One of the side effects of Twitter’s 140-character limitation is that users are coming up with their own microsyntax and abbreviated Twitter grammar to make their Tweets more expressive. If your are merely retweeting someone else’s tweet, for example, you acknowledge that by placing a “RT” at the beginning of your micro-message. If you are replying publicly to another user or just referring to them, you indicate that with an “@username.” You can even add hashtags to a tweet so that it shows up in searches for specific topics (please use “#twittergrammar” if you are going to RT this post).

New conventions pop up every day. To make sense of them, and develop new ones, Stowe Boyd is launching Microsyntax.org tomorrow. In a debut blog post, he insists that it is not a “standards body,” but that is effectively what it might become. And we need one, because Twitter isn’t setting any standards. You can follow @microsyntax to keep on top of the latest Twitter lingo.

Microsyntax is not just about coming up with commonly used abbreviations. It is also the way that structure can be added to the mess that is Twitter today. Hashtags, for instance, lets you find all tweets about a particular subject or event. We probably need more microtags for different purposes.

The problem with the microsyntax approach, however, is that it appeals mostly to the command-line crowd instead of to the average user. Nevertheless, if a microconvention becomes popular enough, then Twitter itself can adopt it, as it has with the @replies (although it has messed that up by mixing in retweets that simply mention your name and aren’t truly replies, but I digress). What’s your favorite microslang and what do we need to add to the microlexicon?

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A couple of months ago Erick Schonfeld wrote a post titled “Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?” based on a source that has proved to be very reliable in the past. All hell broke loose shortly thereafter.

Before posting Erick reached out to the RIAA, Last.fm and parent company CBS for comments. The only response was from CBS - “To our knowledge, no data has been made available to RIAA.” The CBS spokesperson, Katie Gunion, subsequently emailed us to say “would you please attribute the statement to Last.fm, it is currently reading as though CBS issued the statement” Gunion’s email lists her title as Public Relations, CBS Interactive, and her first statement did not name Last.fm (this is important, see below). A subsequent statement by Shannon Jacobs, VP of Communications at CBS: “this is a last.fm issue, as far as I am concerned. It is not a corporate issue. This is a last.fm issue, not a corporate issue. The posting represents last.fm’s response.”

After the story broke all concerned parties had no problem commenting publicly.

Last.fm cofounder Richard Jones said “I’m rather pissed off this article was published, except to say that this is utter nonsense and totally untrue.” He followed up with a blog post “Techcrunch are full of shit, “I denied it vehemently on the Techcrunch article, as did several other Last.fm staffers. We denied it in the Last.fm forums, on twitter, via email – basically we denied it to anyone that would listen, and now we’re denying it on our blog.” One blog called us a “tabloid masquerading as a legitimate news outlet.” Lots of others piled on.

Apart from updating the original post we’ve been quiet on this story. The person who first leaked the news was terminated from CBS for the leak, says our original source, and threatened with legal action. He understandably went very quiet. But the outrageously shrill denials by Last.fm just didn’t ring true. Once you got past the personal attacks, the denial language itself was too carefully worded.

Now we’ve located another source for the story, someone who’s very close to Last.fm. And it turns out Last.fm was telling the truth when they said Erick’s story wasn’t correct.

Last.fm didn’t hand user data over to the RIAA. According to our source, it was their parent company, CBS, that did it. That corresponds to what our original source said in conversations we had after our initial post and before CBS lawyers became involved. But we didn’t want to update until we had an independent source for that information, too.

Here’s what we believe happened: CBS requested user data from Last.fm, including user name and IP address. CBS wanted the data to comply with a RIAA request but told Last.fm the data was going to be used for “internal use only.” It was only after the data was sent to CBS that Last.fm discovered the real reason for the request. Last.fm staffers were outraged, say our sources, but the data had already been sent to the RIAA.

Here’s an email from the original source, partially redacted. A screenshot of this email is here.

Re: touching base

From: [redacted, a CBS employee]
Sent: [redacted]
To: [redacted]

[ _____] We provided the data to the RIAA yesterday because we know from experience that they can negatively impact our streaming rates with publishers. Based on the urgency of the request they probably just wanted to learn more about the leak but who knows. Seriously, can you blame them? [______] Our ops team provided the usual reports along with additional log data including user IP addresses. The GM who told them to do it said the data was for internal use only. Well, that was the big mistake. The team in the UK became irate because they had to do it a second time since we were told some of the data was corrupted. This time they transferred the data directly to them and in doing so they discovered who really made the request. Shit really hit the fan, I even got a call [______] Obviously, I can see their POV but what they don’t understand over there is that we are in the analytics business and it’s not like this is the first time we’ve provided this data to a third party. Someone over there should be more forthright with users about the data policy instead of complaining about BD to upper management like I’m here trying to destroy the business. We’re just trying to help them stay afloat here it’s not like Pro memberships are earning any revenue! [______________] So if you hear of anything, I’m even open to possibly moving West now for the right opportunity, let me know.

Our new source, which hasn’t seen this email, says much the same: that Last.fm didn’t know the nature of the CBS request until after the data was sent and that the data was in fact subsequently sent by CBS to the RIAA. This source’s information comes directly from Last.fm employees who he has spoken with.

It’s important to note that while sources are in agreement that it was the RIAA that made the request, it may have been one or more music labels acting independently. The suggestion in the email above that the compliance was made because of the ability for the requester to negatively impact streaming rates suggests it was a label request. But the end result is the same.

We believe CBS lied to us when they denied sending the data to the RIAA, and that they subsequently asked us to attribute the quote to Last.fm to make the statement defensible. Last.fm’s denials were strictly speaking correct, but they ignored the underlying truth of the situation, that their parent company supplied user data to the RIAA, and that the data could possibly be used in civil and criminal actions against those users. We believe that the outrage they aimed at us for reporting the story, which was materially correct, should have been aimed at CBS instead. But Last.fm never spoke publicly of the real facts of the story.

We believe Last.fm and CBS violated their own privacy policy in the transmission of this data. We also believe CBS and Last.fm may have violated EU privacy laws, including the Data Protection Directive, and should be investigated by the appropriate authorities.

And to the CBS employee who was fired and threatened based on this story - we believe certain U.S. Whistle Blower laws may protect you from retaliation from CBS in this matter. We’d like to provide you with legal counsel at our cost.

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Being in Beta is cool. So cool that five years after its April 2004 launch Gmail is still held in Beta by Google. That’s despite the fact that it has 146 million users worldwide (Comscore, April 2009). Which is sort of ridiculous.

Now we’re hearing that Google is having an internal debate about removing the Beta logos from a number of products that are aimed at enterprise customers.

About half of Google’s products were still in Beta at the end of 2008. Retaining the Beta notation in the logo gives the company a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card when problems occur. Hey, it’s still in Beta, so don’t be surprised when something goes wrong.

There’s a problem though. Sure, users think Beta is geeky and fun and cutting edge. But it turns out that enterprise customers are a little more serious about stuff working. A Beta tag means what it’s supposed to mean - not fully baked. Stuff that isn’t fully baked has risks, and guys that run IT at companies aren’t fans of risk. They need things locked down. And while they’re smart enough to know that Google’s Betas aren’t really Betas, they aren’t going to take a risk. If something goes wrong it’s their fault.

That’s why Google took Chrome out of Beta just a couple of months after it was first released. OEMs need release software to install it on PCs, so they had to move it along. Marissa Mayer talked about Google Betas in general, and Chrome specifically, at the Le Web conference in Paris last December - the relevant clip is below.

Don’t look for Google to give up their love of Betas in general. But they may remove the Beta notation from a number of Google Apps services, which are aimed at enterprise customers, sometime soon. A source first tipped us off that a debate was going on at Google, and we’ve subsequently confirmed it. Some top execs feel strongly that the Google Apps products need to have the Beta notation in their logos removed to get some enterprise customers to even consider switching from Microsoft Office.

Four of the five core Google Apps services are still in Beta: Gmail, Google Docs, Google Talk and Google Calendar. Google Sites, previously Jot, is the lone exception. We may see those Beta notations coming down soon, though. Stay tuned.

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We’ve all been there. You’re late for a meeting with friends, stuck in traffic and unsure of when you’re actually going to arrive. You call them with updates like “well, I’m closer now, but still not sure…” and a shaky “maybe I’ll be there in 20 minutes?” What if your friends could track exactly where you were without the frustrating back and forth? Glympse, a new location-based service that is decidedly not another social network, is looking to help you do just that. Glympse is launching tonight on Android, and is coming soon to the iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and “other leading smartphone devices” (read: Palm).

Now, Glympse isn’t the first application that allows you to share your location with friends. But while other services like Loopt ask you to create a permanent connection with your peers, Glympse recognizes that oftentimes we don’t want all of our contacts to know our current whereabouts. Sure, you could adjust privacy settings on a per-user basis to specify who to share your location with and when, but that’s a hassle and can be easy to forget about. So Glympse takes a different approach, instead asking you to create temporary connections with other people that last for a maximum of four hours. The service doesn’t have any concept of long-time friends - you establish a connection, and it’s gone four hours (or less) later.

Glympse is the kind of application that sounds a little pointless at first, but the more you think about it, the more you realize how great the service could be. I can’t remember how many times I’ve told a friend or colleague I’d meet them at a restaurant “in about an hour”, only to find that I get stuck in traffic and wind up calling them multiple times to tell them when I’ll actually show up. With Glympse, I could just send them a message when I left, and they’d be able to track my progress. I wouldn’t have to be overly selective about who I shared my data with, as their permission would expire only a few hours later.

Reestablishing connections with your peers could get old quick, so Glympse is making it as painless as possible (you can initiate a Glympse in well under a minute). After opening the application, Glympse will ask you who you’d like to share your current location with (you can either enter their phone number or Email address manually, or you can select from your contacts). Then you specify the duration, which determines how long this contact will be able to see your current location. You can optionally also enter a message to accompany your location, as well as a plot for your ultimate destination (I could send a map to a friend with a marker that says “meet me here”). Hit Send and you’re done - a message will be sent to your contact informing them of your current position.

The message itself will contain to a link unique Glympse website, which pinpoints the sender’s current location on a dynamically updating map. You can view the website from mobile phones, and you can also share it with friends. This opens the door to some minor privacy issues (I could potentially Tweet a Glympse link and let the world see my friend’s current location) but since it would expire in a few hours anyway it probably wouldn’t be a big deal. Glympse isn’t launching with notifications (you’ll have to manually track your friend’s current status on the map), but the company says that it will soon issue an update that adds the feature soon. This means that you’ll be able to receieve a text message or Email whenever your friend arrives within a certain radius of you. Very cool.

This all sounds great, but there’s one major obstacle that’s going to hold Glympse back, and that’s the lack of background updating on the iPhone. Glympse is really only useful when your peers can keep track of your current position - not where you were the last time you remembered to check in (similar problems affect many other LBS services like Loopt). If I wanted to use my iPhone in the examples above, I’d have to leave the application open for my entire drive. Android does support background updating, but this can be a battery drain and the Android Marketplace doesn’t have nearly the momentum of the App Store. In any case, Apple is rumored to be trying to bring background updates to the iPhone, and other platforms like the upcoming Palm Pre support them, so this weakness may wind up being shortlived after all.

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There’s a popular story on Digg right now about a 104-year-old British woman who uses Twitter. It’s an obvious headline: “World’s oldest Tweeter talks cuppas and casserole.” It’s Digg bait. But what’s worse is that if you examine the story closely, it looks like the UK press may have gotten the poor old lady to sign up for Twitter just for their story!

The story is about how Ivy Bean uses the hot social network to post mundane updates about her 104-year-old life. But take a look at the picture in the story. On the screen next to Bean, you’ll see her Twitter page with a whopping two updates. These two tweets were sent out at the same time, the day before the story ran in a number of UK publications. In other words, Bean signed up and sent her first two tweets at the time all these guys were writing their stories. Or, to put it more clearly, this whole story was staged.

Bean sent out her first tweet at 2:02PM PST (6:02PM local time in the UK) on May 14, it read “I’m enjoying Twitter for the first time and having my photo taken” (the picture used in the articles). The Sun, which also ran the story, has an even better headline. “103-year-old Ivy loves to Twitter” — clearly, she does — I mean, she had been using the service for a whole two seconds before the story was being reported. Worse, The Sun gets poor Bean’s age wrong (they say she’s 103 years old).

We get some flack for running a lot of stories about Twitter, but this is just pathetic. Though maybe it shouldn’t be surprising. Twitter is red-hot right now and “world’s oldest Twitterer” is an easy Digg headline. And the Telegraph, which did get the Digg headline, gets nearly 10% of its traffic from Digg, according to Compete.

Does anyone know any 105-year-olds? I need to contact them for a story. And I’ll be nice enough to give them a Twitter ID that doesn’t imply they won’t make it to their next birthday.

[photo: PA]

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I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Apple’s App Store has been more successful that even Apple ever imagined. It entered a market that had been completely controlled by carriers and handed the keys over to third-party developers to make their own apps. Just over nine months later, over 35,000 of those apps had been made which have been downloaded over a billion times. So it’s surprising when you see numbers like the ones Lightspeed Venture Partners published yesterday, estimating that Apple had made only somewhere between $20 and $45 million dollars in revenue off of the App Store. Surprising, until you dig deeper.

First, I’m not convinced these numbers are sound. While the author, Jeremy Liew, makes some good calculations, the numbers are still drawn largely from a survey. He did this because Apple doesn’t release actually numbers for App Store sales beyond the big numbers like a billion downloads. But Apple has given out what are probably better numbers than the survey results numbers over the past year. For example, back in August, none other than Steve Jobs himself said the App Store was pulling in $1 million a day in sales.  Now, that was a long time ago, and the App Store has grown tremendously since then, but let’s go with that figure for argument’s sake.

$1 million a day means that Apple would be making $300,000 a day (its 30% cut). Extrapolated out over 10 months (the approximate age of the App Store), that would be about $90 million. That’s already double Liew’s high-end estimate. And Jobs would not throw a number like this out there lightly. Apple, if anything, likes to set expectations low and exceed them. For Jobs to throw out that figure and say that the App Store could one day be a billion dollar a year industry, to me means that he thinks it will at least be that big of a business.

Yes, it seems likely that the average price of apps have fallen since August given the rise of $0.99 apps, and probably that the ratio of free-to-paid apps has grown, but that’s why the daily sales angle is an interesting one to look at. No matter what ratios changed, there are also a ton more apps being downloaded — both paid and free — than there were in the first 30 days. And so if anything, this $1 million a day sales mark is probably low compared to what it’s at now.

And there’s other numbers that suggest this as well. Back in March, one analyst cut into Apple’s December quarter numbers and came out with $200 million in app sales just for that quarter. That’s probably way too high for a number of reasons — namely that it’s hard to know the ratio of iTunes/App Store/iPod accessory sales, which are all clumped together. But even if it’s way off, that’s just for the quarter, and it’s another sign that Liew’s numbers are probably way too low.

But even at $100 million, the App Store would still be a small drop in Apple’s bucket when it comes to revenue. But what Liew fails to mention in his report is that this is what Apple has always been expecting. Since day one of its unveiling, Apple has said that it did not plan to a lot of money off of the App Store. Sure, that may have been slightly disingenuous (again, Apple likes to set expectations low), but Apple’s stated rationale behind taking a 30% cut was to be able to keep the App Store up and running — not to make money.

Apple is a company notoriously mindful of its high margins, so why doesn’t it care about making a lot of money with the App Store? Dan Frommer of Silicon Alley Insider has this exactly right: it’s because the App Store is one of the, if not the, key driver of two products that are very high margin: The iPhone and the iPod touch. The App Store is based around the exact same model as its parent iTunes Store, which sells music at a very small markup in order to sell iPods. I don’t think I have to explain how well that has worked.

Another thing to think about is even with the success of the iPhone, Apple still has a very small percentage of the mobile market. Depending on the moves it makes over the next couple of years — namely getting into China and getting off of its exclusive AT&T deal in the U.S. — this percentage could grow by leaps and bounds. When that happens, App Store sales will continue to grow and thus, revenue from the App Store will continue to grow. Remember, the App Store is still not ever a year old, and for much of that time, the number of iPhones and iPod touches in the market was nowhere near what it is even today. The download pace is quickening, and the revenue pace should be as well.

Yet another variable is that Apple takes $99 a year from developers who develop for the App Store. There are tens of thousands of those. Again, not a huge chunk of money, but it all adds up.

But the biggest thing that these numbers draw attention away from is the true potential of the App Store. The reason for that is, it’s not here yet. When in-app payments launch with the iPhone 3.0 software this summer, the sky could literally be the limit in terms of how much both developers and Apple could make off of this. Yes, Apple will still take a 30% cut of these sales. And given that it has to do basically nothing more than it’s already doing to get that extra 30% — it’s pure gravy.

I think Liew’s numbers are well below the actual revenue numbers, but no matter if its $50 million, $100 million or $200 million, that’s not a huge amount of money for a company that has nearly $30 billion in cash in the bank. But going forward, that number is only going to increase both as the platform expands and as in-app purchase come into play. That’s not bad for a company that just wanted to make enough money to keep the App Store running.

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Twitter is officially getting dumbed down.

For the second time in less than two months, Twitter has changed its @reply system, this time by removing an option that has existed for many months in an effort to appease confused newcomers.

The basic premise behind the @reply system is that it allows you to create a semi-public conversation with another Twitter user. To prevent you from having to listen in to conversations you might not care about, the default setting has long been to only show these @replies if you were following both people in the conversation. And that’s the choice most people stuck with.

But there was an option to receive all @reply messages from any users you were following. This led to an increase in noise, but it also exposed you to new Twitter users and conversations that you might have otherwise missed out on. I’ve had it turned on for over a year. But apparently that option has confused too many people, so Twitter is killing it.

From the Twitter blog:

We’ve updated the Notices section of Settings to better reflect how folks are using Twitter regarding replies. Based on usage patterns and feedback, we’ve learned most people want to see when someone they follow replies to another person they follow—it’s a good way to stay in the loop. However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today’s update removes this undesirable and confusing option.

Confused? That’s understandable and exactly why we made the update.

Gee, thanks Twitter. I didn’t realize that an option I manually activated was undesirable. Any other things I shouldn’t like that you’d like to make me aware of?

If there was anything undesirable about the old system, it was that Twitter did a poor job of explaining it, not that the functionality itself was unwanted. And given that the option was not the default and was buried under a settings menu, why would it matter anyway? If too many people are getting confused, why not simply make it more hidden (perhaps under an ‘advanced’ tab)?

In the months since Twitter has grown in mainstream appeal, and especially since it made its debut on Oprah, some of Twitter’s early adopters have expressed fear over a change in the service. With a growing number of celebrities and media presences (not to mention spammers), they worry that the service will lose its tight-knit feel. Before tonight I never paid much attention to this train of though - after all, on Twitter, I can just follow the people I care about and ignore those I don’t. But it’s clear that Twitter is concerned with appealing to a more mainstream audience, and if that takes making a very simple service even more simple, then by golly, that’s what they’re going to do.

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Twitter is quickly turning into the media sharing platform of choice for many people, despite the fact that it, uh, doesn’t have any actual media sharing functionality. But a variety of services are popping up to fill the need, including countless Twitter-specific sites for sharing images, music, and video.

Today TwitDoc is launching what appears to be the first service for sharing documents over Twitter, bringing support for PDFs, Microsoft Office Documents, and a bunch of other file formats. The site has integrated with popular document sharing hub Scribd to make the process as painless as possible - it only takes around 20 seconds to send a document, and you don’t have to sign up to get started. To use the service, you enter your Twitter user name and password, choose the document or photo you’d like to send out, and add any text you’d like to include alongside the document’s link. Hit upload and you’re done.

It’s a handy tool, but I doubt it will reach the same level of popularity as TwitPic and its ilk - most people simply don’t have as many documents that they’d like to share with all of their Twitter followers. Still, it will definitely be helpful for sharing reports you find interesting, or scanned images that wouldn’t be readable if they were shrunk and compressed (which some image services do).

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We’ve got a few more tickets to the Star Trek screening tomorrow night at 7 p.m. in Redwood City (see here and here for more details). We are letting people in at 6 p.m., so get there early. We’re paying for the price of the ticket, and charging a $2 fee to minimize no shows. After the show we’ll meet at the nearby Red Lantern for a drink or three.

Get your tickets here. And we now have three sponsors for the event. Microsoft Live Search, which helps more than 200 million people a month find stuff on the web, is buying everyone a soft drink at the movie theater (remind me to disclose this when we write about the new search launch). Trapster, a location based mobile application that alerts users in real time when they approach speed traps (iphone app here), is buying everyone popcorn (woohoo). And Eventbrite is helping with the cost of the tickets. Thanks very much, Star Trek sponsors.

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The mystery behind what Amazon will announce on Wednesday has taken another twist. The WSJ is reporting that Amazon will, indeed, announce a University textbook specific model with a larger screen at the press conference later this week. So where did this come from and what else can we expect?

One Lev Gonick from Case Western Reserve University has confirmed that Amazon will be providing the university with larger screen Kindles next school year. And Arthur Sulzberger Jr., New York Times Co. Chairman is said to be sharing the stage with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos at the event on Wednesday which quasi-confirms the rumors of a newspaper specific Kindle.