140Char

If you want evidence of the sheer amount of content and data being created by Twitter, look no further than the evidence provided by Twitter analytics team member Kevin Weil on the official Twitter blog.

In 2007, Twitter users were tweeting 5,000 times per day.

In 2008, Twitter users were tweeting 300,000 times per day.

In 2009 Twitter users were tweeting 2.5 million per day, and it grew 1400% to 35 million per day.

And in 2010? Twitter users are tweeting 50 million times per day, which works out at 600 tweets per second.

Kevin goes on to mention Tweet deliveries as a much higher metric, and also says that the team will make time to share more info on ways to measure and understand the information network.

50 million messages is an interesting figure considering the measurements of web-based Twitter usage are pinned at around 55 million, and several studies indicate there’s a high churn rate of new users and a high proportion of dormant accounts – it indicates those that ‘get’ Twitter tend to share a pretty high amount of information. Which isn’t unusual, considering the same curve correlates with the amount of bloggers regularly updating, for example.

It also reinforces why tweets are becoming integrated into search tools from Google, Bing and many more.

Twitter has become one of the prime targets for phishing and spam attacks, due to both it’s huge growth in user numbers, but also the each with which messages can spread (partly due to the inherent weakness in using short urls).

The latest example is the BZPharma ‘LOL this is funny’ attack, as detailed by security firm Sophos. Messages include ‘Lol. this is me??’, ‘lol , this is funny’ and ‘Lol. this you??’, and include a link which looks like ‘http://example.com/?rid=http://twitter.verify.bzpharma.net/login’ –

with the example.com element varying between a number of addresses.

There’s a handy Youtube video with details of the problem. Links are appearing in both private Direct Messages, and in public feeds – plus some third party services allow DMs to be made public, sharing the phishing attack more widely.

Click on the dodgy link and you’ll go to a fake Twitter login page, which replicates the Fail Whale when you attempt to login, and then redirects you back to the real Twitter page to make you believe your account hasn’t been hit. The same technique is also being used to phish Bebo accounts.

And after the first wave of attacks compromised accounts, there’s now a wave of spam selling herbal viagra, with messages including “Get bigger and have sex longer. go here”

So besides double-checking you’re on the real Twitter site before logging in, keep an eye on your sent messages for any clue your account has been compromised, and also watch out for messages being sent by even trusted friends.

You can also take a look at the full Sophos update on the attack.

With the caveat that it doesn’t cover third party applications, comScore puts visits to Twitter at 75 million – and regardless of the correlation between those numbers and the actual figures, what you can take away is that the graph is still going up and to the right:

It certainly seems anecdotally as if I’m witnessing more colleagues and friends not only using Twitter, but attempting to use it in a fairly sustainable way rather than registering, looking confused and then vanishing again.

Meanwhile the amount of content being produced has also risen – to a whopping 1.2 billion tweets per month according to data collected by Royal Pingdom.

The methodology used to collect the figures was pretty simple:

‘we tracked down a tweet from the first couple of minutes of each month. Using the sequence numbers of these tweets, we could then calculate the number of tweets for each month. Since finding old tweets is more or less impossible with Twitter’s own search engine, we used Google, then verified the tweet time stamp by looking at the tweet itself’

Again, while there could be some debate about the accuracy of the actual figures involved, what’s important is that the overall effect is some consistent and sizeable growth. And that’s in the face of the redesign of Facebook – the next challenger on the list is GoogleBuzz, but so far I’ve found it rather unsatisfactory, even apart from the initial privacy issues.

New service Twitwoop will help anyone who has an urge to tweet but can’t type at the time, as it allows you to publish to Twitter with a voice message from your phone.

Register your phone with the service, call the access number relevant to your location in the U.S, UK, Norway, Netherlands, Ireland, France or Germany, and your message gets published as long as you haven’t masked the identity of your phone – if there’s no caller ID, the message goes into the public Twitwoop timeline on Twitter.

It’s been created by German Voice Application Service Provider, Woopla, and the FAQs states that it uses the official ‘Sign in with Twitter’ process to avoid using your login and password.

All good so far.

Interestingly, the service doesn’t say how your voice becomes text, although it does state in the Terms of Service that your messages will be available to anyone on the internet with a direct link in your tweets. So hopefully not making it liable for the same debates and intrigue as voice-to-text service Spinvox has been experiencing.

Things not to like:

I can live with the service auto-posting that I’m using it, especially as I can delete it.

Not so happy about the following:

‘You furthermore accept to receive private messages from twitwoop on your private account or become informed about new twitwoop services or features using your registered phone number.

By signing up to twitwoop you automatically become a follower of twitwoop on Twitter.

You can delete the twitwoop messages from your timeline at any time because those were placed acting on your behalf. Deleting the files however can only be done by calling one of twitwoop’s numbers where you can delete your number and all of your data.’

So if I accidentally upload something I want to remove, I have to go through a phone menu to delete everything?

And in the meantime I have no choice about receiving private messages to Twitter, or worse to my phone?

Hmmmmm

Backing-up your stuff is never a back idea, although there’s some debate over whether to choose the cloud or a local harddrive. But if the cloud’s your choice, then there’s a new company to add with BackupMy.Net.

You get to save emails, blogs, pictures, and most importantly here, Twitter.  It’s relatively fast, and you can download your tweets in HTML, JSON or XML format.

If you want to ask them a question directly, obviously they’re on Twitter as @backupmymail (not backupmytwitter?)

It’s free to back up your Tweets, no password is required, and their own counter is claiming close to 3 million Tweets are already protected.

The main concern that has been highlighted so far has been ReadWriteWeb pointing out that it auto-Tweets on your behalf.

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.

Tweeght is a new site described by it’s creator as offering Digg-like voting for ‘thoughtful tweets’ – although the voting is actual more like Reddit with a simple up or down arrow.

Tweeght - new ranking site for Twitter

It was built by Aditya Kothadiya in under a week, and is pretty simple to use. You can either post a tweet by submitting it on the site, which requires your Twitter username and password, tag Tweets with #tweeght, #thought, or #quote, or send the Tweet to @tweeght.

From the site, you can vote individual messages up or down, Retweet them, or reply – and there’s a Leaderboard of the most popular users.

Aditya says “The goal was to launch something quickly but it should be valuable, usable, beautiful and dead simple.” And you can follow Aditya at @adityakothadiya.

It’s definitely a nicely designed site, but is the timing right?

Previous attempts at social ranking sites for Twitter I previously covered, included Microblogging.com and Dwigger. Both have closed, with Dwigger shut for good, and Microblogging hinting that a new service will appear in the future.

Now I’m not the biggest fan of Digg, but I do see the value on social ranking/aggregation sites. I’m a reasonably frequent user of Stumbleupon, and I do use Delicious (although I’m taking a break until I can sort out my messy tagging!).

But I can see two major problems for this approach to filtering Twitter -

1. The scale of Twitter is hard to accurately judge, but the most generous estimates would put Twitter as a whole under the size of Digg’s monthly active users.

2. Social aggregation sites are useful for filtering the entire internet – over 133 million blogs monitored by Technorati, for example, plus mainstream media sites, video, images etc, etc. Has Twitter reached the point where it needs filtering in this way?

3. The ranking approach always involves viewing messages via an external site, taking you out of Twitter or your client. When you’re using Digg, Delicious or SU, you’re inside that community, whereas with Tweeght you need to have a seperate browser tab or window taking you out of the community stream to see what’s being rated.

4. Twitter is built on personal relevance and connections. I can’t help feeling that external ranking systems are a little web 1.0 for adding value. Would I rather see thoughtful tweets from people I’ve never contacted or followed, or would I rather see what my friends and contacts are saying, and have them highlighting anything they see which is thoughtful or brilliant.

That all said, Tweeght might have come along at the right time, with the recent huge rise in users driven by mainstream media coverage of Twitter – and some of those new users could be the Digg-type audience Tweeght needs. After all, Malcolm Gladwell makes a great case for success being hugely dictated by factors such as timing his recent book Outliers.

You may notice a new icon on every post. It comes from Dan Zarrella (@danzarella), who I continue to be hugely impressed by.

It started back in December when I spotted his interesting analysis of Retweeting, and I’ve followed his Tweetback project. But now he’s gone waaaaay further with the TweetSuite Plug-in for Wordpress.

It includes:

• Server-side (no-JS or remote calls) TweetBacks
• ReTweet-This buttons for each TweetBack
• A digg-like Tweet-This Button
• Automatic Tweeting of new posts
• A Most-Tweeted Widget
• A Recently-Tweeted Widget
• A My-Last-Tweets Widget
• A My-Favorited-Tweets Widget

I’m using it here and on www.thewayoftheweb.net, and so far it’s been simple and easy to use, and has worked ‘out-of-the-box’.

Interestingly, there’s already an alternative to Tweetbacks – The Twittbacks Wordpress Plugin created for Smashing Magazine by Joost de Valk. (He’s also on Twitter as @jdevalk)

One outcome of the two plugins is an interesting post by Jonathan Bailey on whether reproducing Tweets could lead to copyright problems.

In the meantime, I’m using TweetSuite, and so far I can highly recommend it – the only suggestion that immediately sprang to mind is that the icon might be better placed at the footer of a post rather than top left or right, but that’s a minor point!

I’ve seen a bit of feedback about new Twitter advertising service Magpie, which places paid advertising in your messages on a user-defined ratio – e.g. you can choose anywhere between posting one normal message then an add will appear, up to posting 200 messages before the advert posts.

Advertising is flagged by #magpie or a custom message within each advertising tweet. And you can pre-approve adverts, or allow them to autopost.

I’ve currently got the radio set at 10 normal posts before an advert appears, as I’m a fairly frequent poster. I’ve also asked people in advance for their thoughts, and a couple of people have said they’ll unfollow anyone who even starts using Magpie, whereas the majority have either said they don’t really mind, or they’re fine if it’s just a test.

In all honesty, there’s going to be monetisation of Twitter at some point, and the most logical place for any type of advertising-based revenue is around either the content or search functionality, because those are the areas which get attention from users.

For all we know, some of the growing number of services could be approved by the Twitter team behind the scenes as a way to experiment without alienating any users!

There’s a few reasons for testing:

• I hate writing about things I haven’t tried for myself
• My Tweeting and 140char were both started with aims other than making money, but at the same time, I don’t really want to be running a blog that costs me money at the moment.
• Monetisation will happen for Twitter, and this is one viable method in terms of getting attention. So it’s worth investigating now to be able to provide an educated response if it’s adopted as an official monetisation method.

But in the meantime, here’s the figures for my test:

Magpie started: 28/11/2008. Current followers: 1579.

And if you’re going to sign up to test it or use it yourself, why not help out 140char by using our referral link? http://be-a-magpie.com/bkq4mw

Here’s an interesting guide to live twitting from events – guest posted by Julius Solaris, blogger and event planner extraordinaire.
On the 29th of November 2008, I’ll be involved in ecoCampLondon a BarCamp about the environment and sustainability. The aim of the camp is to produce a document with all the discussion of the sessions. For the previous edition we just gave out a template which the session promoter needed to fill in. Boring and time consuming.
We felt that this solution was a bit 1999, so we decided to look at new ways to collect discussions. And here it goes: LiveTwitting

How does it work?
- Every attendee needs to follow either @livetwitting or @livet

- There are very simple commands to learn

- You can manage all the sessions talks on the LiveTwitting website.

BarCamps are a fork of Open Space Technology. The aim of these unconferences is to produce something in a team effort rather than just loosing all that precious interaction among attendees. When the method was elaborated it was the mainframe era and static websites were common. With Web 2.0 things change.
Twitter allows to capture conversations in a great unbiased manner and therefore should be used for most if not all conferences, tradeshows and events in general. The 140chars nature of the service pushes attendees to actually summarize what is going on and synthesize the content in a great way.
Making your event more compliant with new technologies is the way to go and you may be missing out on precious feedback and content if you fail to do so.

I thought I’d start republishing and compiling some of the best Tweets I see. Not only do they illuminate what happens inside Twitter for anyone who hasn’t jumped in, but they can also be funny, inspirational or downright odd…and a good balance to listing business cases!

First up appropriately comes from one of the co-founders @ev, quoting one of the more famous and oft referenced users, @zappos.