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twitter has finally added one of the most requested features to their service - people search.

We’ve just added Profile Search to Twitter! Now you can search across profile information like name, location, bio, and url. That means you can find more people to follow. The search box is over on the right when you’re signed in. Go ahead and find other Twitter-ers in San Francisco, New York, or Tokyo or find out your friends are already Twittering and you didn’t even know it!

Technorati Tags: twitter, micro-blogging, profile, people, search

recently, there have been a lot of articles of the sort ‘x number of ways to improve twitter’. what i find striking about these articles is that pownce, a twitter competitor, has already implemented most of these improvements that people are requesting to be added to twitter.

what we see is that either 1) people recommended an improvement or found something missing in twitter, which pownce later implemented in its version of the micro-blogging platform, or 2) pownce foresaw the need for some functionality and implemented it, which people liked and subsequently felt was missing from twitter. either way, this shows how pownce is really what many expect the next iteration of twitter to be. here’s a look at 7 ways in which pownce improves upon twitter.

1. groups: pownce lets you organize your friends into groups and then allows you to send messages to sets of people.

2. better url handling: rather than using a 3rd party service like tinyurl (which can be unreliable at times), on pownce you can use the actual url without worrying about wasting characters (there is no limit to message size).

3 . better design: if there’s one thing that pownce really nailed, it is the beautiful design. the interface is also skinnable, which means there will be something for everyone.

4. better message handling: there are a couple of ways in which message handling on pownce is much better than on twitter. 1) there is no minimum message size, 2) you can send messages to the public, to your friends, to a self-created group, and to individuals, 3) all replies to a message are threaded, 4) you can forward messages to other people.

5. privacy settings: only messages you sent to the public can be seen by everyone. other message can only be seen by the subset they are sent to.

6. more versatility: in addition to sending messages, you can also share files and create events. there are also much better options for which notifications you would like to receive.

7. friends: pownce makes it a lot easier to look for and add friends. if you go to the ‘add friends’ page, you are shown friends of your friends to see if you know or want to add any of them. in addition you can also search for people to add as friends.

the point of this post isn’t to say that pownce is better, surely there are several things that twitter still does better or that pownce simply lacks. while the twitter versus pownce versus [insert micro-blogging tool name here] debate will rage on, the bottom line is that though pownce is far from revolutionary or even a totally new product, it does fix a ton of things that are wrong with twitter (and the prevailing micro-blogging platform) and that we can expect to be improved in twitter 2.0.

References:

1. Five Quick Suggestions to Improve Twitter by Allen Stern
2. Six Ways to Improve Twitter by Josh Lowensohn
3. Introducing Pownce, Like Twitter But Better by Hong Kiat

ever had a song stuck into your head that you wanted to hear a piece of right away? with yahoo! audio search now you can do exactly that.

Now on Yahoo! Audio Search you can play samples of millions of songs. The new inline player provides instant playback right next to the search results. There are no intrusive pop-ups or multiple browser windows to manage — only a 30-second, uninterrupted instant audio experience. And, there’s also a ‘Select Preferred Audio Service’ feature that helps you link to your favorite audio provider directly from the results page.

simply search for a song, an artist, album, or lyrics from a song and listen to a snippet right away.

now this is the kind of innovation that is going to put yahoo! back in the game. also of interest are these yahoo! audio search apis.

while social networking and watching video clips are incredibly popular online activities, guess what activity eclipses both of these:

The research and analysis company Parks Associates announced Friday that games are still the most popular Internet activity in the United States. The report, “Casual Gaming Market Update”, found that 34% of U.S. adult Internet users play online games each week, compared with 29% who watch short online videos and 19% who visit social networking sites.

not only is casual online gaming more popular than these other activities, but the industry also has a better revenue model which includes advertising, try-before-you-buy, subscriptions, and micro-transactions, according to James Kai, a research analyst at Park Associates.

that said, the year-over-year growth rate of the casual online gaming industry is 79%, while online video streaming enjoys 123% and social networking is at 46%, which means that gaming sites need to act fast if they are to keep their lead in the long run.

you know that great facebook feature that let’s you share things with your friends? and you know how you run into a problem if you’re trying to send a message to or share something with all your friends but can’t (and have to email a few separately) because some of your friends aren’t on facebook? well, facebook has updated their sharing/messaging feature so that you don’t have to worry about that anymore.

Now you can enter a friend’s email address into the To: line when you send a message or share an album, and Facebook will email them the message. Your friends will be able to reply without signing up, and they will be able to see content you share with them.

rich skrenta, founder of dmoz.org and co-founder and ceo of topix.net, has some advice for jason and his human-powered search engine, mahalo.

We know this from experience: No one will ever go to Mahalo directly, just as no one ever went to About.com, dmoz, Tripadvisor, Nextag, IMDB or any other vertical or broad-but-shallow site. Google is where everyone starts and Mahalo’s distribution strategy has to be SEO. Its traffic is going to live or die based on SEO skill and Google’s continued favor.

given how passionately jason hates anything and everything that has to do with seo, that’s gotta hurt. here’s the response:

From where we sit we think that we can make a great service that is not driven by SEO. If we rank high because some of our pages are one of the BEST pages for a keyword on the internet we are honored to be considered. However, it’s not our focus. Our focus is on building the best pages and we think that we can capture a significant audience who will either come to Mahalo first, or side by side, Google/Yahoo/Ask.

beginning of this month, loren feldman decided to post a video on his site about the lack of black technology bloggers, a video that eventually stirred up quite a bit of controversy. because loren decided to use blip.tv to host the larger flash version of the video, some of the site’s patrons got upset and one of them actually sent them a letter detailing the potential damage to the blip.tv brand as a result of hosting the video.

Are you sure that blip.tv wants to have their brand associated with such “comedy”?? The blip.tv logo is prominently displayed next to his player (as was podtech’s) - is blip.tv as a company willing to risk such negative news coverage as this.

rather than taking the video down, blip.tv has responded as follows:

I found the video distasteful and not funny. But as a company we don’t delete videos on that basis. Instead, we err on the side of free speech, and enabling discussions. I think that a remix or response video would be more effective a refutation than censorship.

not only has this put blip.tv on my radar, but i have an enormous amount of respect for the site and their team.

i saw the following submission on reddit earlier today,

and couldn’t help but point out the irony. as of last count, the submission had 35 positive votes (and 25 down votes). the following are screen grabs of two different times from the reddit front page from a little while back:

one of the things social media is about, is instant gratification. and maps, charts, graphs, statistics, and pictures, help content producers do exactly that.

there has been too much talk going around about this site or that site being a digg killer (or replacement). while i think its great for the ‘socially driven news’ space as well as for digg itself that new sites pop up and try to compete with the incumbent, it is not only frustratingly inaccurate but the practice of labeling every new socially driven site as a ‘digg killer’ has become incredibly trite.

here are some examples from bloggers that (while i disagree with them from time to time) i have a lot of respect for and think have enough foresight (and their fingers on the pulse of the industry) to predict the next big thing. let’s take a look at their thoughts on what would kill digg and how it obviously didn’t.

Behind Curtain Number One: Michael Arrington

What he said: “On Thursday, AOL’s Netscape property will no longer be just another portal - it’s being converted into a Digg-killer.”

Verdict: While I think Netscape, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc are all great sites in their own right, none of them is a Digg Killer.

Behind Curtain Number Two: Pete Cashmore

What he said: “MySpace News: The Digg Killer?”

Verdict: MySpace News is not an Anything Killer.

Behind Curtain Number Three: Jason Calacanis

What he said: “Will digg die the death of 1,000 cuts?”

Verdict: Pligg is a great content management system, but the secret behind digg’s success is not just the socially driven system the site uses but the huge incredibly active community that it has engendered. Pligg is not going to kill digg.

Behind Curtain Number Four: Robert Scoble

What he said: “Google Reader + Facebook Application = Digg killer?”

Verdict: Mario Romero’s application is great but by no means even close to being a replacement for Digg.

Behind Curtain Number Five: Josh Lowensohn

What he said: “Streamy-yes, it’s a Digg killer”

Verdict: After using Streamy for a couple of days I can say with complete certainty that Streamy and Digg aren’t even competing in the same space.

Behind Curtain Number Six: Jeremiah Owyang

What he said: “Could NewsTrust be a Digg Killer?”

Verdict: NewsTrust is a great product and while i don’t see it as a digg killer, it is definitely something that could be integrated into digg to provide a better social news experience.

Behind Curtain Number Seven: Steve Rubel (and Steve Mermelstein)

What they said: “Steve Mermelstein wisely states that Google Reader could be a digg killer.”

Verdict: Google Reader is not even a high-end feed reader replacement, let alone a Digg Killer.

As you can see, I have only begun to skim the surface with these few observations. There are hundreds if not thousands of sites that are referred to as Digg Killers while they are simply socially driven sites trying to implement or further the socially driven news model. While it’s great to give these sites coverage and complement/critique them for their work, it’s just unfair to expect them to stand a chance against Digg and in most cases even the other big sites (Netscape, Reddit, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Fark, Slashdot, and so on).

comscore has released its list of the web’s 50 most trafficked sites for july, and it’s incredibly interesting to look at the top few companies. take a peak at what powers these online giants and you’ll note more than just a touch of the social:

1. yahoo! sites (also include flickr, upcoming.org, del.icio.us, mybloglog, etc.)
2. google sites (also include blogger, dodgeball, youtube, feedburner, orkut, etc.)
3. time warner network (also includes weblogs inc., netscape, etc.)
4. microsoft sites (also include wallop, windows live services, etc.)
5. fox interactive media (also includes myspace, photobucket, etc.)

this goes on to show the importance these growing companies are placing on new and emerging social technologies and how these technologies are helping these online giants solidify their positions at the top.