LinkedIn Classmates Shows Your Entire Alumni Network

By Alicia Eler

From http://www.readwriteweb.com/

Today LinkedIn launched LinkedIn Classmates, a way to tap into the power of alumni networks without calling your school's alumni office. This new tool gives you access to what your fellow alums are doing in their post-school lives, highlighting what they've accomplished since graduating, an opportunity to reconnect with alums in your field and a way to find alums who are interested in helping you.

LinkedIn Classmates also gives you the opportunity to track career trends based on where your school's alumni work, what they do and where they live now. Maybe you'll discover an alumni working at a company you're interested in applying to, or perhaps you'll notice alumni working somewhere you used to work. LinkedIn Classmates gives you access to that data quickly and easily, making it an ideal tool for gathering insights and reconnecting with individuals.

You can also find out what you have in common with those people now through graphs that chart specific interests. LinkedIn Classmates is not limited to college - it includes all of the schools you've entered into your LinkedIn profile. There's also an option to see people who attended during specific years, and those who graduated in a specific year. The least automated feature here is the option to join your alumni group - but you've already done that, right?

Alumni groups are an important part of the LinkedIn ecosystem, and are more geared toward conversation.

Some alumni prefer not to list the year they graduated, but that doesn't mean you can't find them. Using an easy toggle feature, you can grab a list of everyone who attended your school, regardless of graduation date.

To use the new feature, go to http://www.linkedin.com/classmates.

LinkedIn Classmates comes on the heels of status updates from companies, which lets administrators of company pages post short updates, just like users.

Foursquare Takes Quick Advantage of Apple’s iOS 5

By Nick Clayton

From http://blogs.wsj.com/

Location-based services have not quite conquered the world in the way it seemed they might a year or two ago. Their thunder has been stolen partly by established networks such as Facebook and Twitter, but also not everybody wants to tell the world where they are.

In response, Foursquare has launched its version 4.0 with a new feature called “Radar,” which takes advantage of the improved push functionality of iOS 5. If activated by the user, Radar alerts users of people, things or places they might want to visit near where they happen to be at the time.

It will, for instance, notify them if they are close to a location that three or more of their contacts have checked into. It will also tell them if they are near a place on a list they follow. And the information will be pushed to users even if the app is not actually switched on at the time.
But Wired has a feeling of deja vu:

Sound familiar? It is. After Facebook’s 2010 launch of its “Places” feature – which offers many features similar to Foursquare’s service, including check-ins — it seemed as if Dennis Crowley’s small 80-man startup was all but dead in the water. Similarly, Facebook’s “Deals” program offers a location-based deal notification service much like Foursquare’s daily-deals program, created in partnership with LivingSocial.

“We weathered that storm,” said Holger Luedorf, Foursquare VP of mobile and international, in an interview, noting that Facebook recently shuttered its deals program while Foursquare’s remains strong. “Honestly, we’ve recently announced over 1 billion check-ins, with a user base of over 10 million people. That’s already huge, but we’re focused on growing even more and not spending time worrying about our competitors,” Luedorf said.

Foursquare also says it is working on an Android version of Radar.

Obama checks in to Foursquare

By the CNN Wire Staff From: http://www.cnn.com/

President Barack Obama addresses the Seed Savers Exchange on Monday in Decorah, Iowa, as part of a Midwest bus tour.

(CNN) -- Social-networking app Foursquare has snagged perhaps its highest profile user: President Barack Obama.

The commander in chief has joined the location-based service and will be using it to highlight places he visits and what he does there, the White House announced on its blog Monday evening.

Obama's check-in coincided with a three-day bus tour of Midwestern states.

The mobile platform has seen astronomical growth as users turn to it to find out where their friends are hanging out and what they recommend you do when you get there.

On Monday, the White House posted its first tip -- from a town hall meeting at a riverside Minnesota park in Cannon Falls.

"President Obama discussed ways to grow the economy and strengthen the middle class with a crowd of 500 people at Hannah's Bend Park on the first stop of his economic bus tour across the Midwest," the White House said.

Foursquare is just the latest foray into social media for the president. He's already on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

To find and follow him, one will have to go through the White House's page on the site: https://foursquare.com/whitehouse

Searching for "Barack Obama" on the app will pull up a man in Salt Lake City and one in London.

One appeal of Foursquare is to check into a site so often that you can oust someone else to become the "mayor" there.

For Obama, that raises a question though: How appealing is "mayor" when you're already president?

Can Facebook and Google+ Coexist?

The two Internet giants are going head-to-head in a social networking battle, but cooperation could be the key to their survival.

By Megan Geuss,

PCWorld    Jul 11, 2011 9:30 pm

Like oil and water or like peanut butter and jelly? Google+, the search giant’s new social network, has everyone in the tech industry speculating about whether it’s "the Facebook Killer."

The death of MySpace seems to prove that people have room in their lives for only one social network, one profile page. After all, how many different places do you need to announce your favorite TV shows? How many different places do you need to share your witty thoughts?

On the other hand, Twitter proved that "social" can come in different forms--and 140 characters is more appropriate for some witty thoughts than for others. Twitter also allows users to link certain posts to their Facebook page if they wish, meaning that if the social networks could restrain themselves from treating social networking as a zero-sum game, everyone might win.

Of course, Google and Facebook haven't played nice lately, and they probably won't now. Google has tried to index public Facebook pages for its searches, inciting the ire of Facebook, which earlier this year hired a PR company to pitch Google-negative stories to the press. And Facebook's recent partnering with Skype to compete with Google+’s Hangouts suggests that each Internet giant has the other in its crosshairs.

Theory 1: They Can Coexist Independently

Though all-out war between the two companies seems imminent (if it hasn't already begun), Google’s executive chairman (and former CEO as of this April) Eric Schmidt thinks that there’s more than enough room for the two companies to exist independently. According to a July 7 Reuter’s article, Schmidt said that Google+ will succeed just as Facebook and Twitter have because demand for entry into Google+ is high, and because Hangouts--Google’s multiperson video chat feature--is very popular with younger users.

The response is a familiar one from Schmidt, who told 60 Minutes back in 2005 that Google believed it could coexist with Microsoft’s relatively new Bing search client. Because of Google’s size and search accuracy, the company never seems to break a sweat in public, insisting that identical services can exist in tandem. But that talk might just be a PR ploy: Google and Microsoft do compete head-to-head for search advertising dollars, just as Facebook and Google+ will in the social network arena. In June, the Federal Trade Commission launched an antitrust probe into Google’s dealings, concerned that the company may exercise too much control over what we see on the Web.

Despite their face-off, both Google and Facebook have massive user bases (and a massive potential user base in the case of Google+) so it’s entirely likely that the two can and will coexist. Smaller companies such as LiveChat, which builds software for companies to offer customer service through video chat, are expecting both social networks to succeed and thrive, and are strategizing accordingly. Mariusz Cieply, the CEO of LiveChat, says that his company hopes to offer its services through both Facebook and Google+ in the near future, so that companies can, for example, provide post-sales tech support through video over Facebook or Google Hangouts. “It will be great to have both Facebook and Google Plus,“ Cieply says. “We will start with Facebook first, but we see a huge opportunity with Google Hangouts.”

The idea that Google+ and Facebook can offer people different types of social media and therefore coexist without endless hostilities isn’t crazy. People have created channels on YouTube, profiles on Twitter, AIM screen names, Flikr albums, and Tumblr pages. Surely there’s room for one more?

 
If Tom from MySpace, and Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, are on Google+ then maybe everyone can get along after all.

Theory 2: They Can Coexist Only If They’re Willing to Work Together

Many industry experts believe that the ability of Google+ and Facebook to coexist will depend on how well the two companies connect with one another. Jason Shellen, head of AIM products at AOL, sees the Google+ vs. Facebook battle as a familiar story--after all, AIM coexisted with MSN messenger, and now is trying to reinvent itself to compete with Facebook chat and Gchat (the Google Mail chat client) by allowing users to set up video chats without any login or account beyond an AOL-generated URL, and AIM hopes that that URL will be shared and embedded on Facebook and Google+ walls.

“We’ve made it so you can go to Gchat and add an AIM buddy,” Shellen says of AIM’s coexistence strategy. “We federate and talk together; sometimes this false walled-garden thing doesn’t need to be that difficult.” Certainly that worked for Twitter, whose hashtags and 140-character tweets can be linked to just about every other social media hub, from Facebook to YouTube channels.


In this respect, however, Google+ is at a disadvantage. In the same recent Reuters article mentioned earlier, Google’s Schmidt admitted that talks with Facebook to allow importation of friends from Facebook to Google ended in an impasse, and talks with Twitter to integrate that service also broke down. That leaves Google+ a little less convenient for people who like to link their profiles together.

But the other loser in Google’s failed “Facebook integration” talks is Facebook, because Google has a huge user base (including people who use Gmail, Google Checkouts, or Picasa, for example), and Facebook has been butting up against a lot of negative press lately that could increase Facebook users' willingness to switch to Google+ if they have to choose one or the other..

Theory 3: There Can Be Only One Survivor

The "One Social Network to Rule Them All" mentality might be right as consumers get smarter about how to deal with social media. Judy Shapiro, a blogger for AdAge and the CEO of EngageSimply, a technology marketing firm, says that both Facebook and Google+ are in a war, and consumers will choose the victor based on privacy or on how well they can turn the social network off. “Google+ is just Google's attempt to be Facebook, and Facebook is doing its share to become Google,” Shapiro says.


In the beginning, Google had search and a way to make money through ads, and Facebook had social data. Google seems to feel that the best way to improve the accuracy of its search results is to integrate social data, something it tried to do back in 2010 when it acquired Aardvark, a company that gave feedback to questions based on the preferences of the asker's identifiable friends and followers. For its part, Facebook has gradually built an onsite platform that allows advertisers to send targeted ads based on users’ personal and preference data. It has also established a partnership with Bing to help generate revenue from all of that social data.
But Shapiro argues that the convergence in what Google and Facebook can do might not merely create a mass exodus of users from one social network to the other; it might ensure their mutual destruction. “The more precisely a network can target us [in terms of ad-sales] the more resistant we become to it,” she says. “If you marry the strength of the search that Google has with behavioral base of social media that Facebook has, that's a one-two punch. But our privacy becomes the collateral damage.” Eventually we might get smart enough to seek alternatives that let us share information with friends and family, and yet avoid sharing it with companies that have an abiding interest in monetizing our data.

Google to Stabilize Video for Google Talk on Android

by Charlie White
From: http://mashable.com/

A common problem with video chatting using tablets is shaky video. Now Google has selected SRI International to embed its video stabilization software inside the Google Talk app in Android 3.0 devices, promising to smooth out those jittery video transmissions from front-facing cameras on Android smartphones and tablets.

The Menlo Park-based nonprofit SRI International, formerly associated with Stanford University and responsible for the invention of the computer mouse in 1964, has been working on this stabilization software since the early 1990s. Now, Android tablets are fast enough to allow the software to perform its magic in real time.

The software works by identifying the user’s face, stabilizing that video before it’s compressed for transmission. There’s an added benefit to that steady shot — the video is easier to compress because there’s less movement involved, making the picture look sharper with less video noise.

So far, this video stabilization is only available for Google Talk with Android 3.0 installed. There are stabilization apps for the iPhone and iPad (such as SteadyCam Pro, which we favorably reviewed), but they don’t yet work in real time, a necessity for live chatting.
[via Ubergizmo]

Graphic courtesy SRI International

Want To Get Rewards For Going Out? Good, Because LoSo Wants To Find You Free Drinks

Rip Empson
from http://techcrunch.com/

I’ll bet that got your attention. Finally, an app that wants to buy you a drink. Well, not exactly, but it’s the next best thing. LoSo is a location-based social media app for the iPhone that re-launches today to bring the best parts of Foursquare, Yelp, and OpenTable together in one app for your mobile phone. An ambitious goal, yes, but to counterbalance that, LoSo is targeting a very specific market: your local restaurants and bars. So, on the one hand, LoSo is addressing a problem cited by many small businesses in using Groupon: They’re happy to have a blast of new customers taking advantage of a big discount, but they want to see loyalty, not single-serving customers. And, on the other hand, LoSo wants you to be rewarded for doing just that: By being (or becoming) a loyal customer at your favorite local eatery or watering hole.

While this may not be a “new” idea, it’s worth checking out. In a nutshell, LoSo is taking the better parts of the aforementioned services (and, maybe Citysearch) to create a realtime guide for going out on the town. Currently, the app offers 200K realtime feeds for 700K local bars and restaurants, allowing you to see happy hours, drink specials, dinner specials, what bands are playing, and more. LoSo ranks these eateries and bars according to total number of checkins, so you can get a sense of which place has the most activity.

Taking a page from Foursquare, LoSo encourages users to checkin from their favorite spots, pooling these checkins in live Twitter and Facebook-like feeds, which you can get a sense of from the screenshots above. By clicking “IMHere”, you can show your friends where you are, as pins drop down on a Google Map to display your current location. You can navigate this interactive map of local venues and leave posts that tell your friends where you are.

With each checkin, you earn a point. Earn ten points and you can redeem your points for free swag. You can make checkins private, or public. And, probably the coolest part, is that you can post videos you take while being over-served and post them to Facebook and Twitter. They show up on the business pages of the place where you’re eating, which is hopefully great for the local business. As long as the videos aren’t troll-ish, of course.

As to the reward system, each time you checkin at a local spot, you earn a certain amount of points, most often 10 points. In the meantime, LoSo has encouraged the local business you’re patronizing to set up a rewards page, describing the types of rewards you can earn and how many checkins it takes to take advantage. Most frequently, it only takes one or two checkins, LoSo CEO Rich Rodgers tells me, before you might be throwing back a margarita gratis. LoSo will also be offering points of its own, so if a user starts checking in frequently (to any place), they will become eligible for LoSo rewards as well. Which could be anything from a cruise to 3 months of free HDTV, Rodgers says.

But what’s to stop people from doing drive-by checkins to take advantage of deals? To discourage these miscreants, Rodgers says that part of the app’s secret sauce is that you will only be eligible if you’re within 100 feet of the establishment, and the reward will only become available after 10 minutes. So you can’t just throw back a quick one and then run, like a coward..

“We set out to create a mobile app that was built around the idea that mobile is a mentality of the here and now,” said Rodgers. “We started by building the largest social media connected database of any city guide”.

While there are definitely game mechanics at play here, unlike FourSquare and other game-related retail “directories”, LoSo gives people more than just listings and status. LoSo’s Restaurant Rewards Points are good for free drinks, eats, and prizes, and each check in on LoSo also counts as a checkin on Foursquare and Facebook Places, so all checkins can be done from one app. So, users can not only become Mayor in Foursquare, but stay current on Facebook, earn restaurant rewards, and accrue LoSo Loyalty points.

Rodgers also tells me that LoSo recently closed a $350K round of seed funding from various New York-based angels and VCs, allowing them to do some more iterating and a little bit of hiring. But, how is the free LoSo app going to make money, you ask (aside from seed funding)? Well, unfortunately, there may be some ads. Rodgers told me they won’t be obnoxious, but if they are, don’t shoot the messenger. LoSo is also offering local businesses the opportunity to let the startup take over all of their social media activities, email and SMS marketing, and all that good stuff. The subscription will cost $100 a month.

The other bad news is that, though you can use the app anywhere (and they’ve already added 800K places), rewards are only available in Philadelphia. But, Rodgers says that if the experiment goes according to plan, they should be expanding to other U.S. cities within the year. With how expensive eating can be in the Bay Area, I hope LoSo makes it out to the West Coast before I’m bankrupt.

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CrunchBase Information

LoSo

Company:	LoSo, Inc.
Website:	itunes.apple.com/us/app/loso/id4...
Launch Date:	May 12, 2011

LoSo is a location-based social media app that shows you what is around you and what is going on. Now you can get rewards for going out on the town. Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

Astronaut checks in with Foursquare from space

From: http://www.intomobile.com/


With over four million users, Foursquare is becoming quite popular and we’re seeing people check in from all sorts of places. I don’t think anyone was expected to see a check in from space though and that’s exactly what an astronaut did.

Douglas Wheelock used the location-based service to check in from the International Space Station today and he received a NASA Explorer badge for his efforts. It’s neat to see this type of location-based service gain traction even off the Earth.

The move is a neat PR boost for Foursquare but there’s definitely something to the check-in movement. I was at game 4 of the Giants-Phillies baseball playoffs and one of my companions said, “You haven’t really gone somewhere unless you check in on Foursquare.”

I don’t quite buy that but it does show that check-in services and LBS are hitting the mainstream. Foursquare is the undisputed leader in this category but there are a ton of challengers to the crown.

SCVNGR just updated its iPhone and Android apps and it offers check-in services with more of a gaming element. I’ve been impressed with the company’s ability to score deals with companies to offer real-life rewards like restaurant discounts and season tickets to the Boston Celtics.

Yelp has also seen some success with its check-in service for restaurants and this is the one type of LBS service that I will routinely use
.
I do think the big player in this market will eventually be Facebook with its Facebook Places offering. While this is still a bare-bones offering, it has the weight of the world’s largest social network behind it.

It’s not a zero sum game though, as Foursquare said it had a huge amount of signups after it announced it would integrate with Facebook Places. All of the other major check-in services will try and leverage this service, too.

[Via Foursquare]

Flipboard Launches as the iPad’s Social Media Magazine

By: Ben Parr

With backing from several heavy hitters and an acquisition, Flipboard has kicked off its quest to become the new and vibrant way you browse your social media streams.

Flipboard, which is now available in the iPad app store, is a start-up that calls itself the “world’s first social magazine.” It connects to your social media accounts — primarily Facebook () and Twitter () — and utilizes that information to create an interface that will feel familiar if you’re a magazine lover. It officially launches today.

Flipboard takes popular news sources (specifically the ones you choose) as well as your Twitter and Facebook feed to provide to create a unique web browsing experience. Moving through the interface is a simple as flipping the page. Items shared on Facebook are suddenly turned into magazine articles and multimedia is immediately made front-and-center.

Here’s an example of what you might find simply browsing through your Twitter and Facebook feeds via Flipboard:

Coinciding with the Flipboard launch are two big announcements: first, the startup has raised $10.5 million in a Series A round including KPCB, Index Ventures, The Chernin Group, Jack Dorsey (Twitter’s creator), Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook’s co-founder) and Aston Kutcher.

Second, it has acquired Ellerdale, a real-time web intelligence startup, and made co-founder Arthur van Hoff its CTO. Ellerdale’s semantic analysts technology will help Flipboard choose and organize the most relevant stories for the readers.

I am thoroughly impressed from our first run with Flipboard. It is simply gorgeous and a pleasure to browse. I could the app open for hours just watching my feeds pass by. If I wanted to scan the key news from my social networks, this is the way I would want to do it.

Would you use an app like this to browse your social media feeds? Let us know what you think of the app in the comments.

Should you be able to “abhor” Facebook posts? Threadsy says yes

Kim-Mai Cutler |

Oh, “I bought new socks” status update. How I hate thee….

And now you literally can hate them.

Threadsy, which puts e-mail and social network updates together in one stream, is experimenting with an “abhor” button to flag lame Facebook posts.

Facebook, which adopted a “like” feature in January to let people voice approval for posts, has never offered any negative reinforcement to prevent boring updates. (However, Facebook lets you “hide” updates from users you don’t want to see without offending them.)

So San Francisco-based Threadsy’s barging in with its own more pointed feature. If a post has been abhorred, it will have a link that lands at a Threadsy page reading, “This Facebook status has been abhorred. Someone must’ve thought it was particularly lame.”

Scott Kendall, who leads product at Threadsy, said the “abhor” button probably won’t be anonymous to prevent blatant spamming.

“There’d be no accountability and no impact on your reputation — same as what you see happen with anonymous blog comments,” he wrote in an e-mail. “The way I envision it, abhors should be used sparingly, jokingly, and perhaps only with your closest friends.”

Plus anonymous “abhorring” would require a special “abhor” app for Facebook. Threadsy, which is backed by August Capital, is in private beta but you can get a special invite here.

So readers, do you “like” it or “abhor” it?

Mom-and-Pop Operators Turn to Social Media

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Published: July 22, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO — Three weeks after Curtis Kimball opened his crème brûlée cart in San Francisco, he noticed a stranger among the friends in line for his desserts. How had the man discovered the cart? He had read about it on Twitter.

Enlarge This Image

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Curtis Kimball, owner of a crème brûlée cart in San Francisco, uses Twitter to drive his customers to his changing location.

Multimedia

Today's Business: Claire Cain Miller on Twitter and Small Businesses

Times Topics: Twitter

For Mr. Kimball, who conceded that he “hadn’t really understood the purpose of Twitter,” the beauty of digital word-of-mouth marketing was immediately clear. He signed up for an account and has more than 5,400 followers who wait for him to post the current location of his itinerant cart and list the flavors of the day, like lavender and orange creamsicle.

“I would love to say that I just had a really good idea and strategy, but Twitter has been pretty essential to my success,” he said. He has quit his day job as a carpenter to keep up with the demand.

Much has been made of how big companies like Dell, Starbucks and Comcast use Twitter to promote their products and answer customers’ questions. But today, small businesses outnumber the big ones on the free microblogging service, and in many ways, Twitter is an even more useful tool for them.

For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing. It is far easier to set up and update a Twitter account than to maintain a Web page. And because small-business owners tend to work at the cash register, not in a cubicle in the marketing department, Twitter’s intimacy suits them well.

“We think of these social media tools as being in the realm of the sophisticated, multiplatform marketers like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, but a lot of these supersmall businesses are gravitating toward them because they are accessible, free and very simple,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst who studies the Internet’s influence on shopping and local businesses.

Small businesses typically get more than half of their customers through word of mouth, he said, and Twitter is the digital manifestation of that. Twitter users broadcast messages of up to 140 characters in length, and the culture of the service encourages people to spread news to friends in their own network.

Umi, a sushi restaurant in San Francisco, sometimes gets five new customers a night who learned about it on Twitter, said Shamus Booth, a co-owner.

He twitters about the fresh fish of the night — “The O-Toro (bluefin tuna belly) tonight is some of the most rich and buttery tuna I’ve had,” he recently wrote — and offers free seaweed salads to people who mention Twitter.

Twitter is not just for businesses that want to lure customers with mouth-watering descriptions of food. For Cynthia Sutton-Stolle, the co-owner of Silver Barn Antiques in tiny Columbus, Tex., Twitter has been a way to find both suppliers and customers nationwide.

Since she joined Twitter in February, she has connected with people making lamps and candles that she subsequently ordered for her shop and has sold a few thousand dollars of merchandise to people outside Columbus, including to a woman in New Jersey shopping for graduation gifts.

“We don’t even have our Web site done, and we weren’t even trying to start an e-commerce business,” Ms. Sutton-Stolle said. “Twitter has been a real valuable tool because it’s made us national instead of a little-bitty store in a little-bitty town.”

Scott Seaman of Blowing Rock, N.C., also uses Twitter to expand his customer base beyond his town of about 1,500 residents. Mr. Seaman is a partner at Christopher’s Wine and Cheese shop and owns a bed and breakfast in town. He sets up searches on TweetDeck, a Web application that helps people manage their Twitter messages, to start conversations with people talking about his town or the mountain nearby. One person he met on Twitter booked a room at his inn, and a woman in Dallas ordered sake from his shop.

The extra traffic has come despite his rarely pitching his own businesses on Twitter. “To me, that’s a turn-off,” he said. Instead of marketing to customers, small-business owners should use the same persona they have offline, he advised. “Be the small shopkeeper down the street that everyone knows by name.”

Chris Mann, the owner of Woodhouse Day Spa in Cincinnati, twitters about discounts for massages and manicures every Tuesday. Twitter beats e-mail promotions because he can send tweets from his phone in a meeting and “every single business sends out an e-mail,” he said.

Even if a shop’s customers are not on Twitter, the service can be useful for entrepreneurs, said Becky McCray, who runs a liquor store and cattle ranch in Oklahoma and publishes a blog called Small Biz Survival.

In towns like hers, with only 5,000 people, small-business owners can feel isolated, she said. But on Twitter, she has learned business tax tips from an accountant, marketing tips from a consultant in Tennessee and start-up tips from the founder of several tech companies.

Anamitra Banerji, who manages commercial products at Twitter, said that when he joined the company from Yahoo in March, “I thought this was a place where large businesses were. What I’m finding more and more, to my surprise every single day, is business of all kinds.”

Twitter, which does not yet make money, is now concentrating on teaching businesses how they can join and use it, Mr. Banerji said, and the company plans to publish case studies. He is also developing products that Twitter can sell to businesses of all sizes this year, including features to verify businesses’ accounts and analyze traffic to their Twitter profiles.

According to Mr. Banerji, small-business owners like Twitter because they can talk directly to customers in a way that they were able to do only in person before. “We’re finding the emotional distance between businesses and their customers is shortening quite a bit,” he said.