Portland startups, open source, and tech news, jobs, and events #pdx
Remember Tweet-a-Beer? The app—built by tenfour and Waggener Edstrom on the Chirpify platform—allows Twitter users to send a beer to a friend all through the magic of Twitter and PayPal.
And during SXSW, it took off. Now, the folks who built the app are sharing their initial results. Read More
And that’s why Sell Simply, a new service from Portland-based the Good, is a breath of fresh air. Plus, if you have a Twitter account—which I’m going to bet you do—you already have a Sell Simply store
If the Web is good for one thing, it’s for buying stuff. I mean, really. Most of the time you’re either buying or you’re looking for something that you plan to buy. It’s just a big old marketplace.
But have you ever actually tried to sell something online? Yeesh. It can be a mess. And that’s why Sell Simply, a new service from Portland-based the Good, is a breath of fresh air. Plus, if you have a Twitter account—which I’m willing to bet you do—you already have a Sell Simply store, all thanks to the magic of OAuth. Read More
A technical glitch with an incorrect Twitter name seems to have Obama healthcare proponents from Oregon spamming Jeffrey Kalmikoff of Threadless with misdirected tweets intended for Jeff Merkley
[HTML3]Now, it’s no secret that the Barack Obama campaign did a phenomenal job with social media. Facebook, Portland-fueled iPhone apps, Twitter, the whole shooting match. Many—myself included—were in awe of the Obama campaign’s mastery of social media—and the potential it held for the presidency.
Well, we were. Until today. When a technical glitch seems to have Obama healthcare proponents from Oregon spamming Jeffrey Kalmikoff of Threadless with misdirected tweets intended for Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley.
Oopie. Read More
Portland-based TwitterLocal, the service built by Matt King that allows you to create an RSS feed of Twitter users for a particular location, has just moved added a feature that takes the site from a one-time visit to a regular destination—a leader board for the top 30 cities on Twitter.
The leader board currently ranks cities by the number of tweets by residents in a rolling 24-hour period.
Glancing at it a few minutes ago, Tokyo was in the lead with San Francisco running a close second. Paris leads the Europeans. And our hometown of Portland is sitting around #14 or so.
From 8:00PM, April 8, 2008 through 8:00PM, April 9, 2008, the list looked something like this:
As you can see, there is some weirdness can show up in the results. King notes these flaws in the system:
- The seemingly high count of random places like “my pc”, “cybertron”, etc. are the geocoding service’s way of having fun. It seems some fake locations get assigned coordinates to somewhere in Kansas.
- There is also a very high count of locations with asian characters, which again the geocoding services give only one location. Other than that the numbers are fairly accurate.
Despite these minor foibles, TwitterLocal’s leader board is the first location-specific Twitter analysis that I’ve encountered which actually begins to show which locations have caught the Twitter bug.
And as impressed as I was with TwitterLocal’s service, I’m sure to find this type of competitive ranking completely addictive, at the very least. I’m sure I’ll be checking TwitterLocal leader board, obsessively, over the coming months to see if we can get Portland to crack the top 10. At the very least.
Did your hometown make the list? There’s only one way to find out.