The footballer in question, a Premier League player, has recently been in the news for his alleged involvement with former Miss Wales and Big Brother contestant, Imogen Thomas. The concerned player has brought an injunction against his name being published by the regular tabloid publications.

However, the story has been among the trending topics on the social networking site Twitter, where his name was revealed and discussed widely. This only means that even though the newspapers are being restrained from publishing his name with regards to the story, his involvement in it is common knowledge.

A Scottish newspaper, the Sunday Herald has taken the liberty of publishing his name. They have also displayed his photo with a black bar across his face and the word “Censored” written across.

While this could be seen as willful opposition to the injunction, they have explained in their editorial that it is “unsustainable” for newspapers to be prevented from publishing this hot piece of news while the individual’s name is being openly discussed on Twitter, and therefore known to everyone who has access to the Internet.

They have further said that “The issue is one of freedom of information and of a growing argument in favour of more restrictive privacy laws.”

The British prime Minister, David Cameron has expressed general agreement with these sentiments. He has said, “It’s not fair on the newspapers if all the social media can report this and the newspapers can’t, and so the law and the practice has got to catch up with how people consume media today.

Mr. Cameron has further indicated that it may be time to take a fresh look at this aspect of the law, and make some appropriate changes regarding privacy laws in keeping with the times.

So far, the attorney general’s office has not brought any charges against the newspaper or Twitter. However, the judges ruling on the case have continued to rebuff attempts by the newspapers to bring this case to trial, mainly due to the fact that overturning the rules would only serve to benefit the newspapers and not the general public and definitely not the individual whose privacy is being encroached upon.

On the other hand, even if the courts choose to sue Twitter for the breach of the injunction the question being asked by many is whether it is possible for the British courts to sue Twitter which is an American company and has no culpability in the U.K. courts.

The new service is a social news product and it was officially launched yesterday, shortly after an ex-employee of LinkedIn, Mrinal Desai, blogged about it on TechCrunch.

According to Desai, this new feature could help to turn LinkedIn into the Wall Street Journal of the social world. While Twitter and Facebook have been competing with each other to be the most popular social network for some time now, this new feature on LinkedIn could give LinkedIn an edge over the two, especially in the business world.

Mrinal Desai reportedly also recently received an email from the URL ‘news@linkedin.com’. This could well be a precursor to the formal launch of what he called “LinkedIn Headlines”. This email contained all the most-shared news on his network.

LinkedIn Headlines news via email

So far, it has been observed that LinkedIn is used mainly by sales personnel and people who recruit new staff for their companies. If this new feature is publicised well, it could make LinkedIn a far more popular and well-used social network.

LinkedIn has also recently added a new feature called Skills, which allows users to learn more about any skills that they are interested in.

Skills, in conjunction with LinkedIn Today will allow users to collect more information on topics ranging from the highly technical to general, which is something that sites like Facebook and Twitter would find difficult.

Update: Screenshot of LinkedIn Today

Some agencies in the USA have already been invited to test Twitter’s ad serving platforms, and their clients have seen an encouraging results. This could, of course, be due to the relative novelty of the advertising medium.

Some of the products that have been marketed through Twitter include health supplements and books. In the short period since the advertisers started using Twitter as a medium to advertise, they have found that the money spent is less than what they do on Google and Facebook, and at the same time they have received mare orders from Twitter than from Google and Facebook.

Targeting small and medium businesses seems like a good move on the part of Twitter, especially in light of the fact that Google owes its popularity in large part to this sector of the market.

Twitter has started efforts to develop a self-service platform since last December, and they hope that their 200 million users will respond favourably to their advertising initiatives.

The micro-blogging site started advertising as a means of monetisation only last year. They generated $45 million in revenue through this means last year. They hope to be able to generate $150 million through ads this year.

Twitter is also likely to introduce location-based targeting in the near future, as the service is often accessed on mobile phones.

Data collected for the report shows that the number of U.S. adults paying at least 1 visit per month to Twitter.com has gone down from 9.54 million in November 2009 to 8.25 million in November 2010.

While this figure alone would indicate a decline in usage, the average number of visits per month has gone up by 37% in the same period. In November 2009, the average number of visits was 7.3. In November 2010, that figure rose to 10.

Average time per session & Average visits to Twitter in the USA

However, the duration of each visit has gone down slightly during this period, from 15 minutes and 12 seconds to 13 minutes and 12 seconds. This shows that users now prefer to make more frequent but shorter visits to Twitter, rather than fewer but longer visits as they were doing earlier.

The report shows that the average time being spent for by Americans on Twitter is now 2 hours and 12 minutes per month, compared to 1 hour and 51 minutes a year ago.

These findings collectively show that while Twitter might not be growing in popularity as spectacularly as it did in 2009, its users are finding new and more interesting ways to use the site, thereby increasing its net usage.

The Egyptian protests, which started last Tuesday, have been gaining ground. The opposition in Egypt declared January 25 as a “Day of Rage” to end the 30 year rule of President Hosni Mubarak.

People with varying ideologies ranging from Islamist to Communists and Secularists have come together for this protest. They have been gathering in huge numbers on streets and squares. They have been shouting and burning symbols of the dictatorial government.

The government, for its part, is doing all it can to subdue the protestors. They have set out the secret police as well as the riot police. They have resorted to using water cannons and even assaulting the public.

Egyptian government officials have also tried to deactivate the mobile towers and block sites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, which are being used for propaganda.

While they have succeeded in blocking communication channels to an extent, they have not been entirely successful in doing so. Users are still able to access Twitter in English, Arabic and French. Mobile phones are also partially functional. Photographs and videos of the protests which have been uploaded are being sent around the world by supporters of the uprising.

A curfew was imposed in the country on Friday, but it was defied. The riots have reached such proportions that the police were eventually forced to retreat and the army had to be called out to control the situation for the first time in 25 years.

Update: Google has joined in on the fray by enabling Egyptians to call a local number in order to tweet about the uprising. The new service has been introduced via SayNow, a company that Google bought just last week.

These figures show a steady increase from the 160 million registered accounts in September 2010, and 95 million tweets per day in December 2010. The latest figures from this week claim that Twitter has 240 million registered accounts.

Source: DoubleClick Ad Planner

While these figures clearly indicate that Twitter is continuing to grow at a fairly steady pace, they do not say anything about the quality of the information being tweeted and how much of that information is actually ever read.

Quality of tweets is obviously not a concern for executives at Twitter, who have now decided to focus on global expansion.

With this in mind, they have recently launched their service in Korean, which is the seventh language that Twitter is available in. Other languages that Twitter is available in are German, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and English.

Twitter has made deals with the local carriers LG and Uplus and local search engine, Daum, to encourage more users to sign on to Twitter in the Korean language.

The micro-blogging platform probably chose Korean as the latest language for their site, because the use of Twitter went up ten-fold among Koreans in the last year. iPhone and Android apps are also available in Korean.

The majority of Twitter users access the English language version of the site. However, the number of tweets in English has gone down by about 25% during the last year. This is sufficient reason for Twitter to try and expand to other languages.

While Twitter is now available in 7 languages, their biggest competitor, Facebook, is already available in 70 languages. Facebook managed to achieve this feat by crowd-sourcing the translation process by providing their users with a dedicated translation app.

If Twitter copied Facebook for once, instead of Facebook always copying Twitter, the micro-blogging platform could grow faster globally.

From 05:00 British Standard Time on Thursday to 05:00 today, three Twitter accounts fed information about each and every call that was dealt with by the Greater Manchester Police force.

Their main Twitter account, @gmpolice, interfaced with the public and retweeted information from the other Twitter accounts that had been set up for the purpose. Calls that were tweeted ranged from mundane complaints being logged for domestic and neighbourhood disputes to more serious matters such as rape, murder and theft.

Follower numbers of the GM Police Twitter account shot up from 3,135 last Friday to over 15,000 today. What caught a lot of people’s attention was the number of ridiculous calls that the police seemed to deal with.

Callers complained about televisions that didn’t work, horses that wouldn’t go where their owners wanted them to and builders showing up two months late!

3,205 incident reports were tweeted during the 24 hour period. 341 arrests were made and 126 people were taken into custody during the same period.

Police forces have used Twitter in the past to monitor and clamp down on criminal activity. This is the first time that a police force has successfully used an online social  medium to raise awareness of the work they do and gotten so many members of the public keenly interested.

A study conducted by Sysomos, a company that specialises in monitoring and analyzing social media, has arrived at this conclusion. The study, which was conducted over the last two months, analysed 1.2 billion tweets that were posted during that time frame.

It was found that only 29% of tweets received any kind of reaction, either in the form of a reply or a retweet. Of this figure, 19.3% of the responses were in the form of a retweet, and the rest were replies.

It was also found that 92.4% of all retweets occurred in the first hour after the tweet was posted, and similarly 96.9% of replies were also delivered in the same time frame. This phenomenon is quite understandable as Twitter is all about staying up to date. Mark Evans, an employee of Sysomos says, “This means that if a tweet is not retweeted in the first hour, it is not likely to be retweeted at all.”

A number of automated accounts retweet based on tags or even all tweets from certain popular account. This automated process of retweeting could account for a sizeable percentage of the total number of responses.

Nevertheless, 29% of tweets receiving a response is actually quite a good rate and is actually quite a useful metric for businesses to keep in mind when initiating a conversation with potential clients.

It is also important to realise that good content and appropriate timing of a tweet can generate a better response.

In an interview with TechCrunch founder, Michael Arrington, Kevin Rose said that the team at Digg have made some mistakes with the site lately and this has led to a substantial fall in their popularity.

About a month ago, they launched a new version of the Digg user interface, dubbed Digg v4. This new site design has not been appreciated by Digg’s ardent users, largely due to major changes in its functionality. A poll on Mashable found that most users preferred the old site even though the changes were meant to make Digg more social and less of a closed network dominated by a few “power users”.

Since the new version of Digg was launched, a large number of its regular users started submitting stories to flood the Top News page with direct links to their competitor, Reddit. As a result, traffic to Reddit shot up and Digg raffic has suffered.

Daily Unique Visitors (cookies) to Digg versus Reddit
Source: Google DoubleClick Ad Planner

Digg has had three different Chief Executives during the span of just six months. Some employees have also been laid off due to the problems the company is currently facing.

Under the circumstances, Kevin Rose has admitted to being quite tired and upset with the situation. He even went so far as to mention that he had been in favour of accepting a takeover bid worth about $80 million ($60 million plus earnout) when Digg was at the peak of its popularity, but his board of directors had turned down the offer at the time.

Rose has even refused to confirm whether or not he would continue to be associated with Digg by the end of this year.

The social news experiment from AOL, which was first called NetScape Social News, was rebranded to Propeller in 2007.

While the site had initially hoped to be able to give serious competition to Digg, the fact is that they never quite caught up with Digg, and of late both the site and the parent company AOL have been struggling.

Twitter streams from Propeller were always lagging behind by several days. Wikipedia claims that the site is being run by a team of just 2 people.

While NetScape was doing quite well for itself, it was expected that Propeller would be able to carry on from where NetScape left. However, the popularity of the site fell by about 55% in just nine months – in November 2006, they had 305 million page views per month, but they fell to just 137 million page views in August 2007.

A major reason for this sudden drop could be the fact that hey did not provide any links between NetScape and Propeller at the time of the change-over. If this had been done, more users may have continued to use the rebranded service rather than switching over to a competitor.

The site will be shut down on 1 October 2010.

This interface will now provide more detailed information about the tweet and its origins. When a user clicks on a particular tweet, a details pane will slide out to the right hand side of the tweet.

Thanks to the new design of the interface, users can now just keep scrolling down the page to see more tweets, rather than having to click ‘more’ every time.

Twitter has also got partnerships with media sites such as YouTube, Justin.tv, Flickr, TwitPic and several others due to which users can now embed photos and videos on Twitter which can then be seen by other users.

The details pane also provides related content about the author or subject of the tweet. Details such as other tweets by the same author, the replies received and geotagging of the location are also available. When a username is clicked, a mini profile of that user is seen.

This new interface has been built on Twitter’s own API and is still being gradually rolled out to users.

More about the new Twitter interface

Usually advertisers are always on the lookout to target their ad campaigns at specific and appropriate groups of audiences, who are likely to engage with the campaign and eventually buy the product or service being advertised.

The new service from StumbleUpon will make it easier for the advertisers, as the optimal audience will now be selected by StumbleUpon itself. The selection will be based on various demographic factors like age, gender, location, topics of interest etc. This facility is thus expected to give advertisers more cost effectiveness and better Return on Investment.

Now, when an advertiser starts a new ad campaign, he will have a checked box, which will enable this feature to work if the advertiser so wishes. If however he ‘unchecks’ the box the feature will stop being functional.

The advertiser will of course be able to continue to control his budget, and start or stop the campaign at will

The advertiser will also be able to see the difference between the responses to the auto-targeted campaigns and to the manually targeted campaigns for future decision making.

StumbleUpon already has a base of over 11 million users and 40,000 brands or publishers on their site. This new feature should give a good boost to their advertisers.

While it is a very well known fact that social media is growing very fast worldwide, the study shows that in the U.K. 85% of the population is already highly connected to the Internet.

The findings show that users spend over 6 hours a month on social media sites, and while 25% of them write their own blog, 60% read blogs. 64% of users have their profile on at least 1 social network.

About 33% of them have downloaded a video sharing site, and 85% watch video clips online.

Over 25% of adults are known to access the internet through their mobile phones and 29.4 million people visit social networks at least once a month.

While the population in the U.K. is 61 million, Germany 81 million, Japan 127 million, Russia 141 million and in the U.S. 308 million, the number of people in the world connected to Facebook has crossed 500 million.

Over the last year, the number of people watching television programmes online has grown by 600% and about 20% of adults in the U.K. prefer surfing the internet than watching TV programmes.

Social networks have now become the single largest activity to pass the time and nearly 33% of adults in the U.K. express the sentiment that they ‘cannot live without the internet’.

78% to 80% of Internet users in the U.K. use the internet to check information about products and services, thus allowing marketers to reach a large number of users.

33% of users trust online banners and while 90% of users trust the online recommendation of friends, 70% even trust the online recommendation of strangers.

20% of tweets contain references to some brand or product, and online visitors from some social media site are far more likely to make an online purchase, than other online visitors. (71% compared to 7%)

Social media sites allow us to create online content and they also help to connect people with each other and also with brands products and services.

The new feature allows users to see exactly where in the world a particular tweet has originated from. It also shows nearby locations such as restaurants, shops and theatres.

Twitter Places is available on both twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com. The service was launched to coincide with the ongoing World Cup, allowing users to tag their tweets with the location from where they are sending the tweet, which is especially cool for those sitting inside the stadium and watching the FIFA World Cup live!

Tweets with embedded location information

The current football World Cup is just one example of how Twitter Places could be helpful. People receiving tweets regarding breaking news stories are more likely to be interested in tweets originating from the place where the event is actually happening.

Users who wish to see other tweets originating from a particular location can click a Twitter Place within a tweet to see all recent tweets from that location.

Foursquare and Gowalla will be integrated into Twitter Places, as many users on these sites already automatically tweet check-ins. Twitter will also release an API to allow developers to integrate their applications with Twitter Places.

Twitter Places will be made available to users across 65 countries in the course of about one week. Mobile applications such as Twitter for iPhone, Android and Blackberry will also soon have access to Twitter Places.

Apart from referring to traditional news sources such as newspapers and television, people are now increasingly relying on blogs and social networks to receive news.

In fact, news is fast becoming a shared social experience. However, the type of news that is popular on these different sources varies widely.

The Pew Research Center has carried out a study on the top news stories carried by different sources and analysed the data collected. The study was carried out between 19 January 2009 and 15 January 2010 on blogs and YouTube and from 15 June 2009 to 15 January 2010 on Twitter.

The study not only found that the lead stories on social media channels varied widely from traditional news media, but it also varied substantially from one channel to another.

It was found that during the course of the study the top story on blogs, YouTube and Twitter coincided only once, during the Iranian Presidential elections held between June 15 2009, to June 19 2009.

Bloggers, in general, were found to be more interested in emotional stories or issues that related to individual or group rights or similar ideologies. Stories that could be personalised and shared attracted a lot of attention. Political news, however, tended to be both pro-liberal as well as pro-conservative.

On Twitter, there was a very different tendency – stories concerning technology, in general, and Twitter, in particular, gained more prominence. However, even here, the Iran elections were the most popular lead story and topped the charts for 7 weeks in a row.

In contrast, on YouTube, the news is usually shared through videos and often does not even contain any added comments. There is also a tendency to pay more attention to international news.

One common factor among all the social platforms studied, was that the stories did not stay on top of the charts for long.

Also it was not uncommon to find that the news stories on all these sources, differred considerably from the top stories on the traditional news channels.

Blogs are more likely to borrow information from the traditional media, but the reverse trend rarely occurs. Bloggers might face a tough time once their main sources, such as The New York Times and The Times go behind pay walls. It has already been announced that the New York Times will start charging for the use of some of their news content from January 2011.

The service has reportedly been in the beta testing stage since last December. Twitter started testing the service by inviting a few account holders to use the service and give Twitter feedback about it. Once Twitter is satisfied with the results and performance of the service it will be rolled out to all users.

A few business users were sent an email, which informed them about the new “Twitter Toolkit”. To start beta testing the service, users were asked to visit their Twitter account settings and then to click on the new ‘Business’ tab where they could provide information to help Twitter to verify the account.

Once a business activates its account by clicking on the email link, it gets automatically verified. The user can then activate the business features for that account. Business account users can provide information including contact details and size of the business – small, large, individual or group.

Activated business accounts show the verified logo on Twitter, which was. until now, available only to celebrities and extremely popular individual users. The benefit of a verified account is obvious – the follower knows for sure that he / she is interacting with an official company representative and not some imposter.

Verified business accounts show four tabs in the Twitter Business Center:

• Overview – general information about the business account
• Business Info – users can change the information was provided at the time of account verification
• Verification – confirms that the account has been successfully verified
• Contributors – allows the business to directly add multiple users to a business account.

Screenshot of the Twitter Business Center

In addition to the ability to allow multiple contributors within an account – a feature that was quite expected, given the success of coTweet – another notable feature of the new service is that it allows businesses to accept direct messages even from users whom they have not previously been following. This feature could be very helpful to businesses as far as receiving information and feedback is concerned.

Twitter has not given any indication of when it aims to bring the service out of beta and make it generally available, nor have they announced what the cost of this service to businesses will be.

According to the findings of the survey, a large number of Americans (92%) make use of various platforms to collect their daily news.

The most popular sources of daily news are local and national TV channels, followed in third place by the Internet. National and local newspapers and radio have not surprisingly fallen behind.

On an average day, almost 60% of Americans will access various online and offline sources of news.

Thanks to the proliferation of the Internet and mobile technology, the new multi-platform media environment is now portable, personalised and participatory.

33% of mobile phone users access the news through their mobile phones, thus making it portable. 28% of Internet users access news on topics that interest them personally via news feeds on their homepage, while 37% of Internet users participate in the act of dissemination of news by posting it on sites like Facebook and Twitter, with or without their personal comments.

People are also using their social networks to filter and assess the news. They also exchange stories through email. 75% of online news receivers, do so via email or social networking and 52% of them share the news with others in the same manner.

Most online news consumers do not have a particular favourite news site, and access a variety of sites to collect their daily news.

While 55% of Americans say that it is easier to stay up-to-date about news and information than it was 5 years ago, 70% of those surveyed feel overwhelmed by the number of news sources now available to them.

Peter Kafka from All Things Digital has provided some details about the Twitter advertising service that were revealed to him by “people who have been briefed by the company’”.

According to the details available, ads on Twitter will be linked to the search service, so that only users who search for something on Twitter will see related ads. Other users will not see ads in their regular Twitter stream.

Ads will also be distributed by third party software and Twitter will share the revenue generated from these ads with the application developers.

Twitter ads will continue to use the standard Twitter format – 140 characters of text.

Initially, Twitter will work with ad agencies and buyers, but will change to a self-serve model similar to Google AdWords in due time.

Kafka cautions that the ad platform is still in the testing stages and a date has not yet been set for its launch. It is expected to be within the first six months of this year.

It is not yet known how advertisers will buy ads and what sort of pricing models will be made available – whether the pricing will be based on a cost-per-click basis or in some other way.

If search is to be Twitter’s sole source of revenue, their search platform needs to be significantly redefined in order to make it more useful and effective. Twitter will also need to gather more data about their users in order to better target the ads.

The survey was answered by 800 teenagers between 12 to 17 years of age and 2,253 young adults between 18 and 29 years of age. This is the section of the population that is a key indicator of future technology trends.

The study reveals that while blogging was a popular activity in 2006, with about 28% of the users indulging in it; in 2009, only 14% of teenagers and 15% of young adults were participating in blogs.

In the past, MySpace, which was then the most popular social network encouraged blogging, but Facebook which has now taken over the number one spot among social networks, advocates the use of short status updates. It has been found that in 2009, only 48% of young adults used MySpace, compared to 73% who used Facebook.

The study also reveals that Twitter has not yet caught the fancy of teenagers like Facebook has managed to do. Only 8% of teenagers use Twitter and the vast majority (66%) of teenagers prefer text messaging.

That social networks are growing, in general, is obvious from the fact that in 2008, about 42% of those surveyed used more than one social network, while in 2009, 52% did so.

Among adults aged 30 or more, only about 40% used social networks in 2009, while blogging activity among them increased marginally from 7% to 11%.

Social search started as an experiment in Google Labs, undertaken to try and make search more social and personalised. Based on the number of sign ups to try this feature, Google has now released it in beta on their regular search results in the USA.

With this new feature, when users query Google, they will receive all the relevant results as usual. Google will additionally search for information on the subject that has been posted by the users’ contacts on their blogs and social networks and add that information as “Results from your social circle” in the search results page.

Users might give more weight to these social results in some cases, as they already know and trust the opinions of the contacts these results were based on.

The social feature has now also been implemented for Google Images. When a user does an image search, Google will include photos from the user’s contacts’ accounts on public sites like Picasa and Flickr. These results will also be shown under the heading “Results from your social circle”.

Two new links are visible alongside every set of social search results – “My Social Circle”, which shows the extended network of the user’s online contacts and how they are connected  and “My Social Content” which lists the user’s public pages that might appear on other people’s social results.

Where Social Search Stops Being Social

The last point mentioned above, though, might be the single biggest shortcoming of social search. Google relies on social information that is public. Unfortunately for them, the largest social network in the world, Facebook is largely closed off to search spiders. Public information on Facebook is sparse, at best.

Since these services are still in beta, Google probably expects to be able to improve upon them further in due course. If social search is to be truly social Google’s improvement efforts might need to focus on obtaining content from Facebook without violating user privacy.

Using Social Search

To start using social search, a user must first create a Google profile, and then add links to his / her other public online social network accounts.

For their part, Twitter has been talking about starting premium accounts for businesses that use Twitter, and they have recently rolled out a service called Contributors to help these businesses. So far, though, there has not been much in terms of visible monetisation.

However, it turns out that Twitter has already made a profit for the year 2009.

Bloomberg has revealed that according to some reliable but undisclosed sources, Twitter earned $25 million this year from the search deals they made with Google and Bing.

According to the terms of this deal, messages posted on Twitter will be included as part of the search results on both Google and Microsoft’s search engines whenever they are relevant.

Google is believed to have paid Twitter $15 million for this facility, while Microsoft has supposedly paid $10 million.

The major expenses Twitter incurs are from payments they make to telecommunication companies to distribute tweets to all their users, and employee salaries.

Twitter has cleverly managed to bring down the telecommunication costs because of their growing popularity, so now employee salaries are the largest expense they face. If they limit the number of personnel they employ, they will continue to be profitable.

The total of these expenses in 2009 was between $20 – 25 million, thus allowing Twitter to show a small profit in their account books for the year.

It is not currently known whether the deals with Google and Microsoft will provide a continuous stream of revenue or not. Moreover, if they intend to grow, Twitter will have to seriously continue to look for other ways to monetise their site.

During a talk with the BBC, Biz Stone said that Twitter was looking at starting commercial accounts. He was, of course, quick to reassure users that “Twitter will always be free to everyone. But you will be able to pay for an added layer of access to learn more about your Twitter account – get some feedback, some analytics, become a better Twitterer.

It is expected that these commercial accounts will be introduced before the end of the current year.

Biz Stone also said that the firm was considering the possibility of licensing and syndicating their data. He feels that giving away their real-time data feed to search engines like Bing and Google would help those search engines provide a better search experience.

While Twitter showed a phenomenal growth curve from just 4.75 million users to 7 million between February 2008 and February 2009 (according to Nielsen Online), its growth has now slowed down, at least in North America.

Mr. Stone, however, countered this by saying that from an international and mobile perspective they continue to grow very fast.

He reminded users that Twitter had initially started out as messaging service, which was later extended to the Web. He expects most of their future growth to come from mobile.

In fact, an earlier report leaked from the company showed that they hope to have 1 billion users by 2013.

The introduction of paid accounts will not only bring about some direct monetisation, but will also generate more interest among businesses and marketers, thus helping further growth.

Twitter Tab on Yahoo! Search for Hot News items

Yahoo! now incorporates information from tweets, photos and videos posted on Twitter. They have revamped the Yahoo! News Shortcut result, that shows at the top of the organic results for queries on breaking news topics, into a horizontal tabbed form, which links to three or four news categories.

The first tab in the new Yahoo! News Shortcut result shows news sites with snippets from articles. The next tabs link to photos and / or to videos and the last one to Twitter.

Searches on certain popular news stories currently bring up the Twitter tab, which then takes users to the Twitter search results page for that query. Screenshots provided by Yahoo!, though, show the Twitter tab loading with a couple of selected tweets and associated videos.

According to Ivan Davtchev and Nitzan Achsaf on Yahoo! Search blog, “Starting today, you can see relevant photos, videos and tweets about a breaking news story on the Yahoo! News Shortcut. Many of you are already familiar with the existing Yahoo! News Shortcut, which displays headlines on our Web search results when you look for news stories. The enhanced shortcut with these new tabs will now display for many breaking or major news searches.”

Although both Google and Bing have already started incorporating Twitter feeds into their search results, Yahoo! claims that they are the first to integrate Twitter with news, which actually makes a lot of sense since Twitter is growing into a rather popular source of breaking news round the world.

They are hopeful that this will make Yahoo! News the first choice of users looking for current information on any breaking news stories. Yahoo! will also run a separate algorithm to filter out any irrelevant information that is present on Twitter.

Yahoo!’s Larry Cornett said that they were very pleased with user reactions they saw during initial user testing of this feature.

Orange U.K. users will now be able to send picture messages to each other, in addition to the usual text messages, through 86444 – the Twitter SMS number. Orange has created a new sub domain, called Snapshot, for this purpose:

Snapshot by Orange

Users who don’t currently use Twitter with Text Messaging will, have to first send the message saying ‘START’ to 86444. The same number is currently also used to tweet via SMS from the Vodafone and O2 networks and will be used for MMS tweeting as well.

Once the service has started, users will be able to click a photo on their mobile phone and then send it via MMS to 86444. The pictures will appear on the Orange Snapshot site and will be tweeted with a link to the image on the user’s Twitter stream.

Snapshot is similar in concept to Twitpic, one of the most popular photo-sharing applications associated with Twitter. The only advantage that Orange has is that their users will be able to send MMS tweets to the standard Twitter mobile number directly from their handsets.

Users will not be required to pay any additional fees to Twitter, for this service. Only the usual messaging charges of the service provider will apply.

As part of the deal between Twitter and Orange, Twitter will also be part of the Social Life service, along with Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. This is a service provided by Orange that allows mobile users to access all these social networks with a single log-in.

While Orange, Vodafone and O2 are now quite tuned in to Twitter, T-Mobile and 3 are yet to follow suit.

While both Google and Microsoft’s Bing, have made separate deals with just Twitter, Yahoo! is reportedly in talks with OneRiot for a much broader real time search offering.

Reuters reports that Yahoo! Inc is looking to match its rivals in providing up-to-the-minute Internet search results. The company is supposed to be running tests with several real time search partners, according to sources familiar with the matter.

According to Reuters, Yahoo! is currently holding talks with several companies to provide users with realtime search results on a trial basis. OneRiot is one of those companies.

However, there have been no official announcements on this score from either Yahoo! or OneRiot.

OneRiot, which is based in Boulder, Colorado, taps into several sources including Twitter, Digg and their 3-million-strong user base to collect real time information.

Initially, Yahoo! will provide the real time search results in a separate box at the top of the search results page, to see how their users react to this service.

While Yahoo! and Microsoft have already signed a 10 year search deal last July, it is not expected to turn operational until next year. Until then, Yahoo! needs to fend for itself. Understandably, they would not like to be left behind in the real time search race, and hence this trial with OneRiot seems like a good option to pursue.

Graphing Twitters Decline on Compete.com

The graph above, taken from Compete.com shows a clear decline in the total number of visits over the last three months and a slight decline in the number of unique visitors to the site in the last month.

As far as the subject of Twitter competing with Facebook is concerned, quite contrary to the general expectation that Twitter may soon overtake Facebook, Twitter is actually way behind Facebook in the race, and seems to be losing ground, as can be seen in the graph below:

Comparing Twitter’s Decline to Facebook ‘s rise, based on Alexa traffic ranks

While neither Compete.com nor Alexa.com’s numbers areprecise, they do give a very good general idea of trends, and in both cases, the trend for Twitter over the last month has been downward.

On October 24th Hitwise analyst Bill Tancer studied the number of U.S. Internet visits to both Twitter and Facebook. He found that while Facebook accounts for 6.1% of the market share, Twitter has only 0.14%.

Tancer also says that “At iMedia Breakthrough, Jeff Rosenblum from Questus, referenced a Harvard Business School Study finding that the median number of tweets per Twitter account is 1”.

The final admission that Twitter is not doing too well at present comes from none other than its CEO, Evan Williams, who told CNN, “It’s grown a little bit slower lately, but we have some things in the works that we think will change that.”

We can only wait and watch to see if that actually happens.

To understand this phenomenon better, Nielsen carried out a study across 1,800 participants in August 2009. For this study, users were categorised into 3 groups. Those who used mainly search engines (searchers), portals (portalists), and social media (socialisers) during their research operations.

The study surmised that approximately 18% of people used social networks as their primary source of information. Although this amount is smaller than that of search engine users (37%) and portal users (34%), it is nonetheless significant and growing constantly.

A major cause for this change could be the fact hat the internet is literally flooded with information on all subjects, thus making it difficult for the average user to decide what part of the information to trust, thus creating more confusion, rather than clarifying matters. On the other hand, when they go to the social networks, there is a lesser amount of information available, and equally important is the fact that this information is provided by ones friends and family, which reassures the user that he can trust the matter provided there.

Another factor in favour of social networks like Twitter and Facebook is the fact that they provide information in real time, while the search engines take a while to get updated.

In spite of these facts, social networks have a long way to go before they can overtake or replace the search engines for search. For one thing, social engines are more useful for information like local recommendations etc. while information about general topics is more easily available on the search engines.

Also the search engines are already working on systems for better filtration of the information available, so that users are not overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of content.

In order to enable social sharing of Bing search queries, Microsoft introduced a feature called ‘Bing and Ping’ last month. The service has now been launched in limited beta, with  a handful of users who signed up for the test on Facebook.

Henceforth, whenever one of the beta testers is signed in and searches for something on Bing (U.S. only) and feels that this information would be of interest to their friends, all they need to do is click one of the links to share it with their friends.

Microsoft Bing and Ping

Users can share via Facebook or Twitter or they can email the search result and a link to the SERP. Surprisingly, they have not included the Windows Live service for this sharing.

The service can be used to share things like news reports, recommendations, local movie times and flight status at present. Microsoft has only just started Beta testing this service, and is looking for feedback from users in order to fine tune and expand the service.

Interestingly, Microsoft made quite a blunder while sending out their invites to users for this service. They listed all the email addresses of people who had signed up for the service in the ‘To:’ field, thereby disclosing everyone’s addresses to all the recipients. They tried to set things right soon after, though, by sending an apology letter admitting the error.

Google Trends already shows users which topics are among the 100 most popular searches on a given day. Google has now incorporated this feature in Google Search, so that users do not need to visit another page to find out what the trending topics of the moment are.

Now, when a user Google’s a particular topic which is among the top 100 in popularity, Google will display a graph at the bottom of the search page to indicate the rate of rise of that topic and other details about it.

Google highlights trending topics within organic SERPs

Google Trends’ Hot Trends feature has also been pruned from its existing top 100 topics to only 40. However, when any of the top 100 topics are searched for it will show up on the homepage.

This move will brings Google a bit closer to imitating Twitter’s popular topics and real-time search functionality. It also allows users to not only know what are the most popular topics at the moment, but will also provide them with additional information about those topics. These Hot Trends will be updated every hour to show how the scenario is changing.

The Hot Topic being searched will not only get a number to indicate its rank in the popularity list but will also be classified with terms such as ‘On Fire’ and Volcanic’ etcetera.

This feature is officially launched only in the U.S. and Japan, but can be seen by some users in the UK at present.

Mixx has launched a new site, called TweetMixx, which aims to help users to sort and categorise all types of content, including stories, videos and photos, thus making it easy for users to decide which tweets they want to see and which ones they would likely skip, thus saving valuable time.

Now that almost everybody from VIPs to celebrities and the guy next door are joining Twitter, the site is getting pretty crowded with tweets. Following many people and finding interesting users can be extremely confusing, since tweets are not tagged. It is difficult and very time consuming for users to determine which of the tweets they will find relevant and significant.

The new service from Mixx will allow users to easily find the content that they are interested in, instead of having to sort through thousands of tweets. Users type in keywords they are interested in and TweetMixx provides the most relevant recent tweets.

TweetMixx also provides a shortcut to just the links tweeted by a user’s friends, ignoring all the “pointless babble“.

Shortened URLs are also automatically unpacked and presented as useful links with explanatory titles and descriptions, which can be very handy when trying to decide whether clicking on a link such as http://bit.ly/xpp5L.

Users can send tweets, save pages and check incoming links from their friends on a single dashboard page instead of having to jump from one page to another. When a user receives new tweets, a message at the top of the TweetMixx page says so. To use TweetMixx, users can log in to their Twitter account through OAuth.

While the benefits of TweetMixx for Twitter users have been discussed at length on the service announcement on the Mixx Blog, almost nothing has been said about how the service integrates with Mixx.

TweetMixx Spams Mixx

A bot called TwitterSubmitter on Mixx automatically adds all tweeted stories that get pulled by TweetMixx onto Mixx. When these tweets are listed with further information regarding the links, TweetMixx also provides a count of the number of times the same link has been retweeted and a link saying “Details on Mixx”.

Clicking on the details link brings users to a page on Mixx that shows the very same article, as if a real user had submitted it. However, since the link has actually been submitted by a bot, it hardly ever gets any votes and ends up languishing like spam on the site.

Mixx obviously has the right intentions in mind. They should have thought of a better way to integrate the service and provide more informative content on Mixx, rather than just spamming their own site with every inane tweet possible!

TweetMixx enabling spam on Mixx

First they added real time search to Facebook, soon after it was incorporated into Twitter and then they acquired FriendFeed.

Their latest move along this path is the incorporation of @mentions on their status updates, which allows users to respond directly to various comments, event announcements and so on.

To use this feature, the user has to type the ‘@’ symbol in the status update box, and a drop down menu then allows the user to tag friends, groups events etc. The concerned party will then receive a link to this post. This procedure is expected to simplify the use of Facebook.

@mentions, which were earlier called @replies are an extremely popular feature of Twitter. In fact, @mentions are one of the main reason behind Twitter’s popularity as a quick  communications tool.

Several Facebook users made use of Twitter for their status updates. With this new feature, users will no longer need to access Twitter to message their friends. Facebook users will now be able to tag and chat with each other directly on Facebook. It will, in fact, be possible for users to update Twitter through Facebook, instead of the other way around, which has been the case so far.

Marketers and advertisers will also now be able to communicate and interact with their clients through Facebook as they will be able to follow each comment attached to their name. This will be beneficial for them as Facebook has 250 million users and Twitter has only 10 million.

Another major advantage for Facebook will be the ability this feature gives users to broadcast breaking news on Facebook instead of on Twitter.

Though all these changes are likely to have an impact on the numbers of Facebook and Twitter users, one thing to be remembered is that most users use Facebook only to communicate with a group of known friends, whereas Twitter is used to follow the comments and opinions of people with a common interest, even if they are complete strangers in the real world.

Stopping link juice from flowing out from Digg to dubious sites became a necessity, in some ways, due to the spread of spammy material on the site.

The nofollow attribute will be added to all external links, comments, user profiles and story pages whose popularity happens to be below a particular threshold limit set by Digg.

Digg submissions that cross the required threshold will automatically have the nofollow attribute removed from the link pointing to the articles.

This way, spam-based content on the site should be reduced, while still allowing good quality content to benefit the content owners with search engine friendly links to the publisher’s site.

A number of experts from the SEO industry have been involved in the creation and derision of the rel=”nofollow” search engine robot directive. Digg has had a few run-ins with these professionals and the rebots instruction method in the not-too-distant past when they launched the DiggBar.

SEO professionals are mostly in agreement with Digg on this new system, though. It allows the site to give credit where credit is due and not penalise everyone, like Twitter is doing, because of problems created by spammers.

Google uses a similar policy on Knol: Authors who regularly contribute and are thus well-known and trusted get their links freed of nofollow, while those who are new, need to gain the trust required before the nofollow attribute is removed from their links.

Digg’s Nofollow Criteria

Digg has not officially specified, however, what the threshold of reliability is.

As of now, all profile links are nofollowed, even for extremely popular and trusted Digg users, all newly submitted links are also nofollowed, even if they have been submitted by power users and all sponsored links are nofollowed – which was probably done to keep Google happy.

The only links that have nofollow removed from them at present are those that make it to the homepage, category popular pages or sub category popular pages.

Even the most dugg upcoming or ‘Hot In’ category / sub-category stories have the nofollow attribute on them.

The criteria for getting rel=”nofollow” removed from a link, at present, seems to be simply making it reach the ‘Popular’ list, which is the homepage or the individual category / sub-category main pages.

Even at present, various platform developers have been making some advances in this matter, with the help of the very basic APIs available to them. The currently available geolocation based projects are made with the use of the location details filled in by users on their profiles. However, this is not a very reliable and effective way to judge immediate location as users often tweet from multiple locations without updating their location each time.

Twitter will allow users to add in their latitude and longitude if they wish to do so with each tweet. The service will be strictly opt-in, with the default set to ‘off’.

Tweet-level geotagging will be treated differently than the location data entered manually by the user in their profile. Location data in the profile will continue to be used to give a general idea to visitors about where a user is normally based.

Udates to the API will be made available a couple of weeks before launch, to allow third-party app developers to incorporate this new feature. Documentation for the geolocation function in the API is already available.

Location data will be passed in the following format (code):
curl -d “lat=37.780467&long=-122.396762&status=I have arrived” -u user:pass

The W3C geolocation API will be used on m.twitter.com for the launch of the mobile service.

Users who decide to disclose their location will have to opt in on the Twitter website itself, and the location data won’t be stored indefinitely. Third-party applications will not be given the ability to enable / disable the feature via the API in order to avoid rogue apps turning on the feature without a user’s consent.

Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone, says, “if people do opt-in to sharing location on a tweet by tweet basis, compelling context will be added to each burst of information.”

Placing this choice squarely in the hands of the user is a smart move to avoid the usual problems regarding user privacy and security.

The geolocation service will enable users to follow tweets sent out by people from their neighbourhood or city in addition to tweets from the users they normally follow. This facility would be especially useful, when information needs to be spread urgently, such as in times of crises.

Search results will most likely also reflect location awareness in the near future, once more users opt in to use this feature. This could make Twitter even more useful and much more relevant than Google for real time, on-the-spot searches.

No official date has yet been announced for the launch of this service, though, given the amount of information and developer support available indicates that it should be just a matter of weeks.

Rel=”nofollow” is an attribute that webmasters can add within the code for external links in order to signal that the link should not be followed by the search engine spiders. Bloggers often use the attribute to disuade comment spam.

The nofollow trend on Twitter started last year when they first indicated to search spiders that links posted under Web, on the right hand side of the Twitter profile, were not to be trusted. They then extended that to links within the Bio as well.

Now, Twitter adds the rel=”nofollow” attribute to all external links, be it links referencing an article or links to third-party Twitter apps that enabled posting the tweet.

Internal links remain untouched, turning Twitter into a walled garden much like Wikipedia, with lots of link juice coming in from other sites but none going out.

As Rae Hoffman pointed out on her blog, all the content on Twitter is created by the profile owners. Twitter is robbing profile owners by disallowing them to reap any benefit from their own work.

Twitter is likely to see some backlash as a result of this decision. Their justification for their decision is that it disuades spammers from abusing the service. However, Twitter is quite good at stopping spammer accounts already. And, moreover, that doesn’t then explain why verified reliable accounts such as @Google and @stephenfry also have their links nofollowed.

The popular micro-blogging service has timed these updates quite well. They are now so big, that minor backlashes and disenssion among SEO, social marketers and developers would hardly affect their growth, which is now self-propelling.

Google claim that this new engine has been in the works for several months now and has nothing to with the launch of Bing by Microsoft. The claim is quite believable as it would hardly be possible to put together a new search engine in a matter of weeks.

Google has now released a developer’s preview of this new search engine to get user feedback in order to fine tune the product before the final launch.

This new version has been labeled ‘Caffeine’:

Search using Google Caffeine

Google has claimed that this new version of their search engine will be faster, more accurate and more comprehensive than before, even though the appearance of the search results page will continue to be the same as that of the old search results page. This improvement will be due to several technical changes which have been incorporated. The results will also be indexed in real-time, as the search engines of Twitter and Facebook are.

While they claim that the newer version is much faster than the older one, the actual difference in time will only be in fractions of a second, which will make no real difference to the average user, as he is hardly likely to actually measure whether the time taken to generate the results is 0.1 second or 0.2 seconds.

As far as accuracy and comprehensiveness are concerned, these are very subjective terms and so they may vary from search to search. While the new Google may provide better results for some searches, the older version may be better for others and indeed Bing may be better for yet others.

Whatever the changes may be, competition between search engines is certainly good for the user.

Users will have a considerable say in what kind of ads they want to see. Just as they can vote up or down any articles, videos etc. on the site, they will be able to do the same with the ads. The ads will however be clearly marked as sponsored content.

Thus, the more popular an ad is, the more it will be voted up, while the less popular an ad is the more that ad will be ‘buried’ or voted down. Accordingly advertisers will be charged at a higher rate for the less popular ads, and will be charged at lower rates for the more popular ads. This way, eventually, the advertisers would decide to discontinue the unpopular ads, as they will not work out to be cost effective.

Through this service, Digg is making sure that their audiences get to see ads that they are interested in, and advertisers will try their best to produce ads which users will like.

There is, of course, a slight possibility that users may decide that they do not want to see ads on Digg, and therefore start ‘burying’ all ads.

Digg will initially roll out the ads gradually to a few users, and based on their feedback, make appropriate changes in the service. Over the course of the next few months the facility will be made available to all users.

However, recently some changes seem to have been made in this arrangement, whereby, the links are directed to Digg, instead of going to the publisher site, even if the users are not signed in on Digg.

As a result, thousands of users are pushing traffic to Digg, instead of to the original site that they wanted to link to, without even being aware of it.

Initially those who experienced this change wondered if this was an intentional change, or an error on the part of Digg. It has now been confirmed, via an email from Digg Support to Mashable, that this is an intentional change, and is “working as planned”.

This change will also be applicable to Digg URL’s that were created previously.

Digg has made these changes without informing their users. As a result, thousands of Digg users have no knowledge of the fact that they are diverting their followers to Digg instead of the intended site, which seems quite unethical, and is very likely to upset the publishers who happen to be Digg’s main source of content and traffic.

Digg founder, Kevin Rose has pleaded ignorance of these changes as he was on vacation for two weeks, and he says he will look into the matter.

If one is left wondering as to how a new homepage will help to entice more users, let us clarify by saying that it is not just a new colour scheme or design that they have changed. The change in focus of the network is now clearly evident through this new homepage.

The old homepage introduced the site as a ‘service for friends, family and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick frequent answers to one simple question: “What are you doing?”

The new homepage, on the other hand, invites users to “share and discover what’s happening right now anywhere in the world”.

The logo and tagline and now followed by a search box and a list of trending topics, clearly pointing users towards popular discussion topics. The trending topics and their associated search results are displayed in real time.

Emphasis has been removed from the community messaging aspect of Twitter and instead placed on the news delivery and discussion aspect, which is what has put Twitter in the spotlight repeatedly in the past year.

Trends shown at any given time are divided into popular topics at the time, on that particular day or during that week. Twitter pulls some of the popular discussion topics from What The Trend.

Now it looks as though Twitter is all set to kill several birds with one stone…

They hope to be able to expand their user base by involving even those people who are not interested in idle chit-chat with friends, or those who have nothing to say for themselves but who would like to know what is going on in the world.

They will also now have the opportunity to monetize their site by introducing relevant ads alongside the search results and the trending topic details.

Their search results will be in real time, so they will be one up on search giant Google on that score.

After a very encouraging opening on Friday, with collections of $14.4 million, the rest of the weekend turned out to be something of a damp squib by comparison. While Friday’s collections made observers predict a first weekend collection of around $50 million, the actual takings at the box office amounted to only about $30 million, which is a very big let down, and rather unusual.

Trade analysts and others from the field, are suggesting that the popular micro-blogging site Twitter caused the downfall of the movie. It is believed that reviews sent out on the social platform could have discouraged prospective viewers from going to see the movie.

While this may certainly be true to an extent, one needs to evaluate objectively why the tweets sent out were so largely negative in the first place.

Could it be possible that the movie was really not what the audiences may have expected, and therefore it did not do well?

The article on Time.com indicated that the second Transformers movie and Ice Age both performed very well during the same time frame, in spite of both being in their second week.

The trend for Bruno on Twitter, seen above, shows a definite spike on Saturday, with Bruno-related tweets accounting for 0.71% of all tweets, followed by a steady descent. The same pattern was seen a week earlier, for Transformers, albeit with a much higher peak – 2.13% of all tweets – followed by a sharper decline in discussions, as seen below.

Comparing Twitter streams for Bruno and Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, both have equal numbers of positive and negative reviews today.

However, the real reason becomes more obvious when we compare the US and UK markets. Tweets from the UK are largely positive, which probably reflects its success at the UK box office – 2nd biggest opening ever for an 18+ movie – whereas tweets from the USA focus on the gay content and the sexual obscenities.

Cultural differences, especially rampant homophobia in the USA, are probably a big factor that could explain why the movie is faring poorly in the USA. Another factor could be that the movie is just plain bad. To be fair, though, it is certainly possible that the existance of Twitter allowed viewers who could not stomach the flamboyant homosexual fashion designer to spread their views faster than normally would have been possible.

Twitter users often look up the latest or trending topics at a particular time, as indicated in the right-hand column when logged in on Twitter. Then, in order to find out more about the topic, users have to query a search engine to get the latest news, presumably from more reliable sources.

BingTweets eliminates the need for users to go to another site for the search process.

Rather than adding the functionality to Bing.com, Microsoft has chosen to launch a new site, BingTweets.com, which automatically provides search results for topics currently trending on Twitter.

Users can now go directly to BingTweets.com and check out what the trending topics are at that point of time and get search results for those topics on the same page.

When a user on BingTweets clicks on one of the trending topics, its search results are provided alongside without having to click further or load a new page. In fact, even the website that is linked to within the search results loads within the same frame, allowing users to stay within BingTweets, without needing to leave it to get details on any interesting topics.

Another interesting feature of BingTweets is a ‘Share This’ option, which allows users to tweet or email the search results to their contacts. In fact, users can even post them on various other social networking sites via the Share This tool.

If such innovations continue, it looks as though Microsoft may really be able to make some in-roads in the search market, which has so far been dominated by Google.

Update:

The screenshot below shows BingTweets in action.

They have now released some details of what the new system should comprehend, through an interview with the LA Times. Their primary concern is that the new tool should focus on conversation, and not on Diggs.

Digg CEO, Jay Adelson says, “a tool that would focus on actual conversations, rather than the mass dumping of links that polluted Shouts. Digg is considering making a ‘one-to-one’ service. It’s not so much a sharing problem. It’s more of a communication problem, where I have one user who wants to talk to another user.”

In other words, the open broadcast links of Shout, where lots of people send links to one post, will be replaced by a system where individuals connect with each other.

The tool will also be category based, i.e. people sharing a common interest such as movies, sports etc. will be able to communicate with each other.

This way, Digg is hopeful of being able to delete, the ‘please Digg my link’ feature, and thus avoid all the confusion and spamming which occurred on Shout.

A recent report on the Google Operating System blog has said that Google will launch a new micro-blogging search service, which will be capable of first sorting out the results according to their relevance and then integrating them into its own search engine, in a way similar to what is done on their Google Blog Search.

This news has not yet been confirmed by Google, but Marissa Mayer, Google’s chief of Product Search has hinted at the possibility of such a development. She said, “we are interested in being able to offer, for example, micro-blogging and micro-messaging in our search. Particularly in Blog Search and possibly in Web Search, but we don’t have any particular plans to announce.”

If such a service is launched, it will be beneficial to users, as it would make it much easier to look up the latest stories and trends on Twitter.

Doug Coleman from ReadWriteWeb points out that if Google were to create such a service, it would be important to factor in things such as the number of followers a person has, the author’s authority in Twitter’s social graph, replies, re-tweets, posting frequency and other stats in addition to the frequency of usage of keywords or the development of current events to base the search results on.

Just as users vote up or down the news stories on Digg as per their preference, they will now be in a position to vote up or down the ads displayed on the site.

If users like an ad they Digg it (vote it up). If they do not like the ad, it gets voted down. Digg will then decide the rates they charge their advertisers, depending on the number of votes an ad generates. If an ad is really popular, it will garner more votes. Such an ad will be charged at a lower cost per click rate, compared to ads which garner fewer votes and are relatively unpopular.

In turn, an advertiser is likely to display a popular ad for a longer length of time, than he would display an unpopular ad, as he would have to pay a higher amount for the unpopular ad.

The ads will appear alongside the main stories and will be clearly demarcated as sponsored content. They will be linked to the main story, trailer or product review.

It will still be quite some months before this platform is launched as it is still in the early planning stages.

Even after it is launched, Digg will look out for user feedback, to further modify the platform as required.

The indexing function by Twitter Search will be on a much smaller scale than Google Search, but should be very interesting, as it will be a true real-time search engine.

Twitter search is still in the process of figuring out the best way to grade or filter the search results. In other words, they want to make sure that the most reliable and authentic results get a higher ranking.

Jayaram says that tweets should be graded by a reputation ranking system, so that the more credible and informative tweets are placed at the top, as compared to the tweets that are less informative or have been sent by relatively unknown sources.

To achieve this, Twitter will have to change the credibility ranking of Twitter users, depending on the subject that is being discussed.

Follower counts of each Twitter user may be considered, but should certainly not be the only criteria for a high ranking – notching up large numbers of followers is no indication of reliability, as is evident from the fact that Ashton Kutcher obtained 1 million followers before CNN did.

A recent study conducted by Nielsen Online has shown that only about 40% of newly registered users return to the site in the next month. In other words, about 60% of new users desert Twitter just one month after joining it, in spite of the number of celebrities flocking to the site.

Such low retention rates could present problems for the long term growth potential of the site, because the number of new users joining the site is bound to reduce after a certain time. The new user growth rate would not remain anywhere near the current 100% after the initial growth spurt has died down.

It may still be too early to make such predictions regarding the growth of Twitter. Comparisons are bound to be made between Twitter and the popular social networks MySpace and Facebook.

A comparative study of the three reveals that in their early stages, MySpace and Facebook had retention rates almost double of what Twitter is enjoying at present.

Source: Nielsen Wire

Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim argued that the findings by Nielsen were not be accurate, as they may not have taken into consideration the fact that many Twitter users switch from the Web interface to one of the several third-party applications.

To correct this error, Nielsen then added over 30 web sites and applications affiliated to Twitter, including Twitstat, Hootsuite, TweetDeck and TwitBin. Their findings were reconfirmed – retention rates even with these sites was almost as low as it was for Twitter.com.

Source: Nielsen Wire

Vine will only be available on Windows PCs for now and may be offered on Macs and mobile phones later. Vine could be a great tool for keeping in touch and spreading information among family and friends and also in communities.

Microsoft Vine

This new service is essentially a personalised messaging and alert system that can be especially useful in times of disaster and crises.

The Vine application must be downloaded and is then available as a widget on the desktop. It shows a map of the user’s friends’ and contacts’ locations, and will also indicate their status. Users can send and receive alerts and reports on the computer or as text messages on their mobile phones.

Unlike Twitter, Microsoft Vine will have a basic service available for free and a premium service that can be accessed by paying a subscription fee. This will make it seem a bit more official to government officials and executives. Microsoft hope to market the service to disaster management officials for receiving and sending information.

Hillman Mitchell, an emergency management coordinator in the Seattle metro area said in an interview with the Seattle Times, “I think, long- term, this is probably going to be a very valuable tool to help people keep connected.”

Emergency management professionals are already trying to use Twitter and Facebook during crises, but these services offer only limited streams of text and important messages can easily get diluted by unofficial, rumour-driven user input.

Users can already download and print an emergency contact card from the Vine website.

Microsoft Vine emergency card

Tammy Savage of Microsoft thought of building this product after the confusion caused by Hurricane Katrina. She expects Vine to be useful at such times. One wonders, however, if electricity and mobile networks would remain functional during a period of flooding.

It is not yet clear what the cost of this service will be per user, but if it becomes popular, Microsoft could earn significant revenues by charging a nominal subscription fee.

While Vine appears to be similar to other communications services, Microsoft will offer government agencies a direct means of communication with the public during important events and disasters. It also collects information from 20,000 news sources.

Vine could eventually turn out to be big competition for the likes of Twitter and Facebook, especially in times of an emergency, when people want facts rather than wild rumours.

Microsoft has released Vine in limited beta within the Seattle metro area. Current users can invite their friends and family to join them on the beta test by printing a postcard from the Vine site.

Over the past few months a number of celebrities including Stephen Fry, Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears and Barack Obama, to name only a few, and mainstream media companies such as CNN, BBC, The New York Times and many others have joined Twitter and are trying to out-do each other by collecting the most followers.

A few months ago, Stephen Fry and Barack Obama’s PR team led the most popular Twitter accounts, with a couple of hundred thousand followers each. Until yesterday, no single user account on Twitter had crossed the magical figure of one million followers.

The three hottest contenders for the million-follower mark were Ashton Kutcher, CNN and Britney Spears. The race actually started off when Ashton Kutcher announced, through a video, that he intended to beat the popular news channel CNN and be the first to have one million followers on Twitter.

Kutcher had started out on Twitter in a very modest way, but later he was joined by his equally famous wife Demi Moore and that really helped to generate a huge fan following. He also posted photographs of her bending down in her underwear on popular Twitter photo-sharing site, Twitpic, which brought a lot of public attention to his Twitter account.

Ashton has now succeeded in being the first to have a million followers on Twitter, and to celebrate his victory he has announced that he will donate $100,000 to the ‘Malaria No More’ fund, to help fight the rampantly prevalent disease in Africa.

While this gesture is definitely commendable, it seems quite silly that celebrities and the media are trying to beat each other at this game of winning more and more followers on the network. Other celebrities and media publications will reach that target soon enough, and each of them will probably make it sound like they have created history.

Twitter does not seem to mind. In fact, they were reported to have created a special position in the company to cater to their celebrity users.

This obsession with celebrities could destroy the original essence of the site, which had been started by a group of computer geeks, to keep in touch with each other.

Today, Oprah Winfrey posted her first tweet ever, and she already has 100,000 followers, more than double what the most popular geeks acheived after 3 years of using the service! Ellen DeGeneres posted her first Tweet only last month, and is already close to having a million followers.

With Twitter quickly turning into the average person’s hotline to the stars, the number of spam accounts is bound to rise. If the company does not handle its growth and the growth of associated spam on the service appropriately, the original users that helped bring up the service could leave and find greener social media pastures very quickly.

Digg has now launched a new product called the ‘DiggBar’, which appears at the top of the browser whenever users click on any story on Digg. The DiggBar is portable to any website, making social news sharing much easier, but ways to exploit it are already cropping up.

The quasi-toolbar provides a lot of facilities to make it easier to Digg content. The DiggBar allows users to Digg content directly on a site, instead of having to move back and forth repeatedly, between the destination site and the Digg submission page.

Screenshot of DiggBar above a story on BBC.co.uk.

In order to view the DiggBar, users need to merely type “http://dig.com/” before the webpage address. A short URL will be created for that page and theDiggBar will appear at the top, framing the page.

Users can share interesting stories, via email, Twitter and Facebook, easily through the DiggBar. They can also see the top comment, the latest comment and the most controversial comment posted for the story on Digg, while still on the story page.

The DiggBar also shows the number of Diggs, pageviews for the page, related stories, and other stories from the same site on Digg.

Much like the StumbleUpon bar, the DiggBar includes a ‘Random’ button that brings up a random Digg story for users to browse and rate.

Users of the Twitter desktop application ‘Twhirl’ can expect an update, which will allow them to use Digg as their default short URL service.

While all of this is largely positive news for the once darling of social media, the DiggBar is already being exploited by some. As Michael Gray points out, the DiggBar frames a page and assigns it a Digg.com URL, which can be exploited for SEO benefit by unscrupulous affiliate publishers.

A new project called ExecTweets, was launched last week in conjunction with Federated Media and Microsoft. Twitter has introduced an ad unit to promote this upcoming program. Since then, similar ad units have been spotted promoting other products and services from Twitter itself and from third-party advertisers.

ExecTweets will pool in Tweets from various big-shots and top executives of industry, and then republish them for the general public. The service could be of great interest to a lot of people who want to know the personal opinions of top executives on a wide range of issues ranging from business to personal matters.

While there are rumors that businesses would pay Twitter to feature their Tweets prominently on the network, there is no confirmation of this.Back in February, Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone had told Marketing Magazine, “We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them. We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts.”

Federated Media, on the other hand, has suggested that they would like to put in place a revenue-sharing deal with Twitter.

The ExecTweet list currently includes such prominent names as Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg, Werner Vogels and Evan Williams among others. Exec Tweets will allow users to vote on the Tweets and the Tweets will then be ranked accordingly.

Twitter is definitely trying to monetise itself now, a year ahead of their planned intent to start earning revenue. This should not be too difficult as various organisations are promoting Twitter to stay in touch with employees as well as for customer service. Twitter has now hired a product manager to oversee the development of these commercial accounts, but they have not yet set a date for their launch.

JaikuEngine will enable users at the individual, group and organisation levels to run their own micro blogging services through the Google App Engine. Although Google will stop developing the Jaiku code base, Google volunteers will continue to offer support. The JaikuEngine will also provide support to open standard authentication, which Twitter is already using. This will thus allow the creation of a freely available open source micro-blogging service.

JaikuEngine on Google Code

Since the time Google acquired Jaiku in October 2007, for an estimated $12 million, they have been see-sawing between shutting down the service almost immediately and then trying to restart it last August. Now the uncertainty is over and it is finally being handed over to the open source community.

Google surely hopes to be able to compete with the current darling of the social media spotlight, Twitter, by opening up its own micro-blogging service so that the open source community can mould it as they see fit.

Initial user and developer reactions have been mixed. Users seem to think that the loss of international SMS functionality would leave Jaiku with almost no desirable features to draw users away from Twitter. Developers, though, seem more upbeat about the opportunity to take micro-blogging to the next level.

From a business point of view, the acquisition of Twitter definitely looks like one of Google’s many recently admitted failures (think Dodgeball, Audio Ads, Google Video)

Jaiku co-founder, Jyri Engestrom, believes “it’s time to break out and distribute micro-blogs… There should be lots of platforms, and they should talk to each other.”