All A Twitter

Twitter user @ AmandaMooney had a really great idea that she tossed out via her blog, and Twitter...

AmandaMooney: What if every Friday our Twitter community elects a charity we’d like 2 support +We all give at least what we’d spend on our morning latte.

Amanda gave a longer explanation on her blog of how this would look...

Here’s how this could work:

Every Monday, you suggest a cause you’d like our community to support by sending me a message on Twitter or email, Facebook etc and I’ll post them here on ASL.

From Monday to Thursday, we can discuss and choose the cause we’d like to support that week.

On Friday, I’ll post a link on Twitter to a place where we can donate to the cause and we’ll all chip in $5 or whatever we can spare.

I think that this is a great idea, and I'm going to support it.  I think you should too.

-N

Today I found an amazing blog post that talks about how different Twitter users have more juice than other Twitter users. 

"The Law of the Vital Few" is amongst the most unpopular ideas of the last two hundred years. First framed as a social scientific truth by the early 20th century Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto, it states that in all societies throughout human history a small minority of individuals and organizations have held more political, economic and cultural power than the majority. The Law of the Vital Few isn't a popular idea with the majority, of course, because it marginalizes most people making them, at best, incidental players in their own histories. Nor is Pareto's idea particularly popular with elites because it can be used to expose their power and reveal the self-interest of their actions.

Hugh McQuire a great Cnet interview  with Evan Prodromou the creator of identi.ca, that I think is a **must** read if you use any microblogging service.  It is about opening up the microblogging world, rejecting the ideas "walled garden" sort of set up that exists now.  Here is a clip from that article.

How do you differentiate yourselves from Twitter and the others?
Prodromou: Recent numbers show there are already around 110 microblogging services, and with others that have been announced, there are probably 200 different services right now. What we've seen with other kinds of social software is this kind of fragmentation and we are seeing that now with microblogging where you are on Twitter, and I am Jaiku, and we can't be friends and we can't send each other messages. That's not the way the Internet is supposed to work. We are seeing these information silos happen around microblogging just like we're seeing them in other social media and my goal is to see that not happen with microblogging because I think it's a very valuable kind of communication.

Isn't that where something like Friendfeed comes in, to aggregate all the different services into one place?
Prodromou: Friendfeed is a great way to listen to multiple places, but to me, that's a stop-gap solution where we've got lots of silos, so you can listen to lots of silos. I want one microblogging place, where if I'm on one and you're on another, we can still communicate and still be friends. That's the long-term solution to the problem. It should be up to the services to talk to each other. That's really the difference with Identica. I made the software open source, so you can take the software that runs Identica and install it on your own server. Maybe you're involved with a Web community or you have a group of friends that like to talk or maybe you're in business and you want people in your business talking to each other in the enterprise. You can install the software and tailor it just for your group. I built a protocol called OpenMicroBlogging, so if you take the software and install it on your server, people on your server can still subscribe to other people on Identica and vice versa, so we're no longer having these little silos that are fractured and different from each other.

So will Indentica users be able to communicate with Twitter users?
Prodromou: That's my goal. If we get enough people using these open standards and open systems, perhaps Twitter sees it as a business advantage to join this kind of open network. We've seen that before on the Internet. In the early 1990s, there were lot of silos around e-mail and if you had an AOL e-mail address and I had a CompuServe e-mail address, we couldn't send e-mail to each other. But e-mail became so ubiquitous that even the companies with the biggest groups and users had to allow their users to send and receive Internet e-mail and I think that that's going to happen with microblogging, too. But it means that we have to grow the rest of the system.

Right now I use identi.ca and it is a great service.  I for one would love it if microblogging went the way of email, but I think it will take the involvemnt of a company like Google to make it happen in this day and age. 

Any thoughts?

-N

Web Pro News recently pointed me to an interesting blog post by Profy about how companies are "gaming" Twitter. 

Profy stated...

CareerBuilder generated all the activity required to make the name of the site the most discussed topic on Twitter on its own. The thing is that the guys behind the website simply configured a few Twitter accounts (each account focused on a particular city) to broadcast all the latest job positions advertised on CareerBuilder automatically to Twitter. This resulted in a few dozens of new tweets posted to a few timelines belonging to different CareerBuilder geographical sections every hour

Web Pro News asks the question (in light of Twitter's statments about cracking down on spam): how is this not spamming?

My answer: I do believe that CareerBuilder is using Twitter as a way to aggregate their content, BUT you have to opt in to see this the content.  It is sort of like singing up to be spammed. 

Nonetheless, this does expose an interesting sort of problem for Twitter's search technology. 

-N

I think that the VP debates tonight will be good for Twitter.  Why do I say that?

ZDnet reported...

Twitter usage and sign-ups received a healthy boost during last Friday’s first presidential debate for the 08 campaign. The official Twitter blog reports that, despite Friday traditionally being a slow traffic day:

• Friday updates jumped 18.5% from previous Friday.
• Updates during the debate increased 160% compared to same time last week.
• Signups on Friday were up 23%.
• Signups during the debate were up 135% compared to same time last week

Wired also reported...

The number of Twitter users and updates increased significantly last Friday as Obama and McCain took the stage for the first presidential debate, Twitter announced on its blog.

New sign-ups to the microblogging service were up 23 percent from the week before, and up 135 percent during the actual debate from the same time last Friday.

Profy had an interesting article today about the possible future of Twitter as a tool for making money...

The report talks about the Twitter E08 which is a very dressed up presentation of the Twitter search, which use to be a seperate company that was bought up by Twitter. 

Profy's article talks about how this could be the first example of an attempt to monetize twitter.  The article states...

Any marketer will tell you that it is easier to reach a specific audience when you know where exactly it is. And to any advertiser a niche site targeting potential customers of this advertiser is much more appealing than some generalist site full of information that attracts all types of visitors. And this is why I think Twitter niche sites could very easily be used for monetization - Twitter could launch dozens of such websites, aggregate relevant content to them, make people visit them to read more opinions about some particular topic of high interest to them - and sell ads alongside this content to interested companies.

Besides, because of high concentration of textual content on a particular topic, such niche websites will bring some generic traffic from search engines - and this traffic will also be used to talk to potential advertisers and some of the newly-arrived people may very well convert into Twitter users if they are interested in a particular topic Twitter has a site for (even if they had no reasons to create an account before that).

I honestly believe launching a good number of such specific websites could be a brilliant idea for Twitter and if done right could result in both growth of the microblogging service itself and in turning Twitter into a profitable (or at least generating some revenue) business. The most important factors here are that such niche sites should be focused on a topic that is popular among internet users and generates lots of traffic and also has a number of potential advertisers that could be interested in associating their brands with such websites.

I think this is an interesting sort of observation because un until now many people seem to have believed that Twitter would eventually create a "pro" acount, that users would have to pay for, and would of course have more features than a "standard" account. 

The way that I see it is that Twitter provies a very robust source of text based ata that can show what people are thinking / talking about.  All that needs to happen is someone needs to create a tool that can make sense of the cacophony of text that slams into the Twitter service (and servers) every our of every day. 

I'm sure that Twitter has people working on this, but I'm betting that if someone else comes up with a really killer app than Twitter will just buy it the way that they bought search.twitter.com.  (Solve the problem with your check book.) 

-N

So today when I look at Twitter I see a Tweet that say...

Funny

lonelysandwich They should change the symbol for EDGE to stink lines

billpalmer bomb squad blows up three suspicious packages at Philly baseball stadium. turns out to be three packages of hot dogs. overreact much?

Indypodcaster Okay, but ONLY if Ahab is played by Samuel L Jackson ... AND he has the robot arm ... http://tinyurl.com/4e7w3d

templesmith TV show FRINGE: "A psychic office drone named Roy who draws weird Ben Templesmith ripoff pictures of scary death moments" Anyone got pics?

Links

andydiggle Everyone! Go download PJ Holden's iPhone/iPod Touch comic: http://tinyurl.com/4qjr4p

Pistachio pretty outrageous, non-PC, kind of funny, oddly true Sarah Silverman's Schlep video: http://tinyurl.com/3n8zh4

LDpodcast ok- retweet- this is just ridiculously funny http://tinyurl.com/3n8zh4

brianwood U.S. breaks Posse Comitatus Act: http://www.salon.com/opinio...

jowyang: on Facebook 20% vs MySpace 67% US internet market share (visits) http://tinyurl.com/4rlpq2

Best AM Tweet

lonelysandwich Listening to a young man in a hot pink checkered t-shirt passionately expound on high finance. There goes my world view.

Funny

bud_caddell If I were super rich I'd keep Paul McCartney in a little birdcage next to my throne to thrill me with his minstrel skills.

lonelysandwich I guess I can see how Governor Palin could be considered "hot" on a scale of 1 to 2.

Akula I think Apple should enlist Kramer to do Mac ads.

bobgoyetche: Thought of the day: if AirCanada and Bell Canada merged, the whole planet would be annihilated in a huge cloud of suck

Interesting

mattcutts I would like to read a book with the first sentence "All I have to do is stay alive for a few more hours..."

brianshaler Overheard: "Go outside! The graphics are amazing!!"

Smart

timoreilly Retweeting @rjray: What worries me most about Palin, is whether she's an indicator of the type of Supreme Court nominees McCain would make.

Links

chrisbrogan Have you seen Lizzer? http://lizzer.com/ . Kind of interesting. Might be good for people still unsure of their html skills.

DorotheeRH Retwt @kadavy: New Media Camp Chicago discussion: Why are advertisers reluctant to align with comedy content: http://snipr.com/3r7jy

stevegarfield Retweeting @acclimedia: How to Blog by @hotdogsladies. A must view. http://tinyurl.com/5jbyqj

timoreilly Comparing Obama's and McCain's Technology and Innovation Agendas (pdf) http://tinyurl.com/3mg4kx

stevegarfield I just created a new group on flickr for ATM Envelope Art. http://tinyurl.com/569bo7 Join in!

chrisbrogan KyleFlaherty does a great job showing how to track the pain on Twitter: http://bit.ly/2JyYYD