140Char

And then I’m having a family weekend, so updates will resume properly on Monday/Tuesday next week.

Details of London Twestival 2009.

I never fail to be amazed by the Twestival movement – it seems to get bigger and more spectacular every time, and all for a great cause. And it’s grown incredibly quickly, although the earliest events were always fantastically well run and offered, with hindsight, a good idea of what might be to come…

There’s a slim chance I might get away with tweeting discretely during ‘family time, so feel free to check @badgergravling.

Portwiture is an interesting mash-up by Tyler Sticka, which grabs photos from Flickr which match the content of your most recent Twitter updates.

By inputting your Twitter username, a grid or slideshow is created, and you can select the number of photos, to grab photos by relevance, recency or how interesting they are.

And that’s it – as Tyler writes, it’s simply an experiment in mashing social services, using JavaScript framework jQuery and public APIs, some PHP and SlideShowPro. What is quite fun is that he’s suggested anyone who wants to discuss possible uses should do it on Twitter with the hashtag #whyportwit.

I ran my own Twitter account, and you can see the results.

Although there’s no easy embed option, an RSS feed is provided – it would be great if images could be linked to individual tweets – perhaps providing a business model if Tyler uploaded advertiser images, and then pulled them into the system alongside Flickr photos?

And if I could just embed it easily, it could become a really fun way to see Tweeple represented.

But it’s yet another example of the benefits of Open APIs and inventive people, which has fuelled Twitter so far.

Twitter marketer and celebrity Laura Fitton (@Pistachio) has come up with a great charity campaign over Christmas, having realised that just $2 from each of her followers would mean $25,000 – enough for a water project for a school or hospital by Charity Water.

The impetus for this is the fact that 5,000 children die every day from the lack of clean drinking water.

And as a bonus, if $10,000 plus gets raised, it’ll be matched by Tipjoy and Betaworks. Plus all fees are being waived for micropayments via Twitter for this case by Tipjoy.

But Laura puts it far more passionately and eloquently than I can (plus there are more details on the charity, payments, and even an easy form to use), so

• Go and visit the Well Wishes post on the Touchbase blog right now.

If that isn’t enough, Squidoo is also giving money to charity – Every time you tweet a message from the list of 21 charities, it’s a vote which means $1 is donated to that charity (one per person, per day), up to a maximum of $30,000.

Both might be slightly overshadowing my own Twitter charity pledge – @digitalmaverick and myself are racing to 2000 followers, with the loser doing a charity forfeit. Plus I’m giving £20 to a charity chosen by my 2000th follower!

So I’ve been using Magpie to serve advertising within my Twitter feed for one week now, and I thought it was a good time to post the results and reaction.

I started on November 28th, warning my followers that I was about to start testing the system, and immediately lost one follower, with about 4 of the 1598 warning me that they would either unfollow immediately, or consider dropping me if it became more than a test.

One week later, and my follower account is currently 1669 followers, partly as a result of my normal addition of interesting people which has also seen my following count raise by a similar amount.

Magpie offers the ability to set the ratio of advertising to normal messages, and I’ve stuck with the 5:1 default ratio as a starting point to see how much inventory was served – within 7 days, and with around 500+ tweets, Magpie has so far served three advertising messages, earning me a little over 10 Euros.

So far, since the initial response to the test I’ve not had a single message regarding the advertising place in my tweets, and I’m not aware of anyone responding unfavourably.

Reaction so far:

So far it’s seemed that Magpie’s inventory means the adverts being served are closer to the maximum 200:1 ratio than 5:1, which is probably a good thing – particular after the adverse reaction it generated on launch.

It’s made me think that perhaps rather than a tweet to ad ratio (As the number of tweets can vary enormously for any user per day), perhaps there should also be an adverts per day ratio, if the inventory being served increases. I do wonder how many potential advertisers were dissuaded by the outcry on Twitter, and whether the inventory will increase now that the dust has settled.

It also means that it will take 5 weeks for me to reach the minimum payout of 50 Euros at current rates – not terrible when compared to Google Adsense etc, and also not bad for something which wasn’t really monetised until now (I am also trialling Twittad to see if monetising Twitter profile backgrounds is realistic)

I’m definitely intending to keep the test going for a while longer to see what happens to advertising ratios, and to see if there is any more response to the presence of adverts in my Twitter feed (Also to see if the payout system works).

Incidentally, it’s also running on the 140char test account: @140char_com, which I’m going to be using more in the future to test services which may carry an element of risk to them, after the growing concerns that various 3rd party applications require both your Twitter username and password. This way I can identify which services are a real risk without running the chance of compromising my main personal account which I’ve built up over 18 months or so! With just 18 followers, the first ad paid just 0.02 Euros!

Let me know if you’ve been using the service, or your reaction to it, particularly if you’ve unfollowed me because of it!

I’m a big believer in trying out things you want to comment on. Especially if it could contribute to the hosting costs for 140char.com.

Therefore, you can now buy the background of my Twitter profile page for 7 days, for just $50 on Twittads, which I wrote about at length on ‘Is Twittads just a fad?’.

(For the record, I’m followed by 1245, and following 1254 – and just posted by 4071st update at the time of writing).

What I’m interested in is finding out whether anyone is willing to shell out $50 for anyone over the 1000 mark, or where exactly the price point evolves to, and I’m really interested in seeing which advertisers are signed up and using the service and what their method is for seeing a Return on Investment.

Will it convert me to thinking there’s a bright future for Twittad?

You know you’re successful when, despite your much-documented problems, and around $20million in VC funding, your fans try to raise money.

Which is exactly what @ChrisReed is trying to do with Twitterfund.

OK, so at the time of writing, it’s raised a total of £30 since it launched around the end of May – but it’s the fact it even exists which shows the level of involvement and commitment that Twitter, and other microblogging platforms, can generate.

(Incidentally, you can find me @badgergravling.)

The other reason Twitter is so inspirational is in the sheer number of applications being developed. Twemes, Twitpic and Quotably are now part of the Microblogging Tools list. Oh, and Tweetscan. And Yoono. I think that’s the lot!