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CNET News Daily Podcast: Google makes 'Lively' Web chat

Three lucky tech writers got their hands on early copies of the iPhone 3G. We weren't among them, but we did summarize what they had to say about the new smartphone.

Twitter traffic has skyrocketed since last year, despite chronic site meltdowns and anecdotes of people switching over to alternative services. And Google has hopped on the online social train with its introduction of Lively. Unlike the popular Second Life, the program doesn't require downloading extra software--and is designed to be included in the user's real life. CNET News reporter Stephen Shankland tested it out, and in … Read more

Steady growth for Twitter, despite hiccups

Fans of microblogging service Twitter are apparently impervious to repeated outages and technical problems--and their enthusiasm is spreading.

Research firm Hitwise on Tuesday reported that traffic to the Twitter site increased 500 percent the week ending July 5, 2008, compared with the same period last year. That's a significant jump for a service that's continually up and down--and still lacking a clear revenue stream.

What's more, many users of the service appear to be unruffled by Twitter's technical issues. The share of returning visitors has averaged approximately 53 percent over the past four months, according … Read more

OMG! Twitter might buy Summize

Over the past day, a flurry of tech blogs has bloomed with rumors that microblogging service Twitter might buy Summize, a nifty Twitter search engine.

The juicy news was first reported by a virtually unknown blogger, Josh Chandler. And with all the chatter, you'd think it were the next AOL-Bebo. That's because the world of tech blogs (and this one is no exception) has a remarkable tendency to ignore the fact that Twitter is still largely a foreign concept outside the digitally astute and that there are plenty of avid Twitter users who still don't know what … Read more

The rise of digital nomadism

On the occasion of Independence Day, Steve Rubel reflects on the growing independence of knowledge workers in the network economy and predicts the rise of "Digital Nomads:"

"If you spend as much time on the road as I do, you're likely to run into Digital Nomads. This sector of the workforce includes both independents and corporate workers. They use web-based tools like Twitter, wikis, Google Docs, social networks and Skype to collaborate and work wherever, whenever and however they want.

(...)

The reality is that many of the tools that workers need to do their jobs are … Read more

Identi.ca--open-source Twitter?

Identi.ca launched Thursday and it's basically an open-source version of Twitter licensed under the AGPL.

AGPL is a great license for network applications, but one thing that puzzles me is that I couldn't figure out a way to get out of using the AGPL version--like if I wanted to create my own version I guess I just have to abide by the license terms and I can't buy my way out of it?

I tend to think of GPL licenses as a great tool for capitalist projects, but there doesn't seem to be a way … Read more

The Digital Home 22: Can YouTube be saved?

In the first segment of this week's show, Don Reisinger opines about Google, YouTube, Bill Gates, and the future of Microsoft. After that, he invites four listeners on the show to discuss Twitter and what can be done to save the company. Finally, Don ends the show with a rant about Blockbuster and Circuit City. Enjoy! Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 22 … Read more

XMPP plus RabbitMQ gateway = high performance Twitter?

The Rabbit team just released a RabbitMQ to XMPP gateway proof-of-concept.

RabbitMQ is an implementation of AMQP, the emerging open source standard for high performance enterprise messaging. Think of AMQP as the open source version of something like MQ Series or other high-volume JMS servers. XMPP is open XML technology for presence and real-time communication.

Message volume shouldn't be a problem for services like Twitter. RabbitMQ with an XMPP gateway might be part of the the solution. The combination means you can inject very high volumes of messages into IM or other XMPP enabled applications with far fewer scale … Read more

Should troubled start-ups blame the messenger?

No one's denying that the economy's rough. Not a single U.S. company filed for an initial public offering in the second quarter of 2008, the first time since 1978 that this has happened. Mergers in the tech and media industries are down. In this kind of climate, anything from a publicly traded tech giant to the smallest of garage operations can be hit hard.

But if you're one of the little guys, there's another obstacle you have to face: the media hype. (Yes, we at CNET News.com admit that we may, on occasion, be … Read more

How Twitter could be worth nothing in a year

Silicon Alley Insider on Monday wrote that it believes Twitter could be worth "a billion dollars" in one year as long as it "takes full advantage of (its) messaging platform, user base, and user disposition to lead in the P2P mobile payments space, where, despite years of hype, no one has much of a head start."

After reading through the piece, it had me thinking: what if Twitter isn't worth "billions" in one year and instead, it's worth nothing? Just because it has a huge user base and it may be able to take advantage of its messaging platform, can we simply forget that it's down every single day for extended periods of time? Can we simply forget that important features like "replies" are disabled for days at a time because "Twitter is stressing out"?

Twitter may be a destination for millions of people and a great place for self-indulged "Internet celebrities" to massage their egos as more and more people follow them, but it's a poorly designed site with huge stability issues and enough downtime that people are becoming more and more likely to jump ship and join services like FriendFeed and maybe even Jaiku.

It may be difficult to believe such a popular site could be worth nothing in a year, but the way I see it, it's certainly more likely than Twitter being worth $1 billion in that time.… Read more