Friday Five – May 27, 2011

Let’s start off in the world of Twitter…

#1 – Official: TweetDeck Has Been Acquired By Twitter [Tweetdeck Blog]

The past three years have been an epic journey, with many highs and lows, accompanied by the constant thrill of never really knowing what to expect next. We’ve grown from one team member and a single user, to a team of fifteen and a user-base of millions. The reason for this growth is simple – our unwavering focus on providing high-quality tools and services for the Twitter-centric power-user. This has always been our core audience – the most active, influential and valuable users of Twitter and social media in general. Quality over quantity.

It is precisely for this reason that Twitter has acquired TweetDeck. The mainstream Twitter user-base is well catered for by twitter.com and the official mobile clients. And by becoming part of the official platform, TweetDeck will now fill that role for brands, influencers, the highly active and anyone that just needs “more power”.

Hmm… as a Tweetdeck user myself, this one could be tricky. One of the things that makes some of the third party applications for Twitter (or any service) great, is that they extend and push the capabilities of the service itself. Having Tweetdeck as a part of Twitter may limit that innovation. I’m particularly curious to see what will become of deck.ly, which when it was launched by Tweetdeck a few months ago created a bit of a stir because it overrode what many see as a weakness in Twitter’s 140 character limit. Will Twitter kill deck.ly, leave it as-is, or make the Twitter service itself more robust?

While we’re talking about Twitter…

 

#2 – Ending Support for Tweed, our Twitter client for HP webOS [Pivotal Labs]

Over the past two years we’ve worked on Tweed, our webOS Twitter client, we’ve learned a lot about mobile development, JavaScript techniques and of course the Twitter client space. But the landscape has changed a lot recently so we’ve been thinking a lot about Tweed.

We’ve realized that it takes a lot of resources to maintain a Twitter client to the level of features and quality that Twitter users demand. The Twitter API changes frequently and new Twitter-related services appear all the time.

HP is shipping new webOS devices and has a new framework to go with them so we would need to reinvest a lot of time in order to keep up with the platform.

Add in that Twitter recently changed their policy regarding 3rd party client applications and the justification of continued effort is questionable.

After careful consideration we decided that the correct course of action is to formally end development and support for Tweed.

My mobile Twitter client of choice was Tweed. It’s amazing just how short the product lifecycle is in the mobile space. Two years and out for Tweed. I guess one of the problems with the low retail cost for mobile apps is that the developers frequently aren’t making enough money to justify continuing to maintain these products when they bore of them. On the upside, there’s always another app ready to take its place. My new webOS Twitter app is Carbon.

 

#3 – LinkedIn Doubles on First Day of Public Sale [CMS Wire]

People looking to LinkedIn’s IPO as a bellwether for how social media sites would do in the stock market are happy today as the stock more than doubled in its first day, after sales in it were delayed for half an hour just in an attempt to match supply with demand.

…

LinkedIn’s initial public offering was expected to be valued at US$ 32 to US$ 35 a share, raising US$ 260 million and giving the company a valuation of up to US$ 3.3 billion. Due to expected increased demand, the company earlier this week raised its share price to US$ 42 to US$ 45, giving it a valuation of up to US$ 4 billion.

How LinkedIn did in its IPO was important not just for itself, but for a number of other pre-IPO social media companies, including Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc., Zynga Inc. and Groupon Inc., that were waiting to see how LinkedIn did.

After today, it should be safe to say that we’ll be seeing more IPOs in this market space.

So… the tech IPO craze returns with LinkedIn. Interesting that demand shot the price up all the way to ~$86. Of course, as with most IPOs… people buy into the craze, ride the wave up, then it quickly falls back down. My guess is that it’s a good time to short LNKD (I don’t short sell, myself). I think LinkedIn has some serious issues to work out with their product so that it doesn’t just become a spamming ground. It’s pretty good as an online resume, but falls short in a lot of other areas. Disclaimer: The author does not hold any positions in any of the stocks mentioned. Also, do not take investing advice from an IT guy.

 

#4 – How people really use LinkedIn: The truth is in the numbers [OpenDNS Blog]

We took a look at visits to LinkedIn during a one work-week period in May, Monday through Friday, in the United States, and the results were surprisingly consistent. (Time zones were normalized.) Overwhelmingly people visit LinkedIn the most between 8 am and 4 pm, with a dramatic decline during non-working hours.

There are several ways to interpret this data, but one thing is clear: people use LinkedIn during the workday. And almost exclusively during the workday. My expectation was that the numbers would point to more evening usage – folks spending non-work time polishing up their profiles and making connections, but that is clearly not the case. Next week we’ll take a look at Facebook visits and compare LinkedIn with Facebook. Perhaps some patterns will emerge…

A professional networking site is going to be used during business hours. And since “non-business hours” are diminishing for many people, business hours are turning into “those hours when people are most likely to be in front of their computer.”

 

#5 – Behold, the World’s Worst PowerPoint Slide [Gizmodo]

It’s almost brilliant in its horror. Diabolical. The arrows. The colors. This is Satan’s face.

Is a single part of this slide legible, or even comprehensible in some abstract sense? Was the audience given telescopes during the meeting? Do those boxes even say anything, or is this just some sort of psychological experiment?

Happy Memorial Day weekend!