140Char

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?

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 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.

I’ve realised that although I’ve been blogging just as often at my social media blog, TheWayoftheWeb.net, my frequency here has slipped a bit.

I’m starting to wonder whether that’s due to the fact I’m spending more time on my day job and other matters, or whether the financial situation etc has meant less focus on the microblogging boom? There is certainly a change of focus by the majority of blogs I’m reading, and what coverage remains in general blogging is generally all about Twitter and monetisation. Perhaps it’s also the fact Twitter has led the way to the mainstream with the arrival of celebrities from the wider world, rather than just social media agencies and bloggers!

I don’t think a period of slight consolidation is a bad thing - for one thing it might allow us more time to consider which applications really are more useful, and which are just adding to the noise. It might also give me a bit more time to actually play around with alternatives to Twitter. I gave up on Yammer after just a few days, and suddenly found in my absence a new group of colleagues had joined! I rarely get a chance to Plurk, Pownce or Jaiku (can any noun be a verb?). And then there’s getting a decent camera to use with Seesmic, Mobatalk, 12 Seconds etc.

Then there’s updating the tools list - for instance, there’s a new, improved version of Posty to play with (v1.6). And getting some more interesting people to interview about their microblogging or their application.

And there’s the long-needed recommendations for the other blogs which focus on their area. I have a few in my RSS list and more appearing all the time, so it’s about time I shared some link love.

I might even get time to find where all my other volunteer authors on here have vanished to!

So a bit of a quiet spell definitely wouldn’t be a bad thing - but I just know there’s a revoluntionary new app or tool around the corner!

Could the current financial situation force Twitter to start monetising microblogging with a newfound urgency?

Yes?

• Within the $20 million in VC funding, there is bound to be an element feeling a little twitchy at the moment.
• Would anyone buy a service for the valuations Twitter has had, without a working financial model?

No?

• $20 million can go a long way, if you’re careful!
• If Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg is being honest that the social network is concentrating on growth over revenue for three more years, then as the pre-eminent microblogging site, Twitter could follow a similar plan. The only flaw is that Facebook is already making money, just not as much as it could!

These are some initial thoughts, so it would be great to hear some opinions and ideas! Personally I think that we may see some of the smaller microblogging sites, perhaps Plurk for example, need to find revenue generation before Twitter, simply due to the lack of funding reserves. Twitter has the advantage of being able to sit back, and perhaps see some of the experimentation take place before acting.

Forgive the round-up format, but sometimes there just isn’t enough time in the day!

• Al Gore is coming to Twitter (Mashable). Whether or not you want Al Gore microblogging, more prominent figures means more mainstream coverage and members. Which increases the reach and opportunities in microblogging, even as it might dilute some of the things that initially appealed.
• Twestival write-up (TechcrunchUK). Sadly, and despite some farily strong persuasion by one of the organisers, I couldn’t make Twestival, the London Twitter meet to be social for charity. But by all accounts it was a huge success (I will definitely make the next one). Mike Butcher’s write-up and comparison with another event the previous night highlights why it was so good. The Twitter account for the event appears to be dormant now, but I’m guessing the website might remain active for the possibility of another one.
• Social Actions + Twitter mash-up (Mashable). Are auto-tweets bearable if they’re in a good cause? Pick the cause which resonates with you from a drop down list, and the system will auto-tweet once a day on your behalf to all the postings on that cause.
• The U.S Senate can officially resume Tweeting: (Venturebeat).  A new protocol rule change means members of the U.S. Senate can now share with the public more easily via public websites, including microblogs. There are some rules about disclosure, and what data politicians can collect about users of their own websites.
• Executive Twittering: Blogging without the time suck: (Pistachio). Businessweek profiled 10 CEOs who Twitter, and Laura Fitton goes on to explain why it can be such a benefit.
• How did personal video eclipse entertainment video (Chris Brogan). Interesting piece looking at the rise of personal video, and related tools like Seesmic and 12seconds.tv

That should keep everyone going for a bit…

As an Englishman (albeit one with a degree in American Studies), I’ve followed the U.S presidential nominations with a fairly casual interest, and with a slight leaning towards one candidate, but not enough that I’m going to talk about it.

Instead, I’m going to proclaim this the ‘Twitter Election’, and the sign of how news and reporting is changing for the better. First up is Twitter’s own Election 2008. It’s fascinating to watch the opinions and messages appearing every second, although the fact that it seems to be based around the keywords of candidates names means I’m tempted to tweet about McCain oven chips and see if it appears!

What’s interesting is how public service broadcaster C-Span has integrated Twitter, Blog coverage, Video, a Debate timeline and a keyword list into the ‘Debate Hub‘. It’s a great example of how ‘aggregation of sources of information provides a starting point for a media company to add it’s own expertise and reason to provide something of value.‘ Sorry, thought that sentence was worth highlighting, although other people have been saying the same thing for a while.

I’ve talked in the past about Twitter providing a news mechanism that trumps mainstream media for events like earthquakes. And I’ve taken a look at what mainstream media needed to do to utilise the new tools available or become increasing irrelevant.

But events like the death of Heath Ledger, or the various earthquakes around the world had a much more striking effect for those that were on Twitter at the time than for the majority of non-microbloggers waking up hours later and being perfectly happy with the coverage they were broadcast - because they weren’t up at 2am to witness how radically different it could be.

This time, it’s an event which has been flagged up in advance, allowing the word to spread - and it’s increasingly being adopted by various mainstream media sources to a greater or lesser extent, allowing far more people to see the benefits of microblogging over traditional coverage.

And I predict we’ll see more and more of this in the coming months, even with controversies like the decision from an U.S. newspaper and website to Twitter live from a child’s funeral. Whether or not it was the correct way to treat that particular situation at the current time, it’s a sign that the boundaries are shifting, and going past simply acknowledging Twitter coverage. And for microblogging to hit the mainstream, the boundaries need to be a long way further down the road than the mass adopters.

I think it’s also the reason for Twitter moving towards grouping, as much as for users. It’s why I was interested in the previously posted quote by Ev Williams, saying that groups are coming. I don’t think it’s necessarily about just Twitter for enterprise as an inward facing tool. I think in Twitter’s case it will also be about groups and tools for outward facing use by companies, which is why they’ve been seemingly slow to respond to Yammer, Present.ly etc.

It’s about raising routes to monetise from enterprise, but also providing the tools to grow the userbase to drive significant revenue. Facebook does OK at 100 million active users per month - Twitter has about 2.5 million registered used. And that mainstream exposure could be the push it needs.

Not the catchiest title for a genre of sites, but it works! I’ve posted before on my other blog about why I’m not a huge fan of Digg, (and alternatives to it) but it’s silly to deny the fact it’s a hugely popular site and format, and that some of the issues I have are Digg specific.

And there are two sites offering microblogging aggregation. I found Microblogging.com via founder @ShaunMorton on Twitter.  It’s essentially a niche social news gathering site for microblogging, and there’s nothing wrong with that! One of my remarks about Digg was that it increasingly faces a challenge from niche focussed rivals. It’ll be interesting to see if microblogging has enough interest to build a critical mass.

Dwigger has been covered elsewhere, but in the spirit of retweeting it’s an aggregator of tweets themselves, and it also creates threaded conversations with images and even video. Which is an interesting idea, but I suspect slightly flawed. The reasoning behind Twitter is that my contacts will be the filter of relevancy and interest, so it seems counterintuitive to go and seek out what complete strangers are judging to be relevant or important except as an object of curiousity. And Twitter Search allows me to see if terms are popular by volume across the whole of Twitter, rather than the microcosm of Twitterati who also use Dwigger.

Dwigger is by Sift Partners, so I’ll try and drop them a line shortly and get a detailed explanation of what I might be missing, and I’ll keep the jurt out until then, but I’m not sure there’s enough of a mass of microbloggers for these types of service quite yet. Considering Digg runs on around 20 million+ users a month, Stumbleupon is hitting around 6 million registered, and Twitter is around the 2-3 million mark, Microblogging.com and Dwigger might need a fair bit of patience to capitalise on the new communication medium.

Two websites are currently showing the way the microblogging format can be used outside of pure conversation. But although the pair even have similar names, they take totally different approaches. I’ve previously covered ‘Twitter radio’ Blip.fm, but somehow I’ve neglected to cover the other major twist on microblogging, Blippr.  (You can find me using it, here)

But what is interesting about the system is that it not only allows for 160 character reviews of entertainment (music, films, books, videogames), but the focus of the company behind it is concentrated more on the recommendation side of things than purely Twitter for reviews, which means they’re taking on some big names (Disclosure: It also means they play in a similar space to ditto.net, which I do some work with).

What is Blippr in 140 char?

(Jonathan): A community of people looking to discuss, discover and organize books, games, movies and music. In 160 characters or less, of course.

Your company (Tag Team Interactive) has a focus on social relationships and recommendations - what inspired this philosophy?

(Jonathan): My business partner and I just know and see the value in personal recommendations–the ones you receive from your family, your close friends, even just acquaintances. There’s an explicit amount of trust that you extend those influences in your life and you don’t need to come to understand. Recommendations across other platforms, like Amazon or Netflix for example, take time to train and come to trust. There’s this sort of “black box” effect. You’re not sure exactly why the item they’re recommending is a fit for you. However, if your good friend said “You have to see Pineapple Express, it’s hilarious”, it doesn’t require the same amount of learned trust. You already know you can trust that person. It causes even that much more drive to go out and see that movie.

Your company website mentions Blippr is your second application, but what was the first? Was it related to Blippr, and did your previous applications and websites have a direct effect on how Blippr was created?

(Jonathan): Our first was Judge-O-Rama, a site focused on enabling people to resolve their conflicts and contests in a head-to-head context. We like to think of it as our “practice app.” It was just something fun and entertaining, not quite as useful or focused as blippr. Judge-O-Rama was definitely instrumental in our working together, though, and at least serving as the inspiration to us starting to work together. In terms of how this served in blippr’s creation, I think this blog post will give you a good idea of how blippr started.

Who do you see as your competitors? Does it include Blip.fm? What are the advantages of Blippr?

(Jonathan): We don’t view Blip.fm as a direct competitor, per se. They’re doing the micro-thing, but we’re not trying to create a me-too “Twitter for reviews” application. That’s the obvious connotation most people make, given the review constraints, but we’re far more focused on developing the social recommendation and organization pieces than we are a simple micro-review platform. As such, we view our competitors more along the lines of Flixster, GoodReads, LibraryThing, Shelfari, iLike, Trusted Opinion, and a few others. Obviously one of our key advantages is our focus on not just one particular entertainment categories–movies or books or music or games–but on all of the above (we also plan on adding TV in the future). Furthermore, I think if you look at most of those sites, while they have solid communities, we’ve tried to make the participation process as simple as possible to encourage more participation. Also, last but not least, I would say that our focus on integrating with as many platforms as possible is a big differentiator. You can connect your blippr account with Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku, Pownce, Identi.ca, Tumblr, Facebook, Last.fm, GoodReads, LibraryThing, Amazon, and others, which is obviously a great opportunity for our users’ opinions and reviews. Those are some of the high level advantages, at least.

Obviously you’re monetising the site through Amazon, but do you have any further plans to drive revenue you can disclose? With traffic growing, was it a conscious decision not to include display advertising?

(Jonathan): We would say that commerce through various sites will definitely be a large share of revenue, but we do intend on eventually displaying ads that are relevant to blipprs’ userbase, as well. Obviously, the primary intent there is to offer entertainment advertisers a place to capture people who truly are interested in entertainment media and looking to make a decision. But we very much aim to make it a value-add to users first, then advertisers. Jeremy Liew, of Lightspeed Venture Partners, wrote a great blog post a while back on the topic of endemic advertising, which I believe really showcases blippr’s revenue opportunity.

Blippr users can cross-publish to Facebook, Friendfeed, Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku and Pownce. Do your users tie into the audience figures for those sites, or has there been any surprises? And is that the main word of mouth that is driving new registrations?

(Jonathan): This is assuredly a large driver of how people are discovering blippr, but I wouldn’t say that’s the main word of mouth driving registrations. Email invites sent from users have also been a large driver. In terms of surprises, I wouldn’t say there have been too many. Most connections have been with Twitter and Facebook. The rest are pretty much equally spread.

Are there any of the cross-publishing sites which are easier or harder to integrate into?

(Jonathan) That would be a question for my co-founder and business partner, Chief Executive Geek, Chris Heald. Some have taken more time than others. Obviously Facebook takes far more time than any of the others due to building an application for the platform, which is much more than just a cross-publish opportunity. iPhone and OpenSocial integrations will be the next difficult pieces for us, but they are coming.

Does scaling prove as problematic for Blippr as it has done for Twitter? There seem to have been some timeouts recently when I’ve been using Blippr?

(Chris): I don’t think scaling is going to be anywhere near the problem for us that it has been for Twitter; our architecture and product design is a good deal different than Twitter’s, so we avoid many of the specific design issues that they’ve had problems scaling. We have had some timeouts lately, but those were due to some rather exceptional circumstances, and a lack of hardware to fail over gracefully to (in those cases, the problems weren’t scaling issues so much as our primary app server going down without a graceful failover - that’s since been corrected). We’re still getting this thing off the ground, so our infrastructure is very much in its infancy (though we’ve been working lately to address that!). However, we have built this thing with an eye towards scaling, and don’t foresee any major problems in doing so as we move forward. Of course, the proof is in the pudding, but we’ve worked very hard to build a flexible product, and hope to see it grow about as quickly as we can keep up with it!

Do you plan to focus on utilising a microblogging format as the logical mechanism for your relationship and recommendation applications?

(Jonathan): The main inputs for our recommendations are explicit relationships (who you follow), agreements with other peoples’ blips, and the ratings you give titles. (Chris): I don’t think the microblogging format could necessarily be described as the mechanism for our relational/recommendation tools - the other data we’re collecting drives that - but the microblogging format uniquely contributes to this aim in that it encourages extremely high levels of participation, and thus, results in more useful data being present in the system for us to draw conclusions from. It is absolutely a key component to the success of these other components that we have built, even if it isn’t the primary mechanism by which these processes work. Whether we’d use it in future similar applications, I can’t say, but we’re both big fans of the behaviors that it encourages, and would very likely consider it.

And are there any Blips on products which have really shocked, surprised or amused you?

(Jonathan): Good question. It’s hard to pare down to just a single blip or two. Seriously, I can say that I am the biggest fan of blippr. As a huge movie geek myself, I’m constantly reading through blips and finding myself agreeing, laughing, vehemently disagreeing, and more. While some people fault blippr’s micro-format and say that you can’t really know whether something is good or bad within 160 characters, I say, read for yourself. You’ll be surprised!

There have been lots of reports on the Techcrunch50 startup conference/competition, and lots of coverage of Yammer winning the top prize.

It takes the Twitter model, and asks ‘What are you working on’ for enterprise, so a private Twitter for companies. It’s free to use for employees, but the business model kicks in if a company wants to claim their network and get administrative tools to remove messages and users, set password policies, or set IP ranges for who can use it.

So far so good - as always, I’m reserving my judgement until I get to sit and play with it - which I’m about to start doing for a fun little project. One of my main concerns is about the scale of take-up. A comparison between Facebook and Twitter shows microblogging is far from ubiquitous.

With this in mind, will there be enough scale within enough companies to make it worthwhile for companies, and also to show enough revenue to make sense? The natural audience is in the global technology companies, but beyond that, it might be somewhat limited as a mechanism for people with 6 employees signed up and the rest ignoring it.

It will also be intriguing to see how it works across departments, and particularly across verticals. Will people interact in a meaningful way if the management are seeing every message (Yam?). Will it lead to decisions becoming slowed by  Death by Committee as everyone seeks to put in their opinion?

For me, there are too many questions to predict whether it will be successful or not. Within a large UK organisation I’ve seen Facebook rocket in popularity for social use but fail to get traction for business use. Meanwhile LinkedIn has again grown, but as a tool for external contacts rather than questions and interaction. One company in one country isn’t exactly a representative survey, but even within the hardcore of early adopters who embrace social networking (and indeed microblogging), I’m not sure there’s enough conversation to necessitate Yammer over email/instant messaging/forums.

Still the $50,000 Techcrunch prize is more money than a lot of social networks have achieved, so they’re off to a good start!

If you’re writing about Twitter, Plurk, Pownce, Jaiku, Identi.ca etc, then register an account and spend some time before your article (and ideally afterwards).

Otherwise, and I’m not naming names, but you look like an arse.

I know Friday is the traditional day for a round-up post, but so much happens in the microblogosphere on a daily basis, all the 140char team have been busy, and Monday gives some nice alliteration:

• Some stats from Twitter on how the new SMS rules have affected UK Outbound SMS usage:

• Zygotweet and tweetSMS plan to offer Twitter via SMS in the UK (Via Twitterholics)
• Useful and interesting list and stats for newspapers on Twitter (Well, American ones!).
• Jaiku got hit by a power failure at the data center provider for their web servers earlier today, but is back online.
• Plurk has had some minor design and usability upgrades.
• Pownce has integrated FireEagle, which means all your uploads and messages can now be automatically geo-tagged with your location.
• Tumblr now allows you to search within Tumblelogs.
• And Seesmic has a new and improved search function, and threaded player. The improvements to the player make it more and more a mini-application for your website and blog, which now lets you: -start a new conversation straight from where you are without having to leave the site, -reply to any video in private and not only in public. -post to twitter the link from your reply.

So not too much has happened!