25 Members of the 1M Follower Club
By Mark Evans | July 3, 2009
When you’ve only got a few hundred or a few thousand followers on Twitter, the idea of having a million followers is somewhat surreal.
Why would more than a million people want to follow a particular person, including Ashton Krutcher, who’s more famous for being married to Demi Moore than as an actor?
According to Twittercism, there are now 25 Twitter accounts that have more than one million followers. In addition to Krutcher, the list includes Britney Spears, Oprah (who hasn’t made an update since June 6), Barack Obama, John Mayer, Jimmy Fallon and Shaq O’Neal.
Chart source: TwitterCounter
How to Get Unfollowed
By Mark Evans | July 2, 2009
There’s a lot of focus on how to get followed on Twitter but I thought it might be helpful to flip things around by providing some insight into how to get unfollowed.
1. Write about your cat, your Starbucks addiction, the weather or how cute your children are.
2. Update more than 15 to 20 times/day. Sure, Twitter is a quick and easy tool to share information and thoughts but people who get carried away are more a nuisance than a valuable resource.
3. Pound out ReTweets all day rather than doing your own updates. I would suggest the ratio for Tweets to ReTweets is 3:1 or 4:1.
4. Write crude or sexually suggestive updates that are intended to be funny but come across as dumb and/or misguided.
5. After being interesting enough to be followed, you disappear from Twitter for long periods of time.
Any thoughts on other things that would prompt you to unfollow someone?
More: If you want to know when someone stops following you, Qwitter will send you an e-mail.
A Revenue Source for Twitter?
By Mark Evans | July 2, 2009
In checking out Twitter’s new follower/following management tools earlier this week, I also noticed a small box featuring definitions for Twitter-related words. At first, they looked like part of the service but, upon closer inspection, some of them are sponsored.
Here’s a couple of examples:
So, it appears Twitter is playing around the idea of “sponsored definitions” (aka advertising) on its home page. For anyone interested in how Twitter is going to make money - and there are lots of us obsessed by this potential scenario - you have to wonder if “sponsored definitions” are the first step by Twitter to finally cave in and accept advertising.
For what it’s worth, ExecTweets is a Web site to find and follow the top business executives on Twitter. It was created by Federated Media, in partnership with Microsoft.
Trazzler is a travel site in which Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and Evan Williams are “founding advisors”, while their partner Jack Dorsey is an “advisor”.
Twitter: What’s Next; the Purchase of Tweet.com?
By Mark Evans | July 1, 2009
You’d think Twitter would have better things to do than deciding to make become a little more protection of its trademark over the word “Tweet” while promising it has “no intention of “going after the wonderful applications and services that use the word in their name when associated with Twitter”.
For a company that has let its API run free and wild (and that’s been a good thing), you wonder why they would spend time focused on protecting “Tweet” as opposed to, say, creating a business model of value-added services.
In any event, what I really want to know is how much Twitter is going to have to acquire to buy www.tweet.com.
The Web site appears to be focused on birds but it’s hard not to get the feeling the content is just a placeholder until someone comes along to buy the URL. The URL is owned by Mrs Jello, LLC, and registered through domainadmin@exoticdomains.net.
For more on Twitter and its Tweet obsession, check out TechCrunch.
Twitter Quietly Unveils New Follower/Following Features
By Mark Evans | July 1, 2009
With little fanfare, Twitter has introduced some new wrinkles to manage the people you follow and those following you. These are nice, incremental features that probably should have been introduced long ago given they’re widely available on many third-party Twitter publishing tools.
For people following, there are now easy options to mention someone, send a direct message, follow someone and block a person.
For the people you’re following, it’s now easy to mention someone, or unfollow or block them.
TwtPoll: PollDaddy for Twitter?
By Mark Evans | June 30, 2009
At a Montreal high-tech meetup yesterday, I had a short chat with Felipe Coimbra, who organized the event and did a presentation about his start-up, YowTrip, which helps people find travel companions.
Earlier this year, Felipe backed off on YowTrip to focus on creating Twitter applications - a logical move given Twitter’s growth, and the fierce competition within the online travel market.
Over the past six months, Felipe has developed a growing portfolio of Twitter applications - some of more successful than others. He’s taking a 37 Signals-like approach by creating a bunch of applications, and then focusing on the ones that get the most traction.
The star of his Twitter portfolio is TwtPoll, which lets you quickly and easily create polls on Twitter. The basic service is free, although Felipe plans on rolling out more premium services to generate revenue.
In many respects, TwtPolls is a lot like PollDaddy, which made it a snap for bloggers and people running Web sites to create online polls and surveys. While PollDaddy’s free services attracted a lot of users, the company also generated some significant revenue from premium services.
In the end, PollDaddy was purchased by Automattic, which operates Wordpress.
As Twitter attracts more users and become an increasingly valuable way to do research and generate reviews and feedback, polls and surveys are likely become more popular.
This could TwtPoll in the right place at the right time. And if TwtPoll doesn’t work out, Coimbra has the skills and enthusiasm to come up with a bunch of other Twitter applications.
The Story of Twitter (Graphically)
By Mark Evans | June 27, 2009
Here’s an interesting artistic view of the history of Twitter (so far) from Manolith.
Scoopler Has the Scoop on Twitter Search
By Mark Evans | June 26, 2009
Here’s one of the mysteries of Twitter: it is emerging as a fascinating, valuable and powerful search tool yet there are a growing number of third-parties doing a significantly better job of providing search tools.
Take, for example, Scoopler, which features a simple interface but user-friendly and extensive results.
Here’s the home page:
And here’s the results page for a search on Michael Jackson, which features the latest updates from Twitter, as well as links to popular Web sites, videos and images. Scoopler has indexes Digg, del.icio.us. Flickr and Identica.
If you’re looking for a real-time search engine - and there’s no lack of them these days - Scoopler has a good chance of becoming part of your search arsenal.
For more on Twitter search, check out Webware’s Rafe Needleman, who reviews the three best services: Twazzup, Collecta and Scoopler.
Twitter Analytics Lite
By Mark Evans | June 26, 2009
There’s lot of interest in drilling down into activity on Twitter with lots of social media analytics looks getting into the action.
If you want something really simple - and I mean really simple - check out Trendmetr, which measures how many times a search term was mentioned on Twitter over the past year. The results are displayed using user-friendly bar charts.
For example, here’s the result of Michael Jackson, Steve Jobs and Barack Obama. (Note: You can add as many search terms as you want.)
Twitter: “A Crazy, Beautiful Thing”
By Mark Evans | June 24, 2009
Last night at Third Tuesday in Toronto, Nora Young, the host of the CBC’s popular Spark radio show, was asked during the Q&A about Twitter.
After talking about how Twitter is a valuable tool for journalists because it’s a great way to get instant feedback and ideas from readers and listeners, she added that Twitter is a:
“Crazy and beautiful thing that may collapse under the weight of its own absurdity”.
Not only is it a great quote but it puts the spotlight on Twitter in terms of infrastructure and ecosystem. Over the past year, Twitter has poured a lot of money (well, their VCs money) into getting its infrastructure in better shape so that the dreaded fail whale makes fewer appearances.
At the same time, Twitter has become more popular with an estimate 32 million registered users. To me, growth rather than infrastructure is Twitter’s biggest challenge.
As more people climb on the bandwagon, Twitter is going to change. It’s going to evolve from a place where great conversations and resource-sharing happens to a medium where corporations, marketers, spammers and other riff-raff are going to be aggressively engaged.
This is, no doubt, going to change Twitter and continue to push stress on Twitter’s back-end systems. For users, it will become more difficult to sort through the “noise” to find the best, most valuable, interesting and entertaining conversations.
You’ll start to see more marketing and promotional activity - some of it blatant and far from the soft sell that many early corporate Twitters users have embraced.
It’s not that I’m against growth or progress but my hope is that Twitter can evolve but still remain an interesting medium that serves a variety of interests and needs.