140Char

Are you a fan of the same people? (Pic: wvs on flickr)

Unlike the people who apparently follow thousands publicly on Twitter, and then have a second account to follow the people they actually listen to, I only have the one main Twitter account.

And until today, I proudly stated that I’d only ever unfollowed two people – but following 1970+ was beginning to stretch even my Twitter Addiction Disorder.

So I thought I’d do a quick check, via Twitter Karma.

In the end, I reduced my Following figure by about 30 or so. Not major, but I don’t think I can realistically go over 2000 for the time being and still interact with a reasonable percentage of people – so it frees up 30 more follows for people.

The criteria for unfollowing was a combination of:

• If the account hadn’t been updated in over 100 days.
• If it was someone spammy I’d mistakenly let through.
• If it was someone whose interests etc were completely unrelated to mine, their blog didn’t help, and I’d never interacted with them in any way.
• Or if it was a fake account or a discontinued service.

What surprised me was the amount of followers for accounts that hadn’t been updated in a year, or for discontinued services.

I wonder how many people are following dead accounts, or those that have since been revealed to be fake, or changed purpose.

So do you ever review who you’re following?

Just spotted that the Israeli Consulate is using Twitter for a press conference on Gaza attacks.

Spotted via Doc Searls.

More information, here.

Really interesting example of how politics and world events are intertwining with what some people still see as a niche networking platform – but one which in my opinion radically changes the dissemination and interaction with information.

I wonder how international diplomacy may change with UK, U.S and Canadian politicians already in evidence. For instance, UK ministers on Tweetminister, US Congresspeople on TweetCongress, and the same opportunities and tools for collaboration and interaction which individuals and businesses are already able to benefit from?

Update: @rafaelprince has a log of the conference here.

Update 2: It’s also inspired a great post by Laura Fitton on ‘Microsharing as Humanitarian Act‘ – well worth reading.

The ability to instantly update was highlighted at the weekend, when Mike Wilson (@2drinksbehind) tweeted ‘Holy fucking shit I wasbjust in a plane crash!’

As he continued to post updates it emerged that it was the second crash he’s experienced, some of his experiences and possible causes (flagged up as such), and the fact that Continental Airlines wouldn’t serve drinks to the passengers once they were all safely away from the plane.

Silicon Valley Insider has screenshots of the whole thing, and there’s interesting commentary from Loic Le Meur, Jeff Jarvis, Mashable, Laurel Papworth, and The Blog Herald -  and that’s just sources from my RSS feeds!

What’s interesting is how Loic, for example, points out spokespeople weren’t able to give out any details on live TV news, despite the fact we could all follow Tweets from somewhere going through the experience – and Pete Cashmore at Mashable points to the changing roles of news and newsrooms.

Apparently Mike has now been interviewed by Fox News. And apparently the chairman of Continental Airlines was on the replacement flight!

He’s also gained a lot of new followers as a result of the experience.
The implications for news reporters and news sources are becoming more and more important with every piece of breaking news on Twitter. Mike was able to send messages and images from the crash site – and could have also shot live video, all from his mobile, and all distributed instantly online.

For the visceral experience of an event, nothing can compete with that.

Where news sources still provide value is in finding the context of those individual experiences – for instance, when a spokesperson appeared to say they couldn’t say anything, where was a reporter asking about Mike’s messages?

We’ve already had

• Mumbai
• The U.S Election
• Earthquakes

I wrote about how news sites have to change back in July. At that time, the LA Times was the first new source I’d seen to reference Twitter. The fact it’s got a Twitter account probably helps. During Mumbai, both the BBC and CNN were referencing it alongside Flickr.

And there has been plenty of reaction by readers of traditional news sources, as well as from the blogosphere. Many have questioned whether instant updates can be trusted, and whether they’re the sort of thing we expect from traditional news sources.

Part of this, I suspect, is from people who don’t use Twitter and therefore don’t have the human filter as a way of referencing trust. (Incidentally, David Armano’s diagram is one of the most succinct and effective ways of explaining Twitter I’ve seen!).

The Human Filter by David Armano (Logic+Emotion)

And the other part is that news sources are still slowly developing from their coccoon and haven’t fully worked out how to implement Twitter and the meaningful context and analysis on top of it in a readily apparent way.

The sooner websites integrate Twitter, Flickr, Qik, etc, the sooner we can see the value they layer on top.

Twitter marketer and celebrity Laura Fitton (@Pistachio) has come up with a great charity campaign over Christmas, having realised that just $2 from each of her followers would mean $25,000 – enough for a water project for a school or hospital by Charity Water.

The impetus for this is the fact that 5,000 children die every day from the lack of clean drinking water.

And as a bonus, if $10,000 plus gets raised, it’ll be matched by Tipjoy and Betaworks. Plus all fees are being waived for micropayments via Twitter for this case by Tipjoy.

But Laura puts it far more passionately and eloquently than I can (plus there are more details on the charity, payments, and even an easy form to use), so

• Go and visit the Well Wishes post on the Touchbase blog right now.

If that isn’t enough, Squidoo is also giving money to charity – Every time you tweet a message from the list of 21 charities, it’s a vote which means $1 is donated to that charity (one per person, per day), up to a maximum of $30,000.

Both might be slightly overshadowing my own Twitter charity pledge – @digitalmaverick and myself are racing to 2000 followers, with the loser doing a charity forfeit. Plus I’m giving £20 to a charity chosen by my 2000th follower!

Rather than making money from Twitter advertising, Twitpay allows you to transfer money to any other Twitter user with a simple Tweet.

'Money' by jenn_jenn on Flickr (CC Licence)

Send an @ message, for example ‘@badgergravling twitpay $5 for running 140char.com’ or via the twitpay site.

Adding funds to Twitpay can be done via Paypal, and if you’ve got over $10 in your account, you can spend it as an Amazon gift card, a donation to a Twitpay charity, or to Twitpay itself – meanwhile the service takes a flat rate of $0.01 for every $1

It’s a stunningly simple idea to have a ‘Paypal for Twitter’, that came out of a startup weekend. You can read more about how the idea came about on the FAQs page.

What’s interesting is that this is a new approach to providing a monetisable service via Twitter, and possibly creating a new Twitter economy. The main question will be whether enough people have an urge or reason to transfer money to someone on Twitter leaving to use an existing service – and whether more business ideas will appear now the facility is available.

For instance, considering you can place a coffee order via Twitter, perhaps Twitpay could let you pay for it instantly as well, without the need for cash or a debit card?

Edit: Just discovered an alternative in Tipjoy, which also allows for payment via Twitter messages.

The only thing that moves as fast as Twitter is the blog coverage of Twitter. So much that even a day away from blogging leads to a pile of content which, if it were in print, would be threatening to trap me in an avalanche of theories about monetisation…but on the bright side:

• A brilliant post by Rohit Bhargava included the following ‘5 Stages of Twitter Acceptance‘

5 stages of Twitter Acceptance by Rohit Bhargava

• Follower counts will go down as Twitter releases a change to remove deleted and suspended users. Just hope I’ve avoided too many suspended users considering I’d just reach 1925 followers in the charity race to 2000.
• Techcrunch has a write-up about a cool -looking service called Stattweets for sports fans to keep track of their teams. But seeing as it’s only U.S. sports teams, I’m ignoring it for the moment out of principle!
• Via Venturebeat, the news that two-month old StockTwits has closed a first round of venture funding.
• Mashable covers undeniably pretty but possibly pointless new microblogging platform Yonkly. It looks to have some nice features, but it’s running a paid model, and has the problem of trying to raise critical mass against Twitter. Noone mention Plurk…
• Speaking of Twitter, they’re hiring a product manager.
• And from one of the many places covering it, Marketing Pilgrim on the fact Twitter has joined Google Friend Connect – apparently they are also working on joining Facebook Friend Connect and Myspace’s ID solution.

And that’s before I consider the very real risk to my self-esteem of joining Twit or Fit? Or the fact I went to the very enjoyable Twinterval on Monday and didn’t grab any photos, although I did get to chat to a bunch of cool people that I knew, and some cool people that I met that evening.

It occurred to me the other day that i tend to read the blog posts from those i follow on twitter – who ‘tweet’ new articles via twitterfeed or suchlike – more often than the others in my google reader (which i check once or twice a week at the most).

Wouldn’t be good if there was a twitterfeed – that i can control – that tweets me selected blogs – from my reader – as they happen?
This would save a lot of dicking about between twitter desktop client and browser/feed widget.
Yeah, this kinda happens with friendfeed but I don’t control that – I’m not necessarily friends with most of the authors in my rss reader , whereas with a custom google reader feed into twitter, spec’d by me… is that bit more personal.

Or maybe this functionality already exists? Any thoughts?

UPDATE: I also posted this over at never get out of the boat theres been a couple of comments if you prefer to chime in over there.

One of the major tipping points in getting a business benefit from using Twitter is if you can provide something which spreads via other users seeing value and retweeting it.

Which is why the work Dan Zarella has started looks like it’s the beginning of something incredibly useful and valuable…

What’s in a Retweet? The Data Behind Viral Messaging on Twitter | Dan Zarrella.

It also reinforces the value of being polite and saying ‘Please’ !

There’s a new service, Twitblogs, which allows you to post without being limited to 140 characters, include image tags, embed videos, and include urls of images and audio files – and it also updates Twitter for you.  (There’s a write-up on Mashable with some very interesting comments around the legalities of the appearance etc).

But the flipside is that the founder Sam Sethi, has some previous noteriety, after previous startup Blognation closed.  Michael Arrington writes about both Twitblogs, and links to his own experience with Sethi, who is a former editor of Techcrunch UK.

While I wouldn’t take anyone’s view on what happened as unbiased, and don’t know the details to comment, Arrington does make a couple of very good points about Twitblogs:

• You need to disclose your Twitter username – and importantly your password (something that’s been raised as an issue with other applications)
• Although a privacy policy page has been added, the site still hasn’t got any Terms and Conditions listed – the Terms at the bottom of the page isn’t linked. And although most of us may be less than thorough when looking at the Ts and Cs, there are times when they become vitally important.

Personally I’ll wait and see what other responses there are, until I get a chance to use the 140char test account – but in the meantime, you can always see the latest thoughts, as ever, via Twitter Search.

Just spotted an amusing exercise to try and condense the plot of Hamlet into 140 characters on Twitter .

It was kicked off by JP Rangaswami, and it’s just a bit of fun – just tag your effort with #TwitBard.

Already one of the contributors has added Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

It’s quite a challenge in some cases, equal to the venerable site ‘The Four Word Film Review’, which unfortunately seems to be offline at the moment.

And of course, 160 character review site Blippr, (I interviewed the founders on 140char a while ago).

It’s started me thinking about the many criticisms claiming that microblogging and Twitter are reducing us all to quick and superficial short updates with no meaning – isn’t that overlooking the fact that often a short message can encourage us to look deeper – such as a 140 character summary of Hamlet reminding me of family trips to watch the Royal Shakespeare Company, and wondering if I can find time later to reread Henry V?

Interesting article, and a chance to test the PressThis bookmarklet for Wordpress 2.7:

Why MLM Will Kill Twitter (Hint: because They Have a Business Model) – Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog.

Looking at how multi level marketers and business models that can extract value can have a major effect on Twitter, particularly as spam models only need a relatively small conversion rate, and people are so eager to retweet a message without examining it!

I’ve just been issued a friendly challenge by @digitalmaverick, as we both have around 1700 followers.
After wondering out loud whether it’s wrong to be a little excited by the thought of reaching the 2000 followers mark, he’s issued a friendly competition to see who can get there first…
So if you know anyone who might get some value or entertainment from following me, please recommend they add www.twitter.com/badgergravling asap!

Update: We’re just agreeing a forfeit for the loser, such as volunteering for charity work on Christmas Day – plus I’ll donate 2000 pence (£20) to the charity of choice of the 2000th follower.