Colin Mercer On The Inter-Web

Hey guys, so here’s something I covered a while ago. A new search tool for Twitter (my main addiction other than blogging) called Summize. Interesting Summize has already been rebranded as search.twitter.com.

Well it appears that Twitter have liked the look of it too, Techcrunch announce today that Twitter have acquired the much smaller company Summize. Of the 6 Summize staff, 5 will join the Twitter engineering team in California (I know exactly where it is as I’ve been there :D). The Summize founder Jay Verdy has decided to move onto pastures new.

Check out the full article on TechCrunch here.

I shall skip the boring parts of day 3, breakfast and morning work were boring as you can expect. Lunch picked up, we went to meet up with Eddie from www.eddie.com, he’s one of the assistant directors of the Spike Lee collaboration film called Nokia Productions (good name hey?!?), and more importantly, he is a thoroughly nice chap. He’d recommended that we go to this little French bistro in South Park. And very nice it was too, I was still bulging from breakfast and the site of the massive baguette was exactly what I needed. As we left Eddie took us on a brief tour of the landmarks, the building opposite was the Twitter HQ. I resisted twittering saying I was outside (just), now I kinda wish I had photo’ed, but to be honest it would have been a boring picture. The office looks more like a little secluded house, there was no forms of branding etc. The next place on the web 2.0 tour was the Organic building, where Wired is/was based and where Yahoo do a load of stuff. Uber interesting to see how unglamorous these places are.

Hotel, work, boring, prep for the event in the evening. The event went really well and everyone seemed to have a good time. I wont go into detail.

Afterwards we popped for another drink with Eddie, I don’t know where this bar was because Eddie drove, all I remember is an extensive list of whiskeys/gins on a chalk board. Sehr cool.

That’s day 3 done and dusted.

Noticed this a couple of days ago but not had time to blog about it. As I’m getting more and more addicted to Twitter I have been paying more attention to Twitter news… and this is the latest and greatest! New Twitter search engine called Summize, see here. Summize is an existing search engine to find user opinion on products/people/anything.

Something I hadn’t noticed in my first look around was the ability to search by polarity of sentiment, according to Laughing Squid this is done by the emoticons in tweets. Very clever! So thanks to Laughing Squid, more accurately Scott Beale for this insight!

I know what you’re thinking… WTF?

There’s a competition, or tournament, not sure which, being ran on Twitter. Basically you join a team based on colours, then your team compete in challenges to find the superior colour. I am a proud member of the Orange Team, check out my branded picture on Twitter.

To join the Orange Team all you need to do is follow them on Twitter, whichever colour team you most recently began following is the team which you are officially a member of. At the moment we have around 450 members, the main competitors are the veryGreen team who have backing from top bloggers Pete Cashmore (Mashable), Hugh Macleod (GapingVoid) and Chris Brogan. You can follow the team numbers on this site.

The home page for Twitter Colour War can be found here.

You will have seen the constant Twitter feed been spamming along on the left hand sidebar, and daily post about the updates. The wonders of Wordpress twitter plugins. My newest addition is to add my phone to the Twitter account. Now this basically means that when certain friends post to their Twitter feed, I get a text message with the update. There is a limit on 250 texts a week, but to be honest if I got anywhere near that many I’d turn it straight off.

Luckily, there is a feature to stop it texting you at night, by settings your “sleep” period. Mines set very conservatively so no trying to post Twitter updates in the middle of the night/early in the morning in an attempt to wake me up!