140Char

These are my links for November 28th through November 29th:

• Wikinomics » Blog Archive » Twitter used for machine to machine communication – Another use of Twitter – machine-to-machine communication. It's been bubbling for a while – the interesting thing will be if the facility to do it becomes more popular and mainstream.
• Tweetsgiving: Raising Money out of Thin Air | Pistachio – Nice look at Twitter use for established charities, and the example of Tweetgiving
• /Message: Edmodo: Educational Microstreaming… And More? – Educational tool around microblogging/sharing/streaming, with 'Teachers' able to create Groups and Events, upload files, create alerts etc. Posts all stream in the group, and in personal account of group members.
• With Twitter, a Desperate Need for Context – GigaOM –

A while ago I wanted to test exactly what difference having human interaction makes on Twitter, vs Twitterfeed.

As a result:

If you’d like to see the latest news from Car Magazine: @carmagazinenews

If you’d like to see what Car Magazine’s Associate Editor is tweeting about: @carmagazinetim

Both accounts were set up on the same day, within a few hours of each other. What’s interesting is that @carmagazinetim has 147 followers, to the 130 following the news feed – yet Tim has tweeted 1/3 of the news feed total, skips days, and only follows 32 people. So feel free to message him and encourage him to get more involved!

I should have really put this in my last post, ‘Testing Magpie advertising within Tweets‘. If you want to see if anyone is using the service at the moment, check out a Twitter Search for #magpie.

And I have to feel sorry for the unfortunate Twitter user @magpie, who isn’t anything to do with the service (Their Twitter account is @beamagpie).

Oh, and if you happen to sign up, why not help fund www.140char.com for the futre by using this link? http://be-a-magpie.com/bkq4mw

And here’s a nice graph of what’s happening (should dynamically update from time of posting!)

I’ve seen a bit of feedback about new Twitter advertising service Magpie, which places paid advertising in your messages on a user-defined ratio – e.g. you can choose anywhere between posting one normal message then an add will appear, up to posting 200 messages before the advert posts.

Advertising is flagged by #magpie or a custom message within each advertising tweet. And you can pre-approve adverts, or allow them to autopost.

I’ve currently got the radio set at 10 normal posts before an advert appears, as I’m a fairly frequent poster. I’ve also asked people in advance for their thoughts, and a couple of people have said they’ll unfollow anyone who even starts using Magpie, whereas the majority have either said they don’t really mind, or they’re fine if it’s just a test.

In all honesty, there’s going to be monetisation of Twitter at some point, and the most logical place for any type of advertising-based revenue is around either the content or search functionality, because those are the areas which get attention from users.

For all we know, some of the growing number of services could be approved by the Twitter team behind the scenes as a way to experiment without alienating any users!

There’s a few reasons for testing:

• I hate writing about things I haven’t tried for myself
• My Tweeting and 140char were both started with aims other than making money, but at the same time, I don’t really want to be running a blog that costs me money at the moment.
• Monetisation will happen for Twitter, and this is one viable method in terms of getting attention. So it’s worth investigating now to be able to provide an educated response if it’s adopted as an official monetisation method.

But in the meantime, here’s the figures for my test:

Magpie started: 28/11/2008. Current followers: 1579.

And if you’re going to sign up to test it or use it yourself, why not help out 140char by using our referral link? http://be-a-magpie.com/bkq4mw

Bearing in mind the huge influx of bloggers to the microblogging/microsharing space, and the huge amount of applications being developed, I wanted to focus more on in-depth posts to offer value, and not replicate what other people have already done.

At the same time I want to be providing an overview of what’s happening and what’s available.

So I’m going to trial the Postalicious plug-in for Wordpress to see if it provides some value – if the posts are too frequent/annoying, or aren’t providing value, please let me know!

It seems that Canada has joined the rest of the world in losing the ability to receive Twitter updates via SMS, as revealed on the Twitter Status Blog. As with the rest of the world, the blame is placed squarely at Mobile carriers:

‘We can’t afford to support this service given our current arrangement with our providers (where costs have been doubling for the past several months.)’

The post continues:

‘The ability to update Twitter over SMS will still be supported over 21212. But we know that this is only part of the experience and we want to make Twitter work in the way folks want … regardless of where they live.

There is a realistic, scalable SMS solution for Canada (and the rest of the world.) We’re working on that and will post more details on the Twitter blog as we make progress.’

It seems a little strange this appeared on the Status Blog, and not the Official Company Blog, which is what happened when we lost Twitter updates via SMS in the UK. And at the time, there was the promise of several new local SMS services across Europe – but I don’t think anything has been arranged yet, and to be fair, if you’re not being monetised or bought by Facebook, then the costs do start to add up:

‘Even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per user, per year to send SMS outside of Canada, India, or the US.’

SMS is obviously a hugely profitable enterprise for mobile providers currently. And I doubt much will change on that front for some time – but hypothetically, with the rise of smart phones and access to social networks (and fortunately, Twitter and clients), could this a cause for even the start of a decline in SMS usage? Any mobile phone experts got any idea of the figures, and whether smart phone usage means less SMS?

Due to the complications of time differences and my dodgy maths, there should still be time to check out and contribute to Tweetgiving, which is aiming to raise $10,000 for a new classroom in Tanzania, and is almost there – but the project only runs until 12pm (EST) on Thursday, November 27, 2008 so get in quick.

If you want to read a great post about the idea – and also what makes it such a great campaign, take a look at the always interesting and readable David Armano – What Brands Can Learn From A Turkey.

And if you want to donate without visiting the Tweetgiving site, then you’ve still got an option:

As the full horror of the ongoing terrorist attacks in Mumbai (Bombay) unfolds, Twitter has once again become the place to find first hand accounts and updates. So much so, that CNN is citing both Twitter and Flickr as the places to keep up with the latest updates, as updated by @Moto62 and many others.

Meanwhile @BreakingNewz is trying to raise awareness of a blood shortage at JJ Hospital due to the attacks. And @hemanshukumar provides a phone number to donate at St George’s hospital. And @Netra provided a direct contact for the blood bank at JJ Hospital.

Other reports on the role Twitter is playing in relaying first hand reports and reactions to the news include Techcrunch, and GigaOm.

Responses and reactions are flowing incredibly fast on Twitter, and you can follow the stream here. (Flickr results are here). Or you can follow a localised Twitter search updates.

It’s hard to find the right words to express the sympathy I have for everyone there right now, but seeing individuals sharing important information to help each other is a reminder of the good in the world. And also that in the debates about monetising microblogging, perhaps we’ve missed a far more important role and legacy we could be helping to develop further as a response tool to tragic situations.

I’m not a regular Telegraph reader, so I may have missed something, but the website has an article today with a short bio of the Twitter trio of Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone.

But nothing else. No story about Twitter, no story about online business, microblogging, or even bios that you couldn’t find on Wikipedia or elsewhere. Just links to their Twitter accounts and 3-4 paragraphs on each.

How odd, and rather pointless. Feel free to witness it for yourself.

There’s been quite a lot of discussion around the Magpie Network advertising service for Twitter, and whether it’s a good or bad thing. Such as ReadWriteWeb, Jeremiah Owyang, and Techcrunch.

I bet the Twitter team are looking at the responses with interest!

But James Cridland picked up on an incredibly effective and authentic Word of Mouth event on Twitter. I’ll summarise, so you can go and read the full article, ‘Word of Mouse – @stephenfry sells bucketloads of Tweetie‘. Hugely popular celebrity and ‘proper’ Tweeter Stephen Fry mentioned some Twitter clients, received a recommendation for a paid client for the iPhone, posted a positive review of it, and gained a huge number of responses from people who appear to have paid for the client on his recommendation.

Who would have though that an influential celebrity who is authentically using a service could have a direct effect on a product? I’m off to persuade U.S. basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal he should be promoting 140char!

I’ve mentioned Pistachio Consulting and Laura Fitton (@pistachio) in previous posts. Laura and Pistachio focus on microblogging, or as they term it, microsharing.

So who better to write the first Twitter for Dummies guide?

Twitter for Dummies

Well, us it turns out! Laura has taken the wise and cool decision to crowdsource ideas and topics from the mass of Tweeple. You can (and should) contribute you ideas, and vote/comment on others at the Twitter for Dummies site.

And it turns out she’s not the only Twitter-inspired author. Shel Holtz has announced his next book, Twitterville – How Business can Thrive in Global Neighbourhoods. Meanwhile, German speakers could check out Nicole Simon’s ‘Twitter Mit 140 Zeichen zum Web 2.0‘ which is out mid December.

At some point recently, I appeared to have achieved critical mass on Twitter – that is, I get a trickle of people requesting to follow me, even when it isn’t reciprocal, or when I haven’t been particularly active. Sometimes the trickle turns into a miniflood, but I always check out every single follower to decide whether to return the favour – and my ratio of Following to Followers is pretty close to 1:1 (Here’s the proof).

But the decision is getting much harder, because a seemingly increasing number of people are following without giving me a clue of who they are, or why I should return the favour. And following almost 1500 people means I’m becoming more careful about the signal to noise ratio of people I’m following.

• Following me, but having updates protected: Unless I know who you are, or you’ve sent me a message, and your updates are protected, how can I guess whether to guess to request to return the favour?
• No weblink or informative Bio: A lot of people, myself included, have bio information which doesn’t outline exactly what we do for a job, or where our exact interests lay. For instance, mine is: ‘Social Media, Community Marketing,Blogger,Dad,Writer’, but I’ve seen a lot more vague descriptions. If that’s combined with an absence of a link to a blog, linkedin profile or some clue about who you are, I’m scratching my head again.
• Weblink doesn’t give me a clue: This seems to happen with certain content platforms – particularly options like Tumblr, where it’s easy to set up a default Tumblelog without leaving any information. That means I need to spend time going through every post for the last few days to find out more, and makes it tempting to move onto someone/something else in this time-starved world.

This doesn’t mean I only follow people with exactly the same jobs and interests – far from it. But I do only follow people who I think will bring something interesting, entertaining or valuable to the party.

And it’s not just me: Even as I started to write this, I noticed Darren Rowse is running a poll on Twitip, asking ‘Do you automatically follow everyone that follows you?’ Currently 89% of those taking the poll have said they don’t, for similar reasons to myself.

Top tips:

So what’s the best way to let people know who you are?

• Insert a relevant personal/company weblink. It can be your blog, your Linkedin profile, your bio on the corporate website etc – just anything that can give some clue about what you do.
• If you have a personal/lifestyle type blog you want to link to, then consider either linking to the About page, or to a special landing page or post created to people arriving from Twitter.
• Consider using your Twitter background to serve up some information. You can pay professionals, or just experiment with your own image, containing some info on yourself.
• And if you’re using Protected Updates, and you want to converse, interact and have a follow reciprocated, then why not contact them via an alternative channel, e.g. an email address on their blog, to let them know who you are and why you’re following them.

It’s an example of what you put into something have a direct relationship with what you get out of it. If you’re informative about who you are, you’re much more likely to get more people finding you, interacting with you, and for those interactions to be far more relevant.