140Char

Inspired by the recent decision of U.S TV star Conan O’Brien to follow just one apparently random Twitter user, Leo LaPorte and his guests on last Sunday’s Twit.tv show (John C Dvorak, Kevin Rose and Clayton Morris) decided to follow suit with an added twist – both the Twitter user that was picked and one random follower will win an Apple iPad.

As a result, @LisaTickledPink was chosen by a search for the phrase ‘I hate technology’, and has shot from 2 followers to 17,428 followers at the time of writing. As a result, she’s turned off email notifications from new followers, but has already been interviewed on radio and TV in her native New Zealand.

Meanwhile the subject of Conan’s attention, @LovelyButton, still has a slight lead with 21,218 followers:

In terms of creating attention, Conan and his 616,177 followers are now up against @leolaporte with 172,323, Dvorak’s 65,656, Morris with 20,899, and of course not only Kevin Rose’s 1,157,702, but also the attention gathered via Digg.

Besides the publicity the two stunts have garnered, it’s interesting to compare the relative pull of a showbiz star vs tech stars, and also that attention and fame on Twitter is still often driven via famous endorsement. Neither of the two subjects are inherently are more or less worthy of following because of the attention they’ve had, but the mix of request/prize/attention has seen both followed by tens of thousands of people.

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.

I’ve long been following Dave Winer, and I’ve been paying particular attention to some of his current projects concerning Twitter, microblogging and OPML files and more.

More on that later, as it appears the wireless internet connection on my train to work is completely broken, but I had to mentioned the list of who read ReadWriteWeb also follow on Twitter after @cslyons pointed out I was on it!

Luckily it can’t go to my head as I’m pretty far down the list with 7 followers compared to someone like @timoreilly’s 124 followers or Scobleizer’s, but the gap isn’t as big as I would have imagined, so maybe ReadWriteWeb readers have better taste than Twitter users in general.

I’ve played around with numerous Twitter analytics and statistic applications, and I have to say that Twitter Analyzer seems to be about the most comprehensive in terms of available information.

It features:-

User stats:- including number of tweets, reach, hashtags, popularity,etc etc.

Friends stats:- including f0llowers growth rate, location, activity and re-tweeting, etc.

Mentions:- including all, social, updates, etc.

Groups:- including by occupation, join date, gender, etc.

And Trends and Fun tabs are apparently ‘coming soon’.

It’s fast after the initial username analysis, and nicely presented, with handy graphs and charts. The biggest flaws currently are that you don’t seem to be able to export the charts and graphs to anywhere else (although there’s a handy ‘Tweet’ option for some of the interesting information you might want to share via Twitter.

It also seems to be limited to the 30 days for a lot of the information, in line with the data and limits that Twitter has. Which is understandable, but also frustrating. If they were able to pull data in on a regular schedule to provide longer timeframes once a username has first been indexed, and enable the ability to export the information for presentations and spreadsheets, it would be a clear leader in Twitter stats and analysis.

So apparently Jennifer Aniston ended her relationship with John Mayer because he didn’t have time for her, but did have time to keep updating Twitter. Meanwhile Ashton Kutcher makes national news in several countries after posting a Twitpic of wife Demi Moore’s bikini-clad bottom.

For those of you with an inquisitive nature, the image is still available.

Besides the gossip angle of celebrites on Twitter (For that I’d recommend @heatworld, one of the titles I work on), it raises interesting questions about both the nature of celebrities when they’re increasingly interacting online, and also the nature of relationships playing out in public.

Will Twitter mean more ‘real’ celebrities?

Twitter undoubtedly gives the appearance of closing the gap between the public and celebrities, even with follower numbers of top stars reaching huge numbers (hundreds of thousands follow Ashton, Demi, and John etc). But does it also put more pressure on celebrities to produce content which previously would have been filtered by their relationship with the press?

Rather than deciding to work with the press and paparazzi, or spend their time trying to hide from the media, will celebrities feel they need to increase their popularity by updating on an ever-increasing basis, and perhaps giving more insight into their lives than they might have usually allowed, in the same way as ‘regular’ people?

Will it also start to change the current mainstream obsession with style over substance, leading to a greater popularity of celebrities capable of creating content of interest?

What about relationships?

As more couples and families are likely to appear on Twitter, as they have on Facebook, it could have serious implications for the people involved. Already there have been tragic cases involving social networking, such as in the UK, when a man murdered his estranged wife after she changed her Facebook status to ’single’. But Twitter could be potentially more problematic due to the space it occupies between instant messaging and previous social networks.

The nature of @replies, and the speed of interaction could see public arguments occurring when couples monitor who their partner is interacting with.

Will we all have to think about not just how we present ourselves, but also how our families and relationships are presented and available online – in the same way as celebrity couples have needed to manage themselves in the past. And will that effectively flip for those celebrities who have a happy and interesting partnership, as they’ll benefit from the ease with which they can reveal details and interact publicly online?

Is this the blurring of the celebrity continuum, so that the megastars at the head of The Long Tail, and those in the tail, are seemlessly joined without some of the segregation between those who are labelled as famous and those who aren’t?

With Twitter just celebrating it’s third birthday and social media still in the troublesome teenage years, the pace of change and the effects it will have are only going to accelerate in the future – it might be worth checking with your significant other about their online plans now, rather than later!

There are so many interesting visualisations of data around, I almost hesitate to mention any. But Twittersheep is interesting because it takes a similar approach to Wordle, but applies it to your Twitter followers, rather than your own account.

My (@badgergravling) Twittersheep result (Click to see full size)

Which is a useful tool for seeing what friends and followers are interested in, and also handy if you need a quick and easy way to display that type of data to someone.

The other bonus is that it only requires your username, not your password.

I’ve just been issued a friendly challenge by @digitalmaverick, as we both have around 1700 followers.
After wondering out loud whether it’s wrong to be a little excited by the thought of reaching the 2000 followers mark, he’s issued a friendly competition to see who can get there first…
So if you know anyone who might get some value or entertainment from following me, please recommend they add www.twitter.com/badgergravling asap!

Update: We’re just agreeing a forfeit for the loser, such as volunteering for charity work on Christmas Day – plus I’ll donate 2000 pence (£20) to the charity of choice of the 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!

A while ago I wanted to test exactly what difference having human interaction makes on Twitter, vs Twitterfeed.

As a result:

If you’d like to see the latest news from Car Magazine: @carmagazinenews

If you’d like to see what Car Magazine’s Associate Editor is tweeting about: @carmagazinetim

Both accounts were set up on the same day, within a few hours of each other. What’s interesting is that @carmagazinetim has 147 followers, to the 130 following the news feed – yet Tim has tweeted 1/3 of the news feed total, skips days, and only follows 32 people. So feel free to message him and encourage him to get more involved!

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?…

There’s been some commotion over the fact Britney Spears (or at least the PR team with her), has a Twitter account to accompany a new blog-type site.

Aside from the fact it’s disapointing she isn’t texting entries herself, and I’m not entirely sure how many of the Twittersphere will respond (1720 followers at the time of writing, only 360 more than your good author!), it’s a sign of a growing move towards the mainstream for Twitter.

After all, I’ve been meaning to post that Twitter doesn’t need a single new member to be perfect for me with the memberships of legendary British wits John Cleese (7084 followers) and Stephen Fry (7400 followers)

Plus MC Hammer has established himself before Britney, with 6019 followers. And sci-fi fans will appreciate the presence of former Star Trek star Wil Wheaton (19504 followers).

Strangely the Twitter Fan Wiki lists Hammer, Wheaton, and anyone else within a ‘Minor Celebrities‘ list. Seems a bit harsh! Perhaps we might need to make room on 140char.com for a more updated list – particularly of those celebrities who are tweeting for themselves and making a great job of it (Looks like everyone except Britney then!)

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?