Until now, as DuVander explains, application developers could bring Twitter-based content into their user interface through search or by pasting in the stream itself. Think of the new service as a way to include Twitter-based content that can be tailored by a viewer’s interests and keys off the activities of a selected individual or group. Twitter provides some insights and guidelines (including use cases) for the API in this post. It is telling (in a good way) that the first guideline is to declare all information in a “protected” account as “non-public” and therefore out-of-bounds for services that refer to the output of the streamed API.

Of special interest to customer care, social CRM and VRM professionals should be the additional metadata that is included in the API or “feed”. It has the potential to let users know when a Twitterer favorites a site, retweets a message, follows a new twitter or makes changes to a list. As I recently wrote, Programmable Web was purchased by Alcatel-Lucent, which is aggressively working to to integrate (mashup?) the customer interaction management resources of Genesys Labs with the rest of its Enterprise Software Group. With so much attention focused on bringing social media content into the customer care contact center workflow, an easy way to incorporate real-time streams should be much appreciated.

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For more information on becoming an Opus Research client, please contact Pete Headrick (pheadrick@opusresearch.net).

A blog post by Eric Sachs, Senior Product Manager at Google, characterizes the addition of OAuth as “consistent with our broader data liberation efforts.” In this case, OAuth provides the means for 3rd party application developers to build solutions that require access to messages or other information that reside in GMail’s password protected region.

As a reminder, OAuth is an open protocol designed to allow people to share such things as photos, files and now GMail messages with other folks without having to give out their usernames and passwords. OAuth provides a means for its users to hand out software “tokens” instead. Each token contains code that grants access to a specific site and for specific resources within that site for a defined period of time. It is a crucial enabling technology for Recombinant Communications solutions in cases where some crucial elements reside inside a password protected site. Twtter’s API has supported OAuth-based access for a while now and expectation has been building both from developers and users to make it easier for people to protect privacy and control while while mixing or surfing through a multiplicity of their favorite password protected sites without regard to whether they are at their desktops or on their mobile devices.

The prospective applications go far beyond remote banking. As Voxeo explains, the Tropo platform now enables Web application developers to add all the multiple channels mentioned above to their existing applications. For instance, Tropo will enable them to give self-service apps a Twitter name and customers can contact it simply by Tweeting.

In today’s announcement, Voxeo highlighted an expansion of its international footprint by making it possible to dial into the Tropo cloud using “local” numbers in 30 different countries. In terms of languages supported for spoken input and output, the platform covers US English, UK English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Mexican Spanish or Castilian Spanish.

Voxeo Labs continues to provide the Recombinant Communications community with free access to its development environment, by featuring direct-API and JSON-based development interfaces without a fee. Users pay only when applications are put into production.

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For more information on becoming an Opus Research client, please contact Pete Headrick (pheadrick@opusresearch.net).

Webcast On-Demand – Sign-up Below!

There’s still time to register for this free Webcast. I’ll be sharing results from a survey of “shoppers” regarding actual use of multiple channels when dealing with vendors.

In both preference and practice, people have established personal preferences in how they interact with selected vendors. A recent Opus Research survey shows the increasing sophistication in how consumers choose shopping and support options based on these preferences.

Among the survey highlights, it is clear consumers first identify products or services to purchase online. Subsequently, consumers apply all means of communication — including search, toll-free numbers, social networks, and mobile interactions — to pursue and support these transactions.

While phone-based customer support remains an important link in customer conversations, the survey provides empirical evidence that merchants and their technology providers need to extend support to all communications channels — including those with which their customers are growing most comfortable.

In this free webcast, Dan Miller, senior analyst with Opus Research, and Dan York with Voxeo, discuss the survey results and how emerging modalities (chat, IM, SMS, video) are influencing merchants in developing customer care solutions.

Speakers:
Dan Miller – Senior Analyst, Opus Research
Dan York – Director of Conversations, Voxeo

Webcast On-Demand – Watch Below!

In both preference and practice, people have established personal preferences in how they interact with selected vendors. A recent Opus Research survey shows the increasing sophistication in how consumers choose shopping and support options based on these preferences.

Among the survey highlights, it is clear consumers first identify products or services to purchase online. Subsequently, consumers apply all means of communication — including search, toll-free numbers, social networks, and mobile interactions — to pursue and support these transactions.

While phone-based customer support remains an important link in customer conversations, the survey provides empirical evidence that merchants and their technology providers need to extend support to all communications channels — including those with which their customers are growing most comfortable.

In this free webcast, Dan Miller, senior analyst with Opus Research, and Dan York with Voxeo, discuss the survey results and how emerging modalities (chat, IM, SMS, video) are influencing merchants in developing customer care solutions.

Speakers:
Dan Miller – Senior Analyst, Opus Research
Dan York – Director of Conversations, Voxeo

Advisories are available to registered users only.

For more information on becoming an Opus Research client, please contact Pete Headrick (pheadrick@opusresearch.net).

Microsoft, Nuance Communications and BSquare take credit for SYNC and its support of multiple interfaces, applications and users. Indeed, the basic software platform was jointly developed by Microsoft and Ford using the Windows Auto platform. It was introduced in 2007 on selected vehicles with Nuance providing the speech processing engine to support “navigation” and command of a multiplicity of applications.

BSquare is a small Bellevue, WA-based is a highly-specialized system integrator with particular expertise in the Windows Auto environment. It built a custom user interface to Ford’s specification integrating Windows Auto with Adobe Flash and Nuance’s speech rec resources to control navigation, media, climate controls and phone functionality.

To its credit Ford has featured some of the most popular apps in the mobile Web milieu, including the two popular, personalized radio feeds: Pandora and Stitcher and audio rendering of microblogging phenom, Twitter. Rendering of Tweets is accomplished by using a mobile client OpenBeak (originally TwitterBerry) in conjunction with Nuance’s text-to-speech rendering capabilities. As for using speech to navigate services, Nuance has refined voice activation by offering “One-Shot Destination Entry”, enabling users to use a single utterance to both enter a full address and request navigation instructions. For instance, “Find the closest Italian restaurant” will generate local results, which become the basis for navigation when the driver says “take me there.” In addition, the Nuance-interpreted voice commands now control the SIRIUS Travel Link information portal, including near real-time sports scores, weather conditions, traffic, fuel prices, or movies listings.

As we noted here, Ford is finding success using mobile speech as a differentiater, with SYNC. It will expand on that success by incorporating voice command and navigation into a package called MyFord Touch, which will be launched on the model year 2011 Ford Edge (shipping in 2010) followed by global availability on the 2012 Focus. Under the name MyLincoln Touch, the package of services and resources will be “standard” on new Lincolns, starting with 2011 MKX (also available in 2010).

Orange already offers social media service called Social Life in the UK. It provides a single site where users can access a number of social media websites, including Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. The roll-out of Orange’s Twitter TV offering is expected to move from the UK to France, Spain and Poland, initially, and then more broadly in Western Europe.

This article in the online Guardian UK provides some details. Mobile Twitter will be offered to Orange customers as part of their existing phone service. They will be able to put limits on the number of Tweets they receive, in order to control costs.