This at least solves the question: is twitter already relevant for marketing? It does not yet solve the question: is it effective for marketing? But that question will probably only be answered much later, once the user base of twitter has reached a critical mass.

In his post, Pete suspects twitter now having spam profiles. I second that, I have a Chinese Hotel,a kidney stones and a prostrate cancer follower. Seems like twitter is slowly becoming a playing field of professional spammers, too.

Twitter has become very popular. More than one million people are tweeting, some are updating their status many times a day. Many people have started using it as an instant messaging tool at the same time. Works fine, and you can even use it seamlessly on the go, on your mobile phone.

But since twitter started having their problems more frequently, people have started to complain. Of course it’s a bummer, if you can’t update your status (even though I can happily pass on quite a few of the statusses some people publish all the time). And it’s even worse if you’re depending on the IM feature of twitter. But heck, if you need a better IM tool, get skype, msn, icq or any of those!

So far, twitter does not take any money for their services, nor is there any advertising financing it. I really do wonder how they make their money? Is it just with the inbound SMS messages? Do they actually include a margin on top of what you need to pay for SMS anyway? I wouldn’t know, because I am sending my twitter SMS from Germany to the UK (where the only twitter number in Europe is available) and I wouldn’t know how much regular SMS would cost in contrast to the twitter SMS.

My question is: can/should you really complain so loudely about the failures of a free service? If their business model was already advertising financed, or if they would charge for their services, I could understand all those people complaining.

But this way, I think people should rather use and enjoy it, while it works, and if it doesn’t, be patient. In Germany, we have an expression saying: “einem geschenkten Gaul schaut man nicht ins Maul”. (Means, basically: if someone gives you a horse as a present, don’t bother checking for its health.)

PS: as I write this, twitter is down once again.

And for me: I always felt like the joost interface just wasn’t right somehow. I don’t watch fullscreen video on my PC. Still, I was always hoping for it to evolve (globally), so that one day I could enjoy watching videos via joost. But not any more, I guess.

(found here)

This and other great cartoons of this kind you can find at the SocialSignal Blog.

(via here)

A good idea, you can set one up easily at tumblr (30 seconds it says!). Steve even started a “reply stream” to capture all the replies and comments to anything he published.

This is a logical continuation to bundling and remixing everything on the web using RSS. In the same way I am bundling all my favourite news sources (blogs, pictures, weather, press, etc.) on one startpage (netvibes, by the way – very recommendable), I should bundle all my output on one page for everyone to easily find. Which of course takes us to the other (still unsovled) side of the lifestream: how can I distribute content to all of these platforms and track the user traffic without having to visit all these sites all the time?

Is “lifestreams” something many people will take up anytime soon? I don’t think so. It’s still to geeky, to much hastle, and most people have too few lifestreams anyway. But in a few years time, when more people will have an increasing digital trail, this might become a habit. We’ll see.

I think I will set one up shortly, once I am through with another – much more time consuming (and completely offline) – project that will keep me busy in the next 4 weeks. I’ll let you more about this soon on this site.

Sofar, we have two sites racing for the jackpot: Kongregate and YoYo Games.

I doubt the potential is as big as for any of the other typical Web 2.0 sites, simply because it is so much more difficult to conceptualise a computer came, with all its rules, scenarios, player modes, levels, etc.

At the same time I am sure the market is still big enough for good advertising potential, since people will probably spend even more time on these online games portals than they will on Youtube.

(The only thing the sites need to make sure: that the players will see a range of ads, even though they are most likely spending a lot of time on a single page. Remember the discussion about the death of the page view?)

Here is a short article about a Red Bull Widget that seems to be the killer app for all those people bored at the office (during lunch break only, of course).

It is an online version of Rock / Paper / Scissors. You can play this via the widget against other people from the facebook network. Great idea!

This might be the start of a whole new stampede of marketing widgets on facebook (and others).

Capture the live pulse of an event
This is one of the most popular marketing uses that I have seen for Twitter, where it is used to offer a visual display of conversations happening around an event. More and more interactive events have this, and I suspect other non-Web related events will start to incorporate it as well to offer participants a visual way to track the pulse of an event and determine where to spend time.

Undoubtedly, this could work. The question is: who is the target audience? If it is all those people at the event, who subscribe to one twitter feed about the event, it could be brilliant to let everyone know what is happening elsewhere within the event. If it is for people outside the event, the whole twittersphere of the event will sound like 140-character long gibberish to those not present, I suppose.

Deepen a static experience through live commentary
I saw an interesting story last week about how Fox is going to be using Twitter to promote their new show Drive by having the director provide live updates and directors commentary via Twitter throughout the show. We will definitely be seeing more of this type of marketing in the near future.

This could be nice, but only if the show is live, too. Otherwise, we’ll be reading tweets about stuff that we know nothing about until we see it a few months later on TV.

Facilitate collaborative watching
When it comes to watching video content online or on television, Twitter can allow you to watch something “alongside” anyone anywhere by sharing your impressions and reading impressions from others as a program unfolds. This is a powerful new method of sharing feedback and ideas

This won’t work, if we truly believe in the end of programmed television. If people are not watching things at the same time, because everyone can watch “on demand”, then how can you share your thoughts with other viewers via twitter? Unless there is a “twitter group” for that particular movie or series – and I just underestimate the scale of randomness: the fact that for some shows, there will always be somebody, at any given time, watching the same show as myself…

Add a new dimension to promotions
Scavenger hunts, user generated content campaigns, and other reality based marketing promotions are growing popularity as ways to encourage interaction from customers. Twitter can offer a way of encouraging dialogue between promotion participants and adding an “instant message style” dimension to a promotion without the privacy and contact acceptance barriers normally associated with using IM for marketing.

This, I think, could be a fantastic use for twitter. A connection of customers in Twitter groups during promotions, enabling “swarm intelligence”, as we call it here in Germany, would be a brilliant setup for all sorts of ideas for promos, alternate reality games, real life social games or gatherings, etc.

So, in general, I start to like the idea of using Twitter for marketing, having been sceptical a few weeks / months ago. But I do think, that we still need a lot of refinement to make sure it’s not just a gimmick, but does actually contribute value to campaigns.

The pipe you’re looking at demonstrates how to use a few of the more powerful modules. In this example a variety of sources are queried with the same term. The results are merged into one feed. Next, all the items are sorted by what was most recently published. Finally any items with identical titles are removed and a new RSS feed is born.

This is how it looks like:

Once you have created a pipe, you can subscribe to the feed via the usual suspects – bloglines in my case.

Apparently you can meshup all sorts of types of information. A popular one for example is a mixture of appartments for rent and google maps.

A fascinating example of how “plattforms” and “programming” become less important, because users only meshup what is of interest to them any way. Question is: how can marketers make sure that users still receive marketing messages? (And like receiving them, at the same time – that will be even more important!)

It is, by all means a very polarising service, some hate it, some use it, and most of those using it, seem to be addicted…

These services elicit mixed feelings in the technology-savvy people who have been their early adopters. Fans say they are a good way to keep in touch with busy friends. But some users are starting to feel “too” connected, as they grapple with check-in messages at odd hours, higher cellphone bills and the need to tell acquaintances to stop announcing what they’re having for dinner.

Several artists gathered to produce an endless zoom animation where you zoom into one digital art only to enter another one through the center. All the way, until you reach the first one again. Brilliant. Each artist needs to make sure that their drawing fits with the previous and the next one following. At the end a flash programmer puts it together…
Here is a link to the Interactive Zoomquilt. And here is an automatic Zoomquilt.

There was already a previous project: Zoomquilt 2005. I already blogged about this on my German blog. That one was a little smaller, as there not as many artists involved.

• Data visualisation
• Information visualisation
• concept visualisation
• strategy visualisation
• metaphor visualisation and
• compound visualisation

And the whole thing looks like this:

But you should really click through to the table (made in Flash) itself, because for each of the squares, the visualisation is shown as a popup.

The images are taken from flickr, of course. And they have made sure it’s as web2.0-ish as possible, including the round corners, the share-me button and the versioning (“alpha, beta, gamma, whatever”) – and at the end of the day, the wrapping paper is “user generated”.

Haven’t tried to print the papr, since I have no printer here with me. Nice gimmick…