Twitter Tuesday is a weekly wrap-up of significant and interesting news relating to Twitter.
Clutch.io joins the Twitter Flock
Twitter has acquired (or aqui-hired) Clutch.io, a company that makes A/B testing tools for mobile app developers. Yesterday, Clutch.io announced in a blog post that Twitter had acquired the intellectual property of the company and it was the teams’ first day as part of Twitter’s ‘Growth and International’ team.
The blog post explains that Clutch.io plans to leave their hosted service active until November 1, 2012 but in the coming weeks will make available everything a developer will need to run Clutch.io on their own servers. Many sources, such as The Next Web, speculate that Twitter’s acquisition of a mobile A/B testing company is a sign that Twitter is thinking seriously about improving their mobile products.
Paul Ryan’s new Twitter Handle
Following the announcement that Paul Ryan is going to be Mitt Romeny’s running mate, he’s (temporarily?) retired his @RepPaulRyan Twitter handle in favor of @PaulRyanVP, which first tweeted on Saturday. His new account has only tweeted four times: three about joining what the account is calling “America’s Comeback Team,” and one @MittRomney retweet. However, the account already follows 200 other Twitter users, which is 200 times as many as his old account follows. His @RepPaulRyan account only follows one account: the official National Debt Twitter account. The gap in the number of followers each account has is quickly closing.
Olympic Records
With the London 2012 Summer Olympics now over, a lot of records have been set…on social media as well as by athletes. The official Twitter blog has written a post outlining the significance of Twitter in the Olympics. Here are a few of the interesting numbers:
- The past 16 days saw over 150 million tweets about the Olympics
- The most tweeted about moment was when Usain Bolt of Jamaica won gold in the 200m sprint, with over 80,000 tweets per minute
- Usain Bolt was also the most discussed athlete on Twitter
- 10 athletes garnered more than 1 million tweets each: Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, Tom Daley, Ryan Lochte, Gabby Douglas, Andy Murray, Kobe Bryant, Yohan Blake, Lee Chong Wei, and Lebron James
- Soccer was the sport with the most conversation surrounding it
- The most tweeted about musical guest in the Closing Ceremonies was the Spice Girls with more than 116,000 tweets per minute
App.net – A paid alternative to Twitter
A crowdfunded project led by Dalton Caldwell tried and succeeded to raise $700,000 for App.net, which will be a paid alternative to Twitter. In the wake of Twitter restricting its API and cutting off two major social networks, Instagram and LinkedIn, Caldwell believes Twitter is selling out. His alternative will cost $50/year for users and $100/year for developers.
In a video on the App.net website, Caldwell explains: “The reason why I’m so optimistic about a paid opportunity is that it aligns our incentives economically with users and developers.” Caldwell maintains that free, ad-supported social networks like Facebook and Twitter have poor user experiences. If the service’s customers are the users and developers instead of advertisers, it has more incentive to give the users and developers what they want.
Would you pay for Facebook or Twitter if it meant no advertisements?
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