The Telegraphreports that Twitter is seeking a Government Liaison. The new hire will be Twitter's first D.C.-based employee. The new hire will also get to work with important political peeps. You can see the job listing here.
Twitter is looking for an experienced, entreprenurial person to make Twitter better for policymakers, political organizations and government officials and agencies. You'll be our first D.C. -based employee and the closest point of contact with a variety of important people and organizations looking to get the most out of Twitter on both strategic and highly tactical levels. You'll help Twitter understand what we can do to better serve candidates and policymakers across party and geographical lines. You'll support policymakers use of Twitter to help them communicate and interact with their constituents and the world. You'll work with nearly every group at the company and at every level to pursue your vision for how Twitter ought to be. You'll help set the culture and approach of a fledgling public policy department and be an important part of our very small company.
If you are successful, the world will be a better place because policymakers will have closer connections with their constituents and will be sharing more information with them.
They will likely get a lot of resumes for this position. The demand is great enough that Twitter probably needs more than just one person dealing with local and international governments.
Stephen Fry Selects the Most Beautiful Tweet Ever Tweeted
There it is. The most beautiful tweet ever. Twitter user Marc MacKenzie from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada is credited with tweeting the most beautiful tweet. He won the honor of the "most beautiful tweet ever tweeted" at the Hay Festival. The judge was Stephen Fry. Marc MacKenzie entered 35 of his tweets in the competition.
The Australianreports that Twitter has reached its 15 billionth tweet just three months after hitting its 10 billionth. Twitter also revealed that 300,000 new accounts are being added daily on Twitter.
For the first time since the site launched in March 2006, Twitter released its numbers, with 105 million registered users and 300,000 new accounts being added on average each day.
The Australian also calls Twitter an "online blog site," which sounds a little redundant to us.
Twitter has announced plans to launch embeddable tweets. Twitter pointed to this post by ReadWriteWeb to illustrate how tweets make useful quotes and can be used in reporting news. They are good for celebrity gossip as well, such as Conan O'Brien's battle with his Twitter nemesis Justin Bieber.
Twitter gave this example of what an embedded tweet will look like.
The embedded tweet includes a follow button and links to the tweet and the Twitter account. Twitter will probably offer a variety of style options.
Twitter recently announced some of its ad plans, including something called Promoted Tweets. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says he thinks people are "going to really love them." Publishers and services are lucky if ads are barely tolerated by users. Having users actually love ads seems unlikely, but it will be interesting to watch how the advertising on Twitter develops. Take a look:
Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga on Pace to Overtake Ashton Kutcher on Twitter
Justin Bieber, tween heartthrob and Conan's declared Twitter nemesis, is already listed on more Twitter lists than anyone else. If he keeps gaining followers at his current pace he will also soon have more Twitter followers than Ashton Kutcher, who currently tops the list of Twitter peeps with the most followers. However, Lady Gaga is gaining followers even faster than Justin Bieber.
According to Twittercounter.com, Justin Bieber is currently gaining 14,583 new followers every day. He will have over 6.1 million followers a year from now. Lady Gaga is gaining an average of 15.1 million followers per day and will have about 6.5 million followers a year from now at that pace. Ashton Kutcher is gaining just over 3,000 followers each day. He will have 5.5 million followers a year from now, which is considerably less than what Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga are forecast to have.
Projected Follower Counts in 360 Days:
Lady Gaga: 6.5 million followers
Justin Bieber: 6.1 million followers
Ashton Kutcher: 5.5 million followers
It appears that Ashton Kutcher's reign as Twitter King will be over before this time next year.
Justin Bieber Likely to Pass Barack Obama as Most Listed Twitterer
Tween hearthrob Justin Bieber is likely to soon pass President Barack Obama as the Most Listed Twitterer. You can see a list of the Most Listed Twitter accounts here.
Last month, Barack Obama was listed on 44,117 lists and Justin Bieber was listed on 29,930 lists.
This month, Barack Obama is listed on 53,865 lists and Justin Bieber is listed on 52,621 lists.
This shows Justin Bieber is rapidly catching up to President Barack Obama and will soon overtake him to be the most listed Twitterer. This could be a sign Twitter is becoming more of a tween haven or tweens just tend to make more lists.
There are over 100 Twitter accounts listed on over 10,000 lists as of today. You can see the Most Listed Twitterers chart here.
The 10 billionth tweet on Twitter was a private tweet so most of us will never ever find out what it was. How sad. The tweet preceeding the 10 billionth tweets was written by @lelamarques. There about 50 million tweets a day now according to a Twitter blog entry so in a few years we will have to 100 billionth tweet to look forward. Sure hope it is not a private tweet.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs Launches Twitter Account
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has launched a Twitter account, @PressSec. His first tweet reads, "Learning about "the twitter" - easing into this with first tweet - any tips?"
The Twitter account's bio says "An official WH twitter account. Comments & messages received through official WH pages are subject to the PRA and may be archived."
The launch of the Press Secretary Twitter account comes shortly after news that Obama administration is seeking a Social Networks Manager to manage the President's Facebook, Twitter and MySpace accounts.
Super Bowl XLIV now has its own official Twitter hashtag, #SB44. The NFL has set up a webpage that aggregates tweets and Flickr photos tagged with #SB44. The site notes that the content submitted by Twitter and Flickr users for the application is not edited, fact-checked or screened by the NFL before it is posted. Expect the pace of the #SB44 tweets to pick up as gameday nears. The NFL also has a Twitter account, @nfl.
Those looking for Twitter followers and/or attention at parties or clubs might try these Twitter stockings. The stockings are sold here on Etsy. The stockings might get more followers if they had your Twitter username but that wouldn't be very subtle. Not that these are subtle.
Mashable reports that Twitter has started rolling out local trending topics. So far just 1% of users have the service.
"We're rolling out local trends to 1 percent of users today, but we'll share more information when it reaches a larger audience hopefully sometime next week. We'll keep you posted when that happens."
Twitter trends have been a feature that is unique to Twitter. Twitter is able to offer the feature which provides a real-time look at what is going on in the world. The local trends will take this feature and apply it to specific cities, towns and regions. Only 15 U.S. cities are supported by local Twitter trends so far but that is likely to change.
Mashable reports that the word "Twilf" has entered Twitter Vernacular thanks to an episode of Current's Super News. In the cartoon Sarah Palin is referred to as a Twilf. The word has a more wholesome meaning then you might think. The Urban Dictionary says Twilf is a "Tweep I'd like to follow." The problem with Sarah Palin being a Twilf is she hasn't been twittering lately. Here is the crazy Current cartoon where the word twilf comes up.
Britney Spears' Twitter account, @britneyspears, was hacked for at least the third time today. A downside to having a high profile Twitter acount is that hack attempts are more likely. Britney's account is the 2nd most followed and the 8th most listed. Unlike in the past when hackers have taken over groups of high profile accounts Britney's Twitter appears to have been the sole target. The hackers tried to make it seem as if Britney is a Satan worshipper.
Britney's web team - which has its own list now on Twitter - tweeted the following apology.
Jim Carrey's bizarre new website should win the award for best version of a Twitter bird. The website has a bird with Jim Carrey's head on it that shares his latest tweets. If you click on the bird it goes to Jim Carrey's Twitter account, @jimcarrey. Well played Jim Carrey.
Celebrity Twitter Accounts Among Most Listed Twitter Accounts
There are some blog posts discussing the most listed Twitter accounts here and here that claim Mashable is the second most listed Twitter account. It hasn't been #2 for several days. Here is the correct ranking of the top most listed accounts.
Update 11-2-09: You can find a longer list of the Most Listed Twitter Accounts here.
It's good to see Mashable up near the top of the most listed Twitter accounts, but Mashable has been falling. The list of the most listed has been trending more celebrity since lists were turned on for all Twitterers a couple days ago. A week ago Mashable was ranked first and a couple days ago it was ranked fourth. Now it is ranked seventh. The trend that seems to be shaping up here is that celebrities will have to most listed Twitter accounts sort of like what you see on Twitterholic, a site that shows Twitter accounts with the most followers. However, the celebrities with the most listed accounts is a turning out to be a little different then the celebrity accounts with the most followers.
Note: You can find a list of 400+ celebrities here, a list of Twitter tools and apps here and lots more lists at Listorious.com.
Barack Obama, Taylor Swift Are Most Listed Twitterers
President Barack Obama and Taylor Swift appear to be the most listed people or organizations on Twitter as of this writing. This could easily change as there are still many people who do not yet have Twitter lists enabled. Here is a short list of the most listed Twitterers as of right now, noonish on Thursday, October 29th.
I created this short list manually and it will no doubt be automated by someone using Twitter's API in the days ahead. It's probably not a surprise to see celebrities and news organization leading the pack. Early on the most listed list had more tech people as you can see here but that has changed somewhat. Those who first had Twitter lists was probably dominated by peeps in the tech industry. Who is on the most lists won't really tell the whole story because determining reach on Twitter has become much more complex. There is the issue that people can follow other people's lists which may be hard to calculate. There are also plain old follower counts but even those don't tell you the whole story because a lot of people have followers that have abandoned Twitter.
Lists and followers will be used to measure how much reach a person or organization has on Twitter even if the measure is imperfect. The great thing about lists is not as a way to measure popularity but that they allow people to organize twitter accounts and their incoming tweets. This way they can get a lot more value out of Twitter.
Update 11-1-09: You can see an update list of the most listed Twitter accounts here.
This tweet by Robin Sloan is apparently the 5 billionth tweet on Twitter. The number at the end of the tweet's URL is 5000000000, which likely means it is tweet number 5 billion if Twitter hasn't been skipping around.
The Social blogs that Robin Sloan has nicknamed the tweet, "The Pentagigatweet."
Corrected to show billionth not millionth! Thanks Glen Green
Twitter Lists are great new way to organize information and follow tweets on Twitter. The feature makes Twitter a lot more useful. It works best for categories. For example, you can create a list of your favorite news
sources or a list for a specific subject, such as blogging, social media, food,
music or tech. Information junkies are going to love this feature. You can also go local and follow your favorite restaurants, hangouts and local news sources.
You can only create 20 lists but that doesn't really matter because you can go and follow cool lists that other people have made. One of the best features of Twitter Lists is that you can add people to your lists that you are not following. You can add someone to one of your lists by using a tab that appears next to their profile. When you hover over the tab your Twitter Lists appear and you can check the box(es) next to the List you want to add them to.
The lists themselves are very useful. They contain all the tweets from the twitterers you have added to the list. The lists appear on the right side of your page underneath the search box. When you click on one of the lists the tweets from the members in the list show up on your homepage. Each list also has its own page.
Here's a short summary of some of the features:
You can make up to 20 lists.
Each list can have up to 500 twitterers.
Lists can be private or public.
You can add people to lists even if you don't follow them.
You can follow lists made by other people.
You can change the title of a list at any time.
The url path for lists is twitter.com/username/nameoflist
Twitter shows you who is following each list.
Twitter shows you how many lists you are listed on (next to your followers/following count)
I have made a bunch of lists already including one for Twitter apps and tools as well as lists for blogging, celebrities, tech, tv and movies, etc. I'm also following some lists others have made including a Metaverse list, iPhone list, nonprofits list and Australia list. I'm also following some company group lists, such as the Twitter list, TechCrunch list, Mashable list, ReadWriteWeb list - these lists contain Twitterers that all blog/work for the same company. You can see my lists and the lists I am following here.
Note: You can't see any of the lists if Twitter has not yet activitated Twitter Lists for your account. Hopefully, they will do this soon.
For those who have Twitter List Blindness here's an example of a Twitter list called "Tech"
Neatorama reports that Dan Ros hacked his Big Mouth Billy Bass so that it quotes Homer Simpson, Bill Clinton, George Bush and characters from Monty Python's The Holy Grail. The hacked Big Mouth Billy Bass will also speak whatever is tweeted at him. The Bass's brain was swapped with an mbed Microcontroller. Take a look:
What a great idea. It's important that we get as many Big Mouth Billy Bass units connected to Twitter as possible.
We have microblogging, so why not microvideoblogging. That's the idea behind Robo.to, a website that lets you publish micro videos - or visual status updates - that are no longer than 4 seconds in length. The videos can be distributed on Twitter, Facebook and other social media websites.
Bits reports that the idea is also meant to serve as a digital calling card for users.
The idea behind the platform is simple: In addition to the microvideos, which can be uploaded from a webcam or a mobile phone camera and pushed out via Facebook and Twitter with a few short lines of text, Robo.to is meant to be a digital calling card online or a hub that houses information about an individual's identity on the Web. That's what helps separate the service from other microvideo services like 12seconds.
Bits says Robo.to already has 100,000 plus users, thanks in part to Justin Timberlake regularly posting the tiny videos on his Twitter account, @jtimberlake.
Twitter blogged yesterday that it will soon add a feature called Lists.
The lists could be a game changer and help end the comfy ride those on Twitter's Suggested Users List (SUL) have enjoyed for far too long. There will probably be attempts to game it and lots of "please add me to your list" tweets. There is some risk with this feature because if people can follow everyone on a list all at once then they are more likely to follow a list that includes a malware spammer. Twitter could also create a public database showing Twitter accounts that are included in the most lists. Twitter's API will probably allow developers to do something like this.
The following aspect is interesting but the real value in the lists is not so much in following but in allowing Twitter users to segment their Twitter followers, and allow them to track tweets by self-chosen categories such as news, business, family, friends, etc. The lists are public by default but there will likely be lots of private lists. Hopefully, Twitter never has an error that lets people see someone's private "Frenemies" list.
The lists should increase following on Twitter, which is one of the reasons Twitter created the SUL in the first place. Most Twitter users don't follow very many other people and these lists should help. If the Twitter Lists make it easy for people to track by groups or categories that help them then it may also increase the amount of time people spend on Twitter.
Business Insider reports that Bit.ly is now offering urls from the j.mp domain, which is two characters shorter than Bit.ly. .mp is the Internet country code top-level domain for Northern Mariana Islands.
We just popped open our bit.ly sidebar to send a tweet and got this new URL tool instead. By knocking out two characters from the URL, that means your tweet content can potentially be 1.4% longer.
You can get a j.mp shortened url at the j.mp website. The site is powered by Bit.ly, which became Twitter's default URL shortener in May.
Here is another Twitter song called "Twitter Rock Stars." The song by Carina K (@carinak) was posted to YouTube a couple months ago. The song described as a "tongue-in-cheek, cheesy fun song" is definitely one of the better Twitter songs. You can see the seven or so other Twitter songs here.
Here's "Twitter Rock Stars" with vocals by Carina K and guitar by Richie Scheffer.
The SFGate's tech blog called The Tech Chronicles has summarized the findings from a new study (PDF) from Pear Analytics. The study analyzed 2,000 tweets that were gathered randomly sampled from the public timeline on weekdays over a two-week period. The study found that over 40% of tweets fall in the "pointless babble" category.
40.55 percent were "pointless babble," which Pear defined as the "I am eating a sandwich now" tweets."
37.55 percent were "conversational," or "tweets that go back and forth between folks, almost in an instant message fashion, as well as tweets that try to engage followers in conversation, such as questions or polls."
8.7 percent had "pass along value," the tweets that are re-tweets passed along from member to member.
5.85 percent were "self promotion," messages about companies, products or services.
3.75 percent were spam, the "See how I got 3,000 followers in one day" tweets.
3.60 percent were news from mainstream national media outlets such as CNN or Fox.
Babble will likely be excruciatingly boring and irrelevant to someone searching Twitter for the latest news but it is far less trivial to a friend or family member that is following the babbler. You may not care that some random person liked the latest Harry Potter movie or is enjoying his burger but friends and family members that know him might be interested.
The Pear Analytics study (PDF) is worth a read because it also summarizes some other recent studies on Twitter.
Tr.im, an URL shortener, is closing its service. The urls people created with Tr.im will eventually no longer work. A post on the Tr.im blog says no one wanted to take over Tr.im, which suprised Tr.im's owners.
tr.im has thousands and thousands of users, creating tens of thousands of URLs per day. But, we were a little surprised to learn, *no one* wanted to take it over. We quietly contacted a number of people within the Twitter development world, and nobody wanted it in exchange a token amount of money. No one perceived any value in it, or they wanted to operate a shortener under a differently branded domain name.
And, users will not pay for URL shortening, and why should they?
And, the data that tr.im generates — the hottest links that people are sharing right now — is all well and good, but everyone has this data. tr.im gets hit by countless bots every day farming this data to create and operate websites such as tweetmeme.com. So, *everyone* has this data, meaning it is basically worthless *by itself* to base a business on (as bit.ly and others are attempting to do) at least in our humble opinions.
And finally, Twitter has all but sapped us of any last energy to double-down and develop tr.im further. What is the point? With bit.ly the Twitter default, and with us having no inside connection to Twitter, tr.im will lose over the the long-run no matter how good it may or may not be at this moment, or in the future.
It does seem odd that there wasn't a lot of interest in acquiring Tr.im. It does have a user-base and it has the nice short username that an URL shortener needs.
Twitter Starting to Filter URLs Linking to Malware
F-Secure reported recently that they noticed Twitter was starting to filter malicious URLs. A person attempting to tweet a malware URL gets a message that says, "Oops. Your tweet contained a URL to a known malware site." A source told F-Secure that Twitter might be using a Google API for malware filtering.
The WSJ's Digits blog says the Bit.ly, a popular URL Shortener, also has a spam-filtering system that warns people of malware.
It is good that Twitter and Bit.ly are trying to catch malware. This is a problem that is likely to become more pervasive on Twitter as its popularity grows.
Wiredreports that Bit.ly is going to launch a real-time news service that would show news trends and share which news stories are the most linked.
Instead, he's going to mine those links to create a real-time news service that would work somewhat like Twitter trends, except that it would track the hottest links rather than the most-used words. The result would be a Digg-like news service comprised of links determined to be important by bit.ly's analysis engine.
“We're seeing more than a billion clicks in the course of a month,” said Cohen. “Looking at that volume of data, we can see the most interesting and the most important content that is being shared across the whole of the real-time web. Sometimes that’s humorous stuff — the other day, the most shared video we saw on the web was William Shatner performing a dramatic reading of Sarah Palin’s farewell address.
“But it’s also occasionally very serious. We were able to see the Neda video out of Iran trending well before CNN linked it in, and we’ve begun to refine our capabilities there to be able to pinpoint stories like that.” He said part of this technique involves looking for links being shared by unlike people, because that means they have universal appeal.
It would be interesting to see what the top shared bit.ly links are. It would compete in some ways with Twitter search but there are also a lot of tweets on Twitter that don't include URLs. There are also sites like Twitturls, Tweetmeme, and Twitturly that already provide data on the most popular links shared on Twitter.
The Wired story also says Bit.ly plans to added expanded fee-based analytical tools to marketers and business using its service.
Scientists Create Software to Measure Happiness in Blog Posts and Tweets
Discovery News reports that Vermont scientists Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth have created a software program that analyzes blogs and tweets to ascertain how happy or sad people are. The scientists have also set up a website called We Feel Fine. Some of the findings based on data they have already collected is what you might expect. The happiest days were vacation days and the recent election and Obama's inauguration. An example of a sad day was the day Micheal Jackson died.
The consistently happiest days are, not surprisingly, vacation days and holidays. The overall happiest days of the last few years were election day (Nov. 4) and President Obama's inauguration (Jan. 20). On these days, people typically typed sentences with words like "pride" and "proud."
Some of the saddest days over the last few years have been the anniversaries of 9-11 and even the day before that solemn anniversary, Sept. 10. Michael Jackson's recent death also caused a drop in the average national happiness.
Analyzing blogs only measures the general climate of happiness across the entire United States (90 percent of the analyzed blogs were from the United States.) To find the level of happiness in your neck of the woods the researchers are now applying their software to 140-character Tweets.
"There are something like 1,000 tweets a minute," said Dobbs. "That's really a lot of data that we can analyze."
Tweets should give a good picture of overall mood. The researchers should be able to narrow down the mood by the hour or minute and not just the day.
Twitter has launched a new homepage. It does a better job of conveying how Twitter is useful for finding real-time information by displaying some of the trending topics. It makes a lot more sense for a tool/service like Twitter to have a dynamic homepage than a static one. The new homepage also carries the tagline, "Share and discover what's happening right now, anywhere in the world."
Twitter widgets and applications are now included in a Twitter Goodies section. There's also a link to the new Twitter 101 for Businesses resources that Twitter added a few days ago.
More details in the new homepage can be found here in a post on Twitter's blog.
CNN has an article about how smartphones, texting and Twitter are helping farmers communicate. Chuck Zimmerman, publisher of agwired.com, told CNN that its a misconception that farmers are slow to adapt the latest technology.
"In large part, farmers tend to be very early adopters of technology. We have the stereotypical image of a hayseed farmer that still persists -- out on a tractor with a straw hat on," he said. "The reality is that most of them are very highly trained from a technological standpoint."
Tucker said his job on the farm in Nebraska includes more than harvesting wheat, corn, sunflowers and millet.
He wants to bring urban Internet users along for the ride. And in doing so, he's become a sort of text-happy evangelist for rural America.
"People out in the cities aren't familiar with agriculture like it used to be 100 years ago. They may not have an appreciation or an understanding of what goes on out in the rural side of things," he said. "I just try to be an information source for whoever may be listening."
So that's what he does from his tractor -- one tweet at a time.
A Nebraska wheat farmer named Steve Tucker has more people following him on his Twitter account, @tykerman1, then live in his town. Take a look:
The BBC reports that the British Royal Family has joined Twitter. You can follow them @BritishMonarchy. The article says the Queen and Prince of Wales are aware of the Twitter account but they won't be typing in any tweets themselves.
A spokeswoman said it had signed up to harness the popularity of Twitter to spread news about the Royal Family.
It will provide details of royal engagements as well as link to information about what members of the family are doing. But the spokeswoman said neither the Queen nor other members of the Royal Family would be tweeting personally.
"The intention," she explained, "is that it is a news service rather than a personal voice."
TechCrunch reports that Twitter has started linking hashtags. They note that Friendfeed already does this.
Now that they are hyperlinked, when you click on a hashtag, you are led to the search result page for the specific hashtag. Others have been implementing this; FriendFeed (big surprise) has been doing this for awhile. Some of the Twitter clients, including the desktop versions of Tweetie and Seesmic Desktop also provide hyperlinks to hashtags.
Turning the hashtags into links makes good sense and it will increase the usage of hashtags. A couple downsides with hashtags - they shorten the length of a tweet and they are often used by spammers, like they were today with news of Sarah Palin's resignation.
You can see the hashtags turned into links into graphic of a search for the #hashtags hashtag
Bing Search Returns Tweet From Popular Twitter Accounts
Microsoft's new search engine Bing is now indexing tweets from some popular Twitter accounts. If you search some of the more popular Twitter accounts on Bing it will return a couple recent tweets. For example if you search "Celebrity Gossip Twitter" on Bing it returns a couple of the latest tweets by @celebritygossip.
Bing says they picked a few thousand Twitter accounts to start with but could add more later.
We're not indexing all of Twitter at this time.... just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start. We picked a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets. We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter's public API to surface Tweets in people search. We'd love to hear your feedback as we think through future possibilities in real time search.
Naamua Delaney talks about the power of retweeting on Twitter with CNN.com writer Elizabeth Landau. Anyone who has used Twitter for a while is familiar with the RT acronym and the power of retweeting. If a story gets enough retweets it has the potential to ricochet around Twitter and send lots of traffic the link mentioned in the original tweet. The CNN video has some basic tips for Retweeting:
Begin with the letters RT
Give credit to the source of the tweet
Shorten the URL when linking
It's pretty basic stuff but Twitter noobs might be confused at the sight of RT when they first see it. Giving credit is also important because sometimes people retweet without giving credit - its probably mostly noobs doing this or those odd spammy twitter accounts. CNN's Elizabeth Landau also says to make sure you are retweeting something that has value to your followers. That's pretty relevant today given all the false stories that are being retweeted and passed around lately - like the fake news that Jeff Goldblum had died. Topsy.com also gets mentioned in the video.
"Tweet Tweet Twitter" is a new song from Irish Pop Group Tinselitis who are made up of Sean McCarthy, Deborah Confrey and Jonathan Jacobson. Here's the music video:
IBM employee Andy Stanford-Clark has wired his home automation system so that it sends a tweet when windows or open or lights are turned on. The home also sends a tweet when a mouse is caught in a trap. Andy's twittering house can be found here on Twitter. Take a look:
Sports Illustrated has an article about Twitter and sports enthusiasts. The article also discusses some professional athletes who are using Twitter.
In fact, the entire sports world is obsessed with the microblogging tool, through which users update their web audience with frequent messages of 140 characters or less. For example college coaches, who can showcase their programs to web-savvy prospects and their parents, are copycatting each other onto Twitter. Pete Carroll, John Calipari, and Charlie Weis -- screen name "NDHFC" -- are among the big names with Twitter pages (somehow, it's hard to imagine Weis' former boss, Bill Belichick, huddled in his hoodie, tweeting away secrets from the film-room).
The tool is scoring for the pro leagues too. All the majors -- the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, NASCAR -- shoot their followers useful information like scores, schedules, and highlight clips, and inane chatter like this, from the NFL's Twitter page: "Boomer Esiason sighting here at NFL quarters." Whoopee. What's more relevant is that on draft day, the Atlanta Falcons and New York Jets both scooped Roger Goodell by announcing their first-round picks on Twitter before the commish called their names from the podium. According to trackingtwitter.com, the NBA, which claims more than 600,000 followers, has a greater Twitter audience than all brand accounts besides Whole Foods and online shoe retailer Zappos. "Our favorite feed," the site said of the NBA, which sits comfortably ahead of Starbucks in the Twitter top 25. "Great mix of content."
Some resources to find athlete tweets and twitter accounts can be found here, here and here. Microblogging is a great tool for tracking sports and for people to share their thoughts while watching sports. It's been obvious lately that sports have become big on Twitter. During the NBA finals keywords related to the games like "Kobe" have regularly appeared in the trending topics section.
Google Operating System reports that Google is planning a microblogging search engine that will let users search tweets and updates from other microblogging sites.
Much like Google Blog Search, Google's microblogging search service will sort the results by relevancy and it also be integrated with Google's web search engine: the keywords that are frequently used in recent posts will trigger a MicroBlogsearch universal search group.
On the plus side, a microblog search engine can return the latest information about an event or topic. On the negative side, there is the potential for the microblog services to become filled with spam and repetitive entries. The more popular they get the more likely that is. Filters can help with these problems and Google's microblogging search engine will likely implement multiple filters.
Retailers have relied on email newsletters to reach customers over the past several years but they would be wise to try Twitter. Many retailers are already using Twitter to inform customers about special deals, store events and new products. Retailers could also use Twitter to search for complaints about their stores.
There are already at least 200+ retailers on Twitter. Some of the retailers with large numbers of followers include:
Based on these large follower totals some people clearly don't mind getting tweets from stores. Retailers not on Twitter are missing out on an opportunity to reach customers. You can find a list of 200+ retailers using Twitter in the Twitter Store Directory.
Caitlin Hill Sets Impressive MC Hammer Tweet Record
Last month, Caitlin Hill at Rocketboom set an important record by sending seven tweets to MC Hammer on Twitter (@mchammer) in just one minute. Well done Caitlin.
Twitter is for both the young and old. Ivy Bean is a senior citizen who is actively using Twitter. She is 104 years young. Her Twitter account can be found at @IvyBean104. A story in The Telegraph says agents from Geek Squad helped Ivy get active on Twitter.
Mrs Bean was already a keen Facebook user but members of the IT support service the Geek Squad helped the pensioner get bang up to date.
The Geek Squad set her up and gave her some navigation training and top tips on how to manage the social networking phenomenon.
The support group is now challenging the Twittersphere to find out if there is actually someone older than Ivy posting updates on their whereabouts, updates and activities. Make sure you catch her before she logs off for her daily weekday appointment with Noel Edmonds on 'Deal or No Deal'.
She now has over 16,000 followers on Twitter thanks to buzz that spread on Twitter after the story ran in the Telegraph.
Loic Le Meur says he asked Google co-founder Larry Page what he though about Twitter search. Larry Page says he was always saying that Google needed real time search. He also says that now that Twitter is being used for search people at Google know they need to compete.
"I have always thought we needed to index the web every second to allow real time search. At first, my team laughed and did not believe me. With Twitter, now they know they have to do it. Not everybody needs sub-second indexing but people are getting pretty excited about realtime."
Twitter is very useful for realtime search but even more so than Google News and other news sources you tend to get the same information repeated over and over. The key will be who can provide the best filter or filters for the endless stream of current tweets and news.
Twitter Quitters: Nielsen Online Stands By Twitter 40% Retention Rate
Nielsen Online recently blogged that Twitter only retains about 40% of the people it attracts. Nielsen says that post received a lot of criticism from the Twitter community. They were criticized for not including third-party applications so Nielsen went back and tested 30 websites and applications that feed into the Twitter community. David Martin, Vice President, Primary Research, Nielsen Online says the results from testing third-party Twitter app were similar with about 60% abandoning Twitter after a month.
So, as an update, we went beyond just Twitter.com, adding in more than 30 websites and applications that feed into the Twitter community including: TweetDeck, TwitPic, Twitstat, Hootsuite, EasyTweets, Tumblr, and many others.
The results verified our initial findings: about 60 percent of people on Twitter end up abandoning the service after a month. The year-long retention curve looks very much the same as the one for just Twitter.com.
Twitter has received a great deal of press lately. Even Oprah did a show on the service. A lot of new users have been coming to the service in 2009. Some of them may have tried Twitter out quickly but then returned to communication tools they are more familiar with and where their friends are. Some people may be busy and not have time to invest the time in figuring out Twitter. It's not a surprise there are Twitter quitters but it is suprising the percentage is so high. It may be a good sign for rival social networking tools if Twitter can't retain more than 40% of its users - unless these are people who turn out to be uninterested in social networking altogether.
Here's a video with David Martin explaining his findings and saying they are standing behind the 60% Twitter quitter percentage.
The White House blogged today about the launch of MySpace, Twitter and Facebook accounts for the White House. The White House says most of the content will come from the White House RSS feed but they do want to hear from followers. The blog posts says, "The WhiteHouse blog (RSS) will power a lot of the content in these networks, but we're looking forward to hearing from our fans, friends and followers."
Twitter has been criticized for being unreliable and misinforming when it comes to the swine flu. The truth is that it depends on who you follow. On any subject and topic you will find people on Twitter spreading both reliable and unreliable information. People do this in the real world too - they spread rumors, theories and sometimes people even share things that they know are not true. That's just how people are. Try a Twitter search for swine flu and you will find retweets of swine flu news, confusion about whether it is safe to eat pork (it is safe), jokes, people saying they are afraid and even conspiracy theories.
Most people try and share the truth with one another and most people are doing that on Twitter. A lot of people are also theorizing and worrying and they are expressing their thoughts on Twitter. There's not anything wrong with that. It's just human nature.
If you want reliable information then you need to follow reliable news sources. The most reliable is likely CDC's Emergency twitter, located at @CDCemergency. There's also @health, @Pandemicflu, @birdflu, @SwineFlu2009, @WHOnews and @swine_flu. The @breakingnews has been covering the swine flu frequently as well. There are also numerous local news twitters that people can follow. Visit the website of your local tv news website and it likely has a Twitter. You can also try searching for it using the Find People tool.
You can also find a growing list of swine flu resources here on HealthNewsBlog.com.
The Neural Interface Technology Research and Technology Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison built a direct brain interface for Twitter. Wired has a story about it here and the video clip below.
This could be an important step towards no longer having to type at all. Someday we will just embed Twitter in our brains and think our tweets.
SeaWorld's Shamu is on Twitter. You can follow Shamu on Twitter at @RealShamu. Shamu's bio says "I live at SeaWorld. I'm a large, athletic, black and white marine mammal. I'm not THE star of SeaWorld, I'm A star of SeaWorld." A real person is behind the Shamu Twitter just like a real person was behind the Mars Phoenix Twitter that was very popular last year.
When blogging starting getting more commercial several years ago there were many character blogs that emerged. Twitter seems like a much better format for character blogs because of the shorter post length and because it is easier for the character to interact with Twitter users.
Zac Efron may be the future but he isn't embracing social media. Zac Efron toldPeople that he doesn't actually want people to know what he is doing all the time.
"I don't have a Twitter, a MySpace or a Facebook or anything like that," says the star of the new comedy 17 Again. "I kind of value in people not knowing where I am or what I'm doing."
To demonstrate his take on the typical posting, he says with a laugh: "I'm on the toilet. Still on the toilet. Guys, dot-dot-dot, out of TP. Still on the toilet."
There may not be much reason for Zac Efron to be on Twitter right now since pretty much every step he makes is already covered. Other stars using social media tools like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook like the ability to get out ahead of - or repudiate - what the tabloids and blogs are reporting.
Kevin Rose Launches We Follow Twitter User Directory
We Follow is a new user powered Twitter directory. The site was launched by Digg founder Kevin Rose. The site is easy to use and understand. Each category on the website is a tag such as gardening, sports and knitting. Twitter users in each of the categories are ranked by the number of followers they have.
Twitter users can add themselves to the category by sending a tweet to @wefollow with the three categories they want to be including in.
Some people not following the instructions (WeFollow Fail) have wound
up in the yourtag category.
WeFollow is a useful alternative to sites like Twitterholic that show only the most popular Twitter users overall. Websites like these have become dominated by celebrity twitterers as of late.
Twitter's traffic has been exploding lately. Jon Stewart investigated on a recent segment as to why the mainstream media and politicians want to be on Twitter. Jon Stewart admits he has no f***ing idea how Twitter works. Samantha Bee, who likes Twitter, interrupted Jon Stewart to tweet while he was discussing Twitter. (via TheBivingsReport)
Restaurant News reports that a free burrito tweet offer entered on the Costa Vida Twitter account (@costavida) - which had 80 followers at the time - ended up being forwarded to 15,000 people with 2,500 people redeeming the coupon at Costa Vida's mexican restaurants.
Costa Vida said a one-day-only, free-burrito offer to 80 "fans" on Twitter.com was forwarded to 15,000 individuals, prompting more than 2,500 people to redeem the virtual coupon at the chain’s 21 restaurants.
"This mobile phone and social media campaign demonstrates the viral power we can tap into with Costa Vida's fans who love our food and are extremely loyal," said Nathan Gardner, chief executive of the Salt Lake City-based chain. "Our first major Twitter initiative also helped encourage new customers to try us - many of whom are now registered Costa Vida Fans."
It shows how messages can really spread quickly on Twitter especially when there is a free burrito involved.
Surgeons at Henry Ford Hospital are using Twitter to educate others about a new cancer surgical proceedure in real time. The surgeons told CNN's Elizabeth Cohen Reports they are trying to get the word out about a way to remove a tumor on a kidney without removing the kidney.
Track Santa on Twitter With NORAD and Bitz the Twittering Elf
It's that time of year when the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) starts tracking Santa Claus and his reindeer as they get close to their big night delivering presents all over the Globe. Santa Claus actually uses more advanced technology than NORAD so NORAD probably needs the extra time to make sure they don't lose sight of Santa on Christmas Eve. The NORAD Santa tracker website has already begun a Christmas Eve countdown and has some features up for kids.
NORAD also has a Twitter profile up. It's being run by an energetic Twittering Elf named Bitz. The name of NORAD's Santa Twitter is @noradsanta.
Twitter Stock Community Called StockTwits Gets Funding
VentureBeat reports that two-month-old StockTwits has raised a round of funding. The company makes it easy to track discussion of individual stocks on Twitter.
Basically, StockTwits is a sort of social hub for people who want the most up-to-date information on the stock market. You sign up for the site, and any tweet (a Twitter message) that you send out will show up on the site's homepage, provided the tweet has a dollar sign next to a stock symbol. So if you were to tweet "I think you fools are undervaluing $AAPL," that message will show up on the homepage and all the other StockTwit users will see it. They can respond and start following you on Twitter - if you’re good, they might tell their Twitter followers to follow you as well. This way, the site serves a clearinghouse for sharing news articles, investment strategies and other helpful information.
StockTwits also provides information for individual stocks including the latest quote and the most recent tweets. For example, here is StockTwits' page for Google. PaidContent writes that the funding round was $800,000.
There has already been at least one successful business venture that relied on Twitter's API. That is Summize which was sold to Twitter and became Twitter search. Summize was able to sell itself to Twitter but future Twitter-based services will likely have to find success in other ways.
Here's a video that provides an introduction to StockTwits.
An apparently fake Twitter account claiming to be Kanye West came to the attention of Kanye West during Stephen Colbert's plot to knock Kanye West from the #1 slot on iTunes. Kanye West noticed a tweet related to Operate Humble Kanye on the @kanyewest Twitter account and said that's not me on his blog. Rolling Stone reports the @kanyewest Twitter has been removed.
The Kanye West Twitter page has since been taken down. With past Twitters like "and I just keep doing my thing…putting out G.O.O.D. music and cultivating my craft" and thanking America for electing Barack Obama, the page had all the makings of another stump for which West could shout from, except for one major detail: It wasn't updated nearly enough for it to actually belong to West, who posts upwards of ten times a day on his blog.
The fake Kanye is gone but why isn't the real Kanye twittering. Some of his posts are tweet-sized anyway. One would think he could at a minimum at least hook his blog feed up to Twitter.
Pownce has been acquired by Six Apart and will be shut down on December 15th. Here is the email that went to Pownce members.
We are sad to announce that Pownce is shutting down on December 15,
2008. As of today, Pownce will no longer be accepting new users or new
pro accounts.
To help with your transition, we have built an export tool so you can
save your content. You can find the export tool at Settings > Export.
Please export your content by December 15, 2008, as the site will not
be accessible after this date.
Please visit our new home to find out more:
http://www.sixapart.com/pownce
Our thanks go out to everyone who contributed to the Pownce community,
The Pownce Crew
The Pownce page on sixapart.com talks about the Pownce team now working for Six Apart and tries to interest Pownce users in Six Apart's Vox blogging service.
Pownce was a microblogging and file-sharing service started by Kevin Rose, Leah Culver and Daniel Burka that at one time was thought to have a shot at being popular before Twitter pulled away from the pack with the bulk of the microblogging traffic. Plenty of other Twitter rivals and alternatives still exist including identi.ca, Plurk, Jaiku, Kwippy and Rejaw.
Al Gore Joins Twitter and Quickly Gains Many Followers
Former Vice President Al Gore recently made the move to join Twitter. You can see his Twitter here. Al Gore has amassed nearly 19,000 followers since his first tweet eleven days ago on November 6th, 2008. It's probably the fastest growing Twitter in history although there is no way to verify that. There are sites that list the top Twitter users like Twitterholic and Twitter Counter but none that list Twitter growth records. What's the fastest Twitter to get to 20,000 followers? That's probably going to be Al Gore who looks like he will get there in about twelve days.
CNET reports that new House rules allow members of Congress to post content on third-party websites such as YouTube or Twitter. This is good because without this rule it made it difficult for members of Congress to take advantage of some of the newer web publishing tools. Of course, some members were using sites like Twitter anyway.
"In addition to their official (house.gov) Web site, a member may maintain another Web site(s), channel(s) or otherwise post material on third-party Web sites," the new House rules read. They also allow members to provide links to or embed outside content on their official sites, provided they include an exit notice indicating the visitor is leaving the House.
The Senate rules also allow for links to be added to official sites. They allow senators to use any third-party site of their choice, but the senators will have an "approved list" of sites for reference.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called the change "a significant step forward toward bringing House rules into the multimedia age and allowing for members to effectively communicate with their constituents online."
FCW.com has quotes from a couple other Members of Congress including Twitter user Rep. John Culberson, (R-Texas). Culberson said the new rules are "Truly a victory for all those seeking increased transparency in our government, the use of online video and other online technologies." The new rules were announced on October 2nd. PolicyBeta also has a post about the new rules abtly titled, "Yes... Our Congress CAN Tweet."
CNET's Politics and Law blog also notes that there is now a Capitol Tweets widget that lets you keep up on the latest tweets from members of Congress who use Twitter. You might also be interested in this list of Members of Congress who Twitter.
Below is a video of someone using Twitter to turn the lights off in their room. This might be useful for confusing potential criminals about whether you or home or not. We have seen similar uses of Twitter like the plant that tweets when it needs to be watered and the Laundry Room hooked up to Twitter that tweets when washers and dryers are available. (via Rocketboom)
Mashable reports that Twitter is growing like a weed. The Mashable post cites new figures from Nielsen Online that show Twitter has grew 422% from August, 2007 to August, 2008.
The latest numbers are in, and Twitter is apparently growing at a torrid pace. According to stats just released from Nielsen Online, Twitter recorded 2.3 million unique visitors in August (US-only), an increase of 422% from the same period last year.
Moreover, visitors to Twitter spent 55% more time on the site on average - a total of more than 7 minutes per user. Those numbers point to rather robust growth for the site, especially considering many of its most rabid users access it through a third-party client like Twhirl or Tweetdeck.
It helps when a CNN anchors is incorporating Twitter into his show. It also helps that everytime there is a major disaster somewhere in the world there are immediately stories about how Twitter was the first place to hear about it. Twitter has always been a great way to cover breaking news invents and share information. It's use by news organizations alone should continue to foster growth and let Twitter remain follower central despite spam and uptime issues.
CNN's Rick Sanchez Incorporates Twitter Into His Show
Craig Stoltz reports that CNN anchor Rick Sanchez discussed having a 3 P.M. Twitter show recently in a tweet.
Rick Sanchez has been using Twitter on-the-air during his Saturday and Sunday evening shows on CNN. Sanchez shows the Twitter on the screen and mentions some of the tweet replies he gets to questions he has posted. It's a cool idea and a lot quicker than trying to comb through hundreds of emails while you are live on the air. Sanchez has accumulated quite a few followers in the process. You can follow him on Twitter here.
More discussion of CNN's use of Twitter can be found here and here. (via Techmeme)
Wallstrip took a break from discussing high-profile stocks to discuss the Twitter microblogging service. They mention some of the microblogging companies including Comcast and JetBlue Airways. They also mention that some users are discussing stocks on Twitter. Twitter has grown 600% since the start of the year says Wallstrip. They also not that you can't invest in Twitter - it's a startup that hasn't even started to monetize yet. Here's the Wallstrip clip.
Barack Obama wants to let people know who he chooses as a running mate by email or text message. You can sign up here.
Barack is about to choose a running mate, and he wants you to know first. You have helped build this movement from the bottom up, and Barack wants you to be part of this important moment.
Sign up today and we'll send you an email announcing Barack's running mate.
You can also text VP to 62262 to receive a text message on your mobile phone.
Barack Obama has a popular Facebook profile. He also has over 50,000 Twitter followers. He could have used either of these distribution channels but his campaign chose this method. Maybe they are trying to grow their database of contacts. Obama did use Twitter to announce that people could receive his VP selection by text message or email.
A crash of Amazon.com's heavily used Amazon S3 storage service has caused problems for many Web 2.0 sites that rely on the service. You can find a status page for Amazon's service here.
Here are a few of the outages and problems.
Plurk, Twitter and Kwippy are having problems showing images loaded with Amazon A3. It sounds minor but it just isn't as much fun microblogging without the avatars.
Posterous.com reported problems posting different types of files.
Another site down is Smugmug.com - you can see their message here.
Slideshare.net reported problems related to the outage.
A video and photo sharing site called Phanfare also reported problems.
More discussion of the outages can be found here on Techmeme.
This is just a sample of the many sites affected by an Amazon Web Services problem. The cheap hosting service has become popular with Web 2.0 startups. There was a similar Amazon Web Services outage back in February, 2008 - see here.
The Telegraph 
Mashable 
Jim Carrey's bizarre new 
Business Insider 
The SFGate's tech blog called The Tech Chronicles has 
Tr.im, an URL shortener, is closing its service. The urls people created with Tr.im will eventually no longer work. A 
Wired 
Discovery News 
Sports Illustrated has an 
Google Operating System 
Twitter is for both the young and old. Ivy Bean is a senior citizen who is actively using Twitter. She is 104 years young. Her Twitter account can be found at 
The White House 
SeaWorld's Shamu is on Twitter. You can follow Shamu on Twitter at 
Restaurant News 
VentureBeat 
An apparently fake Twitter account claiming to be Kanye West came to the attention of Kanye West during Stephen Colbert's 
Former Vice President Al Gore recently made the move to join Twitter. You can see his Twitter 
Mashable 
Barack Obama wants to let people know who he chooses as a running mate by email or text message. You can sign up 
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