Twitter

Oprah joins Twitter

With Oprah Winfrey joining Twitter, expect an influx from Middle America, and a backlash from the press. But remember, it's all part of the technology Hype Cycle

Oprah's followers versus Jonathan Ross's at TwitterCounter

The big event on Twitter last week was Oprah Winfrey making her first tweet, live on her show, with the help of Twitter co-founder Ev Williams. "HI TWITTERS," she shouted, "THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY."

The show also crowned Ashton Kutcher King of Twitter for becoming the first user with a million followers, following a race with the CNN Breaking News account.

Oprah is a huge power in the US, as we have seen from her book club and magazine. Where Oprah leads, thousands if not hundreds of thousands follow -- starting with Gayle King from Oprah's magazine. Indeed, Oprah's own following has already zoomed past many of the UK's favourite tweeters, including Jonathan Ross. There's no telling where it will end.

If you missed the event, you can watch the two YouTube videos on the Mashable post, Ashton Kutcher and Evan Williams Talk Twitter With Oprah [Video].

Kutcher made the right noises about the "democratization of media" -- that "one man can have a voice that's as loud as an entire media company". He also talked about the ability to correct stories about him by talking directly to fans, instead of going through publicists, journalists and other intermediaries.

Whether Kutcher's achievement will survive close scrutiny is another matter. NowPublic has already questioned it in Ashton Kutcher Punks Twitter: A Giant Million Follower PR Stunt. It says:

This is not a story of the "little man" beating out "big media" — this is the story of a major Hollywood celebrity orchestrating a massive, social media publicity campaign that was specifically designed to promote himself, Twitter and, by extension, Ted Turner and CNN.

Kutcher's effort was promoted on 1,133 digital billboards, it says, and "as the race to the million follower finish line approached last night, Twitter users were suspiciously blocked from unfollowing either Ashton or CNN". It reckons the show needed someone to make the million, though (as suggested in comments) it might simply have been a way to prevent people gaming the system to try to win the prize for the millionth follower.

It also remains to be seen whether 4chan got involved. Members of this bulletin board belatedly entered the race, using hundreds of thousands of fake accounts.

Ev was less impressive than Kutcher, and ducked the chance to say something useful about Twitter policy on fakesters. Oprah pointed out that anyone could set up an account and pretend to be Oprah, so how would anyone know an account was the real thing? This is a serious problem that, at the moment, is being handled at the grass roots level by sites such as Valebrity. Ev's answer was that "our people know your people," which is no use at all to many millions of people with some species of fame.

Twitter is a tiny 30-person company, and if you are, for example, an actor on EastEnders or Corrie, or an author or a pop band, your people (if any) certainly don't know their people.

Still, Twitter was growing at a rapid rate, and Oprah's arrival is likely to boost it. This will make Twitter less select and less geeky, and that might attract different kinds of attack. Gartner analyst Mark Raskino, co-author of Mastering The Hype Cycle, thinks the process may already have started., His post, Classic Hype Cycle turn signal: 'Twitter Backlash' reported, picks up on a New York Observer headline that caught his attention: 'Twitter Sucks!' The Backlash Begins. Among other things, this points to "an entire blog devoted to chronicling the "Twitter Backlash".

Raskino says:

Remember the innovation is microblogging (and there are competitors) - so let's forget the company name for a moment. This technology innovation example is particularly interesting because the technology is of direct relevance to journalists and media people in their own jobs. So naturally they will discuss it more and the situation is unusually amplified. As they compete for audience attention we will tend to see more extreme hyperbole and backlash. That helps make this innovation a particularly clear reference example, as it passes through the early stages of the Hype Cycle.

The benefit of the Hype Cycle, of course, is that it helps you regard the backlash in the same way as the hype. Neither is worth taking too seriously: they're just a normal part of the way technologies grow up.

reff: Jack Schofield / guardian.co.uk

Twitter

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Twitter, Inc.

Type	Private
Founded	2006
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, USA
Key people	Jack Dorsey, Chairman Evan Williams, CEO Biz Stone, Creative Director
Industry	mobile social network service, micro-blogging
Website	http://twitter.com/

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users' updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers). Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow anybody to access them. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. The service is free to use over the Internet, but using SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

Since its creation in 2006, Twitter has gained extensive notability and popularity worldwide. It is often described as the "SMS of Internet," in that the site provides the functionality (via its application programming interfaces) for other desktop and web-based applications to send and receive short text messages, often obscuring the Twitter service itself.

Four gateway numbers are currently available for SMS — short codes for the United States, Canada, India, and a United Kingdom-based number for international use. There is also a short code for Vodafone users from the UK. Several third parties offer posting and receiving updates via e-mail.

Estimates of the number of daily users vary as the company does not release the number of active accounts. In November 2008, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research estimated that Twitter had 4-5 million users. A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranks Twitter as the third most used social network (Facebook being the largest, followed by MySpace), which puts the number of unique monthly visitors at roughly 6 million and the number of monthly visits at 55 million.In March 2009, a Nielsen.com blog ranked Twitter as the fastest growing site in the Member Communities category for February 2009. Twitter had a growth of 1382%, Zimbio had a growth of 240%, followed by Facebook with a growth of 228%.

Technology

Twitter has been described as akin to a web-based IRC client. The Twitter web interface uses the Ruby on Rails framework.From the spring of 2007 until sometime in 2008 the actual messages were handled by a pure-Ruby persistent queue server called Starling.Starling was replaced in 2008 with Scarling, a persistent queue server written in the Scala programming language, which has since been renamed Kestrel.The Twitter API itself allows the integration of Twitter with other web services and applications.In late April 2008, TechCrunch reported that, due to downtime related to scaling problems, Twitter would abandon Ruby on Rails as their web framework and create a new system with PHP or Java. Evan Williams, however, soon debunked this report in a Tweet he sent on May 1, 2008.

Twitter messages may be tagged using hashtags, a word or phrase prefixed with a #, such as #beer.This enables tweets on a specific subject to be found by simply searching for their common hashtag, provided that the user has tagged his or her tweet. Meanwhile, the @ sign before a username, such as @example, is used to distinguish a reply directed at that user. A message preceded by the @username prefix can still be read by anyone, but is treated as directed firstly to the user in question.

Privacy and security

Twitter collects personally identifiable information about its users and shares it with third parties. Twitter considers that information an asset, and reserves the right to sell it if the company changes hands.

A security vulnerability was reported on April 7, 2007, by Nitesh Dhanjani and Rujith. The problem was due to Twitter's using the SMS message originator as the authentication of the user's account. Nitesh used FakeMyText to spoof a text message, whereupon Twitter posted the message on the victim's page.This vulnerability can only be used if the target's phone number is known.Within a few weeks of this discovery Twitter introduced an optional PIN that its users can specify to authenticate SMS-originating messages.

On January 5, 2009, 33 high-profile Twitter accounts were compromised, and falsified messages — including sexually explicit and drug-related messages — were sent. The accounts were compromised after a Twitter administrator's password was guessed via a dictionary attack.

Money Blogging

Learning How to Make Money Blogging

There are two major types of business models that entrepreneurs use to make money blogging. The firstand most common way to turn a blog into a profit making machine is to sell advertising to different companies and brands who want to reach that blog's readers.

The second kind of money making blog is one that helps a single brand improve its image by creating positive associations between the blog and the product in the mind of consumers. Both kinds of blogs can make a lot of money, especially if the creator has a keen mind for marketing. If you are blogging with the goal of selling advertising, there are two basic ways that you can go about recruiting sponsors who want to put ads on your site; you can let someone else do all of the legwork, or you can do the work yourself and keep all of the revenue. Within the first group, many people make money blogging by selling space through Google's AdSense program.

The advantages of this program are numerous, as it requires very little effort on the part of the blogger or webmaster to begin raking in profits. However, most people discover that they make less money through this method than they had hoped that their blog would earn. Selling advertising directly to companies who want to put banner ads or sponsored links on your blog can take quite a bit of time, but it is often fairly lucrative. If you have a lot of contacts in industries that are related to the topic of your blog, you may want to try to go this route.

People who have a strong background in sales and are experienced at pitching proposals can make quite a bit of money by renting blog space to interested companies. The most serious problem with this model is that you often have to build quite a sizable readership before you can attract advertisers, which can mean that you have to do several months of work before you start to make money blogging. As blogging becomes a more and more lucrative business, a lot of established companies are considering how they can get into the action.
One way that companies are capitalizing on the blog movement is by having blogs that provide a kind of friendly face for their corporation. Often, a company will employ an established blogger to create a weblog designed specifically to appeal to that company's customers and to create positive associations with the brand in consumers' minds. More than one writer who never even dreamed that he or she could make money blogging has been approached by a company and offered quite a pretty penny for this kind of gig.

Yuan.