The use cases for Twitter, the IM/blogging hybrid that has taken the blogger world by storm, continues to grow. Tonight I spotted Amazon.com using Twitter to announce Gold Box deals. I found out about this via (what else) Twitter, when bloggersblog pinged it - noting that Amazon has "a long way to go to catch @woot". And sure enough, woot is (at the moment I write this post) announcing a deal on a "Dyson DC14 Full Kit Upright Vacuum", for just $259.99. On closer inspection, it turns out to be "the (now) official Woot twitter bot" for an online e-commerce site called woot.

This is a great example of how instant communication tools like Twitter are being used for commercial means. Basically the Amazon and Woot deals are feeds of offers, pushed out via Twitter. These kind of feeds could also be received in your RSS Reader, or email.

The next step for Amazon and Woot is to allow personalized Twitter feeds - e.g. you could sign up to an Amazon Twitter feed of just music deals (if music is what you want to buy). This would equate the "followers" of Amazon's Twitter feed to leads for the company - very fine grained ones, because Amazon knows what their "followers" want, based on which e-commerce deals they sign up for via Twitter.

I must mention that in my advisory work with nooked, an Irish RSS marketing company, we're working on a concept just like this - which Nooked is calling FeedCommerce. The concept is basically that personalized feeds allow consumers to get great deals and retailers to specifically target their goods and services to consumers. Twitter is in a great position to take advantage of this trend, as an output pipe for such feeds. It's yet another example of how a brand new communications tool like Twitter is being used in ways that few people would've predicted, least of all Twitter's developers.

MIAMI, FL, JUNE 4, 2007: Jcx.Software today announces the release of VS.Php 2.3 for Visual Studio 2005, a PHP integrated development environment (IDE) for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. VS.Php 2.3 adds support for Windows Vista and Visual Studio Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005. VS.Php 2.3 new features focus in providing developers with the ability to work easily on existing PHP applications hosted on remote sites.

VS.Php 2.3 also upgraded the support for deploying local projects faster and more efficiently. It also added support for deploying files using FTP over SSL. Another key feature in VS.Php 2.3 is the ability to import projects from a remote server. The wizard lets the developer download the entire Php application from a remote server and allows working on the project locally. The developer can choose to deploy the files back to any remote server.

Could Silverlight 1.1 assemblies be generated with Visual Studio .NET 2005? Well, if you read the GetStarted page of Silverlight you see only upcoming Visual Studio codename Orcas as development platform.

Bryant asked this in the Silverlight forum and got a great answer from Scott Louvau. He replied:

Well, in VS2005 you can create a class library which will build against the Silverlight runtime, but it's a little work.

1. Create a Class Library.
2. Remove all references from it.
3. Right-click on the Project and pick Properties.
4. On the Build tab, click Advanced and check 'Do not reference mscorlib.dll'
5. Manually add references to mscorlib, agclr, System, System.Core, System.Silverlight, and System.Xml.Core from the Silverlight install folder (\Program Files\Microsoft Silverlight\)

At this point your build outputs should be Silverlight consumable binaries. It looks like the equivalent command line call to csc.exe (the C# compiler) should include the references to the mentioned binaries and the /nostdlib option but may require others as well.

You will find an Hello World example on Bryant's blog here. Feel free to download it and try it with Visual Studio .NET 2005. Don't forget to first install Silverlight 1.1.

Targets Linux developers with gateway IDE

Sun Microsystems today releases Sun Studio 12, its latest IDE (integrated development environment) for C, C++ and Fortran. It's freely available for Solaris and Linux software platforms and the update will be useful for developers building multi-core and multi-threaded applications, the company says.…

AP - With dominance of the market for high-definition movie discs still up in the air, Sony Corp. said Monday it is including a small surprise with the new Blu-ray disc player it is shipping this week: a price tag $100 lower than previously announced.

AP - Apple Inc.'s highly anticipated iPhone will be available June 29, according to both TV commercials broadcast Sunday night and a company spokesman.

Filed under: Video, Web services, Microsoft