OK, I realize that ReadWriteWeb is not your go-to site for SpongeBob SquarePants news. And normally, the notion of SpongeBob - on Twitter or elsewhere - is probably the sort of pitch that most tech bloggers would roll their eyes at and ignore or delete.

But with the flurry of interest over the last week-and-a-half over Google Plus and questions about its potential implications for Twitter and Facebook alike, I've been curious to see how some of the storytelling efforts we've seen on Twitter may or may not transfer to Google's new social network.

What sorts of storytelling forms will we see on Google Plus? Will they build on some of the wonderfully creative endeavors on Twitter? Will authors have a stronger voice on Twitter or on Google Plus? Will they be able to better engage with readers in one network or the other?

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Collaborative Storytelling on Twitter

SpongeBob is quite a latecomer to Twitter in that regard, and an awfully commercial one at that. As more companies and brands start to broadcast their stories on Twitter, it may be that the noise becomes overbearing and the format dull. But in the meantime, we've seen a number of innovative uses of Twitter for storytelling. The works of James Joyce and Shakespeare have been retold in short snippets, for example, and artists like Neil Gaiman and Tim Burton have utilized Twitter for collaborative storytelling projects, engaging other users in helping create new stories, 140 characters at a time.

Twitter is well-suited for that. Thanks to the public nature of the service and of course to the hashtag, anyone can easily add a line to a story - an online version of the Surrealists' exquisite corpse game, where users can contribute one line, without any clear sense of where others plan to take the narrative. Crowdsourcing creativity, if you will.

The Rise of Storytelling on G+

This morning, Louis Gray tagged me in a post on Google Plus for a new tradition in-the-making - a Saturday Story Circle. The idea behind the #StoryCircle (he used the hashtag to mark the post) is to share a short story and then tag other people so they too can post on the topic.

In some ways, this feels rather akin to the memes from the early days of blogging or from Facebook status updates: everybody post on this pre-ordained topic, change your profile picture, and so on. The use of the hashtag to mark the nascent tradition draws from Twitter, true, but the rest seems rather conventional. This raises several questions: how will we track stories and memes on Google Plus - the hashtag? And (how) will we develop new conventions for storytelling on the site?

The notion of storytelling on Plus is intriguing as the new social network has introduced a new form for chronology and for networking. Unlike Twitter, for example, the posts on Plus aren't simply a stream. Comments bump old posts back to the top of your feed. And there are more granular controls with sharing, so the stories we tell needn't be de facto public.

That emphasis on privacy and control is something that Google highlights, and sure, there are definitely stories we'd be better off not sharing with everyone on the Internet. But the open and public nature of Twitter - along with the short, rapid-fire updates, has given rise to some interesting new ways of creating stories.

Something Old, Something New

As it stands, the stories shared on Google Plus feel an awfully lot like blogging. As in, here's my story: feel free to comment. That's not necessarily a bad thing. But it's not really a new thing. I'll include the standard "It's still early" caveat here, of course, because I don't mean to say that after 10 days we've seen the creative culmination of G+. No doubt new forms of collaboration will appear. Humans are clever that way.

But it's too easy (and too elitist) to mark the arrival of SpongeBob to Twitter as "the end days" for creative expression there. Indeed, it's still early with our experimenting with the shorter, collaborative format. Echoing all those who say they're not giving up on Twitter, I'd say that even with my enthusiasm for Google Plus, I'm still keen to see more stories crafted on Twitter - pineapples under the sea notwithstanding.

Reporting from advertising conference Cannes Lions in France, The Financial Times says that Twitter executives have been meeting with ad executives "on the fringes" of the event this week. Other reported options Twitter could use to help monetize the service are Groupon-syle daily deals as well as instituting some type of "QuickBar" on its home page, much like the one that caused an uproar when the company put it in its mobile applications.

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What will tweets within users streams look like? Twitter needs to find a balance between allowing tweets in the main fire hose of user updates and not overwhelming the stream with what basically become officially sanction Twitter spam. A couple possibilities: Twitter could allow one or two companies a day to place ads into users' streams on a scheduled basis. For instance, Twitter could allow two "promoted tweets" into the stream per hour. A company could buy inventory for every hour of a particular day, or every other hour etc. For users that follow a lot of accounts, two tweets advertising related tweets per hour would not be too painful in a river of other updates.

In terms of deals, Twitter has tried that route before and it did not go well. @EarlyBird sputtered out almost as soon as it got off the ground. One of the problems with @EarlyBird is that it was not targeted well enough to users who actually cared about the deals. A similar false start for Twitter was the "QuickBar," better known as the #DickBar. Users found it to be so irritating and obtrusive that it quickly became a Twitter meme and the company was forced to take it out of the companies official mobile applications.

Twitter can take two tracks when it comes to advertising - blunt volume in in all users' streams or targeted or specialized, targeted ads aimed at interested consumers. Promoted tweets placed directly in the timeline would be a volume play, aimed at getting as many "impressions" as possible. Specialized promoted tweets would be harder to pull off and require Twitter to analyze user accounts to determine what kind of accounts they follow. As such, Twitter could create an internal classification of users and sell ads against categories like "book lovers," "tech enthusiasts" or "sports fans."

According to an anonymous advertising executive in the Financial Times report, Twitter is "going to get much more commercial." It looks like the first steps are currently being taken.

Think of StrawberryJ.am as an automated curator of stories in your social stream. Its algorithm finds what the people you are following are tweeting about them presents them to the user in a manner reminiscent of Reddit or Digg, though combined with the social graph, the way XYDO does. You can then load those stories into your Buffer queue and they will be tweeted throughout the day. StrawberryJ.am is offering beta invites to ReadWriteWeb readers. Check after the jump for information.

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Tools For A Curated Web

StrawberryJ.am and Buffer are complimentary pieces in the puzzle of a curated Web. StrawberryJ.am surfaces content using your social stream and Buffer helps you spread tweets linking to it throughout the day. The companies make perfect foils to each other. See the announcement on Buffer's blog for details on how the two will integrate together.

Strength In Numbers Against the Competition

The startups will need to find some strength in each other because the curation and tweet-scheduling landscape is crowded. Outside of normal news readers like Feedly and Google News, StrawberryJ.am must contend with the likes of iPad applications Zite and Flipboard that use semantic social data to uncover content. Then there are Digg (yes, it still exists) and Reddit, Summify and XYDO in the space. Buffer competes against popular platforms like TweetDeck, Seesmic and Hootsuite along with tweet schedulers like Twuffer, Later Bro, Twaitter, Future Tweets and Tweetsqueue.

We wrote about Buffer when it launched a few months ago. Directly after our post went up, Buffer was contacted by Ryan Sarver, the director of platform at Twitter. Sarver said that Buffer was among the apps that third-party developers should be creating, (which was covered by The Next Web). For a startup with two founders under the age of 24, that was good news. Buffer was then contacted by reputation ranker Klout for possible collaboration and now it is partnering with other startups. Things are looking up for founders Joel Gascoigne and Leo Widrich.

As a special offering for ReadWriteWeb, if you sign up for the public beta of StrawberryJ.am on Friday you will be approved on Saturday June 11 with up to 500 invites.

If you wanted to shorten a link within Twitter.com before, you had to use a link shortening service like Bit.ly or TinyURL and paste the link into the "New Tweet" field. Twitter will now truncate URLs that are longer than 13 characters and give them a t.co ID (Twitter's URL shortening handle) while keeping the original URL intact so you know where the link originated.

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Twitter will not provide analytics for its URL shortening service. In a blog post announcing the new service, Twitter said that "you can continue to use your favorite third-party link shortening services" if you want analytics for short URLs.

Security was also on Twitter's mind. All links shortened through Twitter.com will be checked against the company's database of malicious URLS. Twitter will shorten URLs to 19 characters so that they will contain the primary stem of the link that is being shortened. One of the primary problems with short links on Twitter is that third-party links from services like Bit.ly could come from anywhere. Many publishers use custom or vanity URL shorteners to avoid the problem. Google also allows publishers to shorten URLs through Goo.gl.

There are also spammers to worry about. Last week it was reported by security company Symantec that spammers are creating new and sophisticated ways to use public URL shorteners to redirect their phishing targets to malicious websites.

This is another rollout of a core feature by Twitter that was filled primarily by a third-party service. Last week the company launched hosted photo sharing, going after the likes of TwitPic and YFrog along with better search functions. This week it is URL shortening. What core service will Twitter unveil next week?

This may be one of the first features that Twitter is implementing from its acquisition of TweetDeck. The Twitter desktop client has shortened URLs within the "New Tweet" field almost since its inception.

Today's announcement actually has two part: one dealing with search and one dealing with photos. It also involves two new partners for the company: Firefox and Photobucket.

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Twitter says that it's rolling out an updated version of its search today, one that will not just give you "more relevant tweets" and that will show related photos and videos on the results page so you needn't leave the site to view them.

Twitter is partnering with Firefox in these improved search efforts - at least as part of today's announcement. With a new version of the browser, users will be able to type a hashtage or a @username into the Awesome Bar and go directly to the search results page. There's also an add-on that will give this same functionality. This makes Twitter search function much like any other address-bar-based search engine. (Well, except that it bypasses both Google and Chrome, of course.)

Twitter also announced that it has partnered with the photo-sharing and storage company Photobucket, which will be responsible for hosting these tweeted photos. In coming weeks, Twitter says, users will be able to upload a photo and attach it to a Tweet directly from the Twitter.com website. This will also be available via Twitter's mobile apps, and the company is exploring ways to Tweet photos via SMS.

Just as the new photo-sharing service will be unveiled over the coming weeks to users, it appears as though developers will also have to wait for more information about the new "'Tweet-with-photo' API." But as there are a number of companies who've staked their claim on providing just this sort of service - namely Twitpic and YFrog - the future of Twitter photo-sharing still appears cloudy.

A Y Combinator alum, AdGrok offers a platform to help businesses manage their Google Adwords. The company built a number of tools to make the process easier for businesses to be able to gauge the performance of the keywords they're buying, with a breakdown of the impressions, clicks, and conversion rates.

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AdGrok says it will be joining Twitter's "revenue engineering team," and it's pretty apparent that the tools that the startup built could be adapted to help Twitter monetize its Promoted Tweets, as well as other campaigns.

"When Twitter approached us and asked if we'd be interested in working on their monetization platform, we realized that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that we just couldn't pass up," says AdGrok co-founder Matthew McEachen. "The fact that the Twitter team is both smart and user-focused only made our decision easier."

For its part, AdGrok will no longer accept new companies, will stop charging its existing customers and will shut down its services at the end of the month. It also says it will make sure to unlink all customers' accounts from the AdGrok Google account and "securely delete our databases." No data from AdGrok's customers will be shared with Twitter.

According to Techcrunch's Alexis Tsotsis, who broke the news of the impending acquisition over the weekend, the deal was for "less than $10 million." She also noted that it was "complicated," surmising that this was due in part to co-founder Antonio Garcia-Martinez who recently changed his Facebook profile status to reflect that he's a product manager at Facebook.

Indeed, today's blog post by AdGrok is signed by McEachen and his fellow co-founder Argyris Zymnis, with no mention of Garcia-Martinez. We've reached out to the team for comment, but haven't heard back at the time of publishing.

Twitter updated its blog post from Friday that announced the suspensions, saying that "Our initial review indicates that steps have been taken to remedy the violations for these applications." Once the apps are updated, says Twitter, "you'll be able to download their updates to access Tweets again on these applications."

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According to the most recent Tweet from developer Ubermedia, Twidroyd is available to download and the update to UberSocial is on its way.

That's good news for users of these apps, many of whom have been frustrated (if not angered) with what seemed to them as a sudden decision to suspend their preferred Twitter applications. For its part, Twitter insists that the discussions with Ubermedia about these violations have been ongoing and that Friday's decision was a long time coming.

But as GigaOm's Mathew Ingram noted, Twitter's suspension of Ubermedia's apps was a shot "across the bow of every third-party developer whose app competes in some way with the micro-blogging service." And even if Twitter and Ubermedia have declared a ceasefire, the conflict may leave a lasting impact on the developer community.

Local NBC stations in both New York and Washington D.C. have rolled out a new experiment incorporating news, local celebrities and everyone's favorite news add-on, Twitter.

Dubbed "The 20", the experiment attempts to surface to stories that people are talking about "by following 20 individuals who shape the local conversation."

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Twitter has become a favorite for many news outlets. It can be a source for on-the-ground reports when news breaks, a way to easily source "man on the street" type interviews or provide quick samples of general public sentiment. This, however, takes the Twitter integration a level deeper, by defining 20 local influencers and relying on them to provide content for both a Tumblr blog and a Twitter list.

How do the stations pick their local 20?

It's an art and a science. We combine input from social media organizations and factor in the trending local headlines and the topics driving the local conversation.

This will be a home for incisive commentary and coverage of the stories that New Yorkers are talking about. As these stories and ideas change, our list will as well.

According to Lost Remote's Cory Bergman, NBC has said it will roll out 'The 20' to all its markets over the next few months, with each station hiring a "social media point person".

"People increasingly get their news and information from each other," NBC local media platforms president Greg Scholl told Bergman. "I think it's an exciting and innovative idea."

This sort of method, of course, is second nature to us in the tech media industry. Organizing people, Twitter accounts, blogs, news sources, RSS feeds and any other streams into categories, running them through appropriate filters, and then seeing what comes out is the name of the game when it comes to tech blogging. The interesting part here is to see this multi-layer approach (rather than the usual "Joe from Bridgeport Tweeted 'There's 3 inches of snow here!'") hitting local media outlets.

But in what seems to follow on a rather unfortunate series of events for Twitter's developer ecosystem, the announcement may not bode well for startups that have thus far associated themselves - in name and in logo - with Twitter and its Tweets.

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How to Tweet (and Refer to Tweets) without Consulting Your Lawyer

The list of guidelines is designed, according to Twitter, "to help you use our marks without having to worry about negotiating an agreement with us or talking to our lawyers." So here's what you can do, according to Twitter, without having to call in legal counsel. How companies like Twitterific, with its iconic blue bird, will need to respond, remains to be seen.

Apparently we're not supposed to use screenshots of people's Tweets without their permission (but here's a link to my boyfriend's recent Tweet where he totally checked in via Foursquare without my permission. I am definitely going to sue.)

Twitter wants to retain control of its mark on merchandise, which is understandable, as far as the "Twitter" logo goes. But it goes one step father, saying that "if mentioning 'Tweet,' you include a direct reference to Twitter (for instance, 'Tweet with Twitter') or display the Twitter marks with the mention of 'Tweet.'"

Impact on Developers?

The new guidelines also say that using Tweet in the name of an application is only acceptable if the app is designed to be used exclusively with Twitter, something that, as Techcrunch's MG Siegler notes, doesn't bode too well for Tweetdeck. Twitpic, and other services that start with Tw- or Twit- are, however, "generally okay with us."

And the T on "Tweet," just so you know, should always be capitalized - because Tweeting is Important, much like the googling and facebooking we all undertake.

Since it's original posting on Friday afternoon, Siegler's post has been updated multiple times with clarifications from Twitter, suggesting that the initial guidelines may not have been penned with the utmost precision -- small consolation for developers who are working within the Twitter legal and linguistic ecosystem.

Williams, who is now focusing entirely on product strategy, spent an hour answering some burning questions from users. It's definitely nice to see one of the major faces of the company spending some time with us regular folk.

In our continuing effort to curate the hell out of the real-time web, we present today's conversation, powered by Storify.

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