TechCrunch stories will now appear in the Washington Post website’s technology section as part of a syndication deal between the publishers.
“I think this is a good experiment for the Washington Post – adding new types of content to the site to retain reader interest, over and above their existing stories,” said TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington.
Currently no comments will be allowed on TechCrunch content on the WaPo site – something Arrington hopes will change in the future.
It was only a matter of time before Twitter looked to cash in on its volumous community of users – and if rumours are to be believed that time is now.
TechCrunch is reporting that Twitter was suffering service difficulties yesterday and that during those interruptions some users spotted ads in their Twitter stream (could the users be mistaking Twitterrific ads if they are using those services?).
Click through if you want to take the TechCrunch poll on whether Twitter should carry ads.
Google has launched App Engine – a service allowing web developers to test out their applications on Google’s infrastructure.
By using Google technology developers will be able to see how their applications fare ‘under heavy load and with large amounts of data’, says a post on the new blog for the service.
“The goal is to make it easy to get started with a new web app, and then make it easy to scale when that app reaches the point where it’s receiving significant traffic and has millions of users,” writes Paul McDonald, product manager.
There are certain restrictions on the applications, namely: maximum of 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day and 10GB bandwidth per day. The tool will remain free when used within these parameters and, as it’s developed, users will be able to purchase extra resources.
Donald says most applications are expected to be able to serve approximately 5 million pageviews per month.
The App Engine is at the ‘preview’ stage – meaning only the first 10,000 subscribers can play with it for now. The list is already full:
According to Darren Waters on the BBC’s dot.life blog there were no more places within 24 hours. Waters points to the launch as a signal of where Google is headed as a company:
“There’s no doubt that hosted services, from web applications to programs we associate mainly with desktop computing, are the future… more interesting will be what Google says it will be able to do with the applications and resultant data that it will host on our behalf, on the behalf of developers and companies.
“Google could help drive standards not just for the web as we understand it today, but for each and every device that is being connected to the net now and in the coming years…”
TechCrunch has already used the service to build an application and says it took four hours from sign-up to deployment – its speed and simplicity being the main attraction to developers. However, questions will need to be asked about the scaling process, writes Henry Work.
While making it quick and easy is undoubtedly a positive for developers, Thomas Claburn at InformationWeek urges caution:
“[D]evelopers looking to travel the path of least resistance should pay close attention to the risks of depending on someone else and to the limitations imposed by terms-of-service contracts. We’re talking about outsourcing your infrastructure, after all.”
Is this Google offering developers a helping hand or offering to buy them up?
Been a big week for Twitter – they have announced THREE new additions which will start to have a presence on the site:
(Thanks to TechCrunch for the skinny on these additions)
Perhaps another thing to mention is that ReporTwitters.com has now gone live. We wrote about it earlier in the week: it’s a site so that fanatical reporters who just can’t live without the thing can post news reports and their twitter posts in the same place.
A ‘more-realistic’ rounded view of the news, is the half-cocked reasoning. Still, might be an addition to the explore feature before too long.