140Char

As microblogging evolves, I think there are going to be a lot of attempts to define what it is, and what sites qualify. And my own definition is somewhat unevolved at the moment, so I’m opening this one to you.

Do you think Tumblr counts as microblogging, and should be included in the site?

A lot of Tumblelogs tend to be short, sharp updates via the bookmarklet to quickly share a link, image, or video. At first I struggled with the idea of yet another site to sit between my main blog at TheWayoftheWeb, and my Twitter account. But I’ll admit that I didn’t think it through, despite playing around with an account.

I’ve got two blogs including this one, and my first, TheWayoftheWeb is fairly well established (Despite recently moving to Wordpress and self-hosting!). They give me the chance to post long form ideas, and develop theories, whilst also getting some interaction through the comments I’m fortunate to receive.

Meanwhile Twitter and Plurk give me as much conversation as I can cope with, within the confines of 140 characters (See, the blog name does make sense!).

But having chatted to two of my colleagues about blogging, Tumblr makes a lot of sense for them. They don’t have the time to commit to a full blog, or the conversation required to get the full value out of Twitter - and yet they both want to have an online presence and a place to share the things they value. And it seems to offer a way to display their personality in a slightly more obvious way than using Del.icio.us.

So that’s my case for why it’s useful, and picking some Tumblelogs at random, they show the short form, frequent updates we’d associate with microblogging. Here’s 3 examples picked totally at random from those listed on the front page of the site:

Example 1.

Example 2.

Example 3.

So what say you? Personally I’m leaning towards inclusion…

Every popular social network contains people and accounts which, for one reason or another, are undesirable. Spammers, con artists, egomaniacs (Isn’t that all of us?), the plain offensive etc all inhabit the social world - as they do in the real world.

Recently I unfollowed 3 such accounts on Twitter. None were malicious in the same vein as people setting up phishing scams. But two constantly used it as a platform for personal attacks - either against one individual, or against a group of individuals, without providing anything of value.

A third autofed his latest blog entries but refused to engage in conversation, or even reply to direct messages. That’s just about excusable if you’re constantly breaking lots of news e.g. @BBC for BBC News, or you’ve reached the scale of someone like Robert Scoble, who follows and is followed by over 20,000 people. It’s not ideal, but excusable…but if you’re batting at under 100 for example, then there really is no reason for ignoring anyone who wants to interact with you.

That all might seem a bit negative - but then I flipped it around in my head. I’ve unfollowed 3 people - not had to block them, or complain about them, but just unfollowed them with a simple click of a button. But due to a policy of reading through a few details before adding people, those are 3 of 714 I’m following. So that’s 0.42% of all the people I have chosen to follow, and an even smaller percentage of people that I’ve had any contact with.

It’d be interesting to find out how this compared with other networks, but from a subjective viewpoint, it’s a lot less. And the number one connection tool for irritation still seems to be Myspace.… The perentage on there is probably closer to 20%!

It’s why we persevere with Twitter despite the downtime, and it’s why Plurk is gaining traction. The days of average users amassing 1000s of random contacts for the sake of it is waning by people who actually want to use these tools for a tangible benefit. The days of using them for what my colleague, David Cushman describes as ‘self-forming communities of (global) niche shared interest’ is here for more and more people. And Twitter is all the better for it…

It seems as if there are a million Twitter applications, widgets, and ways to publicise your membership and latest Tweets, but things are a bit twickier when it comes to Plurk.

So far, there has been an unofficial API, and third party Plurk tools are thin on the ground. But even more annoyingly, I can’t use the official Plurk widget.

There’s a simple reason. They offer it for users to embed into a Facebook, Myspace, or blog page. But they’ve fixed the width, so trying to display it on this blog, for instance, means the sidebar will be blown apart. And the width is set at 300 pixels wide - way too much for most pages on Facebook or Myspace.

So for the moment, I’ll not be sharing my Plurking as much as my Tweeting.

You can still find me on Twitter. And on Plurk.

I’ve just spotted a great new Twitter search tool to find Twitter people by categories (Found via Mashable).

Twellow has already indexed 300,000 Twitter users into various categories (Including me!), with users replicated across all appropriate categories. For example, I’m the 96th most followed person in Marketing, but I also appear in Management, Advertising (hmmmmm?), News, Geeks and Blogging. All the main categories have appropriate sub-categories to find people more easily (Although there does seem to be Marketing as a category, and also a sub-category of Advertising).

And beyond browsing, you can also use specific search terms, including within specified categories.

Until now, your options were to find people within Twitter, hope to find people via keywords, or use Twitterpacks to find anyone that had manually listed themselves. Suddenly finding other people got a whole lot simpler.

Find other useful tools for microblogging in our list. And subscribe by RSS to never miss a post.

Just read an interesting post by a colleague of mine about Twitter, and his belief that it really isn’t a service for conversation. It’s an opinion aired by Robert Scoble, who sees it as a broadcast mechanism for his 20,000 followers.

But David thinks differently, and explains why he believes it’s around communities of purpose in a guest post on the /Message blog.

Now this is interesting, as I’m a firm believer that much of the power of Twitter comes from external applications - and that even monetising Twitter could be unlocked by the ways it can be used outside of the current website.

Chirrup is an application which allows you to utilise Twitter for your comments. Simply put, everyone can message you via Twitter, Chirrup fetches all the replies and sorts them by url (So you can have a different feed for each page), and you can then display it however you desire.

It’s slightly more complicated than just copying a widget - but no more than installing a Wordpress plugin. It also caches message locally, and goes through your personal replies rather than the public feed - helping speed. And funnily enough, it’s also available as a Chirrup Wordpress plugin. There’s a developer blog, here, for more.

Blimey, things are definitely starting to happen outside of Plurk. First came the first Plurk Facebook app, Plurksync, which updates your status with your most recent Plurk. Unfortunately it’s likely to suffer the same problem as status updates via Twitter, when you end up seeing the same message across every service an individual uses.

Although my favourite incident with linking microblogging and Facebook saw friend and colleague David Cushman in a surreal, endless loop of updates between Twitter and Facebook.

And now comes the unofficial, reverse-engineered, not supported by the Plurk team API, RLPLurkAPI provided by Ryan Lim.

Oh, and from the official Plurk blog comes the news that they’ve tweaked the Karma points.

You know you’re successful when, despite your much-documented problems, and around $20million in VC funding, your fans try to raise money.

Which is exactly what @ChrisReed is trying to do with Twitterfund.

OK, so at the time of writing, it’s raised a total of £30 since it launched around the end of May - but it’s the fact it even exists which shows the level of involvement and commitment that Twitter, and other microblogging platforms, can generate.

(Incidentally, you can find me @badgergravling.)

The other reason Twitter is so inspirational is in the sheer number of applications being developed. Twemes, Twitpic and Quotably are now part of the Microblogging Tools list. Oh, and Tweetscan. And Yoono. I think that’s the lot!

I suspect many people will be silently thanking Andrew Parker for Twittersnooze.

It’s a simple way to unfollow someone for a defined temporary period between 1 and 30 days. Perfect, for example, if a colleague is off to a swanky foreign conference, and you’re stuck back in the office. Or if you just need a break.

There’s only one flaw, which is due to the Twitter API - you’re effectively automatically unfollowing, and refollowing again, which means the target of your snoozing will get an email when you resume following them. But aside from the potential issues around explaining why you’ve snoozed the same person three times in one week, it’s a really simple and effective solution to friend fatigue…

Aside from being a tongue twister, tracking Twitter trends is increasingly useful in spotting where conversations are happening around a given subject.

Twist does a nice job of graphing trends by ‘last week, ‘last month’ or ‘all time’, and let’s you view multiple trends separated by commas in the search box.

It’s free to use, and comes from Flaptorplurk, a search and consultancy firm headed by Diego Basch, a former senior engineer at Inktomi Search, which is now part of Yahoo!

And most importantly, Twist is now included in our great, and ever growing list of Microblogging tools for Twitter, Plurk, Pownce, Seesmic etc. So you can find the right tool for the job, here.

It’s the weekend, so I’ve taken a bit of a break from the latest news - yes Twitter is still up and down like the Assyrian Empire, and Plurk is still getting a lot of buzz. See the graph below for blogs mentioning Plurk over the last 30 days:

But in the meantime, I’m adding to the blogroll (See right). We’ve also kicked off the first Plurk pack list we’re aware of, to compile a list of notable Plurkers by discipline, and we’ve started experimenting with listing any microbloggers looking for advertising/sponsorship, and companies looking for microbloggers to fund. So if you’re looking to get paid or sponsored for Twitter, Plurk, Seesmic, Pownce work, then why not list yourself…

Any other suggestions for items to add, or any offers from possible contributors, are always welcome. After all 140 char isn’t just a character limit - 140 contributors (characters!) could be one hell of a resource.

Well, a twitter account is worth $1002.01 if you’re Ian Schaefer, the CEO of Interactive Marketing agency Deep Focus, and the person currently auctioning a one-month sponsorship of his Twitter page and profile.

What you get for your cash is:

• Background image of your choice on Ian’s profile page, and the replacement of his profile photo with your image.
• Brand representation in 8-10 outbound ‘tweets’ per day.
• Coverage of the experience on his blog.

The money raised is going to charity, but possibly the most interesting part of the experiment is Ian’s motivation: “Someone’s got to figure out some kind of business model with Twitter. And I’d rather be part of the solution.”

It’s the same thinking which has seen Tweeple start selling individual posts, and hypothesizing about how Twitter can use the extra 20 characters for mobile (160 characters is the limit).

There’s still 18 hours left on the auction at the time of writing, so by tomorrow night we’ll see how much a Twitter account is worth. You can watch the ebay auction, here.

And, for the record, Ian’s got 495 followers, which leaves me wondering how much cash I could raise with my 600?