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Jason Kottke takes a look at the growth of Blogger vs. Twitter. Though some of the numbers aren’t accurate it still pretty interesting. Twitter has blown up in terms of adoption. I do think that blogging in general has paved the way for stuff like this to be adopted so quickly in the first place. I also think it’s largely bloggers who have adopted it.

via

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitter Hacks, Google

Nick Wilson of Threadwatch fame is blogging the birth of his baby. This may be the first birth of it’s kind. I’m not sure what it means, but it’s mildly entertaining at least. It’s better than streaming the video, at least! I just never want to see that.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitter Hacks, Twitter Baby, Nick Wilson

Twitter is being assimilated into other social networks extremely quickly - not only did Facebook just upgrade its status updates to do much the same thing, but now Bebo has launched a feature that also emulates Twitter’s functionality. The name of the feature is “What are You Doing?�, which Twitter users will recognize as the Twitter slogan. Subtle. via Bebo Clones Twitter, Blatantly

I like the addition of the feature. It’s not novel by any means, Twitter copied the idea from Dodgeball. It may be a passing fad, but small is the new big at the moment. The copy of the input box, however, is a little bit too much of a copy. I like it, it looks great, of course. I wonder how many others will be adding this type thing into their own social sites. I probably will!

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitter Hacks, Bebo, Dodgeball

Simon over at Advertising Age wrote Web 2.0? Not So Fast — Say Hello to Web 1.9 (If That) and mainly extols the reasons why Twitter isn’t an example of Web 2.0. I’m not a huge fan of all the crazy labels and hype around stuff. Hell, I’m still one of the people who like to call blogs “web pages”, you know, like we used to.

Like any form of communication (chat, email, cell phones, etc.) you are going to get the noise with the signal. You think the banter of teenage girls on their cellphones is worthy of the powerful technology that the cell phone represents? Or me calling my wife asking “what do you think we should do for dinner”. Every tool will have it’s good uses and it’s bad uses. It’s not the tools fault.

via Debra via Twitter

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitter Hacks

Steve Rubel lists Three Reasons Why Twitter Will Be Sold Soon and I think he’s on the right track. I have a feeling that the plan was always to sell it and that was how they plan to monetize it. We’ll see, of course, but I think a sale is very, very likely. Especially now that Twitter has mass.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitter Hacks

Leo Laporte is a bleeding edge technology kind of guy. He’s what marketing monkeys call an “influencer”. He certainly has gravity as a tech/internet celebrity. There is no doubt he’s had a major impact on the massive jump in Twitter popularity in the last 6-8 weeks. Evan even acknowledges this in his recent interview with Jason Calacanis. Now Leo is leaving Twitter for Jaiku a competing service to Twitter.

Leo says the reason for the move is confusing with the name Twitter. Leo’s new project, one that started before Twitter, is called TWiT.tv, or This Week in Tech. They do several podcasts and video casts. I’m willing to bet that this is the real and honest reason for leaving Twitter and I don’t claim to know Leo’s audience as well as he does but it seems like the tech savvy viewers of Leo’s work would obviously (pun intended) know the difference. Branding is a concern for any company and this will be an interesting story to follow. Leo has asked Evan for his account on Twitter to be deleted, which is a shame. Leo is the most “followed” person on Twitter right now with 4,420, nearly double Robert Scoble who is also a huge driving force in terms of sending folks over to Twitter. Leo only has 57 people on Jaiku at the time of this writing. The interesting thing will be to see if Leo has enough mass to pull users away from the gravity he and others have created around Twitter.

You can check out Leo’s page on Jaiku at chieftwit.jaiku.com.

Other people are also talking about this story:

• Joi Ito on Jaiku vs. Twitter
• Twitter Me This, Is Jaiku a Threat? Let’s Ask Those Defining the Landscape
• Attention Leo - I couldn’t careless about TWiT
• Leo Laporte leaves Twitter for Jaiku (Scoble)
• Digg Monkeys discuss it
• Twitter is so last week, now its Jaiku

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitter Hacks, Jaiku, Leo Leporte

Best Twitter line ever:

I find this quite humorous and can only hope it was intentional. If you want to delete a Twitter friend (I haven’t and don’t) the URL is http://twitter.com/friendships/destroy/PoorSapHere. I like it. Social networking as blood sport. Kudos to Twitter. via Destroying Twitter Friendships

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitter Hacks

Great, this should be fun. Just like the domain squatting of yore, spammers will be snatching up any name that’s seo worthy and then using the accounts to spam link to their sites. Fantastic! Paul talks more about it over at Talk New Media.

I’m very much dreading when spammers start abusing the system, not only will it destroy the flow of conversations but it could end up costing Twitter money as well as people who’ve got it setup to SMS them. Though I think the fact that you have to approve friends should assuage that problem just about entirely.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitter Hacks, Keywords, Squatting, Spam

It seem Twitter is grinding to a halt this morning. Trying to get my Twitter fix but I can’t even get in with Twitterific or Twitteroo and they usually work even when the site is slow.

Obviously (pun intended) Twitter needs more pipes and/or servers!

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitter Hacks

Mike over at Vecosys posits that Twitter is spending in the neighborhood of 115k a month on text messages. When I first read it I figured Twitter was done for, but then I read Pat’s post at Roam4free and he rightly points out that sending SMS messages in the US is free. It costs to receive them. Pat thinks Twitter is more likely spending $25,000 a month, while a much better number is still a boat load of cash to be burning. I don’t think anyone has had a hint at how Evan and the gang at Obvious plan on making money on this. The idea is pretty cool and someone could buy them up simply for popularity of the site right now. How far off are we from ads on the Twitter site? I doubt it’ll come to that. The folks at Obvious seem to subscribe to the build it and the money will come model so I think we’ve yet to see how this will become a money making venture for them, and I hope it does.

Update: I read this on TechCrunch

Currently, it costs a lot of money to launch a start-up in the SMS/mobile space — you have to license a shortcode monthly ($500-$1000/mo), pay a SMS gateway provider, and then pay anywhere from $0.03 - $0.05 per inbound or outbound text message. It adds up. But now, if a start-up chooses to use Twitter as a command line to their web service, it’s free (until Twitter starts charging for it).

If my math is right, and it probably isn’t, that sounds like a lot less than either of these guys figured.

Technorati Tags: Twitter