Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

The brains behind Twitter and Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey was interviewed by 60-Minutes recently and gave us an insight into his background and what brought about the idea to what is now one of the biggest social networks to date.

Dorsey, the founder of two of the world’s hottest tech companies (Twitter and Square), goes back to his roots in St. Louis to talk about how he got interested in micro-communications. He was speech impeded as a child and this kept him at home a lot, where he would play on a computer and listen to the police scanner. He found himself fascinated by the short bursts of talking used by law enforcement and emergency personnel, which was the inspiration for the 140 character limit on Twitter. Speaking in the interview, he said he was fascinated by how they’re always talking in short and brief phrases about where they’re going, what they’re doing and where they currently are, and anyone who has the scanner could listen in.

Watch the full documentary below:

E-commerce service Jumia has launched a screaming competition for its customers and non-customers alike. All you have to do is well, scream “Jumiaaaa”. The grand prize is

To enter the competition, you have to signup on Jumia’s Facebook screaming app, upload a video of you screaming to YouTube and paste the link within the app.

There are a couple of videos of people screaming but the problem here is that there’s a bunch of unrelated videos – like Chris Brown trying and failing to dance the Azonto. The app doesn’t state how exactly the winning video will be chosen but it seems like it’ll be based on votes.

For Jumia, this is a brilliant way to propagate its ‘gospel’. People have to share their scream videos with their friends and family to get more votes. Voters are also required to share a link to the app.

So scream away and don’t forget to vote.

No guys, I will not be screaming. There’s already a video of me dancing Gangnam Style on the internet.

So you’ve signed up on a bunch of social networks and you’ve got quite the followership. Won’t it be great if you could spend so much time on social media sites and get paid to share stuff?

Sharetori will pay you to post short messages, links and other content on social media. All you’ve got to do is signup and select one of the “Things to Share”, craft your own message and hit the share buttons.

The service lets you share to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ while paying you per message. For example if you select a message to share, you’ll get paid once. No matter how many times you choose to share such message.

There’s also an analytics dashboard where you can view the message you shared and how many clicks and revenue it generated. Revenue can be withdrawn and received as credit for your mobile phones. Sharetori says they’re also looking towards rewards and gifts just in case you don’t want credit.

For advertisers, Sharetori let’s you reach as many people as possible on social media platforms by creating campaigns. Campaigns start from a mimum of N10,000 at N25 per massage. You can also decide when you want to launch and end campaigns as well as decide a minimum number of friends and followers the sharetori users must have to share your message.

Users can be further broken down into Male and Female.

Sharetori isn’t the first service offering money to post message on social networks. Earlier this year, a similar service Nairatweets launched and pays users per tweet.

Sharetori differs from Nairatweets in mode of payment and its interface. Naira tweets also calculates the costs of tweets based on number of followers Sharetori pays a flat rate to all users at present.

What do you think about pay-to-share services? Do they amplify noise about products or do you hate the hype they create on your feed?

Please leave a comment.

Source: Otekbits

Twitter has launched Promoted Products for Small Businesses. Promoted Products is its ad platform consisting of promoted tweets and accounts. This means there’ll be more ads on Twitter than you’ve seen before. The service is in partnership with American Express and is currently available via a special invite. Businesses who sign up for the service with get $100 in ad credits from American Express and the credits will run based on engagement from tweets, follows and clicks. This means businesses won’t pay for impressions but will pay for engagement.

For the Promoted Tweets, Twitter says it’ll promote the best tweets from an account. Promoted accounts on the other hand, will be shown via the “who to follow” list. Promoted Products also helps you select the location where your tweet and account will be visible so if you’re providing a service in Lagos, it won’t show up on the timeline of Abuja users.

Seems like Twitter is finally getting its monetization act together. The first set of monetization was Promoted Trends but a whole lot of businesses can’t afford that service because it’s too expensive. The service is currently only available in the United States and the company says it will eventually open the platform up to others around the world

Here’s a short video from Twitter explaining the new ad service

What do you think? Will you love to see ads in your timeline?

Source: The Verge8

What hit me there is the word “Insomniac”. I’ve got a load of friends who can’t sleep due to the addictiveness of the service. You know, wanting to keep up with what’s going on everywhere.

Twitter has come a long way from that first tweet. They’ve now got over 200 million users posting an average of 250 million tweets daily. The team has also increased to over 900 employees. Up from 400 last year.

By the way, here’s the very first tweet. It was called twttr back then

just setting up my twttr

— Jack Dorsey (@jack) March 21, 2006

Source: TheNextWeb

Blogging service Posterous has announced its acquisition by Twitter. Posterous says they’re glad to be a member of  the Twitter team because they’ll bring their expertise to a product that serves hundreds of millions of users.

For Posterous users, you don’t need to worry about your Spaces. Everything will continue to run smoothly and you’ll be notified of changes via email. For users who host their blog on Posterous, partner eNom will take over domain management. Switch details will also be emailed to users who use the hosting service. For more info on how you’ll be affected, checkout Posterous’ Acqusition FAQ.

Seems like microblogging service Twitter is willing to move its influence further into the blogosphere. We’re currently not sure how and if there’ll be integration with both services but we’ll keep you up to date as more details unfold.

Posterous was started in May 2008 with funding from Y Combinator. The service pioneered mobile blogging and was named one of the “2010 Hottest Silicon Valley Companies” in May 2010, by Lead411.

If you live in Lagos and you use Twitter, you’re very likely to be following @Gidi_Traffic. If you don’t follow, you’ll definitely have seen retweets from the account. Gidi Traffic was set up in September by an Anonymous Twitter user to help share traffic reports across the city of Lagos. During the #OccupyNigeria protests, Gidi Traffic got a bit of an expansion and was used to share trouble spot reports across the country. After the protests, Gidi Traffic helped us find fuel.

Gidi Traffic has topped the list under the life saving hero category of the Shorty Awards. The Shorty Awards is a yearly Twitter-award ceremony that rewards Twitter users in different categories. Users are nominated by their followers and a winner is picked from the finalist. The life saving hero category is supported by The Weather Channel’s Coast Guard Alaska, a TV show about an elite team that risks their lives in search and rescue missions in harsh weather conditions.

On March 26th, the winners in the different categories will be announced. Gidi Traffic has been nominated alongside Sophia Bush, The New York Fire Department, Nick Jonas, Gabrielle Giffords and ABroaderView Charity.

Looks like we’ll finally get to see the face behind Gidi Traffic.

Source: Vanguard Nigeria

Looking at it deeply, creating a Facebook page is free but the NSC could have hired an agency to run the page. The page currently has 5,444 Likes and doesn’t look like anything managed by a professional social media consultant. There’s a bit of conversation with fans as they commission’s page replies to questions concerning winners of competitions.

Chief Ekeji will also explain the expenditure behind spent to rehabilitate the National Stadium in Lagos and Liberty Stadium in Ibadan.

We’ll update you as more details unfold.

Source: TechLoy via Nigerian Tribune

On Twitter’s blog, the company says  ”As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression”. Twitter says prior to its post, the only way to take account of countries’ limits was to remove content that seemed illegal globally. From now on, Twitter will now be able to block content from users in a certain country while keeping the content available globally.

Twitter will let users know if they are required to withhold tweets from certain countries and the tweet will be marked as withheld. So if you’re in a country where a certain tweet has been withheld you’ll see an alert box that says “@username withheld” or “tweet withheld”

Twitter says it’ll only censor content when it’s asked to do so with appropriate legal requests and will evaluate such requests before censorship. Twitter has also extended its partnership with Chillingeffects.org. Notices related to censorship requests and activities will be posted there.

UPDATE: Users have decided to boycott the social network with the #TwitterBlackout hashtag, with groups like Anonymous sending a tweet that read “SPREAD THE WORD #TwitterBlackout I will not tweet for the whole of January 28th due to the new twitter censor rule #Twitter #J28″

What do you think about this new feature? Does it hinder freedom of speech? Please leave us a comment.

Source: CNet

We received reports a few hours ago of plans to turn of BlackBerry Internet Service for Nigeria. Now when that happens, A lot of BlackBerry users will have problems connecting to BBM and other internet services. Here’s a step-by-step process for tweeting via SMS. Tweets via SMS cost N10 per tweet.

On Your Computer

Head to Settings on Twitter and click the ‘Mobile’ tab.

Change ‘Country/Region’ to ‘Nigeria’ via the drop-down menu.

Type in your phone number.

Select your carrier. Text-to-tweet is currently supported only by MTN, Zain and Glo Mobile.

Twitter will show you the next steps using your phone number.

Send “GO” to “40404″ for MTN and Zain. 20644 for Glo. Wait a while for a verification code.

Finish the next steps and you should be able to tweet by sending SMSes to 40404. Note that SMSes have a limit of 160 characters and Twitter has an update limit of 140 characters.

On Your Mobile Phone

Send ‘START’ or ‘SIGNUP’ to 40404 for MTN and Zain and 20644 for Glo.

You’ll be required to login with your twitter username and password.

If your network turns off Twitter support

If something happens and your network should turn off Twitter support, you can send SMSes to +447624800379, +4915705000021, +3584573950042. If you’re tweeting about the subsidy removal, please tweet only relevant information. You don’t want to tweet something that’ll implicate you o. Remember you have Direct Messaging. Stay Safe guys.