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Twitter has a two-pronged approach to give media companies the ability to create dynamic interfaces that filter and curate tweets in new ways. One is to showcase great examples of Twitter implementations on its Twitter Media blog, and the other is to give media companies the resources to do these types of projects on their own.

I spoke this week with Twitter’s Robin Sloan, who works in media partnerships, to find out more. He said the blog launched a few weeks ago and is aimed at media companies that want to build Twitter integration into their sites.

“It’s designed to be a spotlight and showcase for really good work,” he said.

Sloan and Twitter’s Chloe Sladden split the task of writing blog posts. Their goal is to update it daily and post an in-depth case study each week.

The Blog as a How-To Guide

The blog aims to be a practical how-to guide for creating projects, such as NBC’s Twitter interface for the Winter Olympics, and Sloan hopes that as people follow the blog, their imagination for what they can do with Twitter will become bigger and broader.

“The idea of lists of tweets on a web page; we can go well beyond that,” he said.

Some news sites have already done that. The Twitter Media blog highlights the Huffington Post’s Twitter Edition, in which nearly every page and section has Twitter integration. The site uses a mixture of Twitter’s API, @anywhere, and Twitter lists. Sloan said you can’t tell where The Huffington Post stops and where Twitter begins.

The Huffington Post uses @anywhere Hover Cards on its Twitter lists and the “Hot on Twitter” section of the site is content that’s “selected and organized based on tweet volume,” according to the Twitter Media blog. Sloan said the depth that The Huffington Post has achieved is what they are aiming to get more people to do.

One of the main functions of the blog is to walk producers and developers through how to do one of these projects so they can learn from them.

“On our site, we explain the process,” Sloan said.

The Twitter Media site gets its blog content from partnerships that have launched, and by searching for great examples and from others’ tips. Sloan said they increasingly want to use Twitter itself as a way to get great usage tips on both big and small projects.

“My hope is we can get a lot of stuff that way,” he said.

Why Launch a Media Blog?

The activities of celebrities and reporters can be a strong connection point for new Twitter users to get on board and stay there. Twitter launched their media-focused blog because news organizations and TV personalities have been really aggressive in adopting innovative uses for Twitter, according to Sloan.

“We find media can be a good bridge for users of Twitter,” he said. “We’d like to be able to leverage that to get them to be Twitter users.”

Twitter can help improve journalism, he added, and they would like to assist media companies such as The New York Times in doing better journalism.

In order to better help news organizations, Twitter needs to understand what the media needs. Sloan said there are tools out there that aren’t built by Twitter to help people solve problems.

Sloan told me that in about a week, Twitter Media will launch a directory of tools, platforms and services to better help journalists find the third-party apps that will be useful to them.

More Twitter resources from Mashable:

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- How Journalists are Using Social Media for Real Results
- How Companies Should Approach the New Twitter Advertising Model
- 4 Tips for Tapping Into Twitter Conversations
- HOW TO: Spring Clean Your Twitter Account
- 10 Dos and Don’ts for Brands on Twitter

Last week, Facebook unveiled its universal “like” button, furthering its goal of world domination in the process. Thus, it was inevitable that someone, somewhere would develop the universal “dislike” button.

OpenDislike.org, which is powered by German identity manager yiid.com, is really more proof of concept than something that is ever likely to be largely used or integrated, however.

OpenDislike is the most recent example of tools that aim to fill the void of an official ability to “dislike” content or comments on Facebook. Last fall, we reported on the Facebook Dislike Firefox plugin and before that the Thradsy dashboard, but OpenDislike is interesting because it mimics the implementation and functionality of Facebook’s official like buttons.

Like the official solution, you can add a “dislike” button to a website by pasting in a line of code and modifying the URL to point to that page or article. Of course, users have to log in to their yiid account for the yiid buttons to work, and although you can link your yiid and Facebook accounts, it won’t offer a universal experience to anyone but other yiid users.

Even if this doesn’t have a lot of real-world use, we love the concept. Would you like a universal dislike button to be usable across Facebook? Let us know!

[Img: striatic on FlickrFlickr]

As an early adopter brand, Starbucks has reaped the rewards of social media innovation. Today the company is furthering those efforts with a Facebook application for customers to access and manage their Starbucks cards.

The application will go live around 1:50 p.m. PDT today and will be accessible via Starbucks’ Facebook Page.  Essentially the application provides a virtual way to complete any card-related activity and even view a record of all transactions.

On the card management front, users can register (or unregister cards), check their balance, reload cards and edit profile information. The app also includes relevant rewards program information so frequent customers can check their status levels and benefits.

What’s even cooler is that come summer time, Starbucks will introduce functionality that will let users reload a Facebook friend’s Starbucks card as a gift through the application. Talk about an instant way to make a Facebook friend’s day.

Of course, most of the application’s functionality mirrors what you can already do via the Starbucks website and its iPhone app, but the Facebook app is all about convenience.

Product Manager Brad Nelson explained, “Our Facebook community is very vibrant with over seven million fans. We see this a great way to make it even easier to manage your Starbucks Card on Facebook. We can’t wait to make it easy to buy your friends a drink.”

Convenient it is. Given FacebookFacebook’s size and significance, we expect the application to be a huge hit for both customers and company.

Twitter’s very real-time functionality is obviously the main attraction of the service. But it can also be a downside — if you want to send a tweet at a specific time, you usually have to be poised over a keyboard or phone.

But there are some great solutions. The ability to post-date a tweet is useful for event promotion (where you may be busy at said event), to reach an audience in a different time zone, to space out your messages, or to keep your account nice and lively while you are away.

While some popular Twitter clients offer scheduling options built-in, others don’t. For those in need, here are five great, free online services you can use to queue up tweets for future broadcasting.

To narrow down the vast number of services out there, criteria for this list includes: 1) That it’s free; 2) That it offers OAuth “sign in with Twitter” access, or OpenID sign-in; and 3) That it does what it says on the proverbial packaging.

These five hand-picked options are our favorites, but as always, please do let us know your top choices in the comments below.

1. Twuffer: Best For Minimalists

Twuffer (Twitter buffer, get it?) is a super-simple example of a Twitter post-dating service. Using your Twitter log-in info, you can set your timezone and select how you’d prefer the time and date to appear. Scheduling a tweet is easy — just type what you’re going to say into the box, set the time and date you want it to go live, and hit the “set status!” button.

Queued tweets can be viewed via a tab on the dashboard, but cannot be edited, so if you’ve made a mistake, it’s a matter of deleting to start again. A record of tweets sent via the service is also viewable. Our scheduled tweet made it out the door as timed, so this simple solution gets a big thumbs up.

2. Later Bro: Best for Facebook Fans

In addition to Twitter, Later Bro also works with FacebookFacebook, and both options are offered right from the sign-in page. Once you’ve logged in with your Twitter account, you can change your timezone via the settings, enter your tweet, set the date and time (the latter of which is a little quirky) when you want it to go live, and hit the schedule button.

Scheduled tweets are listed below the main box, and can be edited, while sent tweets can be viewed. Another simple service that works well, Later Bro’s amusing name and contemporary looks might give it an edge with a hipper crowd.

3. TwaitterTwaitter: Best for International Reach

Twaitter (soon to be renamed “gremln” — vowels cost more, don’t you know) is actually a business-aimed Twitter client and scheduling platform, but for the purpose of this exercise, we’re just focusing on the tweet-scheduling aspects.

Twaitter offers some advanced options, including a nifty built-in URL shortener. There’s also the ability to translate your tweets, which, along with the drop-down timezone menu (included in the scheduler), makes this a great option for anyone indulging in some international Twitter action. Other highlights include the option to save drafts, copy tweets, and search and edit queued messages.

4. FutureTweets: Best for Anyone Up To No Good

Offering OpenID sign in (but no Twitter OAuth, for some reason), you have to validate your Twitter account before you can get going with FutureTweets. Once you’re in, this service offers a few cunning tricks that might make it worthwhile.

There’s an analog clock face to set the time of scheduled tweets (great for the numerically challenged among us), as well as some novelty options, like the ability to add icons to your tweet or flip the text backwards. Why you’d want to do any of those things is, of course, a matter for you to consider.

However, the really big selling point for FutureTweets over rivals is that you can choose for your update to appear as coming “via web,” rather than from the service. If you are trying to make it appear as if you are tweeting live (for whatever dastardly reason), this feature is certainly handy.

5. tweetsqueue: Best for Chatterboxes

Currently in closed beta (with the option to ask nicely for an invite), tweetsqueue offers yet another take on scheduling tweets with, as the name might suggest, a queue-based solution.

This system could work really well as a way of jotting down thoughts and sharing links in a timely manner without spamming your followers with a ton of tweets all at once. It could also serve more creative uses, such as the dialogue or dramatic recreations and experiments we’ve seen in the past. After a Twitter sign-in, you simply select your timezone and the frequency at which you’d like your tweets to be issued (e.g, every 30 minutes). Then, start getting them queued up.

Although in beta, tweetsqueue worked perfectly for us, and we think with a bit of refinement in terms of timing options, it could really become a must-use tweet scheduling tool.

Image courtesy of iStockphotoiStockphoto, deezaat

More Twitter resources from Mashable:

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- 5 Tips for Creating the Perfect Profile Pic
- 3 Tips for Managing Your Online Reputation
- 5 Big Twitter Trends to Follow Right Now
- 5 Unique Ways to Use Twitter for Business
- How Companies Should Approach the New Twitter Advertising Model

Now that Tweetie 2 is set to become the free and official Twitter app for iPhone, iPhone app makers have been forced to step up their game.

HootSuite — maker of business-friendly Twitter apps — is doing just that, adding language translation, Facebook integration and geolocation support to its iPhone apps.

The upgrade applies to both the paid ($2.99) and free HootSuiteHootSuite iPhone apps and provides tools to help marketers and brands better leverage their Twitter presence.

Perhaps most significant is the addition of instant translation for more than 50 languages, which should significantly help marketers understand foreign language tweets, replies and direct messages.

When it comes to Facebook, users will able to send and receive updates from that network as well. HootSuite integration supports updates to Pages and profiles as well as the ability to view updates from friends and likers.

The full list of feature updates is as follows:

• Translation — Understand brand sentiment in a of variety languages, plus post Twitter and Facebook updates and be understood most anywhere in the world
• Facebook – Post to Profiles and multiple Fan Pages from anywhere, plus interact with news and status updates from your friends and fans
• Geolocation — Include your exact coordinates with your Twitter updates — ideal for sharing favorite places and coordinating with your friends and colleagues for meet-ups
• Reply to All — One small click will save you many fingertaps — tap “reply all” to pre-populate a message with all the recipients in the original
• Design — Find your way around the App more quickly and elegantly with interface refinements, including a landscape view for composing Twitter updates
• Labs — Some ideas aren’t quite ready but are close enough to share. Visit HootSuite Labs on the iPhone for a beta of our “Bump™ to Follow” feature

Cleary HootSuite isn’t willing to go down without a fight. These upgrades point to the company’s continued interest in the evolution of its iPhone applications and its ongoing interest to cater to its business audience.

You can check out the new features in action in the video below.

Next-generation iPhone craziness, Hugo Chavez getting hip to Twitter, Steve Jobs’s final words on Flash (we think) and scores and scores of acquisitions — this week was one eclectic collection of days.

If you missed anything during this long trek toward the weekend, never fear, we have compiled a list of 10 top social media and technology stories from the past week. Read up, educate yourself and bring your boundless knowledge to spread around at Happy Hour — we would, however, caution you to leave any Apple prototypes at home.

1. Person Who Sold the iPhone Prototype Revealed – We knew that police had identified and questioned the person who found and sold the iPhone prototype, and now his identity has been publicly revealed.

2. Steve Jobs: Flash Is No Longer Necessary – Steve Jobs posted a long open letter on Flash, listing all the reasons why Apple has decided not to support it on the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch.

3. Hugo Chavez Asks Fidel Castro to Join Twitter – After joining Twitter on Tuesday and taking the username @chavezcandanga, controversial Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez asked Bolivian President Evo Morales and Cuban political leader Fidel Castro to join him on the microblogging site.

4. HP to Acquire Palm for $1.2 Billion – Ending weeks of speculation about its future, Palm has been acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.2 billion.

5. Apple Acquires iPhone App Siri – Apple has acquired SiriSiri — an iPhone app that doubles as a voice-operated personal assistant.

6. Apple Acquires Chip Maker Intrinsity – Apple has confirmed that it has acquired Intrinsity, a Texas-based semiconductor maker that was likely the brains behind the chip that powers the iPad.

7. Google Acquires Widget Creator LabPixies – Another week, another GoogleGoogle acquisition. This time, it’s LabPixies, a company Google has worked with to create many of the widgets on its personalized portal, iGoogle.

8. Senator Doesn’t “Like” Facebook’s Instant Personalization Features – On Sunday, Senator Charles Schumer of New York penned a letter to the FTC, urging them to create privacy guidelines for Facebook and other social networking sites. More senators soon joined the fight.

9. RIP Floppy Disk – Sony is the last manufacturer of 3.5-inch floppy disks, and while the company sold more than 12 million of them in 2009, it has just announced it will stop making floppies as of March 2011.

10. Google Confirms Android 2.2 Will Support Flash – Google’s Andy Rubin revealed that the upcoming version of the AndroidAndroid mobile operating system will fully support Flash technology.

[img credit: Wired.com]

Josh Williams, the grinning, long-haired CEO of the rapidly growing geo-social application Gowalla, is the kind of guy who wears flower shirts and cowboy boots under a sports jacket when he goes to New York for meetings. Outdoorsy and family-oriented, he’s a visual designer turned social network founder, who goes by the Twitter handle @jw. He and Gowalla CTO, Scott Raymond, who wrote one of the first books about Ruby on Rails, sat down with Mashable for an hour during their recent trip from Austin to NYC to discuss the changing landscape of social networking.

GowallaGowalla is an app for iPhoneiPhone, AndroidAndroid, and soon for BlackBerryBlackBerry Rocks! that utilizes GPS triangulation to pinpoint users’ locations, and allows people to use their phones as virtual “passports,” stamping and collecting digital souvenirs as they go.

With a constant focus on design and exploration, recently the service launched several features to further distinguish it from its chief rival, the social nightlife game and friend-finder, FoursquareFoursquare. The current version of Gowalla allows users to add photos to specific GPS coordinates, create temporary venues (so your birthday party doesn’t remain on the map forever), and comment on others’ check-in activity.

“We want to build Gowalla as the best service for recording and sharing your favorite places,” Williams explains.

Origins

Gowalla, which now has about 250,000 users across the world, was conceived in October 2008, when Williams stood in the middle of nowhere near Lake Tahoe (on the border of Nevada and California). Wishing he could capture the moment on a passport or perhaps a travelogue on his phone, Williams sat down with a sketchbook then and there and drew the first version of what would become Gowalla. His close friend Raymond built a prototype of the app in just a week, and after successfully checking in via iPhone-to-satellite link down the street, they said, “We should do this.”

Foursquare’s similar app overshadowed Gowalla’s buggy product during its debut at SXSW 2009, and when Gowalla made a comeback with its snazzy second edition that September, many people assumed it was simply a ripoff. But even then, Williams didn’t seem to be concerned. The space was growing.

The Road to Mass User Adoption

Now, as both companies gain eager users by the thousands, and more competitors enter the space, a common concern is that “old” networks like FacebookFacebook or TwitterTwitter might swoop into the space and crush Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, and everyone else. But again, Williams isn’t ruffled. “Location in general is going to become almost ubiquitous to mobile services and ultimately to the InternetInternet,” he says. “The idea of a location-based service will become redundant,” he adds. “We see Gowalla coming beyond just a declaration of ‘this is where I am,’ but ‘this is where I am, these are the people I was with, and these are the photographs that were taken.’ So I can go in and pull up my buddy who checked into the Mavs and Spurs game in Dallas last night and see all the photos taken by fans there, and it becomes this snapshot of what happened in that moment.”

When confronted with the idea of sharing their location –- even with friends –- people tend to rattle off concerns about privacy or say things like “Why would I want to do that?” Gowalla thinks that mindset will quickly evaporate.

“In the late 90s, people were constantly talking about information overload,” Raymond says. “It’s a little bit laughable now to say that in ‘94 people were going to go nuts because of all the information available to them.” He expects the same thing to happen with geo-social networking.

Another common prediction of skeptics is that these networks can never break into demographic segments outside of single 20- and 30-somethings in big cities. At a million users and climbing, Foursquare seems prepared to challenge the predictions of quick obsolescence, but its core audience definitely falls in the above category. Gowalla, on the other hand, is seeing success in reaching older demographics, perhaps because of its “kick-back, explore the world attitude,” as opposed to the fast-paced throb of Foursquare. Williams, who’s married and seems to be a pretty laid back guy himself, says his dad even just commented on his check-in when he arrived in NYC, asking, “What are you up to in New York?”

Gowalla is another way to share your life and keep in touch with old friends, Raymond says. When a friend of his back home in Kansas City checks into a grocery store, he says, it recalls good times and opens up opportunities to reconnect over fond memories.

The Mission and Beyond

Williams shared a few other interesting things about Gowalla: About one-third of the photos taken are of food; someone has tried checking in while skydiving; and someone in Hawaii created a Gowalla trip — a GPS-led tour guide — of all the filming locations for the TV show LOST, complete with trivia and tidbits about each site. The founders say that they don’t really think of the service as a game, but it’s definitely meant to be fun. Anecdotal evidence suggests that users are creatively finding unexpected ways to put the application to work.

“We live in a remarkably big and wonderful world,” said Williams. “There’s a lot of opportunity to explore. We want you to go out and discover the world, and hopefully Gowalla is a service that’s a part of that experience. But in the end, whether its a coffee shop down the street or a mountain viewpoint, we just want you to go out and discover.”

And the opportunities for discovery could be far-reaching: Raymond and Williams admit they’ve already thought about Gowalla in space. “We’re going to wait for location technology to reach the moon and Mars first,” Williams grins.

Raymond adds, “We’re currently a terrestrial service only.”

More location-based resources from Mashable:

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- 9 Killer Tips for Location-Based Marketing
- 10 Foursquare Apps You Can Use Right Now
- 6 Tips for Getting the Most out of Foursquare
- Foursquare vs. Gowalla: Location-Based Throwdown
- Location, Location, Location: 5 Big Predictions for 2010

[Image Credit: kk+]

Controversial Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez said during a visit to Bolivia that he would like to invite Bolivian President Evo Morales and Cuban political leader Fidel Castro to join him on Twitter, according to Reuters.

Chavez joined Twitter on Tuesday, taking the username @chavezcandaga. His arrival on Twitter was a surprise, partly because only 30% of his country has InternetInternet access (though that figure is far higher than it was before he took office) and partly because he called Twitter a potential “tool of terror” just two months ago.

Chavez — who describes himself as a Bolivarian soldier, a socialist and an anti-Imperialist — said he would use the site to spread Bolivarian revolution. Castro and Morales are two of his strongest allies in anti-American sentiment.

Chavez has acquired more than 100,000 followers since signing up. “This has been an explosion,” he said. Of Twitter in general, he said, “The potential this has … it’s not capitalist, it’s not socialist, it depends on how it is used.”

So sit tight and you might soon see the South and Central American political leaders retweeting one another.

Facebook this week announced that 50,000+ sites have implemented its “social plugins” in the week since launch.

With “like” buttons permeating the web, and Facebook’sFacebook intent to connect everything online using this new form of “social link”, should GoogleGoogle be concerned?

After all, if “liking” surpasses linking as the way to express interest in a piece of content, surely Google loses access to the best source of what’s good online? Is this the beginning of the end for Google’s PageRank algorithm?

That’s the topic of my CNN column this week.

Check out the column at CNN.com >>

A recent report on Twitter usage in the U.S. by Edison Research concludes that 87% of all Americans are now aware of Twitter — up from 5% in 2008 — but only 7% of the population actually use it.

Edison’s data was collected in February from 1,753 Americans ages 12 and up. The report also includes the company’s findings on Twitter usage over the last three years.

What’s especially interesting is that the percentage of Americans who are aware of Twitter actually supersedes the percentage of those who have InternetInternet access (85%). Twitter is now equally as well known as FacebookFacebook, albeit used far less. Edison links this disparity to Twitter’s lack of a clear purpose in the U.S. consumer’s eye.

Edison also finds that mobile usage is a key component of Twitter’s value proposition and that users are more likely to update and access Twitter via mobile devices than other social networking sites. One in five Twitter users update Twitter via their mobile devices several times per day; one in three do so at least once daily.

Some other interesting findings from the “Twitter Usage in America” report:

• African Americans account for 25% of the Twitter population, which is double the percentage of African Americans living in the U.S.
• Twitter users are more likely to live in higher income households.
• Four in 10 Twitter users (39%) own three or more computers.
• Twitter users are three times more likely to follow brands on Twitter than on other social networking sites.
• Less than half of regular Twitter users post updates (47%), although 70% of these same Twitter users do post status updates to other social networking services like Facebook.

As a whole, the report supports previous findings on the state of Twitter and emphasizes that it is more important for Twitter to define its purpose than build awareness. Additional findings and charts are included in the full report, which is available here.