140Char

Google is apparently running a quiet test with a handful of advertisers who are able to advertise their Twitter account and latest message in a display advert which also allows readers to follow that account within the advert itself.

As reported by Clickz, the adverts display the latest Tweet in the centre of the advert, with the Twitter bird logo in the bottom left, and a ‘Follow on Twitter’ button in the bottom right.

Google hasn’t commented on the story as yet, and the company runs countless experiments and tests in an effort to keep innovating – and yet the concept of Twitter messages as display advertising seems strangely familiar….

Possibly because social media news site Mashable launched something similar back in March 2009, when they unveiled Twitter brand sponsors. That method allowed brands to have their tweets syndicated into the Mashable sidebar – effectively serving as a display advert.

The good thing is that it might reward those brands using Twitter for active engagement, and encourage more to move away from repurposed RSS feeds.

The ClickZ article cites the source of the information as Qualite Search Marketing, an Oslo search company who were invited to join the beta test, and which claims to have only seen modest increases in the number of their followers. ClickZ also points to a previous campaign by Volvo which brought the largest ever expandable ad unit to Youtube, and featured a Twiterfeed back in April 2009.

While it isn’t in any way new, it’s interesting that Google considers it worthwhile testing – has corporate Twitter interest got to the point that followers are worth gaining on a CPM/CPC/CPF (cost per follower?) basis by enough companies to be measurable?

Popular tool Ping.fm lets you distribute your content to a variety of microblogs and social networks – and it can now include your blog content to be shared automatically.

It’s a real-time feed powered by Superfeedr, which pumps out feed in XMPP or PUbsubhubbub formats. At the moment you can only list one RSS feed, but support for multiple feeds is coming in the near future for Ping’s 700,000 users.

If you’re considering the options for RSS autofeeding, Twitterfeed has been the main choice since the early days of Twitter, and also publishes to other networks including Facebook. In March they announced they have over 500,000 publishers sharing more than 1 million feeds.

The advantage of Ping.fm is that integrating the automation into your regular posting service means you’re perhaps more likely to keep it updated and compliment it with non-automated posts, whereas Twitterfeed can encourage a ‘fire and forget’ mentality, where your RSS feed becomes your entire Twitter stream. One solution to this is to create specific identities for your RSS streams. For instance, I tweet at @badgergravling, but also have @thewayoftheweb, @140char_com and @onlinedriver for each of my sites (Please feel free to follow all of them!)

If you’re looking to publish any RSS feeds to a Twitter account, then apparently you wouldn’t be alone in picking Twitterfeed, as it’s apparently used by nearly 350,000 publishers.

Not only was it around the first default choice, but there are a host of changes now going live to improve the service.

If you publish on a system that offers PubSubHubbub feeds (e.g. Blogger or Typepad), your new posts should be live on Twitter in a matter of moments.

It now also features the option to publish to Facebook, which makes life a little easier.

And you get better analytics – there’s now integration with both url shortner Bit.ly, and Google Analytics.

And behind the scenes there’s an improved queue management system for greater reliability.

In fact, my only complain from a personal note is that the new design and system gives a variety of methods to log-in, and for some reason I’m struggling with mine!

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.

It occurred to me the other day that i tend to read the blog posts from those i follow on twitter – who ‘tweet’ new articles via twitterfeed or suchlike – more often than the others in my google reader (which i check once or twice a week at the most).

Wouldn’t be good if there was a twitterfeed – that i can control – that tweets me selected blogs – from my reader – as they happen?
This would save a lot of dicking about between twitter desktop client and browser/feed widget.
Yeah, this kinda happens with friendfeed but I don’t control that – I’m not necessarily friends with most of the authors in my rss reader , whereas with a custom google reader feed into twitter, spec’d by me… is that bit more personal.

Or maybe this functionality already exists? Any thoughts?

UPDATE: I also posted this over at never get out of the boat theres been a couple of comments if you prefer to chime in over there.

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!