WardCunningham announces TweetSpeak on Twitter

on Friday at 06:22 PM January 25, 2008

Twitter is a popular micro-blogging site that easily demands too much of your attention for the simple reason that you have to read it. Now you can listen instead. TweetSpeak lets you give your friends the continuous partial attention they deserve without taking your eyes off of the work you should be doing.

Reactions around the net:

• Ross Mayfield thinks it is bizarre and wonderful and makes a video.
• This struck Dan York’s laughing button.
• Alex de Carvalho thinks it is weird but fun
• James Burke imagines it could become annoying

Alert - you do need to know how to run a command line.

(but I figured it out, so it is fairly easy)

Contributor: MarkDilley

As another step towards making available great help resources for wiki editors and vistors, we have created our first screencast, called Welcome to AboutUs. Over the next few weeks, we plan to create many more screencasts, to compliment all of the existing help information. We would love your comments both on this screencast and on which topics you think we ought to be covering first as we develop more.

At ChevelleJewelry.com you can find the latest and classic designs for him and her. Whether you are looking for a necklace, ring, earrings or designer watch, find it with ease sorted under category, price and brand. The best sellers list shows what the current ‘in’ is. They have done a great job of using images to make a unique stacked layout for their WikiPage. Apparent from their page, they have something for everyone and every occasion! (View Comments)

In conjunction with our Three New Services, AboutUs founder and CEO Ray King explains the value of wiki as well as the process for our “Promote My Company” service. He also explains what a WikiCoach can do to improve the article about your company and how to use AboutUs to promote your company

contributors: RayKing, WardCunningham and ChrisBabson

PensFans4Ever.com is home to both WBS and Pittsburgh Penguin Fans (two affiliated professional hockey teams). The site offers fans the opportunity to discuss about past games, players and events on the forums, through live chat during a game or get news alerts on their mobile phones. The schedule keeps tracks of game histories, scores, which is an excellent resource to take a quick glance at Pens gameplay. Their WikiPage does a great job of offering an overview of the services and achievements of their website over the years. (View Comments)

We’re excited to announce the availability this afternoon of three new services for the AboutUs community. You may have noticed already that there are three new tabs up in the top right corner of each page on the wiki. Some of these services may be more useful for you than others, but we hope that you’ll be as excited as we are to see what we’ve got to offer.

Here’s a quick description of the three new services available:

1. Free monitoring. Any article on the AboutUs site can now be watched automatically for changes - no account creation required. Just click the “Get Page Alerts” tab and enter your email.

2. Premium Service Package. Our new “Promote My Company” package includes in-house design of your business’ AboutUs page and personalized wiki coaching for a one time fee of $99. Many companies take the time to learn and design sophisticated AboutUs pages on their own, now you can also get professional design and training services to take it to the next level. Here are some examples of steps that we can work with you to improve your page.

3. Portal Sponsorship. Companies can (and are) now sponsoring topical portals that aggregate business listings and functionality like calendaring and maps for cities around the world and industry verticals. Our showcase Portal right now is the PortlandTech Portal - but there are more in the works and we’ll soon launch a technology that will make sophisticated Portals easy for any anyone here to create for free. If you’d like to sponsor one of these fabulous Portals, you’ll be glad you did.

Here’s how we explain the relationship between individual articles and Portals:

In addition to heavy traffic from search, people also navigate through AboutUs by category - to discover and learn about web pages and companies that are related to each other. These categories of pages can be turned into full-featured portals, which can then be built upon further for events, sub-topics or other collections.

See for example the well-developed AboutUs page for Portland attorneys Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt, which looks great as a part of the PortlandTech Portal - a collection of topical pages that also served as the foundation for the Venture Northwest 2007 event page where all the participants, including Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt, can be found listed with links back to their detailed AboutUs pages. AboutUs is a great place to compile detailed company profiles around any topic - so it will benefit you to make sure your company profile page is as effective as it can be.

$99 is a great price for a company to put their best foot forward on this platform, both aesthetically and with assistance from AboutUs in relating to the world of wiki users who will be visiting their page. When you’re ready to take it to the next level, consider sponsoring your industry or city’s portal. It’s a great way to add value to your community and win the admiration that comes with such a contribution.

Those are our new offerings! We hope you’ll find something there that’s useful for you and your organization. As always, please feel free to contact us any time if you’ve got any questions or feedback.

Sincerely, RayKing and WardCunningham

“One size doesn’t fit all, nothing comes off the rack,” says Digngo Luxury Travel, a luxury travel agency specialized in tours of all sorts in France. “No two tours are alike,” they assert. Digngo guys therefore promise that each tour will be custom designed with your needs in mind and your vacation will be a mix of rustic traditions, tailored activities, exclusive hotels, great food, wine, and of course, lots of fun. (View Comments)

FullPoster.com is an innovative website where you can create very cool personal and professional profiles for you or your company. Available in English and Italian, the website offers a bunch of options to its users to liven up their pages such as blogs, polls, snippets, chat, etc. Interestingly, the FullPoster.com guys have chosen to have their Domain Page on AboutUs exactly as it would have looked on one of their pages. Check it out! (View Comments)

AboutUs CTO, Ward Cunningham, authored several posts for the Wikipedia fundraising blog. This is one that didn’t run, but is still good advice.

We buy a computer and we expect it to change the way we live. Sometimes we know exactly how that change will happen. But more often we make the purchase with only a vague notion that life will be better with the new machine. We expect something good and the machine delivers.

The computer industry exists because computers, the network, and the people who use them have delivered on a promise that we only vaguely understood as we paid the bills. Did we know there would be a Wikipedia? Probably not. Still, there it is. Enjoy.

Enjoy, but understand that we are not done paying. I ask you to give to Wikimedia because this investment is necessary and will be even more positively leveraged than your hardware purchase. Your machine sits before you ready to transform your contribution into good in ways that neither you nor I can fully predict. I say this with all the confidence I had when I chose to devote my life to computing. I remain excited by our possibilities. I hope you are too.

Ward Cunningham invented the Wiki style of collaboration in 1995. He has been a member of the Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board since its founding. Ward’s previous request, Contribute in honor of teachers. This post is a personal opinion, and does not represent an official statement from the Wikimedia Foundation or AboutUs, Inc.
contributor: Ward Cunningham