11 Essential Social Media Stories

here was a ton of buzz in social media this week. Twitter’s co-founder squashed acquisition rumors (for now), while Facebook relented under pressure to bring back some old features. Twitterrific 2.0 came storming onto the scene this week, and Seesmic added Facebook to Seesmic Desktop.

We also brought you some useful resources this week, from amazing designers and authors to follow on Twitter to different ways to create your own social media start page.

So without further ado, here are the key stories that made social media news this week:

1. Twitter Co-Founder: “We’re Not For Sale” - Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, made it clear on The View that Twitter is not for sale.

2. 85+ of the Best Twitterers Designers Should Follow - Cameron Chapman opens our eyes to a new level of web design with 85+ great designers to follow, including sample tweets from every person.

3. 7 Ways to Create Your Own Social Start Page - Turn your browser into a social portal with these customizable social media and Web tools.

4. Twitter Search to Become Real Search - Twitter search will soon start crawling not only tweets, but the links within them. Could this development make Google sweat?

5. Seesmic Desktop Fully Integrates Facebook: It’s Awesome - Seesmic released Facebook for the desktop. We review it and tell you whether it’s up to par.

6. Google Sets Contacts Free - Google has made Contacts its own product. Stan Schroeder explores the change.

7. 5 Terrific Twitter Research Tools - I highlight some of the best ways to gather raw data and gleam new insights from Twitter and its millions of users.

8. Literary Tweets: 100+ of the Best Authors on Twitter - Cameron Chapman turns you into a literary aficionado with a recommended list of Twittering authors, as well as sample tweets from each.

9. NIN App Gets Rejected by Apple, Reznor Threatens to Go Jailbreak - Nine Inch Nails’ application was rejected by the App Store, and Trent Reznor wasn’t all too happy about it. Read what he had to say on the matter. (Incidentally, Apple later backtracked and decided to allow the app into the App Store.)

10. A Small Piece of the Old Facebook Returns - Facebook has brought some old news feed features back from the dead, including relationship status and profile picture updates. Adam Ostrow explores Facebook’s decision.

11. Twitterrific 2.0 Makes Twitter Terrific on the iPhone - Pete Cashmore tries out Twitterrific 2.0 for the iPhone. What does it mean for the Twitter applications on the iPhone and especially Tweetie?

10 Things Apple Should Do With Twitter

There's no reason for Apple to buy Twitter, as rumor had it earlier this week. Apple's business is to sell more computers, iPods, and iPhones, and owning Twitter won't help with that at all.

But using Twitter more in Apple products could help, especially as the messaging/microblogging service picks up more steam.

Here's ten ideas for how Apple could work Twitter into its products:

• Twitter support in iChat, Apple's messaging app.
• Using Twitter for RSS-like feeds, such as featured iTunes songs, movies, TV shows, movie trailers, iPhone apps, etc.
• Tweet new photos (and someday, videos) from iPhone, auto-uploaded to MobileMe, TwitPic, YouTube, etc.
• Tweet new photos from iPhoto on Mac, auto-tagging your Twitter contacts.
• Twitter contacts in phonebook on Mac and iPhone.
• Baking Twitter sign-in into iPhone and iPod touch so all apps can access it via one API for things like tweeting game milestones, high scores, etc.
• Read tweets on Apple TV while you're watching a video. (Sort of like Yahoo's new Twitter widget on some TVs.)
• Twitter search built into Safari as an option.
• Tweet the song you're listening to in iTunes or on your iPhone, with link to iTunes download.
• Suggested iTunes playlists/purchases based on most-tweeted songs.

Do you have any other proposals?

A Way To Make Sense Of Twitter Trends

For sure, Twitter Trends give visitors a great general overview of what the app’s user base of millions are talking about the most at any given time, giving some insight in what’s happening around the world.

It’s an awesome way for people to discover what’s going on, and more users will see the benefits of keeping track of trending topics now that the company has decided to integrate the top 10 trends in the right sidebar of the web version for everyone.

At times the keywords for the trending topics, often determined by many users using the same hashtag for something can be quite self-explanatory, e.g. today’s ‘Swine Flu’ and ‘#swineflu’. More often that not, however, you have no idea why a certain keyword is currently a trend, and figuring out what all the fuzz is about can be quite a pain. Enter What The Trend, which attempts to offer short blurbs about trending topics with a short explanation on why it’s in the top 10 list.

For example, I had no clue why ‘Jonas’ was in the top trends list, until I clicked through to this user-editable explanation blurb and learned that it’s a new show in Disney Channel. In addition, What The Trend shows me the latest tweets about the topic, and also attempts to fetch related pictures from Flickr as well as news through Google News.

You can directly tweet that there’s a trend explanation to your own Twitter account, with bonus points for another service boasting its very own URL shortening service (wttrend.com). The service has its own Twitter account which it regularly updates with new trends + explanations and also offers RSS feeds and its own API. I’m left wondering which desktop application provider will be the first to integrate the What The Trend explanations, and how quickly people will start abusing the wiki-approach the service is taking: my guess is we won’t have to wait long for either one to happen.

I can actually see myself going this website once and a while to get a feel of what’s trending on Twitter, although I wish I wouldn’t need to and Twitter would incorporate this into the web version itself. Until that happens, and I doubt it ever will, What The Trend provides the perfect alternative.

Will Twitter Be Acquired in 2009? You Can Bet On It.

Forget the pundits. If you want to know the real odds of something happening or not, follow the money. And at least one online bookie is saying that it’s more than 50% likely that someone will acquire Twitter this year.
Panama based BetOnline is letting people place bets on whether or not Twitter is acquired in 2009. They’re paying even money on a Google acquisition, the most likely suitor. Facebook pays 5 to 1, Microsoft pays 10 to 1 and Yahoo pays 20 to 1. If anyone else buys them it pays 5 to 1. Think they’re staying independent? You’ll get $2.5 for every dollar you bet if you’re right.
These odds will change over time as bets are placed, so if you have inside information or just have a gut feeling you’re willing to bet on, get your wallet out now. And I guess if the Twitter guys decide not to sell, they can make a nice bit of cash on the side by placing the appropriate bets.
Company spokesperson TJ Kendrick says he expects “brisk wagering on their new Twitter acquisition prop.”

Google In Late Stage Talks To Acquire Twitter

Here’s a heck of a rumor that we’ve sourced from two separate people close to the negotiations: Google is in late stage negotiations to acquire Twitter. We don’t know the price but can assume its well, well north of the $250 million valuation that they saw in their recent funding.
Twitter turned down an offer to be bought by Facebook just a few months ago for half a billion dollars, although that was based partially on overvalued Facebook stock. Google would be paying in cash and/or publicly valued stock, which is equivalent to cash. So whatever the final acquisition value might be, it can’t be compared apples-to-apples with the Facebook deal.
Why would Google want Twitter? We’ve been arguing for some time that Twitter’s real value is in search. It holds the keys to the best real time database and search engine on the Internet, and Google doesn’t even have a horse in the game. In a post last month called It’s Time To Start Thinking Of Twitter As A Search Engine, I wrote:
More and more people are starting to use Twitter to talk about brands in real time as they interact with them. And those brands want to know all about it, whether to respond individually (The W Hotel pestered me until I told them to just leave me alone), or simply gather the information to see what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.
And all of it is discoverable at search.twitter.com, the search engine that Twitter acquired last summer.
People searching for news. Brands searching for feedback. That’s valuable stuff.
Twitter knows it, too. They’re going to build their business model on it. Forget small time payments from users for pro accounts and other features, all they have to do is keep growing the base and gather more and more of those emotional grunts. In aggregate it’s extremely valuable. And as Google has shown, search is vastly monetizable - somewhere around 40% of all online advertising revenue goes to ads on search listings today.
If this is accurate, it’s a brilliant deal for Google - the value of Twitter is only going to go up over time. And it will be Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone’s second sale to Goolge - they sold Blogger to them just five years ago. But there’s one big question - where’s Microsoft in all this? Letting Twitter go to Google only hurts them, badly, in the long term search game. This is an asset they need to be competing for aggressively.
Of course, it’ll be sad to see Twitter become just another subsidiary of Google, if this happens. I would have liked to have seen the company spread its wings a little longer to see what it could do.
Updated: Yet another source says the acquisition discussions are still fairly early stage, and the two companies are also considering working together on a Google real time search engine.

How I Use Twitter to Promote My Blog

How Can Twitter be used to promote a blog?
Twitter is a lot of things to a lot of people. For some, it’s a virtual water cooler. For others, it’s a great way to get answers to questions. Since I started using Twitter, I have more than doubled my blog traffic over the last several months, and I can tell you how.

Some people just dump their blog posts into Twitter automatically, with a simple “New Blog Post: Money is Better Than Dirt” and away you go. I’ve found a way of using Twitter to encourage participation , and it’s better than easy; it’s tasteful.

Ask a Question
Instead of telling your Twitter audience that you’ve published a new post, ask them their opinion on the core topic you’ve covered. “Do you think banner ads are dead?” followed by a link to your site is much more appealing than posting to Twitter, “Banner Ads Are Not Dead.” Asking a question engages your Twitter followers and solicits their experience.

If Comments Flow, Remark on It
I genuinely believe that the comments section of my blog is better than anything I write on my own. To that end, when a topic seems to take off, I send a note to Twitter alerting people to the quality of the conversation in the comments. It’s not pitchy in nature. I’m simply sharing that the best stuff came after the initial post.

Sometimes, I Even Dare to Ask for a Stumble
My number two referrer to my site on most slow-medium traffic days is StumbleUpon. Because I seem to get “better” response from people who visit from that site than from other traffic sources, I sometimes will send a third post to Twitter, asking if someone thinks X post is worth a Stumble. Because I do a lot of sharing and promoting and helping others, I usually get a lot of willing people to Stumble something for me from time to time.
I don’t over-do it, and I know that not every day is a “killer blog post” day. With that in mind, when I do ask, it makes a huge difference.

Those Three Touches Help Lots
So in the end, I ask my following in Twitter for love three times: once when I post the blog, again if it takes off well in the comments section, and sometimes a third time if I want to really amp the traffic via StumbleUpon. I mix these requests in liberally with all the various ways I help others using Twitter, and so it doesn’t come off like I’m perpetually pitching my own stuff. My current monthly rate of pitching others vs. promoting my own site is 75 / 25 in other people’s favor. That sounds fair, right?

Have you experimented with Twitter in this way? How did it work for you? What other tips did I miss?

Twitter’s Tweet Smell Of Success

Twitter.com continues to grow in popularity and importance in both the consumer and corporate worlds. No longer just a platform for friends to stay connected in real time, it has evolved into an important component of brand marketing. Unique visitors to Twitter increased 1,382 percent year-over-year, from 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009, making it the fastest growing site in the Member Communities category for the month. Zimbio and Facebook followed, growing 240 percent and 228 percent.

Fastest Growing Member Community Destinations in February 2009

Twitter Most Popular Among Working Adults

Twitterers (a.k.a. Tweeters) are not primarily teens or college students as you might expect. In fact, in February the largest age group on Twitter was 35-49; with nearly 3 million unique visitors, comprising almost 42 percent of the site’s audience. We found that the majority of people visit Twitter.com while at work, with 62 percent of the combo unique audience accessing the site from work only versus 35 percent that accessed it from home only

Unique Visitors to Twitter.com by Age Demographic

Twitter On The Move

PC Web usage of Twitter.com doesn’t tell the whole story. The ability to twitter via a mobile phone-whether through the mobile Web or via text messages-is a driving factor in the social network’s success. In January, 735,000 unique visitors accessed the Twitter Web site through their mobile phones. The average unique visitor went to Twitter.com 14 times during the month and spent an average of seven minutes on the site.

Finally, text messaging offers a third platform for consumers and businesses alike to take part in the twitter craze. In the last quarter of 2008, 812,000 unique users sent or received Twitter text messages from AT&T or Verizon cell phones. There was an average of nearly 240 tweets per person for the quarter.

It will be interesting to watch the evolution of Twitter as it continues to gain momentum. In an unstable economy, it might prove to be an economical and important part of an employer’s marketing strategy that helps to keep consumers aware of and connected to their brand.

The Next Monster-Twitter?

lenty of job seekers spend hours combing through listings on Monster or CareerBuilder but experts say that’s not necessarily the most effective way to hunt for a job. It turns out that only 12.3% of hires of candidates from outside the company come from those kinds of job boards, according to a February report about the hiring practices of large companies by consulting firm CareerXroads. In fact, the report says that Monster and CareerBuilder account for half the job board hires but both are losing ground to social networks and other niche sites.
Increasingly, both job seekers and companies are turning to social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook and even Twitter to find and fill jobs. That may be due to the fact that referrals from both employees and corporate alumni make up 27.3% of all external hires, according to CareerXroads. In fact, the report suggests that referrals could be the best way for outsiders to land a job at a company. Today, software developer Kevin Smith wrote a blog post about how he used Twitter to find a job at a company called Gnoso. Smith discovered Gnoso through one of his Twitter acquaintances who ultimately helped shepherd Smith’s resume to the right person.
The viral nature of Twitter means that one message can be re-tweeted and seen by thousands of people. One marketing firm experienced that viral effect after posting a job listing on Twitter. “Within 15 hours, this tweet went from a few thousand to 15,000 people,” says Divesh Sisodraker, founder of a company called TheJobMagnet which creates recruiting tools for social networking sites. Today Sisodraker’s company launched tweetCruit a software service which helps companies track the viral nature of tweets and how many people clicked through to the job ads. The tool can also help companies do pre-screening and filtering of job candidates.
While Twitter may be a great tool for spreading the word about a job, it can be unwieldy for job applicants. For example, job seekers interested in working at AT&T can follow @attjobs on Twitter. There are plenty of postings but they’re for a range of jobs such as sales consultants and technicians in a range of places from Waco, Texas, to San Diego. There’s really no way to filter jobs based on position or location. These kinds of issues leave some wondering if Twitter will ever become a mainstream tool for job searches or recruiting.
What do you think?

Twitter New Business Model Found!

Jason Calacanis just put Twitter in business. How? He offered $250,000 to be one of 20 users in Twitter's "Suggested Follows" for two years.
Twitter is growing so fast that being on the "suggested" list for new users can generate more than 10,000 followers a day. Jason thinks the slots will soon be worth a Super-Bowl-like $1 million a year, as companies compete to be able to send real-time messages directly to millions of followers.
Or not.
Dave Winer complains that the Suggested Follows list is unfair. Twitter investor Fred Wilson seems to agree:
Bijan [Sabet at Spark Capital, a Twitter investor] got it right when he said that the current suggested follows is a short term fix to address the "out of the box experience" problem for many of the newcomers who have no idea what twitter is and who they should follow. the third party recommendation services aren't a great help to them because they don't even know what a third party twitter app is.but you are right to point out that the current model isn't ideal and nobody knows that better than Ev. it's going to change and hopefully sooner rather than later.
TechCrunch has more on Jason's offer here. Even if Twitter kills the "Suggested" page, this exchange provides a hint of how powerful (and profitable) this company can eventually become. We continue to think it will eventually be worth more than $1 billion.

A new business model of Twitter ——Serving Local News To Users

Germany’s Der Spiegel published an interview with Twitter CEO Evan Williams yesterday on its website, and Williams had a couple of interesting things to say. You can find a poorly Google-translated version of the interview here, which features Williams answering the usual, boring questions ‘professional’ journalists tend to ask about the micro-sharing service (the reporter opened the interview with the Pulitzer-prize caliber question “so does Twitter spark narcissism and idiocy?”).
But Williams did share something worth noting at the end of the interview.
When asked about possible future features for Twitter, he reportedly said that one of the things being considered is an extension that lets people know what’s happening in their immediate vicinity. That would basically mean that Twitter could actively ping users about local events that are going on in their neighborhood, in real-time, based on the location they’ve indicated. As an example, Williams says users could be alerted to the fact a fire is burning a few streets away from where Twitter knows (or thinks) they are.

Digg ?? Twitter have caught Up To it

Twitter has become a popular pastime for many who like to update their daily thoughts and activates, as well as for the voyeurs who just enjoy reading the tweets. Last week, the market share of visits to Twitter surpassed Digg for the first time since launch and was ranked #84 (one above Digg at #85) in the Computers and Internet category

2009 New Business Model ?-----Twitter

The new Twitter "suggested friends" feature is a natural place to sell friend connections between users and companies wanting to communicate with them. It's great traditional lead sales, in fact. Who says you can't buy more friends? $1 per user who takes the suggestion and opts in to getting messages from JetBlue or Zappos? That could happen. Could those companies keep their freshly purchased friends? Only if their Twitter output stayed interesting! We'll see if something like that works with Twitter.........