140Char

I may have already written about Twitter lists, but certainly the interest in them hasn’t started to wane yet.

In addition to everyone and their blogging dog creating posts on the lists you really, definitely, absolutely should follow,  Mark Drapeau has an interesting post on O’Reilly Radar, in which he puts forward the idea that Twitter lists are a more organic metric than the number of followers/RTs an individual has.

Meanwhile the two rivals for most comprehensive Twitter client, Tweetdeck and Seesmic, have both revealed the imminent inclusion of list functionality:

‘While we’re not saying exactly how we’re integrating lists just yet – hey, we all need a few secrets! – be happy in the knowledge that we are integrating lists into TweetDeck. And as you would expect, we’re not just planning any old run-of-the mill integration…oh no. We think you’ll find that what we have planned for Lists is going to take your social media experience with TweetDeck to new heights.’ - Tweetdeck blog.

‘OF COURSE Seesmic will have user lists very soon. I have them on my Seesmic Desktop already testing.’ – Seesmic founder @Loic on Twitter.

I’m convinced Twitter lists will remain a highly important change for Twitter, both for users, and for monetisizing the business.

With about half of Twitter users able to access Twitter Lists as they’re rolled out to everyone, independant Twitter list directory Listorious has been quick to launch and offer curated lists on a range of topics.

It’s interesting to see whether the relatively peer-led recommendation of Twitter lists will displace directories of individual users grouped by category such as WeFollow and Twellow. Obviously there are concerns about both the follower-inflation that everyone has seen from the Suggested User List presented to new users, as well as individuals worried about being pigeon-holed and lists becoming reciprocal favours rather than recommendations.

It’s also likely to diminish the value of the longstanding Twitter tradition of #followfriday.

From a business point of view it makes utter sense for Twitter to have some input/control of listing users – all the examples above have been relatively successful. What’s the betting that an option to promote a specific list could be in the monetisation plans? Spend some cash and your list could be promoted to everyone, or possibly replace the Suggested User List for a period of time?

Suddenly they’d have a route for grabbing sums like the $250,000 offered earlier this year by Jason Calacanis, without it being flagged up as obvious in a list of just 20 or so people.

And obviously list pages themselves offer individual sponsorship/promotional oppportunities…

As a user of Twitter, I’m undecided whether lists will be a positive thing on balance, but as a Twitter observer it’s one of the biggest steps they’ve made in a long time towards making money.

I’m really intrigued to find out what other people are using Posterous for. The ease with which you can post by email, and send images and video which are automatically resized means I keep toying with it for various things but haven’t found something which has got me using in regularly (I’ve already got two self-hosted Wordpress blogs including this one, and a pretty active Twitter account etc).

I know that Steve Rubel is using it as his main place to post in a lifestreaming style.

And the Austin American Stateman newspaper used it to crowdsource images from readers.

Plus more visually-creative people seem to be embracing it – e.g. Christian Payne.

But I need more inspiration – are you using Posterous, and if so, how are you using it? Alternatively have you seen particularly good or bad examples of people using it for a specific purpose or reason?

Although Ashton Kutcher has people following him on Twitter than the entire UK news industry, in terms of online readership, the UK news industry has pretty good reach, with The Telegraph, The Guardian and The Daily Mail all attracting over 30 million unique users in September 2009.

So I thought it would be interesting to see exactly which ones were mentioning Twitter the most – and to keep it simple and relevant for everyone, I decided to only use their search functionality to work it out:

So which newspapers have mentioned Twitter the most?

• The Telegraph: 5180 results.
• The Guardian: 3779 results.
• The Financial Times: 1887 results.
• The Times: 1033 results.
• The Daily Mail: 825 results.
• The Sun: 579 results (inc: The Scottish Sun)
• The Mirror: 100 results (Search total limited – site:themirror.co.uk twitter = 82,000 results)
• The Daily Star: 87 results.
• The Daily Express: 78 results.
• The Independent: 56 results (Note – their Google-powered site search is limited in some way! A general google ‘site:theindependent.com twitter‘ reveals 1400 results)

Key thoughts from this simple experiment:

• Most people would probably have put The Guardian top if asked.
• The fact Twitter search returns and ABCe results are closely linked suggests the effectiveness of site structure and search functionality, rather than Twitter mentions being integral to driving readers! (I’m sure Martin has much more in-depth information on this as part of the team at The Guardian).
• At least a couple of sites have seriously wonky search functionality, despite being two of many with search powered or ‘enhanced by’ Google.
• It’s definitely skewed towards the ‘middle-class’ broadsheets regardless of political leaning, which is what most people would expect.
• There’s a power law in full effect, with two/three sites providing most of the coverage.

This is the first post by new contributor Lauren Fisher, who specialises in online PR and social media at Simply Zesty – and can be found on Twitter at @laurenfisher.

If you’re looking to publish any RSS feeds to a Twitter account, then apparently you wouldn’t be alone in picking Twitterfeed, as it’s apparently used by nearly 350,000 publishers.

Not only was it around the first default choice, but there are a host of changes now going live to improve the service.

If you publish on a system that offers PubSubHubbub feeds (e.g. Blogger or Typepad), your new posts should be live on Twitter in a matter of moments.

It now also features the option to publish to Facebook, which makes life a little easier.

And you get better analytics – there’s now integration with both url shortner Bit.ly, and Google Analytics.

And behind the scenes there’s an improved queue management system for greater reliability.

In fact, my only complain from a personal note is that the new design and system gives a variety of methods to log-in, and for some reason I’m struggling with mine!

One of the most popular Twitter clients, Tweetdeck, has added new features in the latest release,  version 0.31. It’s pushing forward as one of only two Twitter clients with a share of over 10%, as measured by Twitstats.

Included in the latest release is a new notification system which can be applied to certain groups. Plus it also has inline reply, retweets and direct messages inside the notification menu.

A major feature you might not notice is that Tweetdeck has now been optimised to consume less memory, which is good for everyone – plus there’s also the time-saving option of keyboard shortcuts, and a Heads-Up Display.

And depending on how popular you are, you might find the feature to view your newest 100 followers comes in useful as you can directly follow, block or add to a group.

Check oout the video below for the official walk-through:

Fancy winning $10,000 for tweeting? If you’re currently attending full-time in post-secondary education, then College Scholarships.org is offering three prizes of up to $10k for tweeting, then tweeting an entry message, and then following the @Scholarship account.

So nothing too laborious – even for a student!

I know nothing about the company itself, so get involved at your own risk, and you can see all the details to help you make an informed decision.

I remember suggesting something along these lines a while back to a friend – so it’s great to see you can now track commercial flights via Twitter and Facebook social networks.

Lufthansa has launched MySkyStatus which automatically posts the current position of your flight to Twitter or Facebook. Aside from the vicarious thrill of following people on their travels, it has a definite practical application if flights are delayed, for example. And that could mean potentially skipping waiting times of several hours, particularly in winter when clearing snow can definitely affect timetables.

Updates are posted around once an hour, which could mean 20+ tweets on a long-haul flight.

Updates simply state that someone ‘ is flying over xxxx,xxxx in Geramny on Lufthansa’

Reports by the Telegraph of an official Twitter video service have since been denied – and it’s definitely the right decision.

Video services have seen tremendous growth – but very few have made any money. Look at the example of Youtube, and the huge risks in terms of the costs of providing a video service, versus the potential ability to profit from it without a lot of hard work.

And how many video companies have either disappeared, or, in the most appropriate example, changed direction significantly – Seesmic was purely a video service before moving into the Twitter client arena.

And when Biz Stone replied to Mashable’s enquiries, it made it clear:

‘Haven’t read the piece but no video hosting. 140 characters of text including spaces. You know the drill!’

Twitter followers for UK national newspapers have been tracked for a while now by Malcolm Coles over at the Online Journalism Blog.

And there are some really interesting insights emerging – besides the fact that at 1,665,202 followers in total, the entire UK news industry has serious competition from the likes of Ashton Kutcher (3,777,896 followers )and Stephen Fry (794,146 followers).

Take out the @guardiantech account, which contributes 1.2 million followers, and things really don’t look brilliant in terms of scale for most accounts – it might look better if you aggregated all Times accounts, for example, but you’d still be in the low tens of thousands, and you’d still be part of a 400,000 (approx) total.

And although there’s reasonable growth, it’s again all skewed towards the Guardian Tech account, which is benefitting heavily from being included in the Suggested User List for new users.

The question is why news sources – which are proving to be pretty popular judging by their homepage statistics – are so much less attractive on Twitter?

I don’t think it’s the wrong location for finding news and information – in fact the opposite is true.

I do think there are potentially two reasons:

1. Perhaps the strength of major media news sources – which has been written about by many people – is in aggregating and providing context and insight into what’s going on, rather than attempting to ‘beat the crowd’ to the first tweet?

But I suspect it’s more likely to be:

2. If you simply plug in an RSS feed and then bugger off, you’ll never get anywhere.

Humanity has always loved creating lists to provide context for things, and the Twitter universe is no exception.

Whether it’s the suggested user list for new users of the service, the Twitter List function which has recently been announced and will arrive soon, or the huge variety of third-party lists created for almost every topic (e.g. People in UK Radio – I’ve slipped down the list slightly!)

But if you want to create a list quickly and easily to monitor, and don’t fancy waiting around for Twitter itself, then Mixtweet provides a good solution.

Mixtweet

It allows you to create mixes from your friends, your timelines or other peoples mixes, and you don’t need to be following people to add them. And once the list is created, you can embed it as a widget wherever you fancy.

You can also view multiple ‘mixes’ via the site, with real-time updates and the ability to clip any update for later reading, and founder Michael Wu has said that Mixtweet lists will be made compatible with Twitter Lists when their API becomes available.

Mixtweet List View

It also users OAuth to access your account, so minimising any safety risk, or you can create a log-in via the site itself. All in all, a really nice service – although you may wonder what their plan will be once Twitter Lists become available, that doesn’t seem to be a reason to avoid using them in the meantime.