Twitter gives you two ‘Superhero Powers’: the power to be a fly on the wall and listen to people’s conversations, undetected. And the power to hear what people are thinking. There are many stories of people who have found meaningful relationships on Twitter. They feel they are in a community that is supportive of their needs. They actively promote the interests of the community and they bring value by supplying useful information. Twitter is called ‘micro-blogging’, but it is actually different from a regular blog. In a regular blog you have the chance to go deep into a subject. Twitter is more suited to address a wide range of subjects.

In Twitter you are asked a very simple question: ‘What are you doing?” Actually, this is something your parents would ask, or your teacher or a policeman or another figure with some authority. It doesn’t look like the kind of question you would ask your friends, but as it turns out this simple question provokes a lot of discussion. Simply telling the world what you’re doing may seem trivial, but if you’re being arrested and brought to jail, tweeting that fact could bring on a massive response. Like an American student found out when he was jailed in Egypt – his Twitter messages allowed people to get in touch with the proper authorities and free him! Some people are getting quite creative with Twitter. For instance when you say the words ‘bad luck’ in a tweet, a user called @a_dark_cloud will start to follow you.

Until early 2009 Twitter was relatively unknown. A number of events triggered Twitter’s popularity and in the first half of 2009 Twitter exploded. When that plane landed in the Hudson River in New York some guy took a picture of it and tweeted it. That was the first the world learned of the accident and it proved Twitter’s value for up-to-the-minute news reporting. This was really the first act of ‘Citizen Journalism’ that got widespread attention. Today it is clear that everybody can be a journalist. Everybody that has a phone with a camera in his pocket and happens to be at the site of a world news event can now report it to the regular news media. All the big networks and most notably CNN, ESPN and Fox have picked up Twitter as a way to interact with the public during live shows.

When Oprah Winfrey started tweeting at her show, millions of people, mostly women, started to follow her example. When you look at the growth of Twitter pre-Oprah and post-Oprah you will see a remarkable difference. Oprah is now one of the most popular people on Twitter, a position she shares with a number of other tweaking celebrities like Ashton Kushner, Britney Spears, Ellen DeGeneres and even the President. They all have over 2 million followers!

It is amazing to see how many people are following these celebrities. Apparently they get a kick out of tweeting something interesting to a celeb and getting a tweet back. There is nothing more ‘cool’ than that – it is like getting a celebrity’s signature. The attraction that celebrities apparently have on Twitter is one of the most amazing features of this new social networking platform.

When the elections in Iran in June 2009 showed a result that many people in Iran believed was manipulated, riots broke out in the streets where the police was beating up protesters. The regular news media were kept far away from these protests come up but many protesters who were right in the middle of the riots started tweeting and sending photos and videos into the world. This was the only evidence of what was going on in Teheran and other cities in Iran. That weekend Twitter had scheduled an hour for maintenance so it was planning to shut down for a while. On the request of many people including the State Department Twitter decided to postpone the maintenance, so the people of Iran could continue their reports.

This is interesting. Now apparently Twitter is crucial for the world. The fact that many people were asking for Twitter not to shut down is amazing too. Most people are not concerned with what happens on the other side of the world. They are concerned with what happens in their neighborhood and what affects them only. It appears that Twitter is changing that. Many tweople changed their location in Twitter to Teheran, Iran in support of the people in Iran who were tweeting while the government there was trying to shut them down. Changing their location would create hundreds of thousands of people that apparently use Twitter from Iran and would make it all the more difficult for the Iranian Secret Service to find them. In support of the protesters millions of Twitterers also colored their profile picture on Twitter to green. The massive response to this initiative might be a sign that the mentality of the global population is changing towards a keener interest in what goes on in the world, rather than just the neighborhood. It looks like Twitter is a positive influence here.

An interesting phenomenon is ‘live tweeting’ during an event or a TV show. This is becoming the trend at conferences, where Tweeting (and thereby the use of the mobile phone although be it in ‘silent’ mode) is encouraged. On big screens, the tweets from the audience are displayed, which is easy to do as long as everyone uses a certain “hashtag”. Sometimes you see that moderators of panels are picking up tweets from the live audience. Especially on the news TV channels this is happening often. This has contributed greatly to the popularity of Twitter.

Wasting time on Twitter is like sitting around the water cooler and chatting with coworkers about last night’s American Idol segment – it might be fun, and it passes the time, but it wasted time that could have been used to make money.
Here are some tips on how to keep your Twitter time under control:
1. Schedule a time for Twitter. Just like you can spend hours online checking eMails and just surfing the ‘Net, getting on Twitter 10 times a day doesn’t help you at all. Schedule two Twitter times per day – once in the morning and once in the evening – and then stick to it. Your Twitter buddies can survive without knowing your entire itinerary for the day.
2. Decide the purpose for your visit before getting on Twitter. Are you sending a tweet about your latest blog post? Are you trying to find local business people to network with? Deciding what you want to do before you log on is a big time saver.
3. Jot down notes during the day for your Twitter time. It doesn’t have to be anything long or fancy. A sticky note will do. Just keep track of your thoughts so when you get on Twitter you can accomplish what you want and then leave the site.
4. Do not tweet about every single thing you do. No one cares if you are going to the store. They don’t agonize over the fact that your hamster ate too much. Keep your tweets limited to important stuff.
If you take control of your Twitter time, you can take control of how well it works for you. Be strong.
Tweets are like the phone, they touch every aspect of business and companies should be prepared to allow interaction with Twitter at every level and in every department of their company. Twitter is not only useful to promote products and services, it also provides a method to benchmark your company against your competitors, increase the quality of customer support and create better customer intimacy.
For many businesses this must be a horrific scenario. They have always believed that they should funnel all information on the company through very well trained spokespeople. Just the idea that anyone in the company can now be talking to the customers looks like a nightmare scenario. Undoubtedly, internal issues will be brought to the public’s attention and this can hurt the reputation of the company in a great way. However, companies should realize that the worst thing people could say about the company is nothing. Companies should want to hear what the happy customers have to say as well as the criticism on the company itself its products or services.
Especially when companies can promote their corporate All-Star, they are in a position to win the hearts and minds of people and increase the strength of their brand. Sometimes the corporate All-Star is simply the CEO. There seems to be an enormous attraction in the general population to listen to what a CEO of a well-known company has to say. Where’s before the CEOs would say nothing so they cannot divulge confidential information, CEOs in today’s world should realize that there is enormous power in their person as a brand.
Remember one thing: at the other end of a tweet there’s always someone that doesn’t appreciate being hit with advertisements or sales links. They can unfollow and ignore you. Most people on Twitter are smart and educated and don’t appreciate sales pitches. Work on building as many relations as possible with your current followers, and then move on to the next batch of followers and do the same. Treat your Twitter friends as pals and not as clients. Provide true value in everything you do on Twitter.

You ever fancied yourself a blogger but failed to have the energy or time to post considerate or daft missives at regular intervals? Twitter could set your inner blogger free. While some folk call it microblogging or moblogging, I really like to think about Twitter simply as blogging for regular folks. Perhaps you are actually busy. Perhaps you do not have much to assert. Or perhaps you are just lazy.

No problem. This free service works by letting you broadcast a group SMS message to your friends’ mobile telephones from your own telephone, a rapid message or an Internet form at twitter.com. All of your notes are then stored and shown on your private profiling page on the site, which includes links to your friends’ Twitter pages, a thumbnail picture of your choosing, and a short bio. You can even send text updates immediately to your FaceBook or MySpace page. Just don’t forget to keep it short: posts are restricted to one hundred and forty characters, and the subject is, usually, “what are you doing?”. More frequently than not, it seems, Twitter’s 25,000,000 members (twice as many as it had merely six months back, according to Twitter business development director Biz Stone), are simply killing time.

Even presidential candidate John Edwards is on it, though he appears to be the sole one pondering more than lunch. As I type this, Caroline is mulling over some Girl Scout cookies, ian_hocking is “Waiting for Jessica to arrive so we will be able to eat!” and hlantz is “having a pleasant cup of Soft Starmint tea.” Exciting .

The gossip about Twitter escalated into a virtual roar last year in the South by Southwest multimedia festival in Austin, Tex, when the barebones service owned by Blogger founder Evan Williams, 34, was named the best blogging tool and attendees used it to meet up at parties.

Since that point, the fawning attention to the service has come full-circle as reviewers have started to realize how uninteresting most of the people’s lives actually are. ( As if YouTube’s studio of puppy and kitten videos had not already driven that point home. )

Nevertheless, Twitter has been the top term on blog search engine Technorati for the previous 12 months. Lots of folk would happily have Twitter muzzled, instead of endure the beeping alert for yet another new text. But I am gambling that Twitter will get a lot noisier before tweople move on to the following new thing. Why? Because Twitter targets the same crowd that digs FaceBook and, candidly, that site is getting off. We cyberjunkies need a new thrill, and what could be better than a service that mixes social networking, blogging and texting? Dozens of other corporations try to do a similar thing with services like VelvetPuffin and Google’s Dodgeball.

But only Twitter has worked out the easy way to make it easy. I know, it’s absolutely mad and shallow, but that is exactly why Twitter is on its way to turning into the next killer app.

And if you detest it, well, in the words of one Twit from San Francisco, “I’m so sick to death of Twitter-haters. If you do not like it, why waste your time writing, reading, or talking about it?

Well, last night’s Grammy awards showed a new feature of Twitter.  Seconds after Steven Colbert pulled an iPad from his jacket, it was tweeted and live on YouTube! It was interesting to see how it looked when someone captured the TV image on his iPhone and then sent it to YouTube and tweeted about it…This works? well, except the quality of the video is below standard…So can anyone tell me how I can get the TV feed on my iPhone so I can record it in real-time and share it with the world now?

There is a lot of controversy on the question whether it is ethically allowable to make money from Twitter. In the early days of the web the same question was asked on whether it was allowable to make money off websites. In the meantime this question has been answered: millions of people are making money either through advertising or affiliate marketing. Probably the same is true for Twitter. It should be no problem to make money using Twitter and today this is already happening in an increasingly high pace. In fact, many people feel that if you are in marketing and you are not on Twitter, you just don’t get it.

As you will find from Dick Raman’s book “Tweeteronix” there are many ways to make money using Twitter. Whether you’re an artist or running a business, there is much value in driving traffic to your website by tweeting interesting information and including a link. Especially when you have a large number of followers it be- comes quite easy to get people to go to your website and become customers. But more importantly there it is a unique opportunity to use Twitter to find out what people are saying about your brand or to poll the general opinion about a wide range of topics.

For the first time in history governments as well as businesses have a unique opportunity to tap into a low-cost resource and find out if they are on the right track. Some businesses have put together Twitter-teams that are following everything that is said about their brand. They have put an extension to their customer relationship management system in place that allows them to respond to signals in the market coming from Twitter and create an intimate bond with their customers. These companies have already seen the value of Twitter for their business and I predict that if companies don’t follow this example soon, they might not survive. In today’s world the motto for businesses is: “Use social media or die!” Just make sure that when you allow your employees to tweet at work, social networking does not become social not working.

Tweets are like the phone, they touch every aspect of business and companies should be prepared to allow interaction with Twitter at every level and in every department of their company. Twitter is not only useful to promote products and services, it also provides a method to benchmark your company against your competitors, increase the quality of customer support and create better customer intimacy.

For many businesses this must be a horrific scenario. They have always believed that they should funnel all information on the company through very well trained spokespeople. Just the idea that anyone in the company can now be talking to the customers looks like a nightmare scenario. Undoubtedly, internal issues will be brought to the public’s attention and this can hurt the reputation of the company in a great way. However, companies should realize that the worst thing people could say about the company is nothing. Companies should want to hear what the happy customers have to say as well as the criticism on the company itself its products or services.

Especially when companies can promote their corporate All-Star, they are in a position to win the hearts and minds of people and increase the strength of their brand. Sometimes the corporate All-Star is simply the CEO. There seems to be an enormous attraction in the general population to listen to what a CEO of a well-known company has to say. Where’s before the CEOs would say nothing so they cannot divulge confidential information, CEOs in today’s world should realize that there is enormous power in their person as a brand.

Remember one thing: at the other end of a tweet there’s always someone that doesn’t appreciate being hit with advertisements or sales links. They can unfollow and ignore you. Most people on Twitter are smart and educated and don’t appreciate sales pitches. Work on building as many relations as possible with your current followers, and then move on to the next batch of followers and do the same. Treat your Twitter friends as pals and not as clients. Provide true value in everything you do on Twitter.

I have seen a lot of people following thousands of tweople and I always asked myself how they manage to handle so many users. Now with the list function, users will have a new tool that will help them to manage Twitter in a simple manner.   They can create lists of tweople they really want to read tweets from, while their following can grow unlimitedly, so it can be used for marketing purposes.  In other words, the lists bridge the gap that existed between the ‘purists’ that want to use Twitter only for their personal enrichment and the ‘marketing’ folks that just want as large a following as possible to have the largest reach for their promotional tweets.

To get started with lists, there are a few basic things to keep in mind.  The first thing is to plan ahead for best results. First, make sure you share your lists outside of Twitter. Everyone is thinking about sharing his or her lists within Twitter, but don’t stop there. Share the links to your lists on your website or blog. Lists can be accessed via a web address like: http://twitter.com/user_name/list_name. To promote your list on your website, just add a link with this address. Don’t forget to promote your lists on FaceBook, in email signatures, and in your newsletters.  Secondly, give your lists a good name.  After all when you give your list a name this will become part of the URL, people will see this and should be able to remember this.   Naming your lists may not be as important as choosing your Twitter user name, but it is still important. You want the name to be enticing, but it should accurately describe what kind of list it is.  Finally, create lists with a target audience in mind. Think strategically, take a marketing approach and think of lists as a marketing tool. Ask yourself these questions: “What kind of information is my target user interested in?” and “How can I make it interesting enough for him to follow my list”.  For example, let’s say you are a realtor. You would like to attract potential homebuyers in the Boston area. Your target audience would be (first-time) homebuyers and people thinking of selling their house. You should be able to find several bloggers and home magazines on Twitter that tweet about home buying, loan types, the home buying process, mortgages and interest rates. Surely you can find several tweople who tweet about Boston neighborhood statistics or tweet links to articles and blogs on the subject.  Put all of these sources together in a list and you have created a valuable tool for people that could be your prospective customers. Now all you have to do is promote your list in every place you can think of and see the followers of your list (which are your prospects) grow.

Lists are public by default, but you can make them private, which makes sense if you are just using them to organize what tweets to read.  The lists you have created are linked from your profile. Other Twitter users can decide to subscribe to your lists. This means lists can be an important new discovery mechanism for great tweets and tweople.

When you follow a list, you can see it in the “Lists” section in the right-hand side of your Twitter home page. There are different ways to find lists to follow.  You can use Twitter under ‘People You Follow’ on the profile page of anyone on Twitter, and you can see all of the public lists they have created and all the lists they follow. You can also see the lists that person appears on. Checking out the lists that your close friends have created, follow, or appear on, is a good way to locate lists you might be interested in.  It is expected that many third party applications will come out with list functionality.  Listorious is a good example of such an app.  It maintains a rapidly growing directory of Twitter lists. You can search or browse through many lists by category and check out the most popular lists in different areas.

The Lists API has now been updated as well. This will allow developers to add support for lists into their Twitter apps. Business usage of Twitter Lists is one of the challenges that new Twitter users face in finding interesting users to follow. There are several third-party tools to help you decide who to follow, by allowing you to search their Bios and their tweets. Developers will be able to grasp the API and use its functionality to add the Twitter lists feature into their apps. The management of your lists is a manual activity and may take up quite a lot of your time.  So it is expected that many third party developers will come up with clever additions to their software to automate the creation and maintenance of Twitter lists.

All in all, the addition of lists to Twitter is a great idea.  As long as you make your lists public, everyone can enjoy the fruits of your labor. The fact that these lists can be made searchable on the Twitter site itself means more exposure for your own Twitter account. Alternately, you can keep the list private and just use it as a way to stay connected inter-office.  Make some clever lists and share them with others, ask them to follow your list and see your popularity grow. There is no better way to network than to have a lot of interested readers! In the end, lists can really help Twitter users enjoy their experience in the Twitterverse and also use it for their own business purposes. Who knows what they will come up with next!

Twitter recently announced a new feature on their website. This feature allows users to organize the people they find interesting on Twitter in so-called “lists”. The twitter list function shows up at the top of your account page providing easy access to create your own lists.  Users can create multiple lists for different purposes, a list of friends, artists or just a list of their favorites brands.

If you click on the list, it will only show tweets from the people you put in that the list. Maybe you were was expecting that this function will let you control which people can read my tweets, but that’s not the case. Twitter lists let you organize how you can more selectively read tweets posted by people on your list. You can select what list you want to read instead of reading your whole stream.

Twitter has chosen to keep the lists separate from your followers.  In other words, you do not have to follow someone to add him/her to a list that you create. You can also remove your name from any list you don’t want to be on. If someone adds you to a list you don’t want to be on, you can block that user and you automatically remove yourself from the list.

Lists can be public or private. If you choose them to be public you are sharing your list with the world, if you set it to private, only you can use it. Twitter lists can also be used to create widgets from a specific list allowing you to post them on your blog or social network site.  Basically, twitter lists are a new way to group and share people you find interesting. Currently users can’t exceed 20 lists with a maximum of 500 tweople.

Companies or brands can create multiple lists based on specific users with requested backgrounds or topics. The list feature is a powerful marketing tool for research and live search of people’s reactions to product releases, events or general feedback about anything. This was a prominent feature that a lot of people were asking for.

Considering that these twitter lists are linked from your personal account, there is a great possibility that users who are regular viewers of your activity will be introduced to new and exciting twitter accounts that you are following and feature within a list. You could help your friends follow funny or interesting Twitter users that they were previously unaware of!

In the past, users have recommended Twitter accounts to follow by tweeting the user name with the tag ‘#followfriday’ every Friday. Each week on this day the tag tops the list of Twitter Trending Topics. However, now with the invention of the list feature, this tag may become less popular as friends can simply look at your lists to discover new accounts worth following. If you need to see an example of a twitter list, the Twitter team that developed this feature has created a list showcasing all of their activity that can be seen at http://twitter.com/twitter/team. This is a great way for the people at Twitter to stay connected through this list and read each other’s status updates quickly, without sorting through hundreds of other feeds they are subscribed to. You can link your own job’s member accounts together in a list and share it on the company website.

You can even feature your Twitter lists on your own website or on your favorite social networking sites by utilizing the Twitter List Widget (http://twitter.com/goodies/widget_list). Simply fill out your information on the Twitter List Widget page and the site will produce the proper HTML code that you can embed on your own personal or business site to share your list.

When people first encounter Twitter they just don’t ‘get it’. They think it is rather silly to start sending SMSes that the whole world can see. Just about all people that first encounter Twitter have a similar reaction. It takes a while before people start to recognize how powerful Twitter can be.

Especially Business people have a tendency to overlook social networking as a valuable business tool. They are busy running their company and they usually ignore the social networking sites altogether.

That is mistake number one. Social networking has become a major driver of traffic on the Internet and businesses need to take this seriously if they don’t want to miss out on a great opportunity. Every company today should have a FaceBook account and engage in conversations with their customers and prospects on Twitter.

After all, businesses are a collection of individuals and these individuals start to express themselves on the Internet more and more. Through the social networking sites employees are engaging in conversations with their friends and family and increasingly with total strangers. There is great value for businesses to tap into this source and generate more brand awareness and traffic to their websites.

Twitter is especially suited for this purpose. Be- cause tweets are easy to read and easy to write, it wouldn’t take much for a business to actively use this medium.

Twitter is a hot social networking tool, but business owners can really profit from it. Twitter is fast, free and simple way to get immediate results for your business. You can increase your traffic today, and reap the benefits quickly.

Here are some ways your business can profit from Twitter:

1. Find local people you can network with or find local events to meet local customers. Use the search feature (http://search.twitter.com) to find people who are near you, then follow them. Especially for business professionals like lawyers, doctors and accountants this is a great way to find new customers.

2. Get great quality traffic by sending messages (“tweets”) that are meaningful and helpful. Twitter users come from many walks of life and income levels, so build a relationship with them to get the best results.

3. Remember the old saying, “It’s not what you know but who you know that counts”? That is true on Twitter, as well. If you need a favor, send out a tweet – you never know who can help (or who knows someone who can help).

4. Know the power of the “re-tweet,” which is what it is called when someone takes a message (“tweet”) you send and then sends it to their followers. It is sort of like the way a forwarded email works. Send a quality tweet to your followers and see how it gets passed along to others.

5. Use the search feature to find like-minded people across the world. Use it to find people who may not possess the same talents as you, but complement your talents.

Twitter is an excellent tool for building your on- line business. If it is used properly, it is a free asset to your Internet marketing plan. Let’s investigate the few areas in which a business could use Twitter to their advantage.

Twitter is a preview of the third generation of the web, where we are communicating in real-time. The first generation was rather static.  It was mostly companies displaying their products and services on web pages. Individuals started creating personal websites, but they too were static.  The Web was used for publishing and a lot of screen scraping was done to cut and paste from other websites.

The second generation of the Web, the so-called ‘Web 2.0’ was more interactive. With the advent of webServices, the web became a more connected place. Companies started using the social networking media like MySpace and FaceBook, to set up a dialogue with their customers. Individuals were using social networking media to connect with their friends and to keep them posted on what they were doing. Everywhere ‘wikis’ were being set up with individuals blogging about a wide range of subjects. This created a web where you could follow what was going on in a certain niche and take part in the discussion.

The third generation of the Web is about to break loose.  It takes things one step further than interactive; it’s real-time. Here the Web is connecting everything and everybody. We will see real-time interactions between devices and people. These interactions are taking the form of a constant stream of data that comes to you, rather than messages or web pages you have to look for. People will still be concerned about what has happened in the past, but this generation of the web is all about what’s happening now.

Twitter gives us a glimpse of this the third generation of the Web. It lets us communicate in near real-time, but it resembles a stream of a gigantic stream of data that everybody can jump into, to pick up what they like.  Many things that happen in the world are first reported on Twitter. When that plane landed in the Hudson River early 2009 a guy called Janis Krums was on the ferry picking up the first survivors. He took a picture of the plane and tweeted this to the world.

When the elections in Iran in June 2009 were over, the world learned from the many tweets from Iran that there were violent protests against the election results. When the protests started, the regular news media like CNN did not pick this up for hours.  This in itself caused a big discussion on Twitter (#cnnfail) about the role that the regular news media should be playing.  The issue here is: can what is tweeted be trusted by the news media or is further investigation required? The answer is a difficult one, but one thing is clear “the truth is more seen than read”, so anything that is documented on video or photos, can be trusted more than what is written.

Today Tweeteronix launches a book and an application on Twitter.  The combination creates a unique proposition for the market: all buyers of the book will get a free subscription to the Tweeteronix application.  Author Dick Raman wrote a brilliant book on the use of Twitter for Business and Pleasure.   The application is designed for businesses and bloggers that would let users automatically build up a substantial following in a number of accounts, while tweeting interesting messages on behalf of their business.

Dick Raman, a renowned Entrepreneur, Speaker and Author, clearly positions Twitter as the new way to stay in touch with what is happening in the world now. Twitter is the next generation web: the real-time stream of information, anyone can dip into and join the conversation on any given topic. At the same time the book explains clearly what businesses small and large can do with Twitter and how Bloggers can get more readers.

Erik Verhaar, Publisher said: “This is a very powerful book: it is a complete guide to Twitter that describes not only how Twitter works, but also the logic behind it, the context in which it can be used as well as the applications for businesses. The author manages to provide a level of depth, seldom seen in books of this kind. It offers the reader all the tools to get everything possible out of Twitter.”

The book also describes the Tweeteronix application. This application distinguishes itself from other Twitter applications by its sophisticated engine that is designed to automatically build up a substantial, but targeted following.   The application offers many user-defined settings that can create a meaningful group of followers for multiple Twitter accounts.  It allows the user to post predefined tweets that are relevant for his audience, so he can build a solid relationship with his followers.   Since everything is on autopilot, users would not have to spend much time doing this, which helps the busy executives to save time.  Tweeteronix provides a low-cost way to reach the point, where businesses can use the power of Twitter for marketing their business in a unique and meaningful manner.

You can find the application on http://Tweeteronix.com you can order the book there as well