Happy HalloTween

The Twitterverse has always been a spirited bunch, participating in holidays and contests. Halloween is no difference as you can see from the avatars below.

We do more than change our avatars, though. Courtesy of Sonny Gill (and others), I found some cool Halloween icons. Rob Key and his Converseon team have creatively crowdsourced a company Halloween costume contest by asking the Twitterverse to vote for the best costume. I voted for Catwoman, by the way.










Bryan Eisenberg and Mass High Tech All-Star Chris Brogan are organizing a meme, Trick or Tweet.

There are 2 goals for Trick or Tweet:

1. Connect lots of interesting people with other interesting people they didn’t know before.

2. Do some good with our Tricks (there is enough tricky things going on in our worlds).

A great way to connect people within the community, particularly new users and donate to some very worthy charities. So let's get scary and #trickortweet!

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First State of the Twitosphere in Costa Rica

A while ago a commenter on this blog asked if I could also analyze the twitosphere in his country, Costa Rica. Costa Rica is a country in Central America, bordered by Nicaragua to the north, Panama to the east and south, the Pacific Ocean to the west and south and the Caribbean Sea to the east (source : Wikipedia). I have never been to Costa Rica, so I do not have personal memories or opinions on this country. Nevertheless, I found it a good idea to have a closer look at the usage of Twitter in Costa Rica.

The first question in such an analysis is the number of Twitter users in Costa Rica. Twitter user search is temporary disabled, so I cannot inform you on the number of Twitter users in Costa Rica according to Twitter itself. Twitdir reports 338 Twitter users for location Costa Rica.

Based on the location info in the Twitter profiles, I was able to find 507 Twitter users in Costa Rica, still active users. Persons who have closed their Twitter accounts are not included in this number. Because the number of Twitter users not mentioning a true location in their Twitter profile is estimated at around 50%, the actual number of Twitter users in Costa Rica will probably exceed 507. With a population of 4.133 million people (source Wikipedia), the Twitter user density for Costa Rica is one Twitter account for every 8,152 inhabitants.

History of the Twitter accounts in Costa Rica
The graph below shows the history of the Twitter accounts from Costa Rica. The graph is based on the date of the first message posted on each of the public Twitter accounts. Twitter users who haven't published any messages and Twitter users with a private profile (their messages are only visible for their approved followers) are not included in this graph. Twitter started late in Costa Rica. The oldest Twitter users date back from March 2006. Only 8 months later first Costa Ricans started using Twitter.



Oldest Twitter accounts from Costa Rica
http://twitter.com/gringuitica - Erin - first message on January 11, 2007
http://twitter.com/darcia - David Arcia - first message on February 14, 2007
http://twitter.com/lizrincon - Liz Rincon - first message on March 16, 2007
http://twitter.com/Gorileo - Rogelio Umaña - first message on March 18, 2007
http://twitter.com/soloesteban - Esteban Solorzano - first message on March 20, 2007
http://twitter.com/405 - Cuatro Cero Cinco - first message on March 22, 2007
http://twitter.com/MariHo - Mario HB - first message on March 28, 2007
http://twitter.com/nityananda - Nityananda das - first message on March 29, 2007
http://twitter.com/conejita236 - Angel Ackermann - first message on April 6, 2007
http://twitter.com/BarryStev - Barry Stevens - first message on April 22, 2007
http://twitter.com/Toxicomaniac - toxic - first message on April 26, 2007

Private or public
59 Twitter acounts from Costa Rica or 12% have chosen to keep their updates only available to their friends.

Number of following
A Twitter user can choose to follow one or more other Twitter accounts, called "following". 84 Twitter accounts from Costa Rica or 17% do not follow other Twitter users. An average Twitter account from Costa Rica follows 31 Twitter accounts.



Top 10 following
http://twitter.com/iecr - Spanishinstitute - 2,000 following
http://twitter.com/muchacostarica - MuchaCostaRica.Com - 1,727 following
http://twitter.com/NicoPisani - NicoPisani - 655 following
http://twitter.com/Gorileo - Rogelio Umaña - 493 following
http://twitter.com/iCostaRicaTV - iCostaRicaTV - 425 following
http://twitter.com/jenfos - jenfos - 418 following
http://twitter.com/ReverendDoctor - TheReverendDoctor - 418 following
http://twitter.com/remediosgraphic - remediosgraphic - 310 following
http://twitter.com/AlexOtarola - Otárola - 213 following
http://twitter.com/stevekatz - stevekatz - 212 following

Number of followers
A follower is someone who has indicated another Twitter account as following and receives all updates of that other Twitter account. 40 Twitter users from Costa Rica or 8% have no Twitter followers at all, meaning that no one else on Twitter has indicated this account as following. The messages published by these Twitter users are only read by themselves (and by search engines). An average Twitter user from Costa Rica has 24 followers.



Top 10 followers
http://twitter.com/muchacostarica - MuchaCostaRica.Com - 606 followers
http://twitter.com/Gorileo - Rogelio Umaña - 518 followers
http://twitter.com/NicoPisani - NicoPisani - 443 followers
http://twitter.com/jenfos - jenfos - 283 followers
http://twitter.com/iecr - Spanishinstitute - 283 followers
http://twitter.com/stevekatz - stevekatz - 261 followers
http://twitter.com/SEOCharlie - SEOCharlie - 236 followers
http://twitter.com/fusildechispas - cristian cambronero - 196 followers
http://twitter.com/remediosgraphic - remediosgraphic - 158 followers
http://twitter.com/gringuitica - Erin - 153 followers

Updates
An update is the term refering to Twitter messages published by a Twitter users. These are also called tweets. The average number of updates for a Twitter users from Costa Rica is 118. 44 Twitter users (or 9%) are still waiting for their first message to be published. Below you can find the top 10.



Top 10 updates
http://twitter.com/Gorileo - Rogelio Umaña - 3.715 updates
http://twitter.com/berylcorea - berylcorea - 2.883 updates
http://twitter.com/reiterstahl - RQR - 2.248 updates
http://twitter.com/SEOCharlie - SEOCharlie - 1.957 updates
http://twitter.com/OzaCR - OzaCR - 1.804 updates
http://twitter.com/willvv - Will Vásquez Vásquez - 1.621 updates
http://twitter.com/zoncho - Carlos Murillo - 1.461 updates
http://twitter.com/yeco - Yeco - 1.337 updates
http://twitter.com/olesha - olesha - 1.209 updates
http://twitter.com/Rafa - Rafael Gonzalez - 1.207 updates

Degree of activity
37% of all Twitter users from Costa Rica have publised at least one message in the last 7 days.
30% of all Twitter users from Costa Rica have not published a message for more than a month.
12% of all Twitter users from Costa Rica have published at least message on in the period between 7 and 31 days (older than a week, but in the last month).

12% of all Twitter users from Costa Rica is private, so no information on their degree activity is available.
On 9% of the Twitter accounts from Costa Rica not a single message has been published.

Conclusion
Costa Rica is a relatively small country in Central America. It is not known for a significant contribution to what's happening on the internet or in the blogosphere of twitosphere. Neverthelessm there is an active Twitter community in Costa Rica. This community started rather late, but it is growing at a relatively high speed.

Do you really know who is following you?

Have you heard? The Army intelligence report, thinks that Twitter could be used as an effective tool for coordinating militant attacks. We've all marveled at the speed of distributing news on Twitter. Many people have found Twitter to be the fastest way to break news. There have been well-documented reports of Twitter being used for keeping the public informed during catastrophes whether it's earthquakes, California wildfires, or hurricanes. Twitter succeeds in disseminating news because it's:

• Portable, working on multiple platforms, browsers, and clients
• Easy to use
• Global distribution
  
• Fast, works in real-time

These same attributes make Twitter very attractive to terrorists according to the Army's 304th Military Intelligence Battalion. They lay out a possible Scenario : Terrorist operative “A” uses Twitter with… a cell phone camera/video function to send back messages, and to receive messages, from the rest of his [group]… Other members of his [group] receive near real time updates (similar to the movement updates that were sent by activists at the RNC) on how, where, and the number of troops that are moving in order to conduct an ambush.

The report identifies three new technologies as possible threats to national security. Alongside Twitter, Global Positioning System maps and voice-changing software are claimed to be “potential terrorist tools”. You can learn more about the report on the Homeland Security News site, National Terror Alert Response Center. Ironically, NTARC is also using Twitter for the reasons above to get its messages out.



Maybe this is a little farfetched, but at least the boys and girls in the 304th are thinking.

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• 
  

Betty Draper outed!!!

Like many of us, I got caught up in the Mad Men on Twitter craze a few months ago. Now it seems like any character who was ever in a frame has a Twitter character.  The overexposure of Mad Men on Twitter caused me to unsubscribe to all of them.  Well, it turns out there was a little controversy---The fanjackers were fanjacked. For example, who did you follow- @bettydraper or betty_draper? Although betty_draper had a head start, @bettydraper has come on strong:

• betty_draper has 4036 friends/3000 followers and has tweeted 1304 times
•  @bettydraper has 3987 friends/2866 followers and 819 tweets. She even has a LinkedIn Profile.

Now here's where it gets really interesting.   The writer of the fabulous advertising blog, Ad broad, has been tweeting as @bettydraper. So a cloaked character (Ad Broad) is spoofing another character on Twitter (Betty Draper) who is fanjacking the TV character.  You can read all about it on ad broad, but I need an aspirin!

Vroom, Vroom-Fastest growing social net

Nielsen Online reported today that Twitter is the fastest growing social site. Twitter's traffic has grown by 343% in one year.  Current traffic is estimated at 2.3M, a huge increase from last year's 533K. And a lot more stable, too! CNET also has the analysis here.

Re-introducing Twitter

My friend, Aaron Strout, just celebrated his 10,000 Tweet by tweeting his top 10 Social Media lessons learned as he approached 10K.  Aaron provided some great advice that everyone can benefit from.  A few of his Twitter related tips include:

• Make sure you spend as much time commenting, responding and reading other people's content as you do creating your own.
• Every day I a point of calling out others blogs, Twitter updates or FF activity. Remember its all about them, not you!
• On Twitter be social. Talk about work AND social things. Too much of either can be a turn off.

Thinking about Aaron's tweets, I realized that although I blog about Twitter, I haven't been all that helpful in teaching people about how to use Twitter here. As we all know, although Twitter is very simple to learn and use, it can be difficult to master.  Since much has been written about how to Tweet, I have combed the Twitter ecosystem to find the best advice. I highly recommend each one of these great posts:

• A classic from Jeremiah Owyang, "How I use Twitter, and you?"
• Connie Bensen has written a compendium of  Twitter 101 instructions that includes, insights, tips, links and tools.
• Mark Goren provides quick Twitter thoughts I and II
• Jordan Levy has written a fantastic Flowgram which includes the famous Common Craft video, Twitter on Wikipedia, Chris Brogan's 50 ideas on using Twitter for business
• A list of 170 bookmarks of other instructional Twitter posts on Delicious.com 

 And finally, here is a deck that I presented to Seattle Podcamp, Twitter, What's it all about and why should I use it

Twitter- What's It All About And Why Should I Use It?

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: podcampseattle twitter)

Can I influence you to comment?

Geoff Livingston wrote a great post today in which he published 4 social media primers that were presented at a recent PRSA workshop in DC.  I highly recommend reading his post and downloading the decks on:

• General Social  Media
• Influencer Relations
• Reputation Management
• Social Media Strategy.

As the co-author of  Now is Gone,  Geoff definitely knows his stuff and is a great writer. You should have it in your social media library.

I really enjoyed the Influencer Relations deck.  Geoff's guidance was right in line with a project that I worked on this spring for the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA). Led by chairmen, Sean O'Driscoll of CGT Consulting, Brad Fay of Keller Fay, and Steve Hershberger of  Comblu our committee created an Influencer Handbook that focused on documenting best practices in influencer marketing and engagement.

The high-powered committee was comprised of many influencer experts: Idil Cakim of Golin Harris, Erik Rabasca of PHD-US, Filiberto Selvas of Avenue A-Razorfish, Scott Carpenter of Callaway Golf , Tarah Remington of WOMMA and myself.

The Influencer Handbook is a great document that I encourage you to read.  The Influencer Handbook aims to provide practitioners with the following information:
• Definition of an influencer and influencer marketing
• Types of influencers
• Methods to engage and thank influencers
• Guidelines for influencer self-regulation
• Bibliography of influencer communication research and practice

WOMMA is also soliciting feedback, so please let them know your thoughts.  Unfortunately, Monday is the deadline, so do it quickly.

Twitter shuffles the deck

Twitter founders, Jack and Ev have traded places. Twitter Chairman Evan Williams will now become CEO and CEO Jack Dorsey is now the Chairman. Now Ev will manage the day to day affairs at Twitter. The third founder, Biz Stone said, “We had two very strong leaders here and we really needed to choose one,”Board member Fred Wilson said,“We all think Ev is a better fit to lead the company from a product perspective, an operations perspective, and a business standpoint,” You can read the details in the NY Times bits column.

The news was announced on the Twitter blog today.  In the co-founder's characteristic minimalist styles, you can see their reactions in their tweets:

 

 

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BarackObama followers

Twitter User BarackObama has an incredible amount of followers. This Twitter account follows every Twitter user that follows BarackObama. Currently Twitter User BarackObama is following over 100,000 other Twitter users. A rough estimation of the number of Twitter messages per day per users can be made of two sources. Twiturly scans between 200,000 and 250,000 Twitter messages per day, TwitDir reports 3.18 million Twitters users. This leads to the following calculations.

Number of Twitter Users (TwitDir) : 3,183,544
Daily Twitter messages (Twiturly) : 200,000 - 250,000
Number of Twitter messages per day and user : 0,063 - 0,079
BarackObama followers : 101.350
Twitter messages from BarackObama followers per day : 6.367 - 7.959
Twitter messages from BarackObama followers per hour : 265 - 332
Twitter messages from BarackObama followers per minute : 4.4 - 5.5

It seems quite unlikely that Barack Obama himself would read all these Twitter messages. I even doubt it that a single person is capable of reading all these messages (5 per minute, 24 hours per day).

Twinfluence

Influence of a Twitter account does not solely depends on the number of people who are following the Twitter account. It also depends on the size of the network of the followers of Twitter account. Twinfluence applies the concept of social capital to propose a set of new influence measures for Twitter users (from the about page).

Reach: Reach is the number of followers a Twitterer has (first-order followers), plus all of their followers (second-order followers). Reach is a measurement of potential audience and listeners, a best estimate of the number of people that a given Twitterer could quickly get a message to.

Velocity: Velocity merely averages the number of first- and second-order followers attracted per day since the Twitterer first established their account. The larger the number is, the faster that Twitterer has accumulated their influence. Of course, this number could jump significantly with the addition of a few high-profile followers.

Social Capital: Tthe average first-order network of a Twitterer's followers. A high value indicates that most of that Twitterer's followers have a lot of followers themselves.

Centralization: This is a measure of how much a Twitterer's influence (reach) is invested in a small number of followers. Centralization scores range from 0% (completely decentralized) to a theoretical 100% (completely dependent on one Twitterer).

Efficiency: The more people you follow, the more time you have to spend reading and filtering tweets. Efficiency is a measure of how many people a Twitterer had to follow in order to build up their reach, as a percentage.

A few examples to illustrate these new influence measures.

BarackObama, the most followed Twitter user


SteveRubel, a digital marketer working at Edelman Digital


TwitFacts, the Twitter user I created for this blog



These new influence measures are interesting. They have however also their limitations. Influence should be measured for persons. Barack Obama uses various channels to illustrate his influence : speaches, debates, personal encounters, his website, his Twitter account, … On a lower scale everyone is active on different channels. Steve Rubel writes on his blog, he writes columns, he speaks at various events, he works for various clients as a digital marketer at Edelman Digital. On addition to that, he has a stream of Twitter messages. Influence can be measured for each of these channels : number of blog posts linking to Steve Rubel's blog, number of readers and comments on his columns, number of speaking engagements, number of Edelman clients wanting to work with him, ... All these measures are only capable of capturing a tiny aspect of someone's influence. Influence should ideally be measured for a person, not for a specific channel. Twinfluence is however an interesting approach for a specific domain for which no influence measures were available.

Twinfluence uses a clever way to deal with the Twitter API. All requests to the Twitter API are performed with the Twitter user credentials supplied by the user. After several queries, there is a big risk that a user will receive this error message :

Twitter Top 100 lists compared

In a previous post (Top Twitter Users) I listed several sites where lists of top Twitter users can be found. I wanted to get an idea on the quality of these lists. Do they contain the same Twitter users ? Do they provide the same data ?

I considered four top lists of Twitter users ranked by the number of followers.
1. Twitdir Top 100 followed : number 1 on the list has 94937 followers, there are 6586 followers for number 100
2. Twittercounter The top 100 most popular Twitter users : number 1 on the list has 94600 followers, there are 7156 followers for number 100
3. Twitterholic Top 100 based on Followers : number 1 on the list has 94894 followers, there are 6562 followers for number 100
4. Twittown Top 150 followers (only first 100 considered) : number 1 on the list has 6941 followers, there are 986 followers for number 100

The four lists combined count 179 different Twitter users. It is clear that the top 100 list from Twittown is outdated. Twitter user @BarackObama has only 5441 followers according to Twittown, in reality this Twitter user has 94937 followers.

Let's compare the three other list. The three lists combined cound 122 different Twitter users, see table below.

Twitdir has the highest values for number of followers. Twittercounter has the lowest values.
* If Twitdir is compared to Twitterholic, the differences are up to 43 followers.
* If Twitdir is compared to Twittercounter the differences are up to 337 followers.
* If Twitterholic is compared to Twittercounter the differences are up to 294 followers.

It looks like that Twitdir Top 100 followed has the most actual data, although some Twitter users are missing. On the other hand Twitdir is the least user friendly. The top 100 is presented in 10 parts, each consisting of 10 Twitter users. Furthermore it takes an awful lot of time to load the 10 pages. If you want a quick overview of all top 100 Twitter users, I would recommend the Twitterholic Top 100.

TwitterUser	Twitdir top 100	Twitterholic top 100	Twittercounter top 100
BarackObama	94937	94894	94600
kevinrose	66341	--	66251
leolaporte	57771	57762	57703
cnnbrk	43880	43857	43628
alexalbrecht	38623	38618	38595
MarsPhoenix	--	36237	36182
JasonCalacanis	36148	36130	36083
Scobleizer	35605	35590	35473
Veronica	33393	33382	33333
twitter	--	--	31820
TwitterUser	Twitdir top 100	Twitterholic top 100	Twittercounter top 100
THErealDVORAK	31476	31471	31399
macrumors	31376	31375	31353
hotdogsladies	27617	27614	27577
TechCrunch	26722	26705	26679
ijustine	23679	23675	23636
ricksanchezcnn	23176	23172	23152
twittervision	22982	--	22915
guykawasaki	21087	21084	21061
ev	19692	19683	19635
CaliLewis	19661	19656	19647
TwitterUser	Twitdir top 100	Twitterholic top 100	Twittercounter top 100
Twitterrific	19357	19344	19333
rtm	19287	--	19241
StephenColbert	18888	18881	18692
chrispirillo	18797	18790	18770
wilw	18769	18760	18740
patricknorton	18365	18365	18345
biz	18148	18144	18076
013	--	--	18134
twitlive	--	17465	17460
dooce	17280	17277	17077
TwitterUser	Twitdir top 100	Twitterholic top 100	Twittercounter top 100
laughingsquid	16797	16785	16762
chrisbrogan	16358	16343	16322
garyvee	16356	16339	16267
bloggersblog	15901	15901	15889
ambermacarthur	15427	15423	15419
darthvader	14864	14852	14830
woot	14636	14627	14588
gruber	14403	14398	14378
hashtags	--	--	14220
zappos	14088	14080	13983
TwitterUser	Twitdir top 100	Twitterholic top 100	Twittercounter top 100
mashable	13393	13382	13356
jowyang	13074	13068	13044
NotHenryRollins	12924	--	--
TwitPic	12781	12776	12747
feliciaday	12540	12534	12441
zefrank	--	12360	12332
davewiner	11962	11959	11947
hodgman	11846	11842	11764
dlprager	--	11815	11806
drhorrible	--	11698	11641
TwitterUser	Twitdir top 100	Twitterholic top 100	Twittercounter top 100
problogger	11652	11649	11631
jakemarsh	--	11598	11600
loiclemeur	11435	11426	11403
majornelson	10846	--	10834
Larry	--	10843	--
newmediajim	10820	10816	10785
timoreilly	10800	10792	10714
DannyTRS	10755	10755	10748
Ed	10676	--	--
Ed_Dale	--	10673	10646
TwitterUser	Twitdir top 100	Twitterholic top 100	Twittercounter top 100
WilHarris	10641	10640	10631
wordpress	10625	10617	10545
jeffcannata	10508	10507	10499
UstreamTV	10455	10440	10433
Ihnatko	10336	--	10332
skydiver	10308	10300	10265
mollywood	10267	10265	10260
twitter_status	10003	--	10009
jack	9921	9914	9881
zeldman	9846	9845	9816
TwitterUser	Twitdir top 100	Twitterholic top 100	Twittercounter top 100
jonathancoulton	9683	--	9663
SteveJobs	9677	--	9639
macworld	9639	9638	9603
jkottke	9612	9607	9592
TUAW	9500	9495	9482
steverubel	9428	9424	9418
technorati	9374	9369	9330
brianshaler	9333	9332	9331
om	--	9314	9292
xenijardin	9116	9112	9100
TwitterUser	Twitdir top 100	Twitterholic top 100	Twittercounter top 100
nytimes	8783	8783	8759
s	--	--	8711
osen	--	--	8632
SethGodin	8623	--	--
revision3	--	8555	8535
cnn	8426	8424	8410
warrenellis	8298	8293	8263
gapingvoid	8268	--	8263
missrogue	8144	8141	8129
factoryjoe	8060	8055	8050
TwitterUser	Twitdir top 100	Twitterholic top 100	Twittercounter top 100
socialmediaclub	8047	8036	8023
digg	8021	8018	8000
nprpolitics	7986	--	7909
simplebits	7780	7775	7767
sarahlane	7670	7663	7638
Maggie	7553	7554	7530
acedtect	7529	7527	7523
BreakingNewsOn	7475	7474	7462
DanRaine	7349	7349	7338
Damiano	7339	7332	7330
TwitterUser	Twitdir top 100	Twitterholic top 100	Twittercounter top 100
Dizzed	7269	--	--
jeffpulver	7249	7246	7239
springnet	7200	7200	7197
PhillyD	--	7195	--
buckhollywood	7177	7179	7161
CNETNews	7165	7162	7156
waynesutton	7147	7144	--
StephenTColbert	7026	7028	--
timer	7010	--	--
mybloglog	7004	--	--
TwitterUser	Twitdir top 100	Twitterholic top 100	Twittercounter top 100
fredwilson	6987	6983	--
lonelysandwich	--	6927	--
seesmic	6795	--	--
Pistachio	6792	6787	--
Zadi	6746	6733	--
mozillafirefox	--	6745	--
Borat	--	6674	--
adamcurry	6621	6618	--
Mickipedia	6586	6582	--
tferriss	--	6582	--
TwitterUser	Twitdir top 100	Twitterholic top 100	Twittercounter top 100
ryanblock	--	6568	--
briansolis	--	6562	--

These figures presented above date from Friday October 10, 2008.

Top Twitter Users

For those who are interested in how to find top Twitter users, I have created a collection of links to top lists of Twitter users according to several criteria.

In the first place there are global rankings.

1. Twitterholic

Twitterholic.com offers Top 100 lists based on Followers, Friends and Updates.

2. Twitdir

Twitdir presents Top 100 followed, Top 100 updaters, Top 100 favouriters and Top 100 followers lists.

3. Twittercounter

Twittercounter has a list called The top 100 most popular Twitter users.

4. Twittown

Twittown, the unofficial Twitter community, offers Top 150 followers, Top 150 updates and Top 150 following lists.

5. Twitter Grader

Twitter Grader gives you a grade based on the power of your Twitter profile. It also offers the list with the highest ranked Twitter users.

6. Twitterposter

TwitterPoster is a visual application based on Twitter API. It provides a visual representation of the degree of influence of the Twitter users. It does not present a top list as such, but only top Twitter users are shown.


There are also specialized rankings of Twitter users.

7. Twitstat

Twitstats offers various lists of Twitter users followed by @twitstat : Top 10 today, yesterday, most engaging, most social, happy people, funny people, angry people, tired people, most replies, perfect tweets.

8. Top analyst twitterers / analyst twitter index

On the Technobabble blog, a post in July presented a ranking of analysts.

9. Newspapers that Twitter

Rankings of American newspapers offering Twitter feeds can be found on the graphicdesigner blog. There is a July ranking and an August ranking.

10. Unofficial 2008 Top 50 Tweeples

Finally you can always submit your own Twitter account for the Unofficial 2008 Top 50 Tweeples list.

Public Service Announcement - Twitter gets tough on Spam

I've written about spam on Twitter before yet follower Spam continues to annoy Twitter users.  As Twitter has grown in popularity, it has gotten more aggressive about combatting spam. In the past, the best defense against spammers was to block the spammer from viewing your updates. It was understood that Twitter tracked the blocks closely and the community's self-policing would be acted upon by Twitter. And it seemed to work fairly well as many of the spammers were removed.  Now TechCrunch reports that Twitter has taken an even more aggressive approach by introducing the Spam account.  By sending a reply @spam or direct message will get a spammer on the list.  I just started to follow the Spam account and suggest that you do as well. Let's get rid of Spam!

Crowdsourcing on Twitter

I've seen a lot of interest in Crowdsourcing on Twitter lately. We seem to crowdsource all the time.

As Laura Fitton said in Clive Thompson's great Ambient Awareness article, “I outsource my entire life,” she said. “I can solve any problem on Twitter in six minutes.” Many other people are relying on the twitterverse for its opinions and referrals. As an example, just the other day Ken Burbary asked,

Ken promptly received several answers to his request.  Chris Brogan asked Twitter forinnovative ideas on a social media project for Oreo. This happens all the time. Twitter is the ultimate crowdsourcing vehicle.  Several months ago, Zena Weist, discussed the concept in her blog and described the activity on Twitter as Community Sourcing, Community sourcing is taking crowd sourcing to the next level:
Outsourcing a task to a connected group/community for the benefit of that community.

There are a few great books on Crowdsourcing that I highly recommend and of course, each author is active on Twitter.


Mzinga Chairman Barry Libert, wrote We are Smarter than Me.
NYU Professor Clay Shirky, wrote Here Comes Everybody
and most recently, Jeff Howe of Wired wrote Crowdsourcing.


Have you read these books?  What did you think?  How do you use crowdsourcing?

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New Twitter Communities

As we all know, the Twitterverse is a great community where we can enhance our networking, strengthen relationships and crowdsource various questions/ problems among other things.  Recently, I've joined a few off-Twitter communities devoted to the Twitter network.

Twitterpated is a Ning community organized by A+ Networker, Vincent Wright,  whose goal is a separate discussion and networking group for My Linking Power Forum members who want to enhance their knowledge and reach on Twitter.com. Currently, there are 107 members.

The Birdhouse is another Ning community.  This one is organized by Tweetcrunch, a blog devoted to Twitter and Microblogging news. The Birdhouse is a place for developers and users who share the love of Micro blogging in any shape or form, from Twitter to Rejaw create groups, share new apps, ideas or suggestions, and get to know the people behind the tweet.  Brand new, there are currently15 members.

More established Twitter communities include Tweeple, a LinkedIn group devoted to Twitter.  Currently,  there are1600 members and 27 lively discussions posted.

On Facebook, Mark Carter created Twitter Strategies and Connections, For people actively using Twitter and people actively wondering HOW to use Twitter...Your forum to connect with like minded people so you can ask questions and share expertise and strategies (this includes everyone from new users to the "Twitter pros") that will make your Twitter experience more valuable! There are 697 members with some lively discussions, videos, and wall comments.

I enjoy participating in each of these communities as well as other social media communities.  A lot of interesting tips,tools and discussions that don't occur in 140 characters.  The net-net is a stronger community, whether on Twitter or not.  Hope to see you around.