Twitterfeed – Twitterfeed integrates with your blog so that every time you publish a new blog post, your Twitter feed is updated automatically.

Tweetmeme – For finding new memes and top tweets on Twitter. Sort options include subject, media types (news, images or video), and period of time.

We Follow – A director of Twitter users if you are looking to find people to follow, sorted by topic of interest. Also a place to add yourself if you are hoping to gain users yourself.

Twellow – another director of Twitter users, plus Twellowhood, for finding people in a specific geographic location.

Bit.ly – A URL shortener with click-through information.

MyTweeple – Trying to decide whether to follow someone? Use this tool to check out a persons user stats, latest tweets, and to penalize spammers.

Hootsuite – A nice application for scheduling tweets for later dates. Also can track stats.

TweetDeck – A favorite of ours in the office. Everyone around me uses TweetDeck to display their tweets in customizable columns which can be sorted by groups and type of message (i.e. DMs, mentions). For desktop and iPhone.

Readtwit – Readtwit is a way to filter your Twitter feed so that redirects (such as URL shorteners) are resolved and you get an RSS feed of your content.

What the Trend – This site explains why certain topics are trending.

Do you have any other favorites?

In a nutshell, it gives advertisers the ability to move their tweets up in the timeline. As the New York Times article says:

Starbucks, for instance, often publishes Twitter posts about its promotions, like free pastries. But the messages quickly get lost in the thousands of posts from users who happen to mention meeting at Starbucks.

AdAge posted an example of an @Starbucks promoted tweet.

Example of a Promoted Tweet from @Starbucks (via @AdAge)

To begin with, the ads are being offered on a keyword focused CPM basis. There is a maximum of one sponsored Tweet will be shown on a search results page. Right now Twitter ads are limited to one per search results page, and will be shown only on the web interface. Watch for application, search engine and general API release to come once they have a grasp on how to score tweets based on resonance.

Will my Tweets Resonate?

Central to the new program is the concept of resonance, using organic popularity to help tweets which are popular with people already become great ads. Conversely, it’ll help them to dial down or remove non-relevant ads.

You can compare Twitter’s ‘Resonance’ concept to a blend of Google’s Quality Score and what makes up a good piece of linkbait. Here’s how @biz explained it in the official release.

There is one big difference between a Promoted Tweet and a regular Tweet. Promoted Tweets must meet a higher bar—they must resonate with users. That means if users don’t interact with a Promoted Tweet to allow us to know that the Promoted Tweet is resonating with them, such as replying to it, favoriting it, or Retweeting it, the Promoted Tweet will disappear.

What this means in practical terms is that if you buy a promoted tweet that no one cares about, it’ll dissappear. To resonanate well, your sponsored tweets (and your normal tweets) will have to be popular. The success of your Twitter ads will depend on metrics like Retweets, @ replies and perhaps most importantly, how often your brand replies to those @replies.

It took Twitter four years to release a business model, so they’re going to take their time getting this right before it’s rolled out to more advertising.

More coverage:
Jeremiah Owyang: What Twitter’s “Promoted Tweets” Means To The Ecosystem
AdAge: Twitter Has a Business Model: ‘Promoted Tweets’
NYT: Twitter Unveils Plans to Draw Money From Ads

I find it really interesting. The “pointless babble” is just random stuff that people shout out in the course of their daily life. An SEO expert might provide heaps of useful insight, flagging up useful links and helping their Twitter community with stucks and problems. Yet they may also shout out that their cat was just sick over their best handmade organic Afghan rug. Babble ? Or an opportunity for creating social connection. Random Joe might reply “huh that sucks, my cat did that yesterday too”. Following that, they might find they have a lot in common and another online human touch point is created. It all depends if you find people interesting and quirky, or if you’re just looking to “take” from the Twitter/social media experience. If the Internet is 80% crap and 20% remarkable insight and amazing global/local/micro connectivity, do we dismiss it automatically? No, so why all the venting about Twitter? Because it’s new and people haven’t figured out what to do with it yet. But we all know that one man’s garbage is another man’s gold. Or, one man’s babble is another man’s (social) opportunity.

Social media is very much a give-and-take environment, like karma. Give, share, help, and (hope to) receive. “In Twitter we trust”.

Maybe the “takers” aren’t very well suited to social; they just want to get stuff of value to them, or they plainly just don’t get it ? Ever tried explaining social to someone? It’s hard. “Yes, you have to offer something of value and you need to connect to, or build a community. Yes, you have to invest time and effort in it. No, there is no immediate return”. It’s a hard sell to the uninitiated laggard.

Twitter: glass half full, or glass half empty?

Google Can Do Anything, Why Can’t It Make A Twitter?

Google knows what it’s good at. Like any smart company, they focus on what they’re good at and strategically outsource the rest. They also know that there are areas where other companies outperform them or develop technology faster then they can. They’ve done it before. (And they’ve also tried to make a Twitter with their failed service Jaiku, which was also originally a Finnish startup acquired in 2007)

Let’s take a look at a short list of things Google bought:

• Video: YouTube was acquired by Google in November 2006 for $1.65 billion
• VOIP: Google Voice was born as Grand Central, and acquired in July 2007 for $95 million
• RSS Management: FeedBurner was a June 2007 acquisition for somewhere in the neighbourhood of $100 million
• Email Security: Postini was an important purchase to help GMail have a hope of becoming a useful enterprise email solution as a part of Google Apps. The price-tag was $625 million.
• Aerial Image Capture: ImageAmerica specialized in high resolution photos and used a propretary technology to correct distortions and make it more suitable for mapping. Google acquired it in July 2007.

And don’t forget about Blogger, the 1999 startup by Pyra Labs and co-founded by Evan Williams, now with Twitter. Google has a strong record of buying technology where it hasn’t yet created the in-house expertise.

What Would Acquiring Twitter Mean?

We’ve seen a common theme amongst algorithm updates over the last few years, pushing for more timely, yet relevant results. Twitter Search takes that equation and goes almost as far to one side as possible….as timely as possible. But what they’ve discovered out of that is that freshness tends to create relevance which matches the intent of many queries. The use of hashtags for event or group based tweets seems to take care of the rest of it. The issue with these results is that the relevancy only exists while they’re under the umbrella of Twitter. It’s a single tool, and Twitter-style results on as large an index as Google holds would be chaos.

What Google wants out of Twitter is more likely a combination of data, technology and a testing framework. Google wants to understand the intent behind the query, and freshness is an exceptionally difficult variable to test. We’ve seen various SERP changes and algorithm updates which push various ‘fresh’ elements into the results: blog results, news, and even Twitter profiles and status updates. What Twitter has is a ready-built window into millions of queries with freshness built in. Google wants to learn more.

Google also wants to help keep Facebook down, and encourage competition in the marketplace. Part of what helps Google dominate is the fact that habitual use of Google as our entrypoint for the internet has been wired into our brain. If Facebook looks to be threatening Google’s place as our start page, then it makes competitive sense to work with the next largest competitor likely competitor.

I don’t think Google’s efforts to eschew possible anti-trust action would be helped by acquiring one of the fastest growing online properties. With Chrome growing market share, the Yahoo ad-deal and no reason to suspect Google’s market share of core search will drop any time soon, they can’t afford to dominate many more online arenas without making some serious efforts to encourage competition.

 For Twitter, a partnership would mean resources beyond another few hundred million. It’d mean research support, technical support and publicity. It would make raising further funding easier, help with development of a true revenue model and guidance to help move beyond tech-savvy people in North America.

I don’t see Google acquiring Twitter. It’s too risky from an anti-trust standpoint, and would discourage more true competition in the market. Twitter doesn’t really want to be bought, as least not yet. And I think the biggest synergy will come from a strong partnership. At the very least, Google will benefit by using the information to improve it’s search results, and Twitter will benefit in terms of capital (human and monetary) and a quiet helping hand in the competitive landscape.

Skittles, a candy produced by Mars Incorporated, created a bit of an online uproar on March 1 when they made a dead simple, yet effective change to their web home page, www.skittles.com. Instead of a rainbow-colored product site as one would expect, users saw a Twitter feed for the search term Skittles.  The page was superimposed by an intercept survey asking users for their age, and acceptance of a simple terms and conditions statement:

"Just a heads up: Any stuff beyond the Skittles.com page is actually another site and not in our control.  This panel may be hovering over the page, but SKITTLES isn’t responsible for what other people post and say on these sites. Click the box below to acknowledge that you know SKITTLES isn’t responsible for that stuff."

Tweets containing the word ’skittles’ automatically appeared on the new Skittles homepage, along with any tweets making reference to the change as they contained the same keyword.  The buzz on Twitter grew to a point where Skittles became the number one trending keyword in buzz monitoring tools such as Twitscoop.
 

Several Twitterers used the opportunity for creative expression:

Incidentally, this user claimed that Skittles look like a Rick Astley YouTube video.

Users quickly caught on to what Skittles was trying to achieve with the campaign, but were also having fun in being part of the action.

Others gave in to the urge of turning a new found brand awareness into actual consumption.

With this social media marketing campaign, Skittles effectively held up a mirror to the Twittersphere, a mirror which reflected and amplified whatever ’skittle’ was thrown into it.

It will be interesting to see if and how others brands follow suit.

I recently had a chance to catch up with Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs. Ann has developed a successful online presence for MarketingProfs on popular social networking site, Twitter (see twitter.com/marketingprofs). In the interview, she shares her thoughts and personal experiences on Twitter as it relates to her role as a B2B marketer and promoter of the MarketingProfs brand.