Supercharge your tweets with FatBird ; Its on Steroids.

Posted by Rajesh Shetty on July 11, 2008

This post is been in sitting a queue for a while and today I get a time to write about it. As most of us know Twitter is the new way of looking at the news. Well I should say it is new age media now. There is certainly a media shift happened in last few months around twitter. We get to see breaking news on Twitter before A-listers of the media.

Lot of mainstream bloggers using twitter more often than ever. Even though there was quite bit of apprehension about whether twitter can go mainstream or ready to go mainstream, according to me gap between mainstream media and twitter media is very perceptional and your attention span. Big difference between these two is that news on twitter comes in packet of 140 characters and you have running stream of updates to read the whole story. Having said that every tweet (one status update on Twitter) becomes very important for followers (in a traditional media its readers) to consume when someone updates his/her status (traditionally news publisher).


There are tons of twitter apps doing interesting things and adding value to this whole twitter ecosystem. Here at MesageDance we been a fan of Twitter from day one and had twitter status udpate posting via email for few months along with every message users sends (blog post, YouTube video, Digg share, Google Reader share etc) to MessageDance can be updated to user’s Twitter timeline.


With FatBird, we released a new feature called “MyTweets“. With this feature MessageDance becomes the full blown client to Twitter which can send, receive your tweets on demand along with other goodies. Check it out..


Bling Your Tweets


MyTweets in a true sense supercharges your tweets. User’s 140 characters gets more powerful as it exposes important assets of each tweet.
  • TinyURL expansion : instead of tinyurl , It expands the url and shows the real url to the user
  • If the url is YouTube video url it shows YouTube video right below user’s tweet.
  • If the url is Flickr url it shows Flickr photo right below user’s tweet.
  • If the url is MP3 it shows audio player inline right below the tweet.
  • User can Reply or Retweet right there from each tweet.
It feels good to save user some time and few clicks on the WWW.


Set your tweets free with TweetShare.

Having done all the blinging to tweets, How about setting your tweets free to go wherever they want to go?.




TweetShare feature
  • Lets users send the anyone’s last 10 tweets (whom user is following) to their blog, friends, facebook etc.
  • Lets users send conversational tweets to user’s social destinations.
This opens up the door for tweet blogging and link love between blogger and urls in the tweet.
FatBird is your tweets on steroids. Let it fly to places.

Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail | Reply On Twitter

Live coverage of #railsconf by @igrigorik

Posted by Rajesh Shetty on May 30, 2008

Last 6 tweets from igrigorik

IronRuby on rails: only the sql driver was needed to get the stack running… Otherwise everything is the same, and works as expected at 05/30/2008 05:58 PM

Multicore FUD talk: first impression, stop reading from your notes… Room drifting asleep. #railsconf at 05/30/2008 05:50 PM

Back to pen and paper @ railsconf. Wewt. at 05/30/2008 05:45 PM

@timbray more twitter coverage of #railsconf here.. Courtesy of dead laptop. at 05/30/2008 06:31 PM

Multicore talk: plugged Switchpipe by @peterc - mix and match cluster management at 05/30/2008 06:29 PM

Engineyard: ebb is not production ready; don’t worry about the app server, should be the least of your worries. at 05/30/2008 07:15 PM

Blogged with MessageDance | Reply On Twitter

Email still has plenty of juice left.

Posted by Rajesh Shetty on May 10, 2008

"Oh! I have so much data, I want to protect every bit of it and I want users to come to me everyday" said Social network sites when they gathered millions of users. For well known reasons social media world is keeping the tremendous amount of valuable data trapped within its arena. This is no secret to savvy users of all these different services. So we see initiatives like DataPortability and OpenSocial picking up good traction. Facebook, MySpace are doing this but taking careful steps as they have a lot tied with their data which they want to protect as much as they want. Users want their data to be portable and they want it quick. On the other end we have "email" which is loved my billions from its inception thru today and it is still not used very well in the context of social communication and messaging except basic notification service within every major social media sites.

There is a huge gap between email world and social media world as far as data distribution is concerned. Email should go beyond "Notify me when I have a new message or comment" notion. Wouldn't it be helpful to get all that email power close to social media community in terms of outreach, sharing and connection. 

183 billion messages per day means more than 2 million emails are sent every second. About 70% to 72% (or between 128 and 132 billion) of them might be spam and viruses. The genuine emails are sent by around 1.2 billion email users. 

Recently as per Techcrunch on the other topic very interesting numbers came around usage/how much time users spend on different desktop applications. If you relate these numbers with email.
  • In top 10 , users spend more time on 4 email applications (Outlook, Gmail, mail, Thunderbird)
  • In Top 3,  users spend time on 2 email applications.
So we love email here at MessageDance and believe that there are enough innovative and intriguing things can be built around it using users current attention span and exposing them to the interesting content sharing model across social media. To facilitate this, in last few weeks we have released nice little features like
We are working on lot more in coming weeks. 
As we let the time and great ideas build the gap between, so called "legacy email" and emerging social media, we will run into creative ways of using our daily life which is trapped in the wonderful world of email.

Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail | Reply On Twitter

YouTube video share to Infinity with one email.

Posted by Rajesh Shetty on March 09, 2008

YouTube is growing strong day by day, the simple idea that took over the online video world by storm. Just a basic fact about YouTube viewership is astonishing .

As per pcworld

“On a monthly basis, the site has about 68.5 million unique visitors and 3.7 billion page views. Users spend an average of 54 minutes on the site monthly”

As per Washington Post

“During January, YouTube had almost 66.2 million unique viewers and streamed almost 2.6 billion clips”

If you look at the numbers YouTube gets around 66-69 million users every month .These numbers are extremely impressive and if you think how can you make users life little easy, who are watching videos on YouTube at any given time that can bring quite bit of value to their experience. Value can be obtained in different ways; sharing, commenting, view enhancement, extended video information etc.

So if you pick the sharing option which is the most viral part of this whole equation today users can send emails to their friends, If more than one friends you send it to multiple email addresses. Today there is no direct way to send one email and that can send your video snippet to your buddies and their Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and ever growing social media destinations.

MessageDance is exactly doing that and It started with one value add a time. MessageDance not only makes sharing the YouTube easy, but video share goes in chain reaction to your friends networks. You share your YouTube username with MessageDance (in its Social Profile settings) and then go to your favorite YouTube video and share it with friends @ messagedance.com with your personal message. MessageDance sends this video your friends MessageDance inbox and all their online presence (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Blog etc) where they have configured MessagDance for. It is really that easy.

Here is the detailed post on YouTube - Twitter share

Think about sharing YouTube video’s directly with your Twitter followers. 3 clicks are you are making sharing easy breezy beautiful (I know I stole covergirl line, but it makes sense here).

 

Here is the blog post on other features we released recently on MessageDance along with YouTube video share.

It keeps getting better.


Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail

Twitter downtime, MessageDance helps 1

Posted by Rajesh Shetty on January 22, 2008

I saw this notice on my Twitter home page last night.

Twitter Downtime

I can understand how Twitter must be dealing with their ever growing pool of users. It can be extremely challenging to manage infrastructure to support to such a huge capacity.

Going back to the important point; In such situations when active Twitter users who update their status often , what happens to their status when Twitter is going thru downtime?. Not sure how Twitter users handled it so far, but now they have MessageDance. You can send messages to your Twitter without having to worry about their downtime and MessageDance will deliver it to Twitter when it is backup.

It is very simple, log in, Go to social profile tab and setup your Twitter profile and thats it. Now you can send messages(either by sending email directly from your mail client or within MessageDance) and your messages will reach Twitter (depending on which option you selected in social profile). Detail of configuration is documented here

Now you can send hassel free messages to MessageDance , which will reach your Twitter instantly if it is up or whenever it comes back up. As an added bonus your messages goes to Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, LiVEJOURNAL , Blogger, Wordpress , your personal blog if you have confirgured them accordingly.

MessageDance Twitter’ng now

Posted by Rajesh Shetty on January 18, 2008

This long awaiting feature of MessageDance is out. Yes!. MessageDance talks Twitter now :-). We have integrated with Twitter, adding to our existing list of Social media sites and more.

Twitter status update from MessageDance opens up the whole new world for active Twitter users. Details is on MessageDance Blog. In short users can do content rich twittering (video/images/any other forms) that any email can accommodate. Yes that brings up another important point. With this feature users can send status updates from their email itself. Users can do bunch of other things as well. All the options are listed on Sam’s Message.

Let me sum it up. With MessageDance-Twitter combo, You can

  • Send twitter status updates right from your email
  • Send just more than 140 characters, the details follows on MessageDance site
  • Decide to send email subject or body to twitter (more options…it keeps coming :-)
  • If you do not want to send all messages from MessageDance to Twitter, you can directly send message to twitter by sending an email to tweet@messagedance.com or do the same within MessageDance dance floor. (We honor user’s wish to message specific twittering)
  • Your messages are flagged with twitter icon in your MessageDance widget
  • Tweet awareness in your MessageDance message detail (@username feature of Twitter for direct linking Twitter user on the status update)

More Twitter possiblities with MessageDance…

MessageDance support for MySpace, Xanga, LiVEJOURNAL, Blogger now 1

Posted by Rajesh Shetty on December 29, 2007

MessageDance went private beta first week of November and we supported Facebook and Wordpress widget embeds from day one. Now we are happy to announce MessageDance to support for  MySpace, Xanga, LiVEJOURNAL, Blogger.  You can check out Sam’s announcement to the community. We should have this announcement on our official blog as well. Also checkout the widget configuration/customization for different social networks here

MessageDance: So it starts.

Posted by Rajesh Shetty on November 06, 2007

We have been working on MessageDance for couple of months writing prototype , building blocks and testing the basic end to end promise to see how it works within ourselves. It is a very interesting idea and right now we are on our way to execute this for next cycle which would be public beta.

MessageDance is started by 3 founders (including myself) and we all working full time on this.  Work is in full swing from Product Management, Operations, Engineering and Architecture perspective. We recently moved to PlugAndPlayTechCenter. Its a great incubation for emerging technology startups. Energy of this place is very positive and encouraging.

I will have a lot to share here as we progress in our plan but for now we are dancing our way to the next interesting thing in social media.

You can read day to day update on MessageDance Blog and stay tuned to our progress.

You can become one of the first to access MessageDance’s service by signing up with us. Once we are ready for public beta you will be the first one to hear from us.