Twitter

I'm not sure you can call it a suspension from Twitter if the guy supposedly being suspended is, you know, still tweeting. But there are rumors that ESPN has ordered Sports Guy columnist Bill Simmons -- currently on the road promoting his massive tome, The Book of Basketball -- not to tweet for two weeks.

It started with The Big Lead, an independent sports blog which wrote:

Bill Simmons had a book signing in Beaverton, Oregon last night, and a reader who attended wrote in that he "overheard" ESPN's Sports Guy telling a fan that he was "suspended from tweeting for two weeks" and that all he was allowed to tweet about was his book tour. We went to the usually-forthcoming Simmons this morning, and here was his response: "no commento."

From there it got picked up by NBCSports.com Out of Bounds blogger Rick Chandler, who seems to have found a smoking gun:

[A]pparently it was this Twitter jab at WEEI, a sports radio station in Boston, that caused the little red revolving lights to start spinning at ESPN headquarters. Very naughty, Bill! Didn't you know that ESPN and WEEI recently signed an affiliation deal?

The tweet Chandler refers to is this one:

Hey WEEI: You were wrong, I did a Boston interview today. With your competition. Rather give them ratings over deceitful scumbags like you.

The thing is, since that tweet sent on Nov. 10, Simmons has tweeted 45 times. Unless they're being done by a ghost tweeter.

I'm tempted to dismiss the whole thing, but then there's this: The Big Lead uploaded a video interview (below) with Simmons in Portland, where in response to a fan saying "we didn't get any tweets," Simmons replied, "That's a whole other story, why you didn't get any tweets. ...No comment on the tweets."

You don't "no comment on the tweets" unless there's something going on with the tweets.

Twitter officially launched its geotagging application-program interface, platform director Ryan Sarver announced on the Twitter Blog.

Users can opt-in by clicking a box in their settings menu, and several third-party tools support the API.

Sarver's post:

In August, we announced that we were working on a new API that would provide developers with the ability to geotag tweets. Today, the Geotagging API is officially available.

This release is unique in that it's API-only, which means you won't see any changes on twitter.com yet. Instead, Twitter applications like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and others are already supporting this new functionality (go try them out now!) in interesting ways that include geotagging your tweets and displaying the location from where a tweet was posted. The added information provides valuable context when reading your friends' tweets and allows you to better focus in on local conversations. Now you can find out what live music is playing right now in your neighborhood or what people visiting Checkpoint Charlie are saying today about the anniversary of the Berlin Wall. These are only the beginning, and we are really looking forward to seeing the creative uses emerge from the developer community.

It's important to note that geotagging is disabled by default for all users, which means you will need to opt-in in order to use it. To activate the new geotagging functionality, go to your Settings page and click "Enable Geotagging."

Just in time to discuss the controversial goal that sent France's national soccer team to the World Cup, Twitter debuted support for French, joining its already-existing English, Spanish and Japanese support.

Twitter's Jenna Dawn announced the news on the social-networking site's blog, but she did so in French.

The English-language translation, courtesy of TechCrunch:

With the addition of the Spanish version of the site last month, many people have joined the conversations on Twitter. More and more people tweet outside the United States, and we are now able to accommodate users of nearly 30 Francophone countries. It is now possible to change the language settings in French with the participation of translators who have helped turn Twitter into a platform for truly global communication.

The French twitteurs golds can already track people and companies they are familiar with. Whether you attended @lepicerie or @lopera for your gastronomic outings, you read @lemondefr on your way to work, you listen to @theteenagers on the way home, or you're a fan of @CanadiensMTL, there is a wealth of information useful to discover at any time.

To see Twitter in French, just check your settings and select "French" from the menu.

One last thing: Some of the Twitter team will be in Paris Nov. 9 and 10 for LeWeb conference, presented by @loic. The specialists of our platform, Ryan Sarver (@rsarver) and Marcel Molina (@noradio) will present, among other things, a session for developers. If you are in the region on those days, please join us!

continued...

Friday has been a busy day for Web-based Twitter client Brizzly, as it launched in full public beta mode, added foreign-language translation via Google Translate and hired former Facebook and FriendFeed employee Ben Darnell, CNET and TechCrunch reported.

Brizzly had previously been available only via an invite code.

The translation feature works via a simple click of a question mark, according to CNET.

And Brizzly parent Thing Labs founder and CEO Jason Shellen told TechCrunch Darnell will work on "larger framework for communication and content discovery."

College football's controversial Bowl Championship Series kicked off a Twitter account, and the response of many fans clamoring for a playoff: "Tweet THIS," AdAge.com reported.

The @InsideTheBCS account launched with three Tweets, according to AdAge.com: a welcome message to new followers, a link to an article questioning the fairness of a playoff system and a quote from University of Florida head coach Urban Meyer about how the BCS system has been good for college football.

Sports Illustrated columnist Stewart Mandel tweeted, as reported by AdAge.com:

If the balloon boy dad set up a Twitter account, even he would not draw the level of venom @InsidetheBCS is right now.

BCS executive director Bill Hancock told AdAge.com:

We think a lot of the feelings out there are because people just don't understand it. The side talking about playoffs has had that turf to itself…we want it to be a two-way conversation. That's the great thing about social media. It gives everybody a chance to weigh in.

Twitter's user-entry prompt question -- "What Are You Doing?" -- has long been inadequate to the task of defining the multiple ways people use the microblogging service. Worse, it has been the set-up for the greatest cliche of countless Twitter-bashing articles, "No one cares what I'm having for breakfast."

Today Twitter revealed that "What Are You Doing?" has been replaced by "What's Happening?" Company co-founder Biz Stone made the announcement in a blog post this morning:

Twitter was originally conceived as a mobile status update service--an easy way to keep in touch with people in your life by sending and receiving short, frequent answers to one question, "What are you doing?"...

The fundamentally open model of Twitter created a new kind of information network and it has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates. Twitter helps you share and discover what's happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about. "What are you doing?" isn't the right question anymore—starting today, we've shortened it by two characters. Twitter now asks, "What's happening?"

Two quick thoughts: 1) It sounds as though they're trying to be hip, but in an '80s kind of way. Which sort of comes out to "not hip."

2) It's amazing they didn't crowdsource this decision. Think of all the free publicity! The Huffington Post would have turned it into a three-month contest.

Speaking on a panel in London for the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said a premium Twitter service offering verified streams and an analytics package will be available by year-end, paidContent reported.

Stone said:

This takes advantage of some of the commercial use of Twitter we've seen from businesses like airlines and big box stores…We want to present to them a layer of features that allows them to become better at Twitter, show them some of the analytics.

On the subject of mobile use of Twitter, Stone said, as reported by paidContent:

When we look at where we can grow, we look to the more than 4 billion active mobile phone accounts in the world, as opposed to the 1.65 million active Web accounts.

And on newspapers:

As we begin to add things such as the ability to geo-tag an individual tweet and recognize which users have higher reputations than others, that will feed into the culture of news organizations.

Web surfers searching on Yahoo! are in for a real tweet.

Yahoo! users are now able to browse through tweets and images related to their search queries without having to navigate to the Yahoo! News page, CNET reported, as the search engine is using Twitter's public application-program interface, and then running tweets through a Yahoo! algorithm to determine relevancy.

On the opposite side of the fence from employers restricting access to social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, ReadWriteWeb conducted an informal search of job listings on craigslist from Nov. 1-18 and tallied how many of them requested that applicants be familiar with Twitter use.

In terms of cities, New York was at the top of the heap with 196 job listings that mentioned Twitter, trailed by San Francisco with 159 and Boston with 115.

The not-very-tweet-friendly cities were Denver with six mentions in ads; Philadelphia with four, Boulder, Colo., with two; and a big fat zero in Bismarck, N.D.

Who knew a simple 23-minute podcast interview with the CEO of a company that produced an application for sharing photographs via Twitter would lead to so much drama?

TweetPhoto CEO Dan Caulfield is now former TweetPhoto CEO Dan Caulfield following his interview last month with Frank Peters for The Frank Peters Show, and Peters received a letter from the company's lawyers demanding that he remove the podcast, TechCrunch reported.

TweetPhoto dismissed Caulfield for revealing confidential information about partnerships during the podcast, according to TechCrunch, which also posted this except from the letter from TweetPhoto's law firm to Peters:

The interview posted on your Website contains numerous factual inaccuracies and disparaging statements from Mr. Caufield that TweetPhoto is concerned were made in an effort to harm the economic prospects of TweetPhoto and may constitute a violation of the laws prohibiting unfair competition, defamation, as well as tortious interference with contractual relations and prospective economic advantage.