social media” (or marketer for that matter), but here’s an interesting piece with a variety of voices from Tamar Weinberg…

The Definition of Social Media Marketing: How to Find the Best Social Media Consultant » techipedia | tamar weinberg: “With many individuals finding great success with social media (and as an aside, a basic understanding of search engine optimization), they immediately consider themselves social media marketers and consultants (as well as seasoned SEOs) and offer to sell their promotional services. What skills, though, do successful social media marketers have that put these individuals above the average (or addicted) social media user, and better yet, above the traditional marketer? I asked several social media consultants, bloggers, marketers, search engine optimizers, and social media addicts about what they considered to be essential skills and characteristics of the most efficient and results-driven social media consultants. In the many paragraphs that follow, learn from many of the experts and hear what they consider success when using social media to engage with consumers about products and services.”