140Char

There is one feature I dearly wish Twitter would implement as soon as possible. Although I understand they need a business model, and my day job will hopefully be made slightly easier with their proposed marketing/business tools, there is one thing which is becoming ever more vital to me as a user.

Let me search and organise my Direct Messages easily, please. Tweetdeck does.

(I’m trying to check through some of the other popular clients, such as Seesmic Desktop)

For me, Twitter is easily my most used social network – I do use the messaging functionality in Facebook and Linkedin, for example, but Twitter is the stream of contacts and information that I follow and interact with constantly.

And as my network has grown, and Twitter has increase in popularity, an ever-increasing amount of business and personal messages are flowing in and out of my accounts.

It’s starting to replace email as my primary form of conversation with many people.

And yet I have over 200+ Direct Messages, and more coming in every day. And despite my best efforts to sort and file the information, there’s so much getting lost in a list that I can’t order, filter or search.

And although I’m a fan of Tweetdeck, there are times when I can’t install Adobe Air, or I need to use the web interface for other reasons.

Cheers.

A User.

In the increasingly complicated and over-populated world of Twitter applications, sometimes it’s nice to go back to something simple.

Take swg.fm for example. To share an mp3, you insert your username, the name of the artist, the songname, and click send.

And you’re then redirected to your Twitter profile with basic (editable) information for tweeting your song – and anyone clicking on the link is taken to the appropriate video (for example from Youtube) or mp3.

Here’s my test message, challenging it with the relatively obscure Varsity Drag.

And here’s my attempt to go for the ever-popular Freebird!

The secret appears to be that actually the combination of search and url shortener could really apply to anything, and music just looks cooler when you get a video appear.

Want to find Twitter users to follow? There are already a fair number of directories out there, but Followformation offers a slightly different approach.

Whereas Twellow, WeFollow or Just Tweet It display lists for users to explore and manually add followers, you can now select your area of interest, and automatically follow the Top 10 to Top 50 people listed on followformation.

The rankings within each area of interest, e.g. Sports, or Social Media, are all defined by follower counts, so essentially you’re just grabbing the most-followed people who have an interest in their profile.

The only people I can see getting much value from the service are new users, as it’s at least slightly more relevant than the Suggested User List.

Twitter website traffic has overtaken both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal for April 2009, as picked up by PaidContent and expanded on by ReadWriteWeb.

Which is a handy stat, but….

Are we really comparing like for like, or is this as misleading as comparing print and online figures?

For starters, we’re looking at website traffic, and although publication has numerous ways to be accessed online, I’d risk assuming that Twitter’s proportion of mobile and desktop client access is greater than that of the newspaper sites – which probably means the numbers went past the paper sites long ago.

And where’s the measures of interaction for comparison? While not every Twitter user is interacting, and newspaper sites are building in increasing routes to conversations and communities, surely it’s the engagement, interaction and effectiveness of Twitter versus other sites which is of as much importance? Even when it’s breaking news, e.g. Mumbai, the ability to converse with both the source and others is built into Twitter to a far greater extent than the paper sites.

Finally for a comparison – what amount of data is being generated by the different sites?

That’s surely of major importance considering the changes happening in general searching:

First hands on test with Wolfram Alpha

Google search tools moving closer to ‘real-time’

And considering the current wave of new and improved Twitter search tools:

Scoopler

Twitscoop

Tweetmeme

Oh, and major changes to Twitter Search itself.

Whether or not the current buzz and celebrity/mainstream adoption continues, or whether a backlash increases along with the pretty high drop-out rate from people trying Twitter for the first time, it’s the levels of data and engagement which are key to the longterm success, and routes to monetization for Twitter, rather than sheer mass audience numbers. Particularly when the types of both advertiser and advertising which are going to be most effective will also be quite different from traditional publishing outlets.

The first is my contribution to the debate on whether Twitter and the real-time web will replace Google. I couldn’t decide which blog to post it on, as it crosses over to both my sites, so apologies for the linkage.

So to brighten things up with something more light-hearted:

Get your Status on a T-Shirt with Twitoshirt

That’s right, you can now quickly and easily post your favourite status message at Twitoshirt, and then proudly wear your (or someone else’s) genius for just $16.99.

Whether or not you’d want to might be another matter.

But it does make me wonder if I should revive the Tweet of the Week, and if I’ve missed a business opportunity there!

I should have really put this in my last post, ‘Testing Magpie advertising within Tweets‘. If you want to see if anyone is using the service at the moment, check out a Twitter Search for #magpie.

And I have to feel sorry for the unfortunate Twitter user @magpie, who isn’t anything to do with the service (Their Twitter account is @beamagpie).

Oh, and if you happen to sign up, why not help fund www.140char.com for the futre by using this link? http://be-a-magpie.com/bkq4mw

And here’s a nice graph of what’s happening (should dynamically update from time of posting!)

As the full horror of the ongoing terrorist attacks in Mumbai (Bombay) unfolds, Twitter has once again become the place to find first hand accounts and updates. So much so, that CNN is citing both Twitter and Flickr as the places to keep up with the latest updates, as updated by @Moto62 and many others.

Meanwhile @BreakingNewz is trying to raise awareness of a blood shortage at JJ Hospital due to the attacks. And @hemanshukumar provides a phone number to donate at St George’s hospital. And @Netra provided a direct contact for the blood bank at JJ Hospital.

Other reports on the role Twitter is playing in relaying first hand reports and reactions to the news include Techcrunch, and GigaOm.

Responses and reactions are flowing incredibly fast on Twitter, and you can follow the stream here. (Flickr results are here). Or you can follow a localised Twitter search updates.

It’s hard to find the right words to express the sympathy I have for everyone there right now, but seeing individuals sharing important information to help each other is a reminder of the good in the world. And also that in the debates about monetising microblogging, perhaps we’ve missed a far more important role and legacy we could be helping to develop further as a response tool to tragic situations.

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!

I’ve just spotted a great new Twitter search tool to find Twitter people by categories (Found via Mashable).

Twellow has already indexed 300,000 Twitter users into various categories (Including me!), with users replicated across all appropriate categories. For example, I’m the 96th most followed person in Marketing, but I also appear in Management, Advertising (hmmmmm?), News, Geeks and Blogging. All the main categories have appropriate sub-categories to find people more easily (Although there does seem to be Marketing as a category, and also a sub-category of Advertising).

And beyond browsing, you can also use specific search terms, including within specified categories.

Until now, your options were to find people within Twitter, hope to find people via keywords, or use Twitterpacks to find anyone that had manually listed themselves. Suddenly finding other people got a whole lot simpler.

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