The background of your Twitter profile seems to be a fertile place for people experimenting with making money from microblogging. I’ve previously written about individuals auctioning their Twitter profiles for charity and raising $1002, and also advertising service Twittad, which allows advertisers to place adverts on your Twitter profile (I’m currently testing the service - Twittad itself is advertising on my profile at $44).

Now a very different service is seeking to make money from Twitter profiles. TwitterImage.com offers custom images for your Twitter profile. At the moment there’s a special offer running with a free design if you have 2000+ followers and allow a small credit line for the service in your background. If you’ve got less than 2000 followers, then there’s a 25% off the normal price of $100. For your $75 you get a custom background, and one minor revision. Or you can pay the full price of $100 if you think you’ll need more than one design or revision.

For example:

Problogger's custom Twitter design by Twitter Images

I wish them well with the service, but I have to admit to having my doubts about the viability of it. While I understand that designers need to be reimbursed for their talents, how many Twitter users would value their background enough to spend $75 or $100 on it?

Obviously you can insert your contact and bio details into the image - but there is a link for an about page on your site etc. And experimenting with your own imagery costs nothing if you use an open source image editor like Gimp, and have the time to play around with it, plus you still need to supply any imagery you want to be used.

And then there’s the issue that you’d be paying more to have a custom Twitter background than I’m aware of any advertiser paying - so if they’re not seeing the value yet, do you think there’s a huge advantage in having a custom made Twitter background? And are you valuing it at $75-$100?

tr.im is the latest in a fairly substantial list of services which offer to shorten your links to make them more compatible with microblogging sites like Twitter.

After all, when you’ve only got 140 characters to play with, you don’t want to be posting a lengthy website address - and even better, many of the newer services also include tracking of click-throughs. Particularly useful for marketing professionals to see whether it was their link which got traffic to their content.

tr.im works with Twitter and Indenti.ca and will automatically update your status. It tracks stats, allows comments on your urls, and your account keeps a history of your shortened urls (You can log in with your Twitter details). One of the main ways it stands out from other url shorteners is by offering to retweet popular shortened urls - bonus traffic!

Some of the other popular url shorteners are:

TinyURL is just about the grandaddy of url shortening. It does what it says on the tin, via the website or bookmarklet.

SnipURL: Shortens URLs, allows you to see how many people have clicked on them, and has useful options including showing the long url in brackets when the shortened url is copied - handy if people might mistake your url for a phishing scam etc.

Bit.ly: I started with tinyurl but switched to Bit.ly. It keeps stats for your urls, and splits them between Twitter (seperating out individual pages e.g. those clicking from twitter.com/home and twitter.com/badgergravling, and also those from 3rd party applications. Plus it records any conversations and retweets on Twitter and Friendfeed, comments, and metadata. It’s interesting that Twitterfeed (auto RSS posting to Twitter) seems to be using Bit.ly now. And most interesting is that you can set a custom term for your shortened url address - which can only be used once, so it’s yours forever if you pick a good one!

Some that I haven’t tried, and can’t in any way vouch for,  include:

Notlong:

Shorterlink

Doiop

Shorl

Shorttext

Tinypic (for images).

Zurl

Curio.us

Get-URL

and many many more. Interesting several that I’d heard of appear to have folded due to a combination of problems with hosts or spammers using their service. It’s important to make sure you check who is posting a shortened url before clicking on it, just in case - and obviously be aware if the link takes you to a site requesting any type of login information.

To see all the available url shorteners we’ve encountered, check out the Microblogging tools section.

Great write up on a Coffee Shop using Twitter to take orders on the Pistachio Consulting blog. Order for the drive thru, or, use the in-shop wifi to order from your seat and avoid the need to stop working!

Combine that with a recent story I spotted in which a coffee shop/cafe had started naming their free wifi with names like ‘buyanothermuffin’ or ‘trythenewcoffeeblend’, and you’ve got two great ways to really drive sales and engage with the community!

And as someone who occasionally becomes invisible to bar staff, I’m eagerly awaiting some UK pubs to implement a similar system! I recently happened to start chatting to a pub landlord who was commenting that wifi wasn’t a gimmick any more for a pub because everyone has it - but suddenly it becomes more useful than ever.

New site Twingr offers the chance to set up your own microblogging community on a hosted platform - unlike previous options like Laconi.ca, which required you to install the service on your own server.

It seems like a no brainer, but I think there’s one major flaw in the service - critical mass.

One of the successful implentations of Laconica, is Leo Laporte’s TWiT Army, fed from the TWiT Netcast Network, and therefore having enough of a community and interaction to ensure a reasonably constant flow of updates. Meanwhile, there are several options for corporate enterprise solutions, notably Yammer, as a hosted microblogging platform.

But Twingr is external facing, and relies on people wanting to create a group fo sufficient interactivity to seperate itself from the crowd - yet not wanting to host the service, and therefore removing any options to monetise it.

For those small groups, a more general service like Ning would probably offer more scope for interaction, allowing you to upload images and files etc, as well as messaging and forums, meaning a stronger community from a smaller number of participants.

And there’s also no scope to check out and join existing groups, meaning that duplication and confusion may lead to ever smaller splinter groups - is there a need for microblogging for a group of 5 friends who already communicate via IM, Twitter, Facebook etc?

Having said that, if you’re interested, here’s the introductory video - and if you do use it, I’d be really interested in hearing how you get on:

While it was an honour to be asked to contribute to an article which appeared on Businessweek.com recently, I was a bit reluctant to post a link until an error had been corrected, but seeing as it still hasn’t happened, I thought I might as well clear up the confusion here.

The article in question is ‘Building a Better Twitter‘, and to clarify - although I am indeed Community Marketing Manager at Bauer Media, and I may occasionally refer to some of the work I do for my day job involving microblogging, this blog is not owned by Bauer Media, or in any way endorsed by my employer - it’s something I do as a personal project in my spare time, and all views and opinions published are my own, and are not representative of my employer.

On a brighter note, Darren Rowse kindly commented on my last post - highlighting how much more responsive the blogging world in general is to monitoring what is going on and ensuring assuracy and dialogue!

And finally, while I continue to work out how 140char is going to continue to progress, I’m going to air a minor irritation I’ve encountered with some of my new followers - if you’re going to follow me, and you’ve got your Twitter updates protected, are you just looking for me to broadcast at you? Am I meant to guess whether to repripocate? Or wouldn’t it be helpful for you to maybe send me a message telling me who you are?…

In a slightly odd pairing, political eco figure Al Gore and successful professional blogger Darren Rowse both had microblogging news to unveil while I was off on vacation. And the less significant part for me personally, is that Al Gore has his own Twitter account.

More significant was the news that the man behind Problogger and one of four behind the B5media network, has launched TwiTip, a new blog dedicated to Twitter Tips.

Uh-oh.

Darren’s being pretty open about the process and techniques he’s using for the new blog, but the fact he’s already seeing up to 2000 users per day, and has over 1300 RSS subscribers within a few days due to his previous success and fame could be a bit depressing! I have to admit being tempted by Web 1.0 Darkside thinking a little.

Web 1.0: ‘Well, the game is over now. Him and another couple of A-listers will just hoover up the entire audience.’

Web 2.0: ‘Every new blog/person is a good thing for attracting and engaging more people and providing new perspectives.’

Web 1.0: ‘But he’s got a larger audience in a week than 140char has after 6 months.’

Web 2.0: ‘Doesn’t matter. It’s just a reason to ensure I work harder on making this place different and valuable enough that it succeeds in it’s own right and stands out - and maybe Darren will send some traffic by!’

At the end of the day, I wish Darren all the success he’ll doubtless get, and it hasn’t changed my thoughts on the future state of the site too much - initially it looks like he’s continue his tactic of providing great tuitional and instructive guides etc, which will be just as useful to me as other people - and I was already intending to take this blog in a slightly different direction anyway. Especially as I like to play and break new apps and sites, rather than feeling like I’m writing a game guide.

The only thing that does disapoint me a little is the fact Darren is publicly asking for submissions for Twitips and has already received loads of content, which is doubtless coming from Problogger readers who see a chance to get more coverage for their own websites and blogs - it might have been nice to have seen some recognition of the sites already here like Microblink, Twitterapps,  Twitterholics, Twittermaven, etc.

And obviously if anyone, A-list or otherwise, fancies being involved in a site dedicated to microblogging, you’re always welcome to get involved here!

While I was offline and on holiday, I started thinking about permanence and the ‘half-life’ of content and ideas. Is print a better medium for archiving content, in the event all electronic systems are turned off or destroyed in a catastrophe? Or is the electronic medium far better for simply getting an idea into the world, where it may take on a life of it’s own?

Originally it was a comparison between print and blogging, but reading some recent posts from bloggers listing referrals, I noticed how many were crediting large numbers of referrals from Twitter as a direct result of friends and followers retweeting their messages.

That struck a chord, as I tend to be online between 9am and midnight (sometimes 1 or 2am) so I get to see various timezones conversing - and I wonder how much I miss when I’m sleeping or avoiding microblogging to concentrate on other tasks. Unless I set up RSS feeds for every possible keyword, and constantly trawl through archives, there’s always going to be a huge amount of content that is published when I’m not there to see it - and the same it true for almost everyone using microblogging.

Which is why microblogging is probably the best test of a concept or an idea. Not only do you have to fit the pitch into 140 characters, but for it to reach a significant number of relevant people around the globe it needs to be retweeted by a significant number - easy if you have thousands of followers, but unless you’re in the top few Tweeters, for example, it’s purely down to the strength of your idea.

That’s much different to blogging, as tools like RSS are effective at archiving days or weeks of content which can be scanned fairly quickly and efficiently. And it’s obviously different to the print mechanisms of old.

It’s another benefit of the microformat over the longform for getting quicker feedback and response on an idea - although I’d hesitate to drop an entire simply down to a lack of responses - simple requests for messages I’ve posted have had a response rate of around 8% of my followers within an hour or so, which is pretty damn impressive, but if the idea is relevant to the other 90% it might take a while to reach them!

Note: Thinking about it after finishing this post, there may be the subconcious influence of this post by Dave Cushman, regarding responses on Twitter and Focus Groups vs Communities of Purpose.

When Dan asked me to look after 140Char while he is off sampling the delights of foriegn lands I was a little unsure. Yes I have Tumblr and a Twitter accounts but I’m hardly the most prolific poster.

But today I was introduced to a very cool web app called Evernote. I know it has been around for a while but it is out of private beta now and available for all.

Evernote for Windows (also available for Mac, iPhone, mobile and web) - Thanks to bluelectric on Flickr

Once I got over my excitement at how this very useful productivity app is going to save me from the clutches of my addled brain. I noticed that Evernote has a very useful function that allows you to put certain notes in a public folder that publishes them blog-style with a handy little RSS feed.

I’ve already added the feed to my Tumblog and I think I’m going to to be using it quite a bit from now on.

Now I know you can email posts to Tumblr but to be honest I have only used it once and that was just for a test.

So what’s the diference? you ask. Well for me the real benefit is that it will be part of something that I am already using extensively, so the leap from making a note for myself to making a note that I think will be useful for other people is only a small one.

Unlike things like Twitter, which I can see is very useful but don’t have the time to dedicate to building up that network, it will immediately be useful to me and the (micro) blogging thing will just come as an added benefit that I can work on slowly.

Even if you don’t want to use it to add to your blogging arsenal you should still check out Evernote. It is one of the best memory aids I have ever seen.

This post was added by Angus Farquhar, Online Video Producer

Just a quick update that I won’t be online much, if at all, for the next week, so updates might be quiet until my return…

Security North by James Cridland on Flickr (CC Licence)

Funnily enough, searching for a suitable image on Flickr just gave me the above picture by James Cridland, whose blog and Twitter accounts I started reading recently - and the discovery of each was almost entirely unrelated!

Anyway, a good friend and colleague is aiming to supply some guest posts for here and www.thewayoftheweb.net while I’m offline, so you shouldn’t be alone. And as he’s a video expert, hopefully he’ll redress a slight lack of Seesmic, 12seconds, and Mobatalk coverage due to my lack of good looks a webcam.

And after the soul searching I mentioned in my last post, there are several really good things which have renewed my commitment to the site in the jaws of posting something once a week to just keep it going. So this week is a great time to contribute ideas, suggestions, topics, applications, tools or anything else which might be of interest, as I should be online long enough to access my email and even print off some ideas to work onn for my return…just drop your input to thewayoftheweb at googlemail dot com

It’s amazing how the use of social networks, and increasingly microblogging networks like Twitter, can lead to the most wonderful examples of perfect timing!

I’ll be honest and admit that there have been times recently when I’ve wondered whether I’m committed enough to maintaining two blogs - particularly with the slow loading of the site and admin pages I’ve recently experienced, and the fact that all the other lovely contributors have managed to all get busy with their day jobs at the same time. Plus other sites have started appearing which have developed some of the original ideas for 140char a little further (particularly if they’ve had access to developers!). The most recent example is Just Tweet It, which does great directory listings for Twitter. Plus there’s some great blogs keeping track of the latest apps, like Twitterholics, the overview at Twittermaven, and the always great Pistachio Consulting Touchbase blog.

Plus I’m happy to be getting asked to contribute more and more to various projects at work to integrate social media - and I’m about to take a bit of an offline break.

So it took me a day or so to catch up with the source of a lot of buzz on Twitter - Luke Razzell’s awesome guide to Twitter.

Luke Razzell's great Twitter guide

I know there have been several guides to Twitter, and various posts about Twitter etiquette, but having finally sat down and had a look at Luke’s 11 page short paper, he’s combined being accessible for new users with being comprehensive for the more experienced. It’s also packed full of great examples (all hyperlinked). It really is that good!

And having read through it, I was amazed to find, on Page 10 ’see 140Char for some sharp analysis of Twitter and its competitive landscape’

Blimey.

I had to check the url twice to make sure he meant me!

So I guess I better keep going! I’ve had quite a few ideas recently around revamping some of the site, and making sure the focus is on something different and complimentary from the other great blogs and sites out there. And there are a few things I think I can offer.

So although I may or may not have the opportunity to update over the next week, rest assured I will be back - and the site will be new and improved on my return (once I’ve sorted the email overload etc!). And there should be some new and interesting bits.

And in the meantime, go and download Luke’s paper. Read it. And then tell your friends, colleagues and readers.

And make sure everyone thanks Luke at @weaverluke.