140Char

If you’ve built a third-party application for Twitter, you’ll want to think carefully about what you call it, following the company trademarking the term ‘Tweet’.

The official response has been posted on the Twitter blog by Biz Stone, after Robin Wauters highlighted the issue over at Techcrunch. The official announcement is:

‘We have applied to trademark Tweet because it is clearly attached to Twitter from a brand perspective but we have no intention of “going after” the wonderful applications and services that use the word in their name when associated with Twitter. In fact, we encourage the use of the word Tweet. However, if we come across a confusing or damaging project, the recourse to act responsibly to protect both users and our brand is important.

Regarding the use of the word Twitter in projects, we are a bit more wary although there are some exceptions here as well. After all, Twitter is the name of our service and our company so the potential for confusion is much higher. When folks ask us about naming their application with “Twitter” we generally respond by suggesting more original branding for their project. This avoids potential confusion down the line.’

Which is interesting from a marketing point of view – Twitter has namechecked and praised some of the great apps currently using the word ‘Tweet’, including Tweetdeck for example, and suggests it may only use the trademark to go other apps which try to pass themselves of as official, for example.

Then again, ‘to tweet’ or ‘I’ve just tweeted’ suggests common usage of the word as a verb anyway. I’d be interested in hearing from any legal experts about what that would mean for any trademark cases.

And Mark Evans points out that Tweet.com is currently a site claiming to be about birds.

So if you can’t use ‘Twitter’, and might want to stay away from ‘Tweet’, what about Twit?

Well, that could cause problems as well – Robert Scoble reports that Leo LaPorte has trademarked ‘Twit’ for his longrunning TWiT TV netcast network (It stands for This Week in Tech if you didn’t know, rather than being Twitter related, and is something I recommend having a listen to…). There’s a related Friendfeed discussion going on…

So you might want to steer clear of Twitter, Tweet and Twit.

There are obviously reasons why Twitter wants to maintain some clarity between company products and 3rd party applications – particularly when they might be launching more of their own for premium users. At the same time, the constant referrals to ‘Tweet’ and ‘Twit’ have definitely helped publicity and common usage of the parent service, as has the availability of such services.

At the same time, the generic terms aren’t as well used – for instance, microblogging. Which is a bit of a shame, given 140char’s ranking for the term ‘microblogging blog‘!

Personally, I’d recommend building your own brand name – it’s a long term win but means you aren’t tied to one service or risking trademark problems. The short term benefit of going for the most common Twitter terms is likely to be waning as so many exist, and you’ll be able to carve out your own niche.

There are a number of people using Twitter to promote special offers and competitions, so it seemed a bit silly not to mention that Absolute Radio is currently offering a range of tickets throughout the summer via Twitter.

(I’m Digital Marketing Manager at Absolute Radio – which includes managing the Twitter account!)

At the moment, tickets are up for grabs for the Blur re-union gigs in Hyde Park in London on Thursday, July 2nd, so check out @absoluteradio if you fancy entering by Retweeting the specified message.

I’ve long been a fan of Mashable amongst the top tech blogs, and this comparison of the Tumblr and Posterous services goes some way to explaining why.

They combine news with good in-depth analysis of services to show what exactly you might want to use them for – and in general this article is pretty good.

It does have one major, major, major omission, though, which is so obvious as to appear almost intentional.

When Jennifer Van Grive details the autoposting options Posterous offers, she writers:

‘a single Posterous video post could auto-post to Twitter, Facebook , YouTube and Vimeo and blog sites, while photo posts could automatically add images to your Flickr, Facebook, and Picasa accounts.’

What she doesn’t make clear is that Posterous will actually autopost to Tumblr.

That’s a major advantage to Posterous, and certainly a major element for discussion in a ‘head-to-head’ comparison.

And as you can see, it’s something I’m playing around with at the moment, with my Posterous blog, and my Tumblr blog linked.

If you want to combine Twitter with a tribute to Michael Jackson, how would you do it?

In the case of the awesome Billie Tweets, you sync a video of the Jackson classic ‘Billie Jean’ with tweets that contain the individual words in the lyrics, as they play together.

BillieTweets syncs Michael Jackson's Bille Jean with individual tweets

It’s the work of coders 9Astronauts, who have also created other notable Twitter-based sites and applications, including  Blame Drew’s Cancer, lyric-identifier Lyricrat, Youtube videos mentioned on Twitter aggregator Veetweet,  and Tetris-inspired Tweetbricks.

And Billie Tweets probably sums up why Jackon’s death affected so many people. It’s not about being a huge fan – it’s about the fact that even if you liked entirely different music, the odds were that at some point you’d have heard, danced, kissed or more to one of his songs. It’s not about the songs themselves, but the fact that provided a soundtrack to the lives of so many individuals, just as Billie Tweets is providing a sountrack to so many individual Tweets. Even if I suspect it was built more because it was cool than as a statement about Jackson’s celebrity status…

It’s not just Twitter that is spawning television shows in the microblogging world, with the launch of Horsetweet, a microblogging platform for horse lovers, which accompanies U.S. reality TV show ‘Hard Reins to Hold’.

Both the site and the TV show are the work of father and daughter Matt and Loagan Fury, who run Loagan ranches, around which the TV show is based.

Horsetweet itself is on the Shout’Em platform, which allows you to ‘roll your own microblogging community’. Which means you can sign up for the site, or login with your existing Twitter or Windows Live details.

The aim is to accumulate 10,000 members on Horsetweet by the end of 2009 – could this be the start of more disaggregated microblogging for specialist areas of interest?

One of the strengths of Twitter is the ability to get quick feedback, but Microsoft might not be seeing it as a positive right now.

I first picked up on the complaints about Outlook 2010 and the resulting FixOutlook site via Hacker News on Wednesday morning.

The reason the movement have started is that Microsoft intend to use the Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010, and this means:

for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position, no background images and lots more. Want proof? Here’s the same email in Outlook 2000 & 2010.

That means angry developers, which is never good on the internet. The use of Fix Outlook, which is a nicely presented stream of people ReTweeting the message (HT to Neville Hobson for a nice summary and digging a little into who is behind the site), and the move from core users to mainstream means the site went from 7,500 tweeters at around 1pm UK time on Wednesday to 16,676 just five hours later. And it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down yet!

Especially as it’s now being picked up by the likes of Mashable.

The main questions are how significant Microsoft will see this protest, in comparison to the likely number of potential Office customers who don’t use Twitter and won’t understand or care about tables or CSS – and whether that significance will result in any action on their part.

But even if it’s a small group numerically, considering the relatively high proportion of digital workers and developers using Twitter, it’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next few days.

There’s a reason i don’t blog about quantum physics or existentialism. It’s because I don’t know enough about them to offer anything worthwhile, and I’d probably end up looking stupid.

Somehow that doesn’t seem to apply to The Daily Mail when they decide to write an inane piece about Phillip Schofield’s tweets from the Fat Duck.

Apparently the ‘journalist’ in question found it tiresome to listen to the details and see the pictures of Schofield, a British TV presenter, enjoying a £130 meal at the restaurant run by highly experimental TV chef Heston Blummenthal.

Obviously, as pointed out pretty quickly in the comments, they could have unfollowed him, rather than deciding to repeat everything in great detail, and use all of the photos he’d taken without credit or attribution – as Martin Belam pointed out.

There’s no shortage of interesting topics they could have covered instead, and no shortage of digitally-aware people who can also write a decent article. So why waste time and effort doing something so badly when the online newspapers desperately need to find ways to ensure their survival?

When it comes to 140 character microblogging, Twitter has established itself as the leader. In hosted blogging, Blogger leads the way. And if you’re hosting your own blog, then Wordpress is the most common choice (as used for this blog!)

And until recently, the clear choice for someone who wanted more space and multimedia than 140 characters, but didn’t want a ‘full-on’ blog was Tumblr. I set up my own Tumblr blog fairly quickly and didn’t really develop it much, but good friend Angus has taken it a bit fair bit further.

But all that seems to have changed recently, as Posterous has launched a full scale attack of features, and has already inspired Steve Rubel to write about how the microblogging/lifestreaming approach has changed the way he blogs.

While Tumblr has introduced a popularity ranking system, Posterous appears to be everywhere. Recent updated include becoming an alternative to posting images on Twitpic and a way to turn email lists into group blogs.

Now you can import your blog to Posterous from any of the major publishing platforms – including Tumblr.

And upload video from the Apple iPhone 3G S to multiple social sites, including Twitter and Facebook.

Posterous seems to be benefitting from the ‘posting by email’ side of the site, which makes it an easy and effective way to get content online. Although Tumblr has a similar feature, it’s far less prominent when you’re comparing the services at face value. And Posterous is also targetting the distribution of that content, which is something Tumblr doesn’t seem to be doing as much. It’s very much in the vein of Twitter and Friendfeed in making it quick and easy to create, aggregate, and share.

(I’m also available on Posterous, but I’m only just starting to use it).

In fact, the only killer feature that both sites are missing is the one that I firmly believe has kept Blogger popular in the face of Wordpress.com, and also Tumblr/Posterous – the ability to quickly and easily install Google Adsense adverts on a hosted platform. It’s not the sole reason for someone choosing to blog, as we always like to focus on the desire for self-expression, but it’s an important issue for a lot of people. Even if common sense suggests hardly anyone will make any significant revenue, the hope factor is as important as in buying a lottery ticket!

If I ran Tumblr right now, I’d be introducing a similarly quick and simple Adsense system to Bloggers as quickly as I could!

Sadly it’s no surprise that the ‘Trending Topics’ ranking on Twitter is being used by both spammers and distributors of Malware. Or for instigating DoS attacks:

Malware:

Malware is the catch-all term for software referred to in the mainstream press as ‘virusus’ – technically a virus is a type of Malware.

Luckily the methods being used aren’t particularly sophisticated yet – the scammers are creating fake Twitter accounts to post with #hashtags for trending topics and links to sites which contain the malicious software or scams.

Mashable reports that the most common links at the moment are “Twitterbest (dot) mp” and “Zasaden (dot) mp”. An added sign is that in this case, the url also tends to contain a pornographic term.

The alert from Mashable came via Panda Security who explain that the fake accounts link to a page that prompts you to ‘upgrade your Flash player’ or similar. If you agree to download software, it installs itself, and you’ll get error messages warning you of a virus and that you need to pay $89 for fake software called “Fast Anti-Virus 2009”.

The best tip is to avoid links that look suspicious, or are posted by people you don’t know. And if you do think you need to download a software update, go to the site of the company concerned, rather than installing via a random 3rd party site.

DoS:

The New York Times is reporting that Twitter is being used to instigate Denial of Service attacks against key government officials in Iran;

‘But a still developing and less benign use of Twitter in Iran has been its application in denial-of-service attacks against key government officials, including those affiliated with President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

… Tweets have begun circulating that allow users to target a Web site that will eventually be overcome by simply clicking on the embedded URL in the message. As soon as a user hits the page, as many as 24 frames open up simultaneously and refresh continuously, causing a DoS attack against the 24 separate Web sites.’

In amongst the turmoil of #iranelection, and the news that Twitter is starting to moderate trending topics, it’s nice to finish the week on a more humourous note.

Which is why I’m chuckling to myself about the huge number of current ReTweets:

‘Worst Daily Mail poll ever. VOTE YES to skew the results and pass it on! http://bit.ly/w4b6Q’

As of 2pm on Friday, it’s flooding the place.

And the reason for all this is the conservative right UK newspaper, The Daily Mail, whose poll of the day really does defy belief:  ‘Should the NHS allow gipsies to jump the queue?’

And the effect of Twitter probably explains why the poll is currently skewed to 85% Yes, and 15% No.

I’ve played around with numerous Twitter analytics and statistic applications, and I have to say that Twitter Analyzer seems to be about the most comprehensive in terms of available information.

It features:-

User stats:- including number of tweets, reach, hashtags, popularity,etc etc.

Friends stats:- including f0llowers growth rate, location, activity and re-tweeting, etc.

Mentions:- including all, social, updates, etc.

Groups:- including by occupation, join date, gender, etc.

And Trends and Fun tabs are apparently ‘coming soon’.

It’s fast after the initial username analysis, and nicely presented, with handy graphs and charts. The biggest flaws currently are that you don’t seem to be able to export the charts and graphs to anywhere else (although there’s a handy ‘Tweet’ option for some of the interesting information you might want to share via Twitter.

It also seems to be limited to the 30 days for a lot of the information, in line with the data and limits that Twitter has. Which is understandable, but also frustrating. If they were able to pull data in on a regular schedule to provide longer timeframes once a username has first been indexed, and enable the ability to export the information for presentations and spreadsheets, it would be a clear leader in Twitter stats and analysis.

Social scientist (or possibly mad professor) Dan Zarella has now invented what could be a particularly contreversial Twitter application: TweetPsych.

Taken from the main site:

TweetPsych uses two linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC) to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets. The service analyzes your last 1000 tweets and works best on users who have posted more than 1000 updates. It also works best on accounts that are operated by a single user and use Twitter in a conversational manner, rather than simply a content distribution platform.

There’s a bit more detail on his blog, going into what RID and LIWC actually are.

The interesting bit is that compared to most other forms of writing and communication, Twitter is probably the closest to being able to express yourself with little or no thought – it’s simple, quick, and you can hide yourself behind a fake persona or a protected account.

The worrying thing is that it opens up your Twitter account to analysis by  friends, families and employees with little or no knowledge of linguistics and profiling.

In fact, the first comments on Dan’s post are discussing using NLP to influence people to puchase via advertising, the difficulty of interpreting the results, and the fact that it could easily be misused.

And without casting any aspersions on Dan’s skills, the possibility of an error appearing in an automated system isn’t unheard of…

Without being able to intepret my results effectively, feel free to explain them to me! Is it good that ‘Positive Emotions’ comes in at No.5, or bad that No.14 appears to be ‘Sad’.