Twitter has launched its first value-add to the location sharing function of its application.  Now, when you share your location you can get local trending topics for a limited set of markets in addition to the national trending topics.

Minneapolis wasn’t on the list of local markets, so I chose Chicago and there weren’t any topics yet.  We’ll update this post when we find more.

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Are you using your Facebook feeds optimally?  Facebook provides two different feeds, the news feed and the live feed.  What’s the difference?  The news feed is an intelligent collection of what Facebook thinks you will like to see based on your past interaction with the site, but doesn’t include everything that goes on.  The live feed is a customizable as-it-happens feed of everything you wish to see.

Which is right for me?

The right feed for the job really depends on what your needs are.  You’ll find that the news feed might have more interesting information if you are an occasional user, but could become stale if you are a frequent Facebook visitor.  The live feed can be overwhelming at times, but you are sure not to miss anything you are looking for.  For me, a customized live feed with limited content is where I like to spend most of my time.

Still Can’t Decide?

No problem!  You can switch back and forth easily clicking the corresponding buttons near the top of the feed page.

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Facebook has released its Community Council application to a select few with permission to moderate material flagged as objectionable.  Facebook hasn’t commented on the application, which currently requires an invitation to install on your account.  Eyewitness accounts of the application describe a version of the existing moderation tools which has been made available to the public.

The application’s eight options give us an idea of the intent for the application: spam, acceptable, skip, not English, nudity, drugs, attacking (“direct attacks against public figures”) and violence.

Facebook has also used crowd sourcing in its translation application in an attempt to translate Facebook into other languages (including serious languages and pirate English).

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We talked last week about who owns our tweets and discovered that ultimately, the creator of a tweet owns that tweet.  In Twitter’s terms of service, they recommend that you license your tweets using a creative commons license.  Doing this could cut down on legal ambiguity in the future and provide others with the ability to use content you likely don’t actually require the explicit license to.

So, how do you license your tweets?  There isn’t a way on Twitter to apply a certain license to your tweets or even your account.  One common way to accomplish this is to explicitly tweet that you licensed your tweets under a certain license.  Tweet CC takes this one step further by providing an archive of people who have licensed their tweets under a creative commons public domain license.

Tweet CC doesn’t provide a means of licensing your content in another way, such as using the popular Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.  That doesn’t mean you can’t do so.  One popular way of applying a license to your content is to tweet which license you would like to use with a link to it.  So, license your tweets today and let the world know your intentions for your content.

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Many websites with user-generated content use an implied terms of service contract which grants ownership of  user’s content to the website owners.  Twitter’s terms of service is different in that it doesn’t provide Twitter ownership over your content, but provides Twitter with a “worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense).”  So, it gives Twitter the right to use and distribute your tweets free of charge and allows them the right to provide that same license to third parties.  Twitter requires the right to sub-license your content in order to legally provide the content to third parties through their API.

What does this mean?

This means that you are free to not only repurpose your tweets but also provides you the ability to license them to other parties since Twitter’s license for your content is not exclusive.  Twitter retains

How long does this license last?

Twitter’s terms of service don’t provide a duration to the license.  In most jurisdictions, this means that the license and any sub-licenses can be revoked at any time.  A way to revoke this license would be to send Twitter a letter saying that you would like to terminate your account and revoke their license to your content.

Technically, this would terminate their license to use your content and they would likely eventually remove your content from their systems, but what about third party developers?  There is no system in place to notify third parties of revocation of your license.  Your content would persist outside of Twitter’s domain.

Why should I care?

Intellectual property law is important.  There are many works of art which do not have a clear owner and cannot be used as a result of this.  While you may not consider your tweets important today, someone in the future could think they are.  Without an explicit license to use your tweets, your intention for licensing your content cannot be inferred and thus your content could not legally be used.

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Bit.ly has finally started to leverage the vast quantity of links and clicks through its url shortening service with the launch of its new bitly.tv service out of its labs linking the most popular videos on the bit.ly service over a given time period.

Bit.ly has the ability to collect a huge amount of data through users of its service.  This is likely the first of many useful tools to come from the service.  The next thing we expect to emerge from the company is a business model.

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Twitter has a new feature currently in beta testing.  This feature will allow you to change the voice of a brand from an individual representation to that of a community.  Employees of large organizations would be able to tweet under the company’s profile with a mention of the individuals name as well below it.

With this model, if a US Bank employee were to tweet on behalf of the US Bank brand, the tweet would show up under the US Bank account and have a mention below naming the individual.

The feature, if successful, will then be rolled out to the entire community.

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Google and Facebook have both announced URL shortening services today.  Shortening URL’s is becoming increasingly popular as a way of saving time consuming keystrokes on mobile devices.

Google

Google has added a URL shortener called goo.gl that works with The Google Toolbar and its Feedburner service to provide shortened URLs that leverage the Google architecture.

Some of the features for Google lists are its network infrastructure uptime, speed and the fact that it scans shortened links for viruses.  We’ll have more information once we know how reporting works.

Facebook

News on Facebook’s URL shortener cites the service as a shortened way to get to existing Facebook URLs.  Doing so will allow shorter posting and sharing of profiles and fan pages with vanity URLs.

You can now find us at:

http://fb.me/SMCpros

http://fb.me/timbarsness

http://fb.me/maikkula

http://fb.me/tylerolson

http://fb.me/joelfeder

http://fb.me/sarahsueshehata

http://fb.me/mitchellhislop

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In an obvious effort to catch up with Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn has finally released its API, which has been in the works for quite some time. The API allows access to profiles, connections, invitations, and status updates.

An Early Success?

Not quite.  A gander through the developer forums shows a cluster of frustrated new developers with no sample code to work from and virtually no successful integration.

The development team hasn’t quite gotten it all together.  They omitted true documentation and sample code with the basic advice to look at other standard OAuth sample code for references.

LinkedIn Widgets

Similar to Facebook Fan Boxes and other widgets, the out-of-the-box widgets LinkedIn provides allow copy and paste widgets for detail on a company or individual profile and a share on LinkedIn button.

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Twitter’s announcement of opening up the Twitter people search to developers through its API has added powerful functionality for its developers.  Similar to its find on Twitter end-user functionality, this allows developers to programmatically search for people based on profile information.

We can’t wait to see how this will impact the creativity of Twitter apps in the coming months.  We even have some plans of our own up our sleeves.

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