140Char

It’s not exactly engagement or interaction, but women’s online publishing and advertising network Glam has been using a widget which allows manual editing of the Twitter feed around an event to ensure the content is suitable for advertisers (From Venturebeat).

The widget is available throughout the Glam network, and to third-party publishers, who receive a cut of any revenue. And soon even publishers outside the network will be able to receive micropayments via Paypal.

It’s a traditional model, but one which appears to have worked, at least for the #Oscars.

But it suffers from the traditional problem of display advertising – in which the amount of eyeballs doesn’t always translate to the amount of people actively clicking on an advert. Although the sponsorship in this case was for a skincare company, which is likely to appeal to a female-targetted content network, would positioning it next to Oscar content give it relevancy or credibility?

And what does it mean for people who use Twitter hashtags without the knowledge that another party may profit from them?

After all, they were originally used to collate information for aggregating information about fires in San Diego, and have since been used for collating conversation around disasters like #Mumbai along with mainstream entertainment and sporting events.

It raises the eternal content question of the internet – should aggregators be able to collect all the revenue without compensating the content creators?

Then you’re one of the lucky ones.

Pic by delta407 on Flickr (CC Licence)

At some point on Friday it appears something has caused a number of people to find this blog inaccessible.

And the same problem is also causing a tidal wave of spam to slip past Akismet and flood the pending comments section.

I’ve notified my hosting company, and I’m looking into the causes and solutions – meanwhile I’m marking every spam message as spam, but with one message every couple of minutes, it’s extremely frustrating.

As a result, I’m probably going to find it tricky to post until the problem has been resolved – however, you can still find my latest posts appearing at TheWayoftheWeb.net for social media marketing, digital publishing, journalism and other stuff.

Incidentally, if anyone is interested in partnering or collaborating with me here (once the access problem is solved!), let me know…

For some reason, Akistmet and IP blocking doesn’t seem to be countering the tide of spam comments I’m getting – I’ve had some good suggestions for causes via Twitter, but not solved it as yet.

So while I delete 101 really, really obvious spam messages, I’m also playing around with some more functionality – you can see an early start on the monetise Twitter/Jobs page.

An interesting post on the Twittown apps and widget community blog suggested Twitter ‘Took on Facebook’s Zuckerberg and Won‘.

It tracks the timeline between Facebook updating the Terms of Service for the social network, and rolling back to the original terms due to the outcry over ownership of content uploaded.

And while I don’t believe that Twitter outcry alone led to the decision to move back to the original terms and consult users about updates – Google blog search shows the outcry through full length blogging – the Twittown post does suggest that Twitter opinions had a significant effect.

And I would expect the Facebook team to be monitoring Twitter alongside all other channels – especially as FB considered Twitter important enough to try to buy it!

And it shows how monitoring and responding to probably the largest, and certainly the quickest online focus group makes sense for adding value and monetisation, whether it’s by Twitter, or third-party applications like Tweetdeck.

The first is my contribution to the debate on whether Twitter and the real-time web will replace Google. I couldn’t decide which blog to post it on, as it crosses over to both my sites, so apologies for the linkage.

So to brighten things up with something more light-hearted:

Get your Status on a T-Shirt with Twitoshirt

That’s right, you can now quickly and easily post your favourite status message at Twitoshirt, and then proudly wear your (or someone else’s) genius for just $16.99.

Whether or not you’d want to might be another matter.

But it does make me wonder if I should revive the Tweet of the Week, and if I’ve missed a business opportunity there!

Tweeght is a new site described by it’s creator as offering Digg-like voting for ‘thoughtful tweets’ – although the voting is actual more like Reddit with a simple up or down arrow.

Tweeght - new ranking site for Twitter

It was built by Aditya Kothadiya in under a week, and is pretty simple to use. You can either post a tweet by submitting it on the site, which requires your Twitter username and password, tag Tweets with #tweeght, #thought, or #quote, or send the Tweet to @tweeght.

From the site, you can vote individual messages up or down, Retweet them, or reply – and there’s a Leaderboard of the most popular users.

Aditya says “The goal was to launch something quickly but it should be valuable, usable, beautiful and dead simple.” And you can follow Aditya at @adityakothadiya.

It’s definitely a nicely designed site, but is the timing right?

Previous attempts at social ranking sites for Twitter I previously covered, included Microblogging.com and Dwigger. Both have closed, with Dwigger shut for good, and Microblogging hinting that a new service will appear in the future.

Now I’m not the biggest fan of Digg, but I do see the value on social ranking/aggregation sites. I’m a reasonably frequent user of Stumbleupon, and I do use Delicious (although I’m taking a break until I can sort out my messy tagging!).

But I can see two major problems for this approach to filtering Twitter -

1. The scale of Twitter is hard to accurately judge, but the most generous estimates would put Twitter as a whole under the size of Digg’s monthly active users.

2. Social aggregation sites are useful for filtering the entire internet – over 133 million blogs monitored by Technorati, for example, plus mainstream media sites, video, images etc, etc. Has Twitter reached the point where it needs filtering in this way?

3. The ranking approach always involves viewing messages via an external site, taking you out of Twitter or your client. When you’re using Digg, Delicious or SU, you’re inside that community, whereas with Tweeght you need to have a seperate browser tab or window taking you out of the community stream to see what’s being rated.

4. Twitter is built on personal relevance and connections. I can’t help feeling that external ranking systems are a little web 1.0 for adding value. Would I rather see thoughtful tweets from people I’ve never contacted or followed, or would I rather see what my friends and contacts are saying, and have them highlighting anything they see which is thoughtful or brilliant.

That all said, Tweeght might have come along at the right time, with the recent huge rise in users driven by mainstream media coverage of Twitter – and some of those new users could be the Digg-type audience Tweeght needs. After all, Malcolm Gladwell makes a great case for success being hugely dictated by factors such as timing his recent book Outliers.

There’s a lot of coverage of the new funding Twitter has received – despite not actively looking for more money.

For a sample of the coverage:

Venturebeat. Techcrunch. Mashable. ReadWriteWeb. Fred Wilson. Wired. Twitterati. Techcrunch again.    Oh, and the official Twitter blog.

And those are just the some of the sources in my RSS feed! What echo chamber?

But does it affect anything?

Mark at Twitterati suggests Twitter could now fund its 20 employees at $100,000 a year for the next 15 years with current funding – that’s a healthy window!

Plus there are the options to fund new services, buy existing external services etc.

But the biggest implication may be that the team behind Twitter are unlikely to ever sell – after turning down an offer from Facebook, and Ev’s sale of Blogger to Google, I get the feeling this one is a keeper – perhaps showing a move from the almost traditional start-up route of planning around an exit strategy.

And with discussion around real time information perhaps becoming a threat to Google, it’s entirely possible the Twitter team might be aiming to evolve into a longterm internet property (playing with Google, Yahoo, Myspace, Facebook etc).

I’m really interested to see what comments and suggestions come out of this for possible innovation and acquisition – should Twitter buy Tweetdeck for example? Will this fund radical new services? Or is this just additional breathing space before the problems of monetisation might kick in?

Most importantly – is this more evidence to back up Ev’s statement that the current access and functionality of Twitter can remain free?

I’ve just signed up for a new site offering micro-recommendations via web and mobile, Goodrec, after picking up on it via Scobleizer (Who has a great video interview with the CEO, Mihar Shah)

It looks like a good service, although as you can see I’ve just started playing with it.

But what’s interesting to me is that 50% of their traffic comes from mobile, and mobile is a big part of their offering, with recommendations around your location, for example.

The reason I’m so interested in the mobile aspect is that it’s the main difference (along with restaurant and nightlife reviews) from Blippr, a micro-recommendation service whose creators I interviewed back in September.

• Both focus on allowing short form reviews.
• Both include categories for Entertainment.
• Both have a pretty simple rating option, with up to 160 characters for the actual review.

But the big difference is that Goodrec appears to have had mobile in mind from the start, especially with location-based services. Blippr, meanwhile, had a user suggest an iPhone app seven months ago on it’s Get Satisfaction page, and a lot of postive feedback from other users, but the staff replies explain that with one developer, the decision was to focus more on the site. Blippr has exposed it’s API in case a third-party wished to create something, but the most recent work has been a host of improvements to the site itself (details are on the Blippr blog)

Choosing between the two is a tough call – from emailing and Tweeting with the guys behind Blippr, I can appreciate what they’re doing immensely – but without having the resources to develop mobile-based recommendations they’ve left themselves widely open. After all, mobile integration is a major adoption attraction of Twitter.

So combine Mobile with location-based recommendations, and I think Goodrec has launched with a sizeable advantage.

It will be interesting to see if Blippr respond, if anyone else joins the space, and in particular, whether Twitter itself has any plans in the area linked to monetising.

(I’m also on Blippr, although not particularly active).

There’s obviously been a lot of discussion around the plans for Twitter to monetise brands and company usage of the microblogging service.

Robin at We Are Social has a nice write-up of the current situation – as befits a company whose Twitter account has ended up on the front page of Marketing!

And I’ve definitely started having some thoughts about this – the main ones are relief that the monetisation will focus on value-added services, not the current level of access. This will prevent the possibility of brands and individuals being caught in grey areas between classed as people or companies, which is a line being blurred for many people, particularly those likely to be heavy Twitter users.

And I do think that there are ways to offer services and information above what is in the Twittersphere – I like and use a range of monitoring services, but they all currently have certain weaknesses that an official tool might overcome.

My only hope is that Twitter avoids falling into the same hole that Facebook seems to be digging at the moment – trying to force brands into using advertising by increasingly restricting what is allowed even on brand pages. Even with huge growth over the last 12 months (and even this year), it’s still not on a global scale to have the perceived power Facebook has – and if FB keeps becoming harder to work with, I can definitely see an accelerated move to more niche networks, and possibly even back to Myspace et al for brands.

The good thing is that Twitter not on

ly has a lot of ecosystem offerings to keep it honest, but several interesting competitors. Although the likes of Plurk, Identi.ca, Jaiku etc aren’t approaching the scale of Twitter, forgetting to put users first would definitely result in a search to one of the rival services. And don’t forget that Plurk is the number 1 service in Singapore!

Here’s the clarification on the official Twitter blog:

It’s great that both individuals and organizations are finding value in Twitter and there may be ways we can enrich the experience. In fact, we hope to begin iterating on revenue products this year.

However, it’s important to note that whatever we come up with, Twitter will remain free to use by everyone – individuals, companies, celebrities, etc. What we’re thinking about is adding value in places where we are already seeing traction, not imposing fees on existing services.

In an effort to be able to update a little more often….

There are so many interesting visualisations of data around, I almost hesitate to mention any. But Twittersheep is interesting because it takes a similar approach to Wordle, but applies it to your Twitter followers, rather than your own account.

My (@badgergravling) Twittersheep result (Click to see full size)

Which is a useful tool for seeing what friends and followers are interested in, and also handy if you need a quick and easy way to display that type of data to someone.

The other bonus is that it only requires your username, not your password.

I didn’t realise that Twitstat has a list of the clients which post most frequently to Twitter (that are tracked by @twitstat), until I saw the recent list published by Mashable.

The web interface tops the list at 29.57%, then it’s

• Tweetdeck 10.58% (Uber client for Twittering and monitoring)
• Twitterfeed 5.54% (Automated website and blog feeds)
• Twhirl 4.92% (Effective Twitter client)
• Twitteriffic 3.79% (Twitter client for mobile).

And the next four places are all mobile clients, with Twitpic in tenth.

Warren at Twittermaven took things a little further by aggregating the mobile, desktop and utility categories, and pointing out more people use mobile to post than desktop clients. One of his posters has also pointed out that the data could be misleading as people might post through the full web page on mobile internet.

But I’d expect the trend to be fairly close to reality. A mobile-optimised experience is likely to be an easier ’sell’ than moving from the web interface to a client. And although early adopters and corporate Tweeters can find huge value from tools like Tweetdeck,  that’s not the average Twitter user.

The top 10 applications account for 70% of usage, which conforms to The Long Tail. Friends of 140char on the list include MrTweet at #40 and disapointly Cesare’s great Posty client is down the list at #211.