Disqus - Latest Comments for nickhalstead

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/08/better-retweet-button-is-out-there-via.html

nickhalstead — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 20:02:05 -0000

But this new button is 'totally' tied to bit.ly - we support 12 shortener services, so you are not tied to anyone. I think @jeresig is awesome and a click count button is an interesting idea. I believe myself that 'clicks' is much less valuable as a click doesnt mean someone liked something whereas a retweet is someone specifcally saying they 'like' something.

Of course you are relying upon us a single point of failure - but we server 75 million buttons a day now, and still growing. We arnt going anywhere :)

Look out tomorrow for a massive reason why our button will suddenly bring you a whole new world of engagement.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/08/better-retweet-button-is-out-there-via.html

nickhalstead — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:50:33 -0000

Can you explain better? We are all for competition with our service, but better is totally inaccurate.

We have the following advantages,

* Customizable shortener service (rather than being fixed to bit.ly)
* Custom @[whoever]
* Logged in retweeting (you will find out why this is important tomorrow)
* RSS / Email support - to embed the button

Lastly a known brand, people press our button because they know what it does.

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners, part II (Scripting News)

nickhalstead — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 19:11:51 -0000

Dave,

Interesting plan, but http://www.adjix.com/ is not doing proper redirects, it currently builds a page with a META REFRESH tag in to do the redirect, which only a browser can follow.

Re: Disqus Forks Into Two Products, Launches Revamped Real-Time Comment System

nickhalstead — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:17:21 -0000

is anyone else seeing live updates? I have it on 'newest first' - but havent seen one new comment pop-up?

Re: louisgray.com: ReTweet.com's Rip-off Of TweetMeme Is Embarrassing and Wrong

nickhalstead — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:08:56 -0000

definitely not coasting -> http://blog.tweetmeme.com/2009/08/19/comments-a...

Re: louisgray.com: ReTweet.com's Rip-off Of TweetMeme Is Embarrassing and Wrong

nickhalstead — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:18:20 -0000

John,

TweetMeme was around way before twitturly, if you look at the date of this original coverage for TweetMeme -> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/28/the-killer... it launched in January 2008

But it only become popular when we revisited it in February this year, so you can be forgiven for thinking that :)

Re: Coming Soon: Retweetable Blog Comments

nickhalstead — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:40:02 -0000

I dont anticipate any outcry, as we are only doing what Digg/Mixx/Reddit do - and allow people to leave comments in reference to a story link, you have to go to the blog/news/image/whatever to read the story, you then come back (if you want) and can leave comments. We purely want to build a community that is active on TweetMeme itself. And by getting further retweets of comments, we then hope that the story itself gets further coverage.

So definitely better for blog owners, as we hope to drive them more traffic. What people do with our API is up to the developers.

Re: Coming Soon: Retweetable Blog Comments

nickhalstead — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 12:59:32 -0000

We are not trying to be a replacement comment system for blogs. The comments occur on TweetMeme. If Disqus or others want to aggregate our comments into their stream of comments like they do for Twitter/Friendfeed more the better. This post is a little miss-leading on our purpose - go read our post here and you will understand http://blog.tweetmeme.com/2009/08/19/comments-a...

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/08/favorit-shuts-down-as-companys-focus.html

nickhalstead — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 12:51:34 -0000

It would be a boring world if we all agreed all the time, I think at the time my frustration showed through that the vision I had for the reader ended up being overly complex + not approachable. The concepts + vision (as I stated in my post) have certainly been picked up by the lazyfeed.com people and executed in a way that does make it have the 'potential' for mainstream.

But most importantly, the work we did and the lessons we learnt meant when we approached tweetmeme, we really focused on keeping it simple, and making sure those simple things are what the users want.

btw - we need to help you sort out your retweet button, so it retweets you instead of us! :)

Re: Confirmed: Digg Just Hijacked Your Twitter Links

nickhalstead — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 19:07:18 -0000

From TweetMeme's point of view if this stays the same way we will be forced to remove it from our whitelist of shorteners, as by definition this no longer makes Digg a shortening service. We included Digg.com because we felt the addition allowed users the ability to gain extra traction along with the shortening support.

Re: Marketing is what hurts startups. If you're famous how hard can it be?

nickhalstead — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 16:12:42 -0000

Just a slight correction - it is not 'twitturlys' retweet button, it is TweetMeme.com - the one you have on this blog :)

But great article apart from that :)

Re: Repeets Tracks the Hottest Retweets

nickhalstead — Mon, 18 May 2009 18:31:35 -0000

Just a quick one, TweetMeme has always had the feature to track what a user has previously tweeted (you can inline retweet them as well!) -> e.g. here is my twitter account http://tweetmeme.com/user.php?user=nickhalstead

Re: Retweet is stupid (Scripting News)

nickhalstead — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 18:42:32 -0000

Your missing the point completely - its a simple KISS statement, yes they could add a field for like/tweet whatever, but that changes the simple model of why twitter is kicking friendfeeds arse and will continue to do so. For all the techie goodness that FF has it is too fecking complicated for the average user and that isnt going to changed.

Re: Retweet is stupid (Scripting News)

nickhalstead — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 18:21:39 -0000

I agree it should be simple - so for the tweetmeme button/widget thats now on mashable, RRW, (and a shed load of others) - Very soon when you press the button it wont require you to redirect back to twitter, we will just do it for you. So it will be very much your 'like' on friendfeed.

Re: Celebrating Aggregation

nickhalstead — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 18:19:32 -0000

Totally agree, they are scared by what they see - and would right now prefer to try and stop the aggregation. Let us hope they see the error in their thinking, but am sure AP in general and lots of the companies that make it up all think the same.

You may also want add tweetmeme.com to your list Fred, we do have a Food & Drink section which picks up all kinds of stuff people are sharing on twitter -> http://tweetmeme.com/?category=lifestyle-fooddrink

Re: Predictions on How Twitter Will Change Blogs in 2009 | SocialComputingMagazine.com

nickhalstead — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 08:20:07 -0000

Bill, a good read. These things are certainly already happening. You will see on mashable that they have a widget that shows the tweet count (like a digg button) - this is coming form our site http://www.tweetmeme.com , the buttons can be embedded anywhere and we also have a wordpress plugin to automate the whole process.

We also have widgets to show the most popular stories - http://widget.tweetmeme.com

Re: Why Andrew Orlowski from The Register is a twat

nickhalstead — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:27:22 -0000

Frank you are a f**king retard - how can you attack a venture that is purely designed to help people with no financial gain for any parties involved, you must have a seriously f**ked up view of life if this is what makes you happy.

Amanda + the rest of the team worked so amazingly hard to raise money for those less fortunate than ourselves and the best you can do is question how much they raised.

You have have no integrity at all.

Re: Winklevoss twins made $65 million on Facebook “copycat” settlement

nickhalstead — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 14:16:59 -0000

"but this is PHP code, not exactly hard-to-write stuff." - are you a coder? if you were you wouldnt make a stupid throw away statement like this, PHP drives a very large % of the best websites out there, and that with 150 million users on Facebook (written in PHP) that you don't think it is complex?

All programming languages are just tools, what you do with them is down to the intelligence of the individual. Unless of course your still playing with logo?

Re: The Twitter tsunami

nickhalstead — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 09:27:33 -0000

What interested me was to look at Google search volume for the word 'twitter' as mainstream TV audience in the UK will likely not have a clue what it is, and would be interesting to see how many Jonthan Ross viewers did a search - alas Google insight DB is out of date - http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=twitte...

Also the BBC has had a surge in twitter related articles (mainly related to Stephen Fry + Ross coverage from the show) - but this must be creating a massive mainstream spike. I think the lack of UK SMS is still doing terrible damage but they have made noises that this will soon be rectified.

But overall I think this is good for twitter + for anyone who has / or is developing twitter related apps.

Re: Twitter lays the foundation for it’s revenue model

nickhalstead — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 09:34:41 -0000

Like everything a balance must be found between allowing growth through free access and the move towards a model in which twitter has revenue. I do not think that a move to paid could work for at least 6 months - as right now we are starting to see a tipping point into mainstream which of course must be largely due to the app support. But giving notice right now of intention would give confidence and also allow developers build a roadmap.

One thing I did not cover on my post was the typical requests that are allowed free on other services, fav.or.it integrates with I think 18 external services, some of which we have special arrangements with because of the default limitations. But it is not unusual for most API's to limit to 5000 a day - which kind of puts 20,000 an hour in perspective, and even the mighty google attaches a 50,000 per day limit on most of its services.

Re: Why VCs Will Block Good Exits

nickhalstead — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:18:36 -0000

Good post,

And this is a good point to learn, do NOT let the VC have a block on your sale. Of course that is much much easier to say than actually get. A lot will want a veto even if they are a minority share holder. But to me I would rather let them have a liquidation preference that gives them the comfort that below a certain threshold that the Angel starts getting hurt if he tries to exit at a low amount.

Re: louisgray.com: TwitOrFit Says All You Blokes Are Ugly Twits, Worse than Dogs

nickhalstead — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 05:56:43 -0000

I only have anecdotal evidence - but from what I hear a lot more women were concerned about security, but it is more likely that security is really about not wanting to attract more stalkers (twitter has enough).

My real thought when it comes to OAuth - is all about implementation - is it going to be a friendly experience - what we really need is the equivilient of 'facebook connect' for twitter - although from a technical standpoint I hate these 'surface identification models' - from the user point of view facebook connect really does feel really easy + secure to use.

Re: louisgray.com: TwitOrFit Says All You Blokes Are Ugly Twits, Worse than Dogs

nickhalstead — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 19:12:39 -0000

Hi Louis,

We will in the new year reveal some of the voting trends - but given that the ratio of men to women is very high - you can pretty much bet men were voting on other men.

Main lesson we learnt from this is that until we get OAuth (come on twitter!) - we need a way to securely sign people up without taking twitter user/pass.

Have a great christmas + new year,

Nick

Re: louisgray.com: i.TV Hooks Up With TiVo for iPhone DVR Scheduling

nickhalstead — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 06:05:58 -0000

Shame TIVO did not survive in the UK - just have to wait for the SKY+ equivalent makes it to the iPhone

sent from: fav.or.it

Re: rizzn's personal blog: HuffPo’s Grubby Syndication Practices

nickhalstead — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 06:40:44 -0000

hi Mark,

Just for the record a few people have asked to have feeds removed - and once we spoke to those and explained they could change to a Creative Commons license (which our site abides by) they were then happy to leave the content in place. We have had a few 'ranters' who accused us of website scraping (they obviously not spotted their own RSS feed?) but here is the twist ... we get multiple requests to add new feeds every single day.

The fact is that we attribute everything, we take account of license terms. And to give you a little insight into why this will all suddenly make sense.

We have already quietly launched 'channels' - http://fav.or.it/channels - these are content focused areas (a bit like Alltop subdomains) but these are filtered via Yahoo Pipe style rules - and most importantly each can look very very different. (e.g. http://video.fav.or.it)

Why is this important? Well for a consumer its great to have a central location of content from thousands of feeds but on a niche subject.

For the blogs? well very soon we launch http://www.feedbroker.net/ - a way to micro-pay blogger per post - I wont go into how the model works - but suddenly bloggers will have a new way to monetize (that isnt fishy like payperreview) - and who is going to pay? businesses + brands -> these both want to engage with the blogosphere - and imagine building a channel around a brand that aggregates in lots of content + conversation around that brand, good for the brand to be involved in the conversation - and good for the blogs - because they are being paid to be involved.

Have a great christmas,

Nick