Several days ago we wrote that Twitter's analytics team was about to launch a new project. Twitter VP of Communications Sean Garrett denied there was anything earth-shaking going on.
"I wish we were launching something worth 'all this whoop-la,' but this is an update to an existing analytics product that very few people see."
"Our analytics, operations and infrastructure teams are working on a system that uses cassandra for large-scale real time analytics for use both internally and externally."
In other words, Twitter is in fact working on an important analytics product that will launch to the public soon. This blog post bolsters the Tweets we referenced in our earlier article.
Cassadra is an Apache "open source distributed database." A "change in strategy," as King describes it, means Twitter will not use Cassandra to store Tweets as it planned. Now it's going to be used for the real-time analytics that we reported on.
Not a big deal? Nah, it's a big deal. To paraphrase Marshal Kirkpatrick, "Twitter is launching a public analytics product for the countless business customers who will line up to use it."
So, with all due respect to the VP, we're going to stick to our guns.
Why should you care about appearing smart on Twitter? Because the people who hire, promote, fire, date, marry, and divorce you will all read your tweets (updates) at some point. It’s always a good idea to put your best foot forward. Why not do the same on Twitter? Why not make an effort to appear as smart as you can?
A “visible IQ” is a short way of describing the sum total of everything I can point to and say “see, this person [you] is really smart.” As a reader scans your latest tweets, they get an impression of you. You might seem smart, funny, thoughtful, or perhaps even boring, hateful, and sloppy. Twitter makes it easy to seem less intelligent than you truly are for 3 reasons:
No context – You don’t get to explain yourself.
Real-time pressure – Everybody is updating NOW!
Sloppy status quo – Nobody else cares. Why should you?
If you’d like to take some practical steps to make sure you’re doing everything you can to seem smart, try these tips to boost your visible IQ on Twitter:
1. Abandon Predictive Text (T9)
Don’t let your cellphone complete any texts being sent out as a tweet. It might seem like a good idea to let a bit of software choose how you complete your words. But only if you’re willing to be seen on Twitter as apathetic and sloppy. When you’ve only got 140 characters to make your point, every letter of every word needs to be in the right spot if you want your point to hit home.
2. Write Just For Twitter
Posting tweets from Facebook and myriad other social platforms initially looks like a good idea. It actually makes you look like you’re lazy and don’t care much for your audience. Instead of blurting blurbs to the nearest platform and letting RSS spread your thoughts, give Twitter some dedicated attention. After all, didn’t you want to add a few words of extra context to your Facebook status? Take advantage of that extra space! Take Twitter’s space restrictions as a challenge to write particularly brilliant 140-character pieces. Genius!
3. Sidestep Stoner Syndrome
Every complex thought reduced to 140 characters will end up sounding like it was pulled from a hookah. That brilliant thought you had earlier today about how the world could learn a lot just by watching ducks swim? You didn’t seem smarter when you tweeted it. You sounded like you were really, really high. All those inspirational quotes about failure being nothing more than success wrapped in bacon? They make you sound high. This isn’t your fault. Not at all! You can blame it on Twitter’s 140-character limits and our common human tendency to say as many profound things each day as possible. If you focus on sharing your perspective on simpler ideas, you’ll seem insightful and perhaps even witty.
4. Mark Quotes Clearly
If you must quote others, clearly mark the quotes as such. Otherwise, you’re in a prime spot to look like you’re trying pass off other’s words as your own. What’s worse, you might tweet an unmarked quote that seems funny or ironic to you at the time but it may come off as stupid or immature to readers. Look smarter by giving credit and using quotation marks “quote.” for tweets you didn’t come up with yourself. Hopefully others will do the same and you’ll get additional attention for the brilliant tweets you’ve been crafting!
5. Share Only The Best Content
You may have been told that you must share everything your friends are sharing if you want to be a good community member. The quantity of sharing is up to your personal beliefs. The quality of the things you share, however, isn’t up for discussion. If you share low-quality content, you look like an idiot. It doesn’t matter if your best friend published an article. If the article is terrible, you’ll not only damage your own reputation but that of your friend by sharing the article. If you want to be seen as an intelligent and savvy Twitter user, focus on sharing quality.
What tip would you add for Twitter users looking to look their very best for possible employers? (or life partners!) It’d be great to know what you think a smart tweet looks like. Link to your favorite in a comment!
I'm an editor here at Stepcase Lifehack. I know the value of long walks, good books, joyful repartee, and a well-made martini. Say hello in the comments here, find me on my blog or hit me up for a follow on Twitter.
The popularity of Twitter has produced a number of clones in China, just as there are Facebook clones. Some of China's Twitter clones have been closed down by the Chinese government, but some have survived. We take a look at both cases in this post. We also assess Twitter's chances of success in China, should it ever be freed from the 'Great Firewall of China.'
Fanfou, Jiwai and Digu were some of the first Twitter clones to become successful in China.
However
all three - plus Twitter itself - were blocked by the Chinese government in July 2009, due to their usage during the uprisings in Ürümqi.
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According to an AFP article, Chinese authorities blamed online agitators for helping to stoke violence in that region. Prior to being shut down, Fanfou had been dubbed "China's Twitter" and had almost reached 1 million registered users by the end of June 2009.
An October 2009 report by China Daily noted that Fanfou was founded in July 2007 by Wang Xing, a young entrepreneur who also founded China's current most popular social network Renren (formally known as Xiaonei). Both Renren and Fanfou were almost carbon copies of their U.S. equivalent services - Facebook and Twitter respectively.
Weibo Rises to Take Fanfou's Place
Since the closure of Twitter, Fanfou, Jiwai and Digu, other services have risen to take their place. Taotao (owned by the company that produces popular IM service QQ) and
Zuosa.com are two examples.
However it is
Weibo that has emerged to become the biggest micro-blogging service in China. It's owned by Sina.com, a big portal company in China.
Weibo is very much like Twitter, in that it allows users to post short messages 140 Chinese characters or less via the Web, SMS or MMS. Although according to Chinese Internet expert and Beijing resident Kaiser Kuo, in Chinese 140 characters can actually produce quite a long message.
The major difference between Weibo and Twitter, according to Kuo, is that Weibo is censored. Or in the parlance of Chinese Internet users, it is "harmonized."
Sina's Weibo probably has a much greater chance of surviving than its counterparts like Twitter and Fanfou, because it knows how to self-censor. Meng Bo, deputy editor-in-chief of Sina.com and project manager of Sina Weibo, told China Daily in October that "Sina is playing by the rules as they are laid down, with strict word filtering in operation."
According to Meng, there are two teams of staff "keeping close watch to ensure there is no vulgar content or anything that violates the rules."
Would Twitter Succeed in China Anyway?
China's surviving micro-blogging services are tightly controlled by the censorship climate in China.
However even if Twitter became available again in China, would it take off with mainstream Chinese Internet users? Kaiser Kuo thinks that it wouldn't, because of the popularity of currently operational services like Weibo and Taotao. He remarked that although there would be an uptake in the number of users on Twitter, if it was ever to be made available again, Weibo and others will have gained too much momentum by then.
Here's a little secret about Twitter that you may not know: some people are getting paid to tweet. We don't mean it's their job to Twitter as the PR front-end for some large corporation, either. They're actually getting paid to post advertisements to their Twitter stream. When their followers click though, the end result is cold, hard cash.
The Twitter ad industry, an experimental playground where new ideas about making money on the Internet flourish, is made up of a handful of companies who work with advertisers to run in-stream Twitter campaigns. Surprisingly, it's not as unseemly as it sounds. For the most part, tweets are disclosed, backlash is minimal and the so-called "publishers" - the Twitterers, that is - are making a decent bit of pocket change. Just don't count on banking 10K per tweet like Kim Kardashian allegedly did.
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This is part one of a two-part series. Stay tuned for part 2 later today. Part 2 is here.
Diluting the Stream?
Twitter ads are 140-character missives posted to Twitter that link to an advertiser's product or service. Some companies allow their users to craft the ad's text itself while others insist on the advertiser's own wording. But the end result is the same: someone clicks the ad, the Twitterer gets paid.
When first introduced, the concept of in-stream ads was met with backlash and disgust from many in the Twitter community. Advertisers were charged with "diluting the stream" with these irrelevant, unneeded posts. But these days, the backlash seems to be nearly forgotten. Anyone who was offended by someone tweeting ads simply unfollowed them and went on with their life. In fact, that's the beauty of the Twitter system - if you don't like what someone says, they're gone with a click of a button. And when it comes to ads, the reality is that enough people don't mind (or perhaps don't even notice) to make the occasional promotional tweet worthwhile for publishers using these systems.
Beyond Kim K: Real Users are Making Money
There a good handful of companies where a Twitter user can sign up to start advertising to their friends and followers including Twittad, Magpie, Sponsored Tweets, and Ad.ly to name a few. Since the influx of celebrities to Twitter, these companies have become more prominent - Ad.ly and Sponsored Tweets even list some of their celeb publishers right on their homepage. Those lists include everyone from reality stars like Audrina Patridge to artists like Soulja Boy. Take a quick dive through their publisher lists, and it almost seems as if there isn't a single celeb who hasn't signed up somewhere to monetize their fanbase.
But a celebrity and their 1.5 million followers isn't the average user of these services. Instead, the average user is relatively popular within a niche crowd. For example, Magpie reports their average user has follower counts in the three or four digits. Sponsored Tweets says their average user is right around 2500 followers. Obviously, these folks have more than a handful of close friends watching their streams, but they don't come anywhere near celebrity status.
Yes, but How Much Money do People Make?
But the real question everyone wants to know is what do people make? Real people? The answer to this question isn't as simple as quoting an industry average figure. Reports of the $10,000 tweet from Kim Kardashian have people salivating, yet this is far from reality. (Side note: Ad.ly, the company behind that tweet, doesn't actually disclose what their users make per tweet. Sean Rad, Ad.ly's CEO, will only say that publishers "can make as much as five figures." Sponsored Tweets, meanwhile, boasts of a $20,000 payout.) However, outside of Hollywood starlets, musicians and other famous figures, tweeting for cash isn't some get-rich-quick scheme.
Sponsored Tweets says their average payout is $10 per tweet and a user usually gets just a couple of offers per month. Magpie says their users can earn three-figure amounts per month, most in the $100-$300 range. Twittad says their average payout is $15-25 per week. None of these payout amounts are enough money to quit your day job over, but they can easily add up to tidy second income for their users.
And if you grow your Twitter following, you can earn even more. John Chow isn't exactly a Hollywood celeb, but he does tout a follower count of over 50,000. While nowhere near Kim K. numbers, it was enough for his first tweet to earn him $1000 when he signed up with Ad.ly. But simply boosting your follower count isn't enough to be the next John Chow or Jeremy Shoemaker who claims he earned 14K in a month - it all depends on who follows you back and how engaged they are. Without active followers clicking through on your ads, you'll be lucky to earn a dollar.
Two months after announcing that the startup managed to turn a profit in 2009, Twitter has announced that it will be hiring Pixar finance head Ali Rowghani as its chief financial officer.
Twitter's CEO Evan Williams told Reuters today that the new hire represents the company's direction toward "creating value for our users and capturing the financial opportunities that result from it."
Rowghani will join Twitter officially in March.
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Last year, Twitter's search deals with Google and Microsoft made the company around $25 million - about $15 million from Google and $10 million from Microsoft. These two deals were enough to make the company profitable last year. For a fairly young company that offers a simple, free web application for end users, this is quite a feat.
Other revenue channels include creating a revenue-sharing scheme that would let Twitter share the profits generated by third-party applications. The details of this plan are still under wraps, but Twitter's platform director Ryan Sarver announced at LeWeb that the company would announce details about this plan early in 2010.
Other possible sources of revenue are multi-user accounts, which Twitter has been testing internally.
Twitter has also recently made another high-profile hire, calling onCurrent TV's Robin Sloan to work on media partnerships, covering "everything at the intersection of Twitter and media, from live events on TV to citizen journalism on the web."
We're excited to see how the startup that's managed to become a cultural zeitgeist within a few short years will continue to grow and profit. Particularly in its early days, many who lived through the dotcom crash were skeptical about the monetization potential of a free web service. Without incorporating advertising - something that no users wanted to see - Twitter has managed to create a sustainable business.
We can't wait to see what ideas Rowghani will bring to the table.
It's been just about a year now since Twitter started using OAuth as a solution for connecting with third-party applications, but to this day we still find situations where we are asked to enter our user name and password.
According to a blog post by a member of Twitter's API/Platform team, we may not need to worry about this particular nuisance, and potential security hole, much longer.
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Raffi Krikorian, a self-professed "hacker, writer, and ... tinkerer", made some waves in the Twitter development arena late into last night with his blog post, which proposes a solution to a problem many developers have been keeping an eye on.
"We really want to get people to switch over and stop using Basic Authentication when talking to our API in a production manner," he writes. "Why? Basic Authentication is, simply, horribly insecure."
Here's the problem, as Krikorian describes it:
You're an OAuth enabled Twitter client, and you've already authorized your user. You user wants to use a media providing service like TwitPic. TwitPic, currently, asks for the username and password of your user so it can store the photo on behalf of the Twitter user. You don't have that username and password, so how do you give the ability to TwitPic to verify the identity of your user?
Krikorian is proposing a solution he calls "OAuth identification delegation", wherein the application your using, Tweetie in his example, passes along its OAuth authorization to TwitPic, which TwitPic can then use to verify its actions as authorized. Right now, using TwitPic requires you to enter your user name and password separately.
For now, he says the idea is still in development, writing "once I think we've come upon the best solution, I'll write this up more formally, as well as port it to OAuth WRAP/2.0 (where Twitter is headed)."
Krikorian included a diagram of his solution and is soliciting feedback on his blog.
Einstein said that all great original ideas at first appear absurd. This is why it is so easy to dismiss radical suggestions when they surface. We point out that they are absurd and so miss great opportunities. How would you react if an unorthodox business idea was presented to you and you could immediately see problems with it? Imagine that you are the boss in each of these situations:
1. Spectacles manufacturer in the 1960s
Employee: I think we should investigate a new idea I have heard about called contact lenses.
Boss: How does it work?
Employee: We make prescription lenses that people attach to their eyeballs so that they can see well without spectacles.
Boss: You mean I stick a piece of glass onto my eyeball?
Employee: It could be glass or plastic.
Boss: That is ridiculous. What if it slipped behind the eye? What if it damaged the eye? We could be sued for millions. No-one is going to want something so dangerous and inconvenient. Spectacles are safe, cheap and popular. Let’s focus on doing what we know.
2. Radio manufacturer in the 1980s
Employee: I read about this guy Trevor Bayliss who has invented a clockwork radio. It is an interesting idea – do you think we should look at this?
Boss: Don’t be silly. I heard about this too. It will never catch on.
Employee: Really?
Boss: Sure. Let me give you three reasons. First radios need electricity and the easiest way to get that is through the mains or batteries – that is what consumers and the trade want. Secondly the radio will have to be really big to contain the winding mechanism. Third, the radio will suddenly stop in the middle of a programme waiting to be wound up – how annoying will that be? Customers want convenience – not the bother of stopping to wind up a radio every 10 minutes.
Employee: I guess you are right.
3. Website entrepreneur in 2000s
Programmer: I have this idea for a new social media site.
Boss: Great. How does it work?
Programmer: People can make short broadcasts of up to 140 characters.
Boss: 140 characters! Why restrict them? Can they add pictures, music and videos?
Programmer: No – it is just a box for 140 characters of text.
Boss: Don’t be silly. Facebook and Myspace already offer far more than that. We need something more exciting than a text box. How about we copy Facebook and add more features?
See how easy it is? Every day in every organisation bosses are rejecting interesting ideas because the ideas look silly. How can you overcome this problem? You train people to ask questions rather than be judgmental. When somebody comes to you with a bizarre idea do not find fault with it; instead ask questions. How could we make it work? What are the benefits for customers if this happened? Is there a better way to do this?
If you want innovation in your organisation then you must encourage people at all levels to welcome, entertain and explore crazy ideas – they are the ones that can lead to breakthroughs.
Paul Sloane is an author and speaker on leadership, innovation and lateral thinking. His most recent book is The Innovative Leader. He helps organizations improve innovation, creativity and leadership. He is the founder of Destination Innovation. He has written 15 books of lateral thinking puzzles and hosts the lateral puzzles forum.Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/PaulSloane.
Every day, hundreds of tweets fly past our eyes with links to important articles, meaningless drivel and the occasional self-promotion. There's little, if any, way to tell what's important and what's not. Feedtrace has stepped in to try to fill this void and let you know what people are linking to that you might care about.
For ways to harness the beast that is our Twitter stream, Feedtrace may have just stepped in as an addition to the daily toolbox.
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How It Works
Feedtrace works as a Twitter overlay, of sorts. You don't look at your Twitter stream, but instead at the Feedtrace sidebar where you find your list of ranked links. As you navigate the links from this sidebar, Feedtrace steps out of the way and minimizes to the side of the window. It's a browsing companion for navigating what people are linking to on Twitter.
Personalization In Aggregation
Not only does Feedtrace collect tweeted links by overall popularity, like Tweetmeme, but it customizes what links it shows you by comparing to ones that you yourself have tweeted. It uses a ranking system, ranking each link according to how recently it was posted, the "credibility" of the user according to their following/follower ratio, and the number of tweets and retweets.
In addition to aggregating the most popular links Twitter-wide, you can also choose to login to the service with your Twitter account and have it examine only those links added by people you follow. We think this might be a real, distinguishing feature. There are a thousand ways to find out what everyone else is talking about. This lets you find out what the people you are following are talking about.
You can also restrict Feedtrace to look just at a single website, to see what people are talking about the most. This can be a great tool, not only to quickly skim for what people really like right now on a website, but if you have a website yourself, it's another way of measuring your own success.
What's The Buzz?
The final feature we want to note is that the you can also take a look at who is saying what about the current link you've chosen to visit. By clicking the "buzz" tab on Feedtrace, you can see all of the tweets related to the current page. Feedtrace also lets you interact with those users, allowing you to retweet, favorite and reply from directly within the sidebar.
The program was just launched last week and is still officially in beta, but from what we've seen we're excited to see more. According to its blog, a new version "will incorporate new personalization options and improved navigation" and should be released before the end of February.
Seemic's announcement of Look, their brave new Twitter client, had the tubes positively humming yesterday.
Although it might be a great interface for newbies, this app isn't recommended for power users. But we just found one that is - for desktop use, anyway. It's an agile bit of hotness that's as responsive and unobtrusive as you'd ever want, and it can also provide you with a stock-ticker-esque UI that will satiate all your info-social needs. Meet SocialVisor - the Twitter app.
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It runs primarily as a scrolling ticker on the top of your screen:
Here's the skinny:
You can run your social streams as a retractable bar above your desktop screen.
You can login to Twitter and Facebook and choose to see either or both streams.
You can group your buddies any way you want, regardless of which site they use.
You can access DMs, retweets, replies and mentions.
You can see threaded conversations from Twitter.
You can share and view links, updates and pictures on either or both networks.
And more other common features for third-party apps, such as retweeting, following or unfollowing, replying, liking/favorite-ing, commenting and more. And when you want to update, links are automatically shortened with bit.ly and character counts are tracked as you type, all from a simple bar above your other windows.
If a user clicks his "exclamation" icon, there's a slim popout for Facebook notifications. If you need to focus on other tasks, no problem - you can "pause" the entire firehose and resume any time you like.
When you don't need it, it retreats conveniently into the background. There are no annoying popups flooding your screen when your stream gets a little noisy
The app has been live for about a month, and it's just what the doctor ordered. It's an OS-agnostic AIR application, so it'll play nicely with Linux, Windows or Macs. We can see ourselves running this on the daily. One issue we had is that, while the visor does optionally dock at the top of the screen, when it's locked on top, we were unable to access our menu bars for maximized windows. It's still in beta, and a bit buggy, but what kind of early adopters would we be if we didn't admit this app has huge potential, bugs and all?
Give it a shot, and let us know what you think in the comments.
If you're hoping to go to Twitter's first-ever developers conference, Chirp, you might like to know when it's scheduled for, right? Twitter hasn't publicly announced the date, but we wanted to know so that we didn't schedule our next public event on the same date. So I just asked on Quora, the new Q&A service just launched by Facebook's first CTO, Adam D'Angelo.
Within a few hours I got an answer, from Ashton Kutcher, the most-followed person in the world on Twitter. Ashton says the event is going to happen on April 14th. So our event will not be on April 14th.
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It's possible that the Twitter event is not actually going to be held on April 14th, but I strongly suspect that is in fact the plan. As Twitter's #1 guy, as the founder of a high-profile social media marketing company hanging out on a reputation-based site, as someone whose answer got a thumbs up from Quora engineer Kevin Der (who has a strong interest in the site being filled with accurate info) - it seems highly likely that Kutcher knows and is telling the truth.
Quora is a very compelling site, disproportionately filled with Silicon Valley engineering and investing elites talking comfortably among themselves for now. That's unlikely to last (especially if people start blogging about what gets talked about there!) but the site's user experience and design are more than good enough to hold their own long after the cool kids aren't alone there anymore.
Quora is subject of another article, still forthcoming. (Here's screenshots if you don't have an invite.)
For now, just make a note: Twitter's first public event is probably going to be held on April 14th. That's what Ashton Kutcher says, anyway.
Several days ago we wrote that Twitter's analytics team was about to launch a new project. Twitter VP of Communications Sean Garrett denied there was anything earth-shaking going on. 
The popularity of Twitter has produced a number of clones in China, just as there are 
Weibo is very much like Twitter, in that it allows users to post short messages 140 Chinese characters or less via the Web, SMS or MMS. Although according to Chinese Internet expert and Beijing resident 
There a good handful of companies where a Twitter user can sign up to start advertising to their friends and followers including 
Two months after announcing that the startup managed to 
It's been just about a year now since Twitter 
Every day, hundreds of tweets fly past our eyes with links to important articles, meaningless drivel and the occasional self-promotion. There's little, if any, way to tell what's important and what's not. 
Seemic's 
If you're hoping to go to Twitter's first-ever developers conference, 