140Char

The Shorty Awards are held annually, with nominations and votes submitted by anyone via Twitter, combined with voting by the Real-Time Academy of Short Form Arts & Sciences. Twitter client Tweetdeck was one of the 26 category winners announced last week.

The Shorty Awards

Tweetdeck won the Apps category ahead of Hoosuite, Mr Unfollowers, ColourLovers, MailChimp and AggreTweet. Other winners included @BettyDraper, @WholeFoods, and @NathanFillion.  You can see the full list of winners on the Shorty Awards website.

Should Twitter let you post more than 140 characters, include more metadata in tweets, or include embedded images?

Two prominent internet voices, Dave Winer and Robert Scoble have both recently posted their views on how Twitter should improve it’s core product. Dave Winer proposes that using the basis of SMS as a reason for not expanding the core capabilities of the service is wrong, and that Twitter is really SMS 2.0.

Meanwhile Robert Scoble uses the claim Twitter’s web traffic is flat to suggest 14 ways for the service to become more engaging. Number 1 is to remove the 140 character limit and to allow photos and videos in line to ‘communicate something more than the metaphorical equivalent of a grunt.’

The question is whether either of them is right – from a more technical standpoint, I think there’s a valid viewpoint that Twitter could expand the data accompanying a tweet in some way to give more value when it’s referenced by other services.

But I think it’s an incredibly bad idea for Twitter to lose the 140 character limit, and allow inline photos and videos.

For starters, a service already exists for that, called Facebook. Scoble references it as a more entertaining service for that reason, but I wouldn’t agree. Twitter is fun and engaging in creating conversations and quick observations – for both work and pleasure, whereas Facebook is a way to catch up on all the intimate details of your close family and friends.

It also ignores the myriad of ways that people interact with Twitter already – if I want the basic web service on PC or mobile it’s available. If I want greater adaptability, there’s Tweetdeck, Seesmic or many of the other clients. A huge number of clients are available to cater to almost every need – therefore removing the problem of Twitter attempting to do it. Every change made by a major social network is analysed endlessly, and attempting to please everyone results in something which pleases noone.

Increasing the scope of Twitter also infringes on the Twitter ecosystem of third party businesses – embedding images instantly removes the need for the likes of Twitpic, and suddenly increases storage costs for Twitter.

And suddenly you lose a unique network, and instead you have a Facebook also-ran.

So now – I don’t think we should lose the 140 character limit just yet.

Sky News is installing Twitter client Tweetdeck as default software across journalists computers to encourage and integrate social media for newsgathering and reporting, as revealed by Journalism.co.uk.

It will be on all staff computers within a month, and as part of the move, Sky’s ‘Twitter Correspondant’ Ruth Barnett will move to Sky’s Westminster bureau. Since her appointment, around 90 staff have their own Twitter accounts, and the idea is to no longer ‘ghettoise’ it as the role of one person.

Sky already publish a feed from Sky News @SkyNews, and @SkyNewsBreak, which reveals breaking news before it’s even made it onto the main website.
“There aren’t so many users as Facebook, but they are deeply engaged and it can be applied in so many ways,” Executive Producer Julian March told Journalism.co.uk.

What’s interesting is that this is an official announcement and policy for all staff – many organisations are already using Tweetdeck or similar tools on an unofficial basis – usually requested on an individual basis. Certainly many of my colleagues at Absolute Radio have been using Tweetdeck for ages, while I currently use Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop together for two different purposes to avoid mistakenly cross-tweeting. Still others I’ve spoken to are using web-based solutions such as Splitweet, removing the need for downloads and installation.

The announcement is also good timing for Tweetdeck, which has just rolled out a new version of its iPhone app, countering some of the publicity around the acquisition of Ping.fm by Seesmic. Official corporate adoption is going to be just one of the measures in the popularity and success of Twitter clients as we enter a period of serious consolidation by the main players.

I may have already written about Twitter lists, but certainly the interest in them hasn’t started to wane yet.

In addition to everyone and their blogging dog creating posts on the lists you really, definitely, absolutely should follow,  Mark Drapeau has an interesting post on O’Reilly Radar, in which he puts forward the idea that Twitter lists are a more organic metric than the number of followers/RTs an individual has.

Meanwhile the two rivals for most comprehensive Twitter client, Tweetdeck and Seesmic, have both revealed the imminent inclusion of list functionality:

‘While we’re not saying exactly how we’re integrating lists just yet – hey, we all need a few secrets! – be happy in the knowledge that we are integrating lists into TweetDeck. And as you would expect, we’re not just planning any old run-of-the mill integration…oh no. We think you’ll find that what we have planned for Lists is going to take your social media experience with TweetDeck to new heights.’ - Tweetdeck blog.

‘OF COURSE Seesmic will have user lists very soon. I have them on my Seesmic Desktop already testing.’ – Seesmic founder @Loic on Twitter.

I’m convinced Twitter lists will remain a highly important change for Twitter, both for users, and for monetisizing the business.

One of the most popular Twitter clients, Tweetdeck, has added new features in the latest release,  version 0.31. It’s pushing forward as one of only two Twitter clients with a share of over 10%, as measured by Twitstats.

Included in the latest release is a new notification system which can be applied to certain groups. Plus it also has inline reply, retweets and direct messages inside the notification menu.

A major feature you might not notice is that Tweetdeck has now been optimised to consume less memory, which is good for everyone – plus there’s also the time-saving option of keyboard shortcuts, and a Heads-Up Display.

And depending on how popular you are, you might find the feature to view your newest 100 followers comes in useful as you can directly follow, block or add to a group.

Check oout the video below for the official walk-through:

One thing I’ve when people compare Tweetdeck versus Seesmic Desktop, or when there are discussions around the top Twitter clients is the assumption that people only ever pick one client at a time.

At the same time, I’ve started to wonder if the arms race between Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop means that people assume users only ever want more features – rather than perhaps using a comprehensive client for work and a lightweight client for commenting whilst watching television for example.

So before I write my own assumptions I wanted to throw out the question:

An interesting post on the Twittown apps and widget community blog suggested Twitter ‘Took on Facebook’s Zuckerberg and Won‘.

It tracks the timeline between Facebook updating the Terms of Service for the social network, and rolling back to the original terms due to the outcry over ownership of content uploaded.

And while I don’t believe that Twitter outcry alone led to the decision to move back to the original terms and consult users about updates – Google blog search shows the outcry through full length blogging – the Twittown post does suggest that Twitter opinions had a significant effect.

And I would expect the Facebook team to be monitoring Twitter alongside all other channels – especially as FB considered Twitter important enough to try to buy it!

And it shows how monitoring and responding to probably the largest, and certainly the quickest online focus group makes sense for adding value and monetisation, whether it’s by Twitter, or third-party applications like Tweetdeck.

I didn’t realise that Twitstat has a list of the clients which post most frequently to Twitter (that are tracked by @twitstat), until I saw the recent list published by Mashable.

The web interface tops the list at 29.57%, then it’s

• Tweetdeck 10.58% (Uber client for Twittering and monitoring)
• Twitterfeed 5.54% (Automated website and blog feeds)
• Twhirl 4.92% (Effective Twitter client)
• Twitteriffic 3.79% (Twitter client for mobile).

And the next four places are all mobile clients, with Twitpic in tenth.

Warren at Twittermaven took things a little further by aggregating the mobile, desktop and utility categories, and pointing out more people use mobile to post than desktop clients. One of his posters has also pointed out that the data could be misleading as people might post through the full web page on mobile internet.

But I’d expect the trend to be fairly close to reality. A mobile-optimised experience is likely to be an easier ’sell’ than moving from the web interface to a client. And although early adopters and corporate Tweeters can find huge value from tools like Tweetdeck,  that’s not the average Twitter user.

The top 10 applications account for 70% of usage, which conforms to The Long Tail. Friends of 140char on the list include MrTweet at #40 and disapointly Cesare’s great Posty client is down the list at #211.

Tweetdeck is an Adobe Air desktop application that brings Twitter to the desktop of Mac and PC in the most readable format yet.

Tweetdeck uses column layouts to arrange Tweets however you like. The default columns are All Tweets, Replies, Direct, but Tweetdeck’s functionality allows you to add/remove columns and custom ‘build’ your own columns – even group certain Twitter users to their own column.

It also gives you on screen notifications of new Tweets and incorporates an optional column to display a Twitscoop keyword cloud to show you what the biggest keywords are on Twitter right now.

The interface is sleek and Web 2.0 style. Columns can be resized or rearranged by dragging. You can also Tweet directly from the application of course, and it has built in shorten url functionality and Twitpic.

The only thing I would say it lacks is highlighting of new Tweets, which I greatly appreciate from Socialthing.