More importantly, Costolo noted that Twitter will launch an advertising model “soon”. He went on to say that soon means most likely early next year. He continued, “It (the advertising) will be fascinating, non-traditional, and people will love it.”

The final comment from Costolo noted that partners like TweetDeck will be able to partner in the advertising operation.

It seems like no matter who writes about Twitter and advertising, the concept is merging advertising inside the stream (even if it’s displayed separately) and that the ads should be targeted towards the content of the tweet.

I wonder what happens to the paid advertising programs (like the one Izea runs) once Twitter launches their own.

Apparently there are two camps when it comes to the new retweets…one camp likes the consolidated concept and the other camp hates it because they can’t add their 2-cents to the conversation. My guess is that 90% of re-sharing on Twitter is either direct sharing of something Mashable posted or the addition of “lol”.

This past summer I wrote about how Friendfeed could generate massive income and also reach the mainstream. Sadly that never happened because Friendfeed sold out to Facebook. While it looks like Facebook wasn’t reading, this morning I started to think that perhaps Twitter was. What really got me thinking was something I read on Patricia Handschiegel’s blog. While she discusses the way Twitter defined their service in the beginning, she uses the word forum throughout the column.

Could Twitter be moving towards “threaded conversations” similar to what a forum offers? We know that the new retweet functionality will keep everyone’s “like” below the master/initial comment. We also know users want a way to add their own thoughts to the initial comment. Could the threaded conversation mechanism be a way to please both groups? Just like what any forum offers today. And just like the way Friendfeed and Facebook handle the conversation today.

All of this leads me back to the dip in usage. Forums are very sticky because the conversation is centralized and everyone wants “in”. As I’ve written about until my fingers fall off, the conversation is currently so fragmented on Twitter. If Twitter continues to move towards full-Friendfeed, it could mean increased usage.

• Twitter gets $100 million in funding but wants people to work for free to translate the service – Mashable
• Bunch of new features added – MyFamily
• Brand new look for the Lite Messenger – eBuddy
• Major Email Provider Trends: Yahoo and Hotmail Tops, Gmail Catching – MailChimp
• What I’ve Earned (And Learned) From Writing “Beginning Ruby” – Peter Cooper
• The “WiFi At Conferences” Problem – Joel Spolsky
• Shark Eats Entrepreneur Alive – FairSoftware

The panel discussion lasted an hour and I’ve split the video into 20-minute segments – you can view the videos below. Some notes from the panelists:

• Chantelle loads Tweetdeck the moment she hits the office to check Twitter and spends 30 minutes to 1 hour each day going through what her friends sent her
• Kristen discussed using the bit.ly URL shortener as a way to track ROI
• At about the 18 minutes mark in the first video, Chantelle explains how they went to market for their iPhone app using an exclusive with Robert Scoble. She notes that they saw great results by using Robert to get the word out about the app and were even able to get an exciting trending topic on Twitter. They didn’t give the news to the NYT or Newsweek. They met with Robert several times beforehand to build a relationship with Robert. Later on Chantelle noted that depending on the type of story they are trying to push, they will use different sources to work with.

There was a discussion about analytics in the second video although I found the analysis weak. There was no mention about real-value stats – just simple discussion about how many followers or fans a brand has. My guess is that in late 2010 ”followers and fans” will be the hits of 1995.

In the third video there is a discussion about whether to hire a PR firm or if you should look at bringing a person on-board internally.

TwitApps developer Stuart Dallas notes why he is shutting the service down:

I love Twitter and use it a lot, but I’m tired of developing for the API. It’s not that I don’t think the API team over there do a fantastic job, or that I think the API is bad, it’s a personal thing. It no longer excites me the way it once did, and this is part of the reason it’s taken a long time for me to get v2 finished, and it’s still not ready.

We’ve seen other developers say similar things regarding Twitter development. Dallas says the TwitApps Twitter application code will be open-sourced via their GitHub account next week.

Last week the Gmail email service was down for a few hours. Our post about the outage received over 1,500 comments. One of the interesting posts I read came from a blogger who was outraged and mad that Gmail was down and that the company hadn’t posted reasons for the outage and a time for recovery. What was interesting about the post is that this same blogger allowed the customers of his startup (and investors) to go for months with no information about his service before it was shut down with no notice.

From my perspective, everything will go down or fail at some point. Last month ceiling tiles at a subway station in NYC fell and the station had to be closed for over a week. The MTA worked 24 hours a day to get things fixed and while it was a mess for people who needed to travel through that area, I saw very few complaints about how the MTA handled the incident. The truth is that when things fail, it’s important to consider how the company handles the issue and protects their users from the same issue in the future.

If a company handles the outage well and/or we know that the team is working on fixing the problem, we need to all take a deep breath and realize that humans are working to get things fixed. Sure it’s frustrating, maybe it could cost some amount of business but those are costs that should be taken into account as part of doing business. From what I saw last week with Google, they handled the Gmail outage well. As you read this, I am sure you (and I) are thinking that Twitter is another story with regards to how they handle outages.

Last weekend the big story was about a widespread hacker attack against Wordpress blogs. If you read CN, you know that my sites have been exploited so many times, the hackers are sharing some of their link revenue with me. My sites have also lost a lot of Google juice and I am not even sure that all of the sites are back to normal in the Google index.

One of those affected by the most recent hacker wave was Rackspace employee Robert Scoble. Robert lost two months of posts after a hacker decided Robert posted too often about Friendfeed and removed the posts (heh). Many blogs attacked him for not having backups and that he should have been prepared for this. I liked Robert’s reply to those who wrote about his mistake:

“So I am a bad blog administrator. But no one died. I am not in jail. I don’t owe millions. My sons still hug me. There are worse mistakes!”

Sometimes you have to touch the hot stove to learn that it’s hot.  Somehow I am guessing Robert will never have to worry about a backup again. Naturally there are worse outages and some that are just unrecoverable. Even in those circumstances, there is still the same “hot stove learning”.

No matter how good the technology gets, there will always be outages and there will always  be human error. It’s how we deal with the outages and handle the mistakes that makes all the difference.

The Good

A screen shot of the brizzly service A screen shot of HootSuite in single-column mode

On the surface, the brizzly interface resembles HootSuite when you have it set up to show only one column. However, the inner workings of brizzly are actually quite different (for good and for bad) from HootSuite.

Following are some of the really nice features of brizzly:

1. brizzly automatically locates and displays photos and videos people link to in their tweets. For instance, Chris Brogan linked to a photograph of a broken mirror in one of his tweets. Rather than just seeing the link to YFrog, I get to see the photograph he uploaded. So far, I’ve confirmed that brizzly displays photos from YFrog and TwitPic and that it pulls in YouTube videos. I’m not sure what other services it pulls into your feed, yet.
2. brizzly also automatically resolves shortened URLs. Any time a shortened URL is posted on Twitter, brizzly automatically converts it back to the full version of the URL. For instance, Alex Wilhelm posted a link to his latest story on Techgeist within one of his tweets. On Twitter, he posted a shortened URL (http://bit.ly/LDbej), but brizzly shows me the full URL (http://techgeist.net/2009/09/retweetcom-hits-million/). Unfortunately, this feature seems to be a bit inconsistent at the moment. Sometimes the URLs are automatically resolved; other times just the shortened URLs appear.
3. You can “mute” specific users. If one of the tweeple you’re following starts tweeting a bit too much for your likes, you can mute the person, causing their updates not to show up in your timeline.
4. You can save drafts of tweets, in case you decide you’re not quite ready to post it, yet.
5. brizzly automatically shortens URLs for you using bit.ly. Simply paste a link into the tweet you’re preparing, and it automatically gets shortened when you submit the tweet. As with many of the other Twitter clients that use bit.ly to shorten URLs, though, there doesn’t seem to be any way to associate your shortened URLs with your own bit.ly account.

Other than those features, much of what you see in brizzly is very similar to what you’d find in many other Twitter clients. You can save specific searches on Twitter, you can follow/unfollow users when you view their updates, you can upload photos and post them on Twitter and more.

One other neat feature in brizzly is the fact that the service attempts to provide you with an explanation as to why certain topics are trending. On the right side of the window, you’ll see a list of the top trending topics, and each one has a “Why?” link next to it.

The Missing

Unfortunately, there are still quite a few features that I feel are missing from brizzly. Following are a few of them. Since brizzly is still in beta, I’m hoping that at least a few of these will be implemented within the next few weeks or months.

1. At this time, you can only view one “column” at a time. Because of that, you can only view one account at a time. In order to keep up with what’s going on between multiple accounts, you have to continuously switch back and forth between them.
2. The interface works similarly to the way Twitter Search works. It automatically notifies you that new information is available by saying “Refresh to see newer updates,” but it doesn’t automatically update. I would really like to see an option to make brizzly automatically refresh your list of updates in specific intervals.
3. Only Twitter accounts can be pulled in to brizzly. It would be really nice to see the option to pull in Facebook updates and possibly even Flickr, etc. as you can with Friendfeed.
4. The saved searches are still rather simplistic. This appears to be an issue with the Twitter API rather than any specific Twitter client, as I don’t think I’ve found any Twitter clients on which advanced Twitter search works properly. What’s even more inconvenient than the fact that advanced Twitter searches fail is the fact that you don’t get any notification of the failure. Instead, the Twitter clients all seem to just tell you that there were no matches for your search.

The brizzly service also seems to be severely lacking in documentation. For instance, after searching the site for quite a while, I was never able to find any inference that brizzly automatically shortens URLs for you. In order to find that out, I had to test it. There’s also no real documentation on what types of searches can be saved through the service.

I also feel a little bit slighted by the service. When you arrive at brizzly’s site, the only information you see, other than a form you can use to request an invite code and a link to login if you already have an invite code, is the following (emphasis added by me):

“Brizzly is a simple way to experience the social web. You can request an invitation code below and we’ll let you know when we have them ready. (Soon!)”

With brizzly only supporting Twitter (so far, at least), I would hardly say that you can truly experience the “social web” with it. In addition, with that being the only information available to potential users, I just don’t see why people, other than those reading reviews like this one, would even be interested in trying it out.

Conclusion

Brizzly is certainly shaping up to be a nice service. With the inline display of photos and videos, the automatically resolved short URLs, etc., it really has the potential to turn Twitter into a service similar to Friendfeed. Unfortunately, however, with some of the major features of Friendfeed and other Twitter clients missing, it still has a long way to go. The service is very promising, but it’s going to take a bit more before I’ll make the switch.

Related: In-depth comparison of Tweetdeck and Seesmic

The links appear normal to the naked eye but when clicked they morph to something like this:

http://twitter.com/link_click_count?url

From my previous post, “It does not look like third party apps (HootSuite, Tweetdeck, Sobees, etc.) are affected by this link tracking change. Frankly tracking links without tracking the third party apps seems silly as apparently the hardcore Twitter users use some application with the service.”

My guess is that they are tracking the links for both internal and external purposes and perhaps this is the first step to some sort of ranking matrix. Please leave your thoughts on the reasoning behind tracking every link in the comments below.

Update: A CN reader tells me that TweetMeme appears to not be counting correctly and he wonders if this new click tracking has anything to do with it. I don’t use TweetMeme but will contact the service for more details.

Darren Stuart first found this functionality earlier and noted that Twitter isn’t modifying the actual URLs but instead adding a javascript event which runs the “http://twitter.com/link_click_count?url=’urlhere’” function.

It does not look like third party apps (HootSuite, Tweetdeck, Sobees, etc.) are affected by this link tracking change. Frankly tracking links without tracking the third party apps seems silly as apparently the hardcore Twitter users use some application with the service.

We can guess that the URLs are being tracked for internal stats, for some sort of hot URL board, for metrics to use with advertisers, etc. There’s also been talk about Twitter creating some sort of engine so perhaps this is the first step.

Leave your thoughts on the reasoning behind tracking every link in the comments below.

Update: it appears the tracking links are gone as of now.

Today there are a variety of services that make it easier to archive content around a term or product. A new offering from Portland-based Iterasi launching today is hoping to do the job even better. The service is named Positive Press and is setup to capture, archive and report on any content across the Web. The core of the product is Iterasi’s archiving service which saves actual web pages from the time of the save including all contents. I spoke with CEO Pete Grillo who showed me that you can even archive full RSS feeds and the archive is of the webpages that the stories are from not just the plain RSS content.

Positive Press can also archive Twitter messages in the full Twitter style and the messages are retained for all time. It’s very simple to use – just enter a search term and any time that term is used on twitter, Positive Press will archive it. Apparently Twitter only saves 30-days of messages.

The service is perfect for brands and agencies that need to monitor remarks across the web. The service also offers a reports feature which can send on-demand and scheduled reports via email that include the content generated by the archive feature over a specific time period.

As a side note, no matter what tool you use for monitoring, if you have a product or service you must monitor all press so you can respond if needed. If you are working with an agency they better be providing you with reports – if not, find a new agency.

The Positive Press service starts at $99/month. Iterasi’s free service will remain and will be rebranded as Iterasi Personal. Check out additional views on Positive Press from Josh Lowensohn of CNET and Charles Hamilton of WWD.

Here’s an overview of how the service works:

As you can see in the graphic below, you can setup the Sobees web application with as many panels as you would like. The panels can be setup as Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts (soon) and real-time searches. For example, I could have one panel for my @centernetworks Twitter account, one for my @cloudcontacts Twitter account, a search for “web blogs that don’t link”, a search for “great web startups”, etc.

Sobees is based in Switzerland and competes with London-based Tweetdeck (which moments ago announced a new round of funding in the amount of 2 million pounds) and valley darling Seesmic. Seesmic has been talking about a browser-based version for a while now but it hasn’t launched as of yet.

The big issue with Sobees in the past was that you needed a windows machine and some runtimes to get the service to work. With this new web-based version, you need only Silverlight which works on both Windows and Mac in any browser (IE, Firefox, Chrome, etc.).

The tool also offers an anti-spam function which allows you to enter a variety of terms that will be blocked in your timeline and/or search results.

My only real suggestion for the Sobees team is to consolidate their product names – get rid of bDule and just offer Sobees Web, Sobees Lite and Sobees Full. I think it’s a bit confusing that bDule = sobees Web.

Update: Seesmic Web client is now live as well – read a very in-depth review by Frederic Lardinois at Readwriteweb.

Shareaholic is also using their own proprietary data within the real-time results. The topics cover news, videos and blogs. What’s interesting with today’s announcement is that users can also share the interesting trending topics on any of the 60+ services that Shareaholic supports which includes Digg, Facebook, Blogger, LinkedIn, ping.fm, etc.

Mozilla reports over 1 million activations and the service works with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Flock, Safari and Songbird.

Since then we’ve seen major public companies post for new employees that have a minimum of 250 followers on Twitter.

But the HUGE news this evening is that Microsoft and Linux have made love on Twitter by exchanging tweets. While there are 10,000 startups that wish they got coverage, instead a twitter message gets mad coverage.

The Microsoft/Linux tweets are nothing compared to our BREAKING NEWS that a Yankee fan and a Red Sox fan have exchanged Twitter messages. Typically this is banned – for example, as a Yankee fan, I am banned from the entire state of Massachusetts.

After 100 years of the most heated rivalry in all of sports, there just might be a new day dawning for two of the most storied teams in baseball. Will this conversation continue? Will Yankee fans eat baked beans and will Boston fans finally realize that the Yankees are the better team? I don’t know but I can assure you this…. if it happens on Twitter, we will break it!

MG then went all Columbo on us by explaining the stats on the Microsoft official twitter account.  He notes that only 1,000 people were following the account but as of this morning it’s up to nearly 5,000! MG also found out who is behind the account. He notes, “The account is being run by its corporate communications team, consisting of four people.”

The big news here is that since the post, Microsoft’s 4-person twitter communications team has added a third tweet. That’s right…a company with two tweets makes big headlines (the story got a lead from Techmeme ) so I figured I’d watch the account as best I could and I setup a SMS alert when content is added. So I present now, the third tweet message from Microsoft Corporation:

USA Today on Bing v Google “For a search that sings you may want to Bing it” ^JR

CenterNetworks will continue to monitor the account and will report back of any further important developments.

Update: Microsoft has since added tweets 4 and 5 to their account. We can confirm they are now closing in on Oprah’s count.

Here’s the general overview of the position (click the link to read the full job description):

“The Emerging Media Marketing Manager is the primary lead for the Best Buy’s mobile, social, and video marketing & media efforts to drive in-store and online sales, create sustainable word of mouth evangelists, and brand loyalists. This leader will create both bolt-on social and mobile marketing initiatives and other new initiatives and identify business opportunities that can be solved wholly or in part by applying or developing social technology, digital and software strategies and technologies .”

If you are interested in a position in Minnesota, this is actually a pretty damn hot job. To be honest if this is the kind of position you would consider, but don’t care much for Minnesota, I’d still recommend considering it. Most large companies only have one of these positions and Best Buy appears to be doing some things right when it comes to online marketing.  Best Buy wants a lot of experience which is required for a position of this level.

Here’s where the job goes south for me…it’s in the “preferred qualifications” section which has two bullet points and they are:

Preferred Qualifications:

• Graduate degree
• 250 plus followers on Twitter

I know what you are thinking - Allen must be joking. But sadly I am not. They seem to value education at the same level as a silly metric like number of followers on Twitter. I am sure glad I spent time getting my MBA :)

I wonder what internal employee, agency or analyst told them to add that as a requirement?!? My suggestion is if you plan to apply, beef up your followers before you send in your application. And if you think you fit the bill but have no followers, do a search on “add followers to my twitter account” and you can get 250 followers before you click off of this article.

Twitter followers are the new “hits” as a metric.