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When Micro-blogging Grows Up

2008-06-12T01:35:00.000-07:00

I really am a big fan of O'Reilly Radar. While there are individual writers I follow (both on Twitter and rss for their blogs), and some sites/companies that are primarily one author anyway, O'Reilly Radar offers consistently good analysis on how trends and developments might play out -- in a way that feels useful from a business development perspective.

From O'Reilly Radar:
When Micro-blogging Grows Up

Will Twitter and other micro-blogging services start resembling the blogosphere down the road? We are in the early days of micro-blogs and I still remember when Twitter was used mainly for "status" reporting. But more people are using Twitter instead of blogs, following links from trusted sources essentially using Twitter as a highly filtered blog reader. Just like the early days of blogs, the most popular Twitters are heavy on technology and "personal" micro-blogging. On the other hand, given that blogs are perfect for short opinon pieces, politics was and remains popular among bloggers.
...
Once more stable services and business models emerge, I still think micro-blogs will evolve to share some of the properties of the blogosphere described above. Micro-blogs from traditional media sources will be among the most popular. The liberal vs. conservative split will be less pronounced, with conservatives narrowing the micro-blogging gap. The top micro-blogs won't be as dominated by technology, although I'm not sure the format is really ideal for political topics. OTOH, I'm surprised gossip isn't as big - at least not yet. The top micro-blogs won't include as many "personal" ones. Micro-blogging will be just as popular overseas. We definitely will have several micro-blogging services and not be as dependent on the pioneering folks over at Twitter. More likely, micro-blogging will be just one component of broader platforms like FriendFeed. As always, spammers and phishers will try to ruin everything.

A post that was meant to highlight some of the differences between the two top 100 lists has led to forecasts - definitely not my original goal. What are your predictions?

Read the full article here: When Micro-blogging Grows Up-- there's a nice graphic too.

uses of Google & Twitter

2008-06-07T20:08:00.000-07:00

From Joshua Porter's Twitter feed:

Informal Twitter poll results: People search Twitter for advice, trusted perspective, expertise. They search Google for everything else. 11:44 AM June 03, 2008 from twitterrific
You have a question...where do your turn first? Google....or Twitter? 11:11 AM June 03, 2008 from twitterrific

So, immediate specific response from a mostly select group has value. Who'd a thunk?

But seriously, the ability to fire off a quick mostly top of the head response is something I'll usually do (vs. something that needs a reasoned argument and a fair amount of tweaking). That's probably bad discipline and time management on my part, but it does make for a compelling product.

Brian Solis on Summize...

2008-05-20T19:20:00.000-07:00

I've written less here than I'd thought I would... and not all of that's been due to twittering.

From Brian Solis on bub.blicio.us:
Summize Brings Conversation and Sentiment Search to Twitter

...Just a bit ago, I wrote a post covering my favorite tools for monitoring conversations on Twitter.

I’d like to add one more to the bunch. Recently launched Summize is similar to TweetScan, but also unique in its capabilities and in turn, changes how we may view and use Twitter search. At the very minimum, it’s a basic search tool that operates similar to how you would naturally search in Yahoo or Google. Both tools bring Twitter alive and expose the layers of conversations taking place that matter to your personal life, your professional brand or the company you may represent.

Developed by Summize Labs, Summize’s mission is to search and discover the topics and attitudes expressed within online conversations.

Summize, provides clean, simple search interface that can be expanded to include more advanced options, similar to Google’s home page, while TweetScan is more of the Yahoo of Twitter search.

For those who are looking for specific content along with emotion, context, location, traffic, or embedded links etc., Summize provides a series of “search operators” to effectively and quickly navigate through the ever-evolving world of micro conversations.

Each search query offers an RSS feed to automatically search and monitor the results as well as the ability to send your results as a Tweet.

More at: Summize Brings Conversation and Sentiment Search to Twitter

Particles and Waves... Twitter's Value Proposition

2008-05-07T05:37:00.001-07:00

Good morning... Two recent examples of Twitter's Value...

First, from the Reuters Blog:

Breaking News, Twitter Style

News of a possible explosion rippled through the popular online service Twitter on Tuesday, in a preview of what’s to come in the realm of breaking news and citizen journalism. Twitter is a so-called microblogging site that allows users to send and receive short messages.

At about 1:37 pm, software developer Dave Winer asked the Twitterverse: “Explosion in Falls Church, VA?” (Perhaps not coincidentally, Winer is a well-known blogger and podcasting evangelist). A flurry of posts, or “tweets,” followed, as users reported rumbles as far away as Alexandria.

The mainstream media entered the fray at 2:33 pm, with radio station WTOP reporting ground rumblings throughout Northern Virginia, citing a possible earthquake. Officials also told the radio station that the rumblings were part of construction blasts at nearby Ft. Belvoir, which had been scheduled for later in the afternoon as part of a new building for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.

But more interesting... and perhaps more directly relevant is the experience of Twitterer Randy Stewart of Boxbe (which kills spam in your Yahoo mailbox). I was tracking down a talk he gave about Twitter at the Social Media Club in Seattle and saw his thread about an outage they were having -- and how using Twitter helped put them back in operation.

The transparency here -- seeing this normally one to one traffic on his Twitter stream -- is one of the interesting facets about using twitter, to me anyway. Somehow, overhearing part of this customer service dialog helped get me more interested in Stewart, his company and this fellow Ryan who helped him out.

Maybe this is all basic stuff, partially driven by the novelty Twitter still has (I can't imagine trying to tell a story about how email was really helpful), but I think the immediacy and transparency really are something special.

all about twitter, some of the time!

2008-05-03T17:31:00.000-07:00

Image via WikipediaI'm really excited about twitter -- even though I've just started using it.

So for now, I'm just posting links I find, things I and others are experiencing with Twitter.

First, I do like Twitterrific.

From their site:

About Twitterrific

Twitterrific is a fun application that lets you both read and publish posts or "tweets" to the Twitter community website. The application's user interface is clean, concise and designed to take up a minimum of real estate on your Mac's desktop.

To get started, visit the Twitter home page to sign up for an account for use with Twitterrific. Twitter accounts are free, take only minutes to set up and are a great way to stay connected with people around the globe.

In addition, Icon Factory, the company behind Twitterrific seems to be making many other cool tools, including...

Dine-O-Matic

Dine-O-Matic is a fun Dashboard widget created by the Iconfactory and Joesph Roback for Mac OS X that randomly selects a place to eat out when you just can't make up your mind. Does your family have a hard time deciding on where to head for dinner? Your co-workers want to go one place for lunch, but you want to go some place else? No problem, enter your selections into Dine-O-Matic and let the food fates decide!

Seems like a good place to keep an eye on.

Better, though (so far) as a Twitter related product is Twhirl, which runs on Adobe AIR.

The site and, possibly, the company seem to be focusing on the one product and it has a good set of capabilities. From their site:

twhirl is a desktop client for the Twitter microblogging service. Most of the features available on the Twitter website are accessible through twhirl, too. Plus, a lot of usability enhancements have been added.
Some of twhirl’s features:

runs on both Windows (2000/XP/Vista) and Mac OSX
connects to multiple Twitter and Friendfeed accounts
notifications on new tweets
shorten long URLs (using snurl, twurl or is.gd)
cross-post updates to Pownce and Jaiku
post images to TwitPic
search tweets using TweetScan
timeline filtering
localized to English, German, Italian and Spanish
color schemes
automatically check for new versions

You have to download Adobe AIR (which you probably should do anyway), and... at the moment it's really kicking Twitterrific's ass as far as personal utility.

A few other things...

Also useful is Twitzer, a Firefox add-on for shortening text, though... since I'm mostly working with Twhirl, it isn't as useful at the moment (and aside from dealing with urls -- taken care of by other tools -- I like having a cap on total characters).

Find url's that people are twittering about: http://twitturly.com/
Who do the people you're following follow? Where are the hot networks you might not be aware of: http://www.tweetwheel.com/

More, later, I'm sure.

e