Twitter News and Developments

Even though Microsoft acquired Skype in October 2011, Skype seems to be run as if it was as a semi-independent entity. That's evident in a new Skype ad campaign that launched this week in the US and UK. The new ads are pretty aggressive in its comments on two other Internet companies, Twitter and Facebook.

Ad Age reports that the new campaign costs $12 million. It will start with outdoor billboards with messages such as the one above that mocks Twitter's 140 character limit. Another ad makes fun of Facebook by saying, "Upgrade from a wall post to a first class conversation." In the UK, the Skype billboards will be seen in two of the city's busiest subway stations along with billboards placed outside of buses.

While much of the talk leading up to today was about Twitter’s move into the photo game, the bigger news is actually what they’ve done to their search product. They’ve completely rebuilt it. And while it may not be immediately apparent, the product should be much, much better than before.

Twitter details the project in a long post on their Engineering blog today. Notably, they go into the backstory of Twitter Search, which evolved from the Summize purchase in 2008. While that product worked well for a while, the technologies behind it would not allow it to scale to the level that Twitter eventually needed. So things had to be re-written — on the fly.

There’s a button war going on around us. Google, Digg, Yahoo, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn — they’ve all been angling to get their buttons in prime real estate on big websites. But two players loom larger in the space than anyone else: Facebook and Twitter. And Twitter just escalated the war a bit today.

Twitter has just unveiled the Follow Button. This follows their Tweet Button which is already in use on thousands of websites across the web. While the Tweet Button was great for sharing individual pieces of content, the Follow Button is meant to establish more social connections on the service.