Here’s one of the curious things about Twitter: After investing the time to build a solid group of people to follow (that is, unless you’re one of those auto-followers), it’s not that easy to leverage your flock. For example, it should be a snap to do searches limited to the people you follow as opposed to the entire Twitter population. It would also be nice to see where everyone is located.

Stepping into the breach is Flocking Me, which provides a way to read and search for tweets, as well as see some of the trending keywords. Flocking Me offers three different ways to read tweets – a regular stream, a grid and a map view.

You can also do searches for specific keywords using the same views. For example, the screen capture at the bottom is a search for “Twitter” using the grid view.

The Bottom Line: Flocking Me is interesting, particularly the ability to do searches among your followers, but it would be a lot more useful if you could post tweets as well.

Follow Friday has become one of the pillars of Twitter for many people to recognize the contributions, insight and ideas of other people on Twitter.

It’s rooted within the “virtuous economy” in which the “work” of other people is rewarded/compensation by putting them in the spotlight. It’s a public pat on the back for a job well done.

One of the challenges of Follow Friday (aka #followfriday) is keeping track of who to recognize. After a busy week, it can be difficult to remember the people on your Follow Friday list. As a result, you may end up scrambling to do it, or not do it all.

While you could write down the people you want to highlight on Follow Friday, another approach is simply doing it through the week. Why stick to Follow Friday when you could do Follow Monday or Follow Thursday? If you really want to publicly note people making a contribution do it when you want rather than waiting for Friday.

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• A Way to Cheat With Follow Friday (twitterrati.com)

Earlier this week, I received a notification about a new follower (via Topify) who focused on the high-tech industry, and provided some interesting tweets about online services and content.

There’s been a lot of buzz among the digerati about the new Friendfeed beta.

It’s new that I’ve pretty much ignored, partly because the meshU and mesh conferences are happening this week, and partly because I rarely use Friendfeed.

For whatever reason, Friendfeed has never resonated with me. I recognize that it has all kinds of great features if you want to follow peoples’ digital activity. But I’ve never embraced Friendfeed.

In the meantime, I love blogging, become enamored with Twitter, use del.icio.us on a regular basis and sometimes stumble upon StumbleUpon.

TechCrunch nails it by describing Friendfeed as the “coolest app no one uses”.

Here’s a graph showing the growth of Friendfeed and Twitter over the past year. While Twitter is on hockey stick-like growth, Friendfeed is relatively flat.

Technorati Tags: friendfeed, twitter

Yahoo has unveiled a new AIR-powered application called Sideline that lets people track what’s happening on Twitter.

There are a few interesting wrinkles, particularly the ability to track multiple keywords and the auto-refresh feature, but I don’t see why Sideline would attract a lot of users.

After playing with Sideline for awhile, the first thing that came to mind is why wouldn’t I just use TweetDeck to monitor keywords – and that TweetDeck could quickly outflank Sideline by offering multiple keyword searches and an auto-refresh.

Sideline does demonstrate, however, the need for Twitter tools to track, monitor and search on Twitter. While there are lots of tools out there, there’s arguably no “killer app” yet, which is why companies such as Yahoo are getting involved.

For more, check out TechCrunch, which gives Sideline feint praise.

Despite the excitement about Twitter, the reality is Twitter and microblogging are far from being mainstream services.

But according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 11% of online U.S. adults said they “used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others”.

The demographic break-out shows that Twitter – and other services – are most popular with people in the 18-to-24-year-old bracket where usage is 19% and the 25-to-34-year-old graphic where usage is 20%. Usage drops to 10% among 35-to-44-year-olds and 5% among 45-to-54-year-olds.

Pew suggests that people are more likely to use Twitter if they’ve already used a social network. It found that 23% of social network users have used Twitter, while only 4% of Twitter users have not used social networks.

These are definitely interested numbers but I wonder what usage is among people involved in the high-tech and media sectors where I would think usage is significantly higher than average.

When Plurk was launched several months ago, it attracted a lot of attention and a healthy amount of new users. A big part of Plurk’s appeal is/was the user interface that displays posts within a timeline, and responses under each post.

After a promising start, however, Plurk seemed to fade into the microblogging background. Of course, Plurk isn’t alone is failing to resonate with many users within a market where Twitter continues to dominates.

Plurk, however, is still around and battling for attention. Case in point is a new, fresher and more appealing home page. Once you log in, Plurk still looks like Plurk but the home page is a step in the right direction.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of Jaiku’s death have been great exaggerated amid reports Google was turfing a bunch of services.

Rather than going away, Jaiku is morphing itself into an open-source platform in which people can use the “Jaiku Engine” to create their own micro-blogging services. In some respects, it reminds me of identi.ca’s approach to the microblogging market.

For more, check out Jaiku founder Jyri Engeström’s blog post, as as well a lengthy post on TechCrunch.

Technorati Tags: google, jaiku

Tumblr, which has been attracting growing attention (and venture capital) as a publishing platform between blogging and Twitter has just unveiled an updated version of the service that, frankly look pretty amazing.

The look and feel, while still clean and accessible, has been given a solid make-over with some nice sizzle, an improved dashboard, widgets, themes, and new features.

If you haven’t used Tumblr yet, the upgrade should give the perfect excuse to check it out. Whlle Tumblr may not be as red-hot as Twitter, it has 625,000 users who have created 70 million posts. Impressive.

Personally, I’ve got a Tumblr account but haven’t had time or a reason to use it given I’m a WordPress and Twitter “enthusiast”. That said, I just launched a new marketing and communications consulting that specializes in social media so perhaps I could embrace Tumblr as my corporate blog.

For anyone interested in learning more about Tumblr’s fifth iteration, here’s a video the company put together in which founder David Karp says: “It’s a huge step for the site”, adding it will “make room for some big things being rolled out in the next couple of months”.

Introducing: Tumblr v5 from David Karp on Vimeo.

For more, Silicon Alley Insider has a number of screenshots.

Technorati Tags: twitter, tumblr

Twitter’s competitors are disappearing.

First, it was Pownce being acquired by Six Apart, and then closed down. Now, Google has decided to close Jaiku, which it acquired in 2007 to much acclaim.

The move comes as Google attempts to reduce expenses, and involves the closure of several other services such as Dodgeball, Google Notebook and Google Catalogu.

At one time, Jaiku was seen a strong rival to Twitter. In fact, there was much speculation about whether Google was going to buy Jaiku or Twitter. After the acquisition, Jaiku went into hiding before emerging last year.

Many thought Jaiku was going to become part of Google’s wireless strategy, and become a mobile micro-blogging service within Android. But this reality never materialized, and Jaiku gained no traction.