140Char

The Twestival event is now a global phenomenon, but as any event grows it can be harder and harder for smaller companies to get involved – which is particularly relevant if you’re dealing with the Twitter ecosystem.

Which is why it’s great that Twestival Local London recognise this and are offering a sponsor slot for less – as long as you’re company, social enterprise or organisation with 6 or less employees, you have a Twitter account and you’re able to run a fun activity at the event on September 10th.

The best activity gets the chance to run their activity and engage with up to 1200 Twestivalees and press people for £300.

The deadline is 11pm on Monday, August 31, so submit your Twestival activity now! And hopefully I’ll see you there…

The #songsincode craze has been taking over Twitter for the last 24-48 hours, as people worldwide are translating their favourite songs into 140 character code bytes.

For instance:

And interestingly, Andy Smith (@asmitter), a developer at Frogtrade in Halifax, UK, has written the history of how #songsincode started, and how it became a trend.

It all started with a tweet about having a bad morning as a developer:

Which then triggered a song-based reply, and the group of three developers at the company started a back-and-forth dialogue, at which point the hashtag #songsincode appeared.

Then someone retweeted an old message by Yahoo Evangelist Chris Heilman, who had a larger number of followers. And it was that rising fame, plus a day of continued effort by the original 7, which got the topic into the trending list by 5pm the same day, at which point blogs also picked it up. And it peaked at #2, behind the famous #FollowFriday.

What’s great is that Andy has identified some of the key factors in creating the trend:

‘Trendmaking 101: What you need
- An accessible, sustainable idea that encourages creativity and/or competition (which we had by accident).
- Friends, to begin the initial propagation.
- A champion (Chris Heilman) who will spread it to the wider world.

- Lots of time to keep the early ball rolling, and for all the time you spend checking back on it!’

Go and read the full story behind the creation of #songsincode, and keep in mind Andy’s warning that you’ll lose followers due to the need to keep pumping out odd messages to get the hashtag started.

My take:

I think there is one element of this which is universal – an accessible, sustainable idea. And I think it’s also vital to have something incredibly simple.

The fact that it encourages creativity and/or competition is also a key factor, but as my involved in UK politician David Cameron’s ‘Twatgate’ outburst showed, it could be something simple and quotable which prompts anger and indignation (See also the recent defense of the NHS).

The bespoke, more creative trends also need more efforts to seed, as opposed to something which latches onto existing celebrity/anger.

But the key factor is that whatever you do takes some time and effort to maximise the effect.

If you dream of being one of the Twitter A-list and want to get closer to experiencing it for yourself, then cTwittLike is the service for you.

Just enter a username, and you’re able to see all the public tweets they would see, just without their chosen background. It updates whenever you re-enter the username. It hooks into Twitter’s API via Google App Engine, and now that @scobleizer has unfollowed thousands, you can see what his world looks like without blowing the entire internet apart.

Posterous straddles the bridge between microblogging and lifestreaming, and although founder Sachin Agarwal definitely prefers the latter description, I’m guessing it’s of interest to you – both as a place to post and aggregate content, but also as a method for sending content out to other sites, such as Twitter.

In any case, it’s first iPhone application is now available, and PicPosterous provides an alternative to emailing all your updates.

You can send content, particularly images and videos, before you’ve registered for an account, which will mean one is automatically created for you, and visual content can also be added to an album without starting a new post.

You can’t forward links or plain text to the site, which is potentially frustrating, and another niggle is that you don’t have any control over your autoposting settings via the app, besides turning them on or off.

But, as always with Posterous, the focus is on keeping things incredibly quick and simple, and then building on that, so I’m sure the feature list will improve fairly quickly over time.

Last night I spent a fair bit of time chatting about Twitter with a friend in the publishing industry, as we talked about how useful we find it, and how it has replaced some of our usage of email and Facebook. We’re both around 30, and we’re both mixing professional and personal use to connect with work contacts and friends.

And yet, sat on the train home surrounded by 10+ teenagers chatting away, there was not a single Twitter mention – overhearing them without trying to eavesdrop, my ears naturally picked up the 5 or 6 mentions of Facebook.

Anecdotal experiences are always interesting, but I’ve also been following the spread of Twitter surveys like the Pear Analytics ‘pointless babble’ whitepaper. By categorising 2000 tweets in English and in the US and putting them into buckets for News, Spam, Self-Promotion, Pointless Babble, Conversational and Pass-Along Value, they concluded that Pointless Babble makes up 40.55% of tweets, followed by Conversational and only 3.6% are news.

Many places simply repeated the study, but two people I respect a lot have responded:

There’s a great post by Stephen Fry, pointing out that Twitter was never advertised as anything other than a means to connect to people.

‘The clue’s in the name of the service: Twitter. It’s not called Roar, Assert, Debate or Reason, it’s called Twitter. As in the chirruping of birds.’

And the always well-reasoned research mind of Danah Boyd looks at whether the fact that conversation, both online and offline, tends to be social, is actually a good thing, anyway – and our obsession with trying to claim some measure of perceived value

‘I vote that we stop dismissing Twitter just because the majority of people who are joining its ranks are there to be social. We like the fact that humans are social. It’s good for society.’

Well worth reading…

If you happened to catch my previous post, you may have been wondering what had prompted Britain to start defending the NHS on Twitter.

Well, Dave Cushman (Disclosure – friend and former colleague), has a nice summary of the factors he feels were involved in the creation and spread of #welovethenhs.

They include the fact that something many people cared about was attacked, it’s a belief that could be shared by many people who had been emotionally affected, and the tools etc were really quick and simple to use to get involved.

It did have a small bit of celebrity involvement from British comedy writer Graham Linehan, but I suspect this trend had it’s own momentum.

Of course, as a further postscript to the image from my previous post – within the same day Les Paul had died

Dave also raised the issue of how newspapers and organisations feel odd when they’re reporting on Twitter – as I wrote before, this is the stage where we finally accept that TV, Radio, Internet and Mobile have made print-based newspapers into paper archives. There’s still a place for them, but if you were able to study the numbers of people discovering breaking news of a specific event on Twitter, for example, and compared that with those seeing it for the first time, I would be that one is increasing almost as fast as the other is falling. And that is without considering how many people would hear about the event, e.g. Michael Jackson dying, from friends/colleagues/family before they got near a newspaper.

This picture probably says it all:

Taken by @bofranklin :- Image direct link.

Twitter and microblogging really have reinforced and amplified what 24 TV news channels started – ‘newspapers’ should really be renamed ‘paper news archives’.

If you’re thinking about paying to increase your number of Twitter followers, you may have to increase your offer after Ellen DeGeneres announced she would randomly reward one follower with $1000.

The offer came as part of winning ‘Choice Twit’ in the Teen Choice Awards, and was not only hinted at on Twitter, but was also broadcast on air and confirmed on her blog.

Only one thing springs to mind in the rush to add @TheEllenShow and joining the 2,784,700 potential winners – was it a conscious decision to avoid using a hashtag and going for a trending topic to attract new followers?

The recent Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on popular social networks was mainly felt by Twitter, which seemed to either be more susceptible or hit harder by the action, resulting in it going offline entirely for a short period.

The concept of Governments using the internet for spreading information or cyberwarfare is not a new one – but the question is how prevalent it is becoming on social networks, and how many users are aware of it happening?

Twitter seems the most likely place for this question to play out – combine a design which lends itself to the fast spread of information, and an average user age which is more likely, as a percentage of users, to be interested in news and events (particularly political), than most social networks.

Examples of the fast spread of news are commonplace, particularly when it comes to natural disasters, such as earthquakes, or human disasters, such as terrorism or fire. And increasingly these pieces of breaking information are being repeated and picked up by unquestioning users seeking to capitalise on the interest, major news organisations, and even shops using it for spam purposes.

Usage of the media by both Governments and unofficial organisations has long existed, but the internet removes the need to engage with ‘official’ media sources to reach a large audience.

And now we’re seeing the potential for Governments or organisations to co-ordinate attacks against popular services. That’s something that print distribution has somewhat protected us against – you might be able to control or attack a printing press in your own country, but it’s harder to exert pressure on foreign media platforms (although not impossible).

But the internet is accessible from any location, meaning that those who don’t believe in freedom of speech or information are able to co-ordinate their attacks on whichever target they deem suitable – and when it comes to media and social networks, we’re relying on the efforts of private companies to respond. And whilst, for example, the UK Government might interject as best it could to preserve a media institution such as the BBC for the good of the country (being a mechanism to effectively reach the population in times of emergency), do we expect – or indeed do we want, Governments to be increasingly involved in attempts to protect social networks and microblogging?

What do you think?

Just picked up on a warning via Mashable that 1000s of Twitter profiles appear to have been compromised in the latest attack of spam messages on the microblogging platform.

The attacks seem to be producing waves of spam messages, with hundreds of tweets, and then stopping for a while before starting again. The cause hasn’t been identified and the Twitter team have been informed.

Luckily in this case, the url in question hasn’t been masked with a shortening service, so don’t go to high-profits.org unless you fancy risking your account.

If your account has been compromised, change your password immediately etc…

And finally, think about how you might be affected – is the risk of spam and phishing scams a natural balance to adding 1000s of follows and followers that you don’t know, in order to boost your popularity?

Do you RT without checking links first? Click on links from people you haven’t established any reputation with?

I’m not saying close contacts can’t make a mistake and have their account hacked or phished – it’s happened to several friends with online email accounts – but commons sense and building trusted relationships will definitely lessen the odds of you being affected…

In the increasingly complicated and over-populated world of Twitter applications, sometimes it’s nice to go back to something simple.

Take swg.fm for example. To share an mp3, you insert your username, the name of the artist, the songname, and click send.

And you’re then redirected to your Twitter profile with basic (editable) information for tweeting your song – and anyone clicking on the link is taken to the appropriate video (for example from Youtube) or mp3.

Here’s my test message, challenging it with the relatively obscure Varsity Drag.

And here’s my attempt to go for the ever-popular Freebird!

The secret appears to be that actually the combination of search and url shortener could really apply to anything, and music just looks cooler when you get a video appear.

Although comScore only measures visits to Twitter.com, and more than half of Twitter users use clients and apps, it does provide a clue to Twitter’s growth rates.

In June it gained around 7 million new visitors, hitting 44.5 million unique global visitors, up 19 per cent from May 2009, and now making it the 52nd biggest site in the world (and with a 55 per cent international audience).

Techcrunch points to the Iran election as a contributor to the growth, while Mark Evans over at Twitterati somewhat confusingly uses comScore and Compete figures to calculate a 50-50 U.S and International split.

For the record, the biggest properties measured by comScore are Google sites, Microsoft sites, Yahoo sites, Facebook and Wikimedia Foundation sites.