140Char

There’s been a lot of talk about the proposed revenue model for Twitter which will seek to monetise businesses and brands using the microblogging service. But as yet none of the paid services has appeared – but one business-specific feature is now in a limited beta test.

It’s called ‘Contributors’ and manages multiple users to a single account by placing the byline of the user to their tweet on the main account. Imagine @Biz tweeting as part of the @Twitter account:

It’s supported by the API and interesting, the post revealing it on the official blog explains that it’s in beta to get feedback, but then says:

‘After we kick the tires a bit, we’ll do a full launch to all business users and ecosystem partners. Stay tuned!’

Could this be the first paid service? It’s definitely something which will make managing a multiple user account (as I do) a fair bit easier – if you’ve got a long brand name as your Twitter username, you often find there’s no room for attribution on a multiple user account.

But I’m not sure many businesses would pay (if this is released as part of the revenue plan). Although it’s a hassle, I’m not sure it’s enough of a pain to justify payment to sort – but it does show that the Twitter team are definitely focusing on the business users who could pay their bills

Back in December 2008, Six Apart acquired Pownce and promptly shut it down. Now we can see whether that was a wise move, as Six Apart has launched TypePad Motion, a microblogging service ‘evolved from the Pownce codebase and community’.

It’s written in Python using the Django framework, and the idea is that it’s easy to build and customise, allowing developers to use Typepad for the ‘heavy lifting’, with a flexible and separate layer for creating the design etc.

It allows members to share notes, files, photos , video and audio, and celebrity Typepad users have already integrated the system – examples include Zachary Quinto and Ryan Star if you want to take a look. Content can be cross-posted to both Facebook and Twitter, as you’ve probably come to expect by now!

It’s part of Typepad’s move into proving a cloud service to build social applications, including opening up Typepad’s API’s and providing a TypePad Developer Program for a free beta version of the Typepad API.

While it’s nice to finally see the acquisition of Pownce turn into something meaningful, and also interesting to see where the future lies for Six Apart, the cloud platform and opportunities for developers are actually far more interesting for most people than TypePad Motion. Unless you’re a celebrity, you’re not necessarily going to be getting much conversation generated on a regular basis on your site when compared to using a general community like Twitter etc. And I’m not sure the functionality is enough to make people switch to a paid TypePad account from Blogger or Wordpress.

And there’s been ways to self-host your own microblogging platform for a while – Laconica has now become StatusNet, but remains an open-source microblogging server.

What Six Apart’s move really means is a move more towards the cloud service provider space – the likes of cloud storage providers etc, rather than a move into microblogging.

If you want to go beyond sharing text, pictures or audio on Twitter, you can not only share videos with Twitvid, but even upload from your iPhone 3GS with their new mobile application.

That’s in addition to their earlier integration into popular iPhone Twitter app Twitterfon.

Alternatively the site itself allow you to upload a video file or capture your webcam, tag people, tweet it, and also send to Youtube at the same time.

There’s also an API available.

Like most people with a career/interest in the online world, I’ve spent a fair amount of time coming up with ideas for internet startups and businesses. Some are quite fanciful, but others have a reasonable business case behind them. And sometimes, some were implemented by other people because I didn’t move fast enough or didn’t have enough passion.

But just about the only thing I wish I’d invented was Twitter, and it’s nothing to do with the money.

Instead, my wish is because Twitter is becoming successful due to a convergence of various elements which combined into a perfect storm. And on the timeline of digital communication, from IRC and newsgroups, through forums and silo’d and semi silo’d social networks, Twitter is the beginning of the next stage of an evolution which is perhaps 20% of the way to it’s ultimate evolution.

Twitter’s perfect storm:

• The ability to initiate conversations and self-form communities of purpose (Thanks Dave) on the fly.
• The integration of fixed internet and mobile.
• The simplified nature of the core service – 140 characters, @ replies and # hashtags. That’s it…except…
• The external ecosystem and open API which has produced an almost infinite list of tools and services -meaning there’s almost a suitable tool for every individual user, and if not, wait another minute and there will be!
• The growing understanding of the utility of providing customer service quickly and efficiently – leading brands towards the idea of VRM.
• It’s asynchronous, with the ability to be synchronous.
• It’s ‘Many-to-Many’ communication.

Those are just my initial thoughts – I’m sure there’s at least a couple of things I’ve missed. Do add more in the comments.

20%? Really?

There’s a tendency to see the existing state of things as continuing forever – but nowhere is that further from the truth than in the digital (Fixed internet and mobile) world.  For example, from Friendster (2002) , to Myspace (2003), to Facebook (2004), to Twitter (2006), to Friendfeed (2007). (Dates from Wikipedia).

There are still large numbers of people who don’t have access to the internet throughout the world (whether via PC or Mobile). There are large numbers who don’t see the value and haven’t joined a social network. And there are countless companies and businesses who aren’t even close to understanding how to use new channels effectively, and the effect it will have on their business strategy and practices. And advertisers (and therefore lots of the money in content), are way behind.

But there’s a growing number of people who are familiar with the principles of the Cluetrain, even if they’ve never read it. They’re picking it up by living as part of it, and as my friend Tim recently commented on one of my blog posts,

I can’t wait to see the next generation do something with the mature version of the tech having grown up with it being nothing to be afraid of…

But while we’re waiting, the older generations are coming to Facebook and Twitter – and whether or not you’d pick Friendster, Myspace, Facebook or something else as the definition of early Web 2.0 and the social networked world, I’d guarantee Twitter would be the main name quoted for the next version. And there’s nine more before we even get to Web 3.0!

I’m a big fan of the TED talks, the conferences which started by covering Technology, Entertainment and Design, and now include a huge range of thought-leaders on a variety of topics. (More about TED here)

Somehow I hadn’t got around to watching the talk by Evan Williams from Twitter until I saw a good article about it by Garr Reynolds at Presentation Zen.

One interesting point is how Evan has followed a couple of hunches to build projects – Blogger and Twitter.

Secondly – Twitter was designed as a broadcast medium – one message went out to many.

But users invented the @reply functionality, the API, the use of hashtags, and started using it to raise awareness around issues, raise money for causes, implement marketing and business use, etc.

It’s a pretty quick presentation at just 8 minutes – and worth watching until the end to see what happens when TED Curator Chris Anderson uses Twitter search to look for mentions of Evan Williams.

There’s something about Twitter’s recent decisions that just doesn’t make any sense to me at the moment.

It’s experiencing huge growth and celebrity adoption, it’s appearing in mainstream media (Even The Sun is carrying stories about Twitter),  and it has some money in the bank.

But one of the big advantages of the Twitter model is that it can use the huge advantage of external developers and applications undertaking the risky part of establishing themselves before acquiring them or introducing something similar.

After all, Twitter acquired Summize to become Twitter Search.

But since then, things have been a little different. First Twitter acquired Values of n, the company behind Stikkit and I Want Sandy, with Rael Dornfest joining Twitter’s user experience group – and the former services being shut, which caused some outcry, and a group of developers to come together to create an open source version of Sandy.

Recently Twitter introduced a ‘suggested users‘ page for new registrations and alongside the options to find other members. Which seemed like a reasonable idea to encourage new users to start following and interacting with other members.

Sadly it’s rubbish. For two reasons.

• There’s no relevancy. It’s offered to new users before they have filled in profile details or sent any messages, meaning thatthe suggestions have no context, and are pretty much useless. And although many people have said this could be the start of monetisation, how much money do irrelevant friend suggestions make?
• There are far better options out there already. For new users with no context, why not simply let people take a look at relevant categories on Twitter user directory Twellow? And if you’re looking for relevant suggestions for people to follow, there’s already the totally awesome MrTweet. (Interview here)

The only time I've mentioned a whale, it had 'fail' in front of it!

Much better suggestions and information from MrTweet

And now there’s concern over the decision to limit API calls from applications. I’m not aware of how many calls are average, so take a look at Jesse Stay’s thoughts on the SocialToo blog, Mark Evans at Twitterati, or SocialToo advisor Louis Gray (Who very kindly recommended and linked to 140char today!)

The idea from Twitter’s perspective is to ensure reliability – which is certainly understandable giving the problems that sometimes occur – and the only services that aren’t viable any longer are those which notify you of people unfollowing, such as Qwitter (no longer with us) . But as Marshall Kirkpatrick writes at ReadWriteWeb, Twitter applications are developing incredibly fast and this could hurt anyone trying to offer something radically new. And as Rafe Needleman points out at Cnet, it seems very odd that Twitter hasn’t used this chance to partner with external developers.

On the bright side, the API limit should force more efficient use of the Twitter API, which will benefit everyone, and the Twitter Firehose and OAuth support are due within around a month.

Hopefully that will mean Twitter can stop worrying about the scalability and learn to love external applications again. Especially as they’re building financial models (e.g. Twittad and Magpie), and monetisable services (e.g. Stocktwit) which show where the cash is for Twitter without the internal team having to experiment at all.

It seems as if there are a million Twitter applications, widgets, and ways to publicise your membership and latest Tweets, but things are a bit twickier when it comes to Plurk.

So far, there has been an unofficial API, and third party Plurk tools are thin on the ground. But even more annoyingly, I can’t use the official Plurk widget.

There’s a simple reason. They offer it for users to embed into a Facebook, Myspace, or blog page. But they’ve fixed the width, so trying to display it on this blog, for instance, means the sidebar will be blown apart. And the width is set at 300 pixels wide – way too much for most pages on Facebook or Myspace.

So for the moment, I’ll not be sharing my Plurking as much as my Tweeting.

You can still find me on Twitter. And on Plurk.

Blimey, things are definitely starting to happen outside of Plurk. First came the first Plurk Facebook app, Plurksync, which updates your status with your most recent Plurk. Unfortunately it’s likely to suffer the same problem as status updates via Twitter, when you end up seeing the same message across every service an individual uses.

Although my favourite incident with linking microblogging and Facebook saw friend and colleague David Cushman in a surreal, endless loop of updates between Twitter and Facebook.

And now comes the unofficial, reverse-engineered, not supported by the Plurk team API, RLPLurkAPI provided by Ryan Lim.

Oh, and from the official Plurk blog comes the news that they’ve tweaked the Karma points.