140Char

What better way to celebrate the ending of the year, the end of the decade, and the huge rise in popularity and usage of microblogging than starting a series celebrating the biggest moments in Twitter?

So here’s a particularly poignant moment to start with – the hint of a truce between the two rival factions of Coca Cola and Pepsi, from July, 2009.

Coca Cola makes contact on Twitter

And Pepsi responds on Twitter

The idea came from Amnesia Razorfish, with founder Iain McDonald tweeting both beverage empires. You can read more about how the message picked up momentum with plenty of retweets on the Amnesia Razorfish blog.

Cross-posting from my other blog at www.thewayoftheweb.net – it might not be microblogging or lifestreaming, but it’s a really good cause. And my itchy top lip deserves more donations….

The month of Movember is coming to an end on Monday, so if you haven’t donated yet to the worthy cause of raising awareness and funds to tackle male prostate cancer, then maybe this will inspire you.

Yes, that’s my shameful Mo, taken a week ago. It’s not much more impressive now, although it has filled out a bit to look like a less threadbare broom, and more like a doormat made of wire wool.

So if you want to encourage me to take some suitably foolish pictures over the next 4 days, then you need donate. It only takes a matter of seconds, and many of you will have just been paid – so why not donate one or two Christmas drinks worth, save yourself a bit of a hangover, and feel worthy for the rest of the year.

Donate to Dan’s appalling Mo here.

If you want to know more about prostate cancer, start on the Movember Men’s Health page. But the basic facts are that despite the fact men are embarrassed and quite frankly crap at going to the doctor’s and staying healthy, 35,000 men are diagnosed with prostate cancer in the UK every year. It mainly affects men over the age of 50, and the good news is that if it’s detected early and treated, it’s highly curable.

Go on, donate…

It’s great to see a mainstream media report into something mroe insightful than the latest celebrity uproar on Twitter, so the fact that the Wall Street Journal looked at the 301works.org initiative to preserve and archive short urls is a refreshing change.

Not only that but it also raises some interesting points, including the legal aspect of short urls disapearing – a point which also hadn’t occured to 301works.org director and web legend Stowe Boyd, so I don’t feel too bad for not spotting it sooner!

And considering the increasing number of lawsuits regarding content on Twitter which is defamatory or libellous, this could be an increasingly important aspect of the work 301works.org is doing, in addition to maintaining the usefulness of short urls.

Twitter and Facebook integration has come to two of the big three consoles of this generation with both the Xbox 360 and PS3 now allowing you to keep updated in between games.

Although your Playstation will automatically update Facebook when you earn a new trophy in a game, apparently that functionality is missing for Twitter (I own an Xbox 360 instead so can’t test).

But Dirk Olbertz has come to the rescue – he emailed me to say that PS3Heroes.com now allows you to update your Twitter status with your new PS3 trophies.

You’ll need to register with PS3Heroes.com, add your Twitter username, and allow access via OAuth.

And that’s it done.

I’m surprised the official auto-updates favour Facebook rather than Twitter – in terms of auto-updating accounts, you’d assume the focus would be reversed – but this will solve the problem for the time being.

Adding a description field to Twitter list creation is a simple change which has rolled out today, but it’s a useful one.

Not only does it allow you to provide context to people who will view your list (Without creating a list title as long as a book), but presumably it will also be indexed to be searchable, enabling better list discovery. At the moment I’m seeing a huge number of lists created, often with plenty of duplication of topics and titles, and very few followers for each one.

A searchable description field aids this somewhat, although it may mean there’s a land grab to be the first with the best description for a topic – and that there will be consolidation around lists, with a long tail distribution curve in effect.

But it also shows that the evolution of Twitter is continuing, and the team aren’t about to take a break after rolling out Lists and the new Retweet feature (the Beta trial has just reached my account, and I haven’t really reached a conclusion about it yet!)

Given that the Suggested User List is being radically overhauled, user lists and descriptions look set to play a more prominent role in the Twittersphere, and the real-time web it inhabits.

For a while it seemed as if building a third-party application for Twitter was a route to instant fortune (as were Facebook apps before it, and iPhone apps after it). But judging by the eventual sale of Twitter link tracker and aggregator Twitturly, it appears that bubble may now have burst.

Since launching in April 2008, rivals such as Tweetmeme and Topsy have joined the Twitter aggregator space – and when founder Joel Strellner put the site up for auction, just 5 bids came in, with a final price of ‘no more than $8,500′ (HT Techcrunch).

Having said that, Strellner has moved onto other things, leaving the site with a Google PR of 6, Alexa ranking of 40,106, and most importantly, only around 1000 Unique Users per day. And less than 1000 visitors per day definitely doesn’t get the big bucks.

Twitturly

The only thing I can’t understand is why there wasn’t more effort to boost PR and visitor numbers immediately prior to the sale? Then again, the auction details reveal Strellner is working full time, didn’t want to invest more in costs (the EC2 server costs were apparently around $3k per month), and has also recently found his free time taken away by becoming a father (Something which I can totally understand!)

It will be interesting to see whether the new owner can make use of the 622GB data, the agreement to access the Summize (Twitter Search) API an unlimited amount, and a site which claimed 5000 UUs per day.

Although most people will have assumed that the @BarackObama account was staffed by members of his team and White House staff, it was easy to hope that a Blackberry-addicted new President might occasionally sneak a tweet in – especially given the account is always in the first-person, and given messages such as ‘Humbled’ on winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

But it turns out almost 2.7 million people are following the President’s team rather than the man himself, after he spoke in a Q&A session in Shanghai which was streamed on the internet. In it, he fielded a question about Twitter. His answer?

“I have never used Twitter but I’m an advocate of technology and not restricting internet access.”

It’s a pity this hasn’t been made clear on the account, or that he hasn’t been able to at least check in a couple of times to see what the fuss is about.

Interestingly, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs also claimed in July (incorrectly as it turned out), that Twitter was blocked on official White House computers.

It seems that social media hasn’t been quite as pervasive in the Obama administration as you might have assumed.

HT to Breaking News Online, Read Write Web and Techcrunch.

Due to injury and illness, blogging is taking a back seat at the moment…

Apologies and normal service will be resumed as soon as possible…

This Twitter crowdsourcing experiment was set up by regular 140char.com contributor Lauren Fisher over on her agency site at SimplyZesty, so here’s an explanation from Lauren herself:

Using Twitter to crowdsource the world in 72 hours.

Well not exactly the world, but England, America and Ireland at least. That’s the challenge we’ve set ourselves and we’re relying on word of mouth to make the experiment work. The project started just under 48 hours ago and was originally intended just for Ireland. It soon gained traction and buzz so we decided to roll it out to England and the US. We’ve set a limit of 72 hours on each project, to see just how quickly word can spread.

We trialled the experiment as a new way of using lists and so we could see which counties/states were the most active. We’ll be publishing links to all the lists and also producing a map showing which areas are the most active. The first results for Ireland, will be out tomorrow.

The project works through crowd-sourcing and to take part and help spread the word we’re just asking for one tweet (replacing the place name with your county/state)

Ireland “I want to get listed #TwitterCork add yourself here http://bit.ly/2C70pP

England “I want to get listed #TwitterEssex add yourself here http://bit.ly/44DRZ5

America “I want to get listed #TwitterCalifornia add yourself here http://bit.ly/40ZL4M

There’s also more info on all of the projects on our site : www.simplyzesty.com

We’re interested to see how far this project can go in 72 hours and hope that it proves the power of Twitter to any doubters out there. We also want to provide lists that will be useful to people, for example if you’ve just moved to a new area. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that the project works and we’re certainly putting the new lists through their paces!

And I’ll be asking Lauren nicely for a follow-up post to find out exactly how successful the project has been…

If you want to find the most popular brands on Twitter in terms of mentions, you could spend some time setting up various monitoring systems. Or you can just go to TweetedBrands and see which 50 companies are getting the most mentions in any one day.

It’s simple and effective for a quick overview, and each mention number links to the appropriate Twitter search.

TweetedBrands

And that’s about it, other than to say it was produced as part of the 24 hour business camp.