I Tawt I Taw a @Puddytat…
April 15, 2010I never thought I’d see the day where I created a Twitter account, Facebook has everything, right? Still, Twitter has 105,779,710 registered users so I signed up and began exploring. Favorite finds have been the Tower Bridge in London which tweets about passing boats and Ivy Bean, a 104 year old lady who has over 55,000 followers.
My first week with Twitter just happened to coincide with some major events in Twitter history. The Library of Congress announced appropriately through a tweet on Wednesday that all tweets since 2006 are going into the archives. While the details of how much user specific information will be released are unclear, the research possibilities are tremendous.
Like the LOC, Google is updating its real-time search to include all tweets since 2006 and will also include posts from MySpace, Facebook and Buzz. This is useful for looking at the impact of an event over time, natural disasters, politics, news reports can all be viewed as a timeline, spiking as word spread and then slowly tapering. Using a feature like this to see how effective and lasting your ad campaign was could help marketers better target audiences and see what is being said about them.
Other changes are expected as a result of the two day Chirp conference going on now in San Francisco. Chirp is the first official Twitter conference as their blog announced
…we plan to host a collaborative day for developers and enthusiasts who want to spend time coding alongside Twitter engineers, talking in depth with Twitter employees, meeting with investors, and in general talking shop.
At Chirp they unveiled their first step towards turning their 180 million unique visitors per month into profit. Called Promoted Tweets, companies can pay to appear at the top of search results, and already interest has sparked in over a dozen companies from Amazon to YouTube.
On Friday Twitter announced they has acquired Tweetie which will be renamed Twitter for iPhone and made available for free in the iTunes app store. They also acquired Loren Brichter, the creator of Tweetie, and hope to eventually launch Twitter for iPad with his help. While Twitter may have saved money in development, the 37% of active Twitter users tweeting mobily were the exception according to CEO Ev Williams
Careful analysis of the Twitter user experience in the iTunes AppStore revealed massive room for improvement. People are looking for an app from Twitter, and they’re not finding one. So, they get confused and give up. It’s important that we optimize for user benefit and create an awesome experience.
All this consolidates into more accurate search results on Twitter, the ability to Tweet no matter where I am, and the knowledge that my tweets are recorded in the largest search engine and library in the world. Oh joy.
