Twitterwhore Shirts for Everyone !

Well it would seem that the DC area has its newest entrepeneur in its midst. Everyones good friend and Jonnys ParTay producer extraodinaire, Scott Stead, has gone and launched a new web site pimping out his brand new product, Twitterwhore tshirts.

This enterprising young fellow saw fit to buy the twitterwhore.com domain name some time back and has finally made time to capitalize on the Twitter phenomena. I mean how many times have you met someone at a social media gathering and introduce each other by your twitter names ? Happens to me a lot …

Well now with your very own Twitterhore tshirt, you will gain followers by the boatload. Now if the damned service would only stay up long eough for them to get to a computer and follow you …

So I want everyone to head over an support the local guy and get you very own Twitterwhore tshirt. They do make great gifts you know …..

In Case of Twitter Emergency, Break Glass

My name is Jimmy and I am an Apple-holic.  Now to start my 12 step program. …..

I will be the first to admit, Apple has me roped into thes damed events they do, especially WWDC and MacWorld.  I wonder what the loss value of work that day is around the globe ?  I sit trying to refresh my damned screen as the various live blogs go teets up and I break into a cold sweat when I cant get the “One More Thing” right away !!!

With the advent of Twitter we had another avenue to get those little nuggets of news … that is if Twitter is up, whcih as we all know has not been consistently lately.  I saw a couple of posts today about Twitters plans to stay alive during the crunch.  And BTW, it is not only WWDC this week, O’reilly has Graphing Social Patterns East 08 going on as well in DC and I am sure a few tweets will be flying from there.

But in the case that Twitter also goes colonel sanders teets up on us this week, what are we to do?  We need some sort of “In Case Twitter Is Down, Break The Glass” and go to this service … I am not sure what “this service” would be.  It could be the new kid on the block, Plurk, but they seem to be having some scaling issues as well.  Or maybe the old school Pownce … either way break glass, press button and have Twitter forward to that other “this service” …

As a side note, I am getting one of those little square “super bowl” type office pool sheest ready for everyone to take their bid on an time we see the Twitter lights go out … anyone interested.  Gentlemen’s bet of course, you all know gambling is illegal

Twitter Continues to Bring Online World Offline

I can honestly say that most of the connections that I have made with my friends in the DC area here have come right from the pages of Twitter in some fashion. I am continually amazed how Twitter, for the most part, has brought so many of my online connections offline and allowed me to make some really good friendships with a lot of great people.

I wrote the other day about how Twitter helped a couple of stranded Twitter’rs at the Ft Lauderdale airport. Without Twitter, this offline experience never happens and what I am sure will become a friendship would have been missed.

Then today while reading the interwebs, I came across this post title “Twitter for Business?“. The author, Mark Dixon, who openly admits he has questioned the Twitter phenomena, tells of a great experience he had because of Twitter.

However, I had a delightful business encounter yesterday triggered by a Twitter message. On Tuesday afternoon at 2:33pm, I tweeted, “Wrapped up the last of several con calls. Getting ready to head to the airport in route to San Francisco.”

At 2:58 pm, I received an email from Dazza Greenwood, “Just noticed on Twitter you are headed to SF… I’m in the city this week and weekend and wonder if you’d happen to have a few moments to get together and say “hi” in person? …”

Mark made it to SF and that night had a great evening at the home of Dazza. In the end, Mark summed it up better than I can here:

Thanks, Twitter, for spawning a productive face-to-face meeting that gave personal substance to a previously distant, virtual business relationship.

Now if they can only stay up long enough for us to make that next great connection ….

Twitter to the Rescue

As we all know Twitter can be used for oh so many ways.

• communication
• conversation
• marketing/PR
• News
• and so on

I am constantly amazed at how I continue to see people use it.  Case in point the following exchange

Mark Davidson was set to pick up some of his friends traveling to LA.  They got held up at security at Ft Lauderdale and missed their flight.  Mark put out the call, looking for some help from fellow twitter’rs that could help out.  As you can see, @Hunee and @mkhall came to the rescue and picked up the stranded passengers for the night until they could get out the next day to finish their trip.

What a cool community that enables us to reach out to total strangers and they drop what they are doing to help out someone in need.  I am constantly amazed how an online tool like Twitter continues to enable offline relationships.  These two people, @jacklhasa and @scarab of TwitterTravels were on there way to LA for a Tweetup !

Great job Mark, and great work on TwitterStars.

Yet Another Cool Twitter Tool: Twitter Timer

Okay okay, I know, enough with the Twitter crap …

But this one I found pretty cool.  It is your very own Twitter timer.  Simply follow timer and your all set.

Send timer a direct message with a message something like :

d timer 30 Doctors appnt

and in 30 minutes you will get a message back to remind you.  Its that easy.  Try it out and let us know what you think.

Twitter hits a million and a call for week boycott

Some news reported that Twitter was closing in on a Series C round of funding at a reported $60 million valuation.  On the heels of that news, Twitter Facts is reporting that according to twitdir, Twitter now has 1 million registered users.

As many of you are quite aware, Twitter seems to be the topic de jour in many upon many of blog posts these days.  So much so, that Allen Stern of CenterNetworks is calling for a week long boycott of Twitter reporting.  He has been kinf enough to provide a badge, as you see here in the post.  Here is the code is you are interested in posting it on your blog posts.

<a href=”http://www.centernetworks.com/centernetworks-declares-twitter-free-week”><img src=”http://media.centernetworks.com/images/twitterfree.png” title=”Twitter Free Week” border=”0″ /></a>
So what do you think?  Can it be done?  One entire week without a Twitter post?

Build a Brand and Track It

That seems to be one of the buzz words these days, branding.  In some fore or another, everyone is taking part in this branding.  Whether you are just a person on twitter, or a company out there, it is important that you pick a brand and buidl upon it.

As a person, your brand can simply be your screen name.  Try to make sure you carry the same one across the various social media platforms, like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and you are on your way to creating your personal brand.  As for a company, make the screen name match your company name and you are branding it on these networks as well.

After creating this brand, it is extremely important that you follow up and track how your “brand” is being talked about, its popularity, any problems with it, and so on.  But with the vastness of todays social media world, that task can be daunting.  Well I have found your solution.  Enter “The Social Media Firehose“.  It is an unreal Yahoo Pipe built by Kingsley Joseph.  You simply enter the terms you want to search for, like your product or company name and you get this:

A list of everywhere in the social media-verse your brand is mentioned, including images, twitter updates, blog posts, and so on.  It is extremely powerful.  It even has subscription options to include RSS, so you can almost instantly see what is being said about your brand so you can respond appropriately.  You can even get badges to embed on your web site so others can see it all happen in real time as well.  It is really an awesome product.  One that should not be overlooked as you are trying to build and track your brand.

Has Twitter Jumped the Shark

So to speak ? Or at least Twitter users. I don’t know about you but I have really noticed a big jump in the number of what I will call “fishing followers.” You all know the type. They are the ones who follow you in hopes that you will follow back. However, I am not the just follow everyone back type. I like to gain some value out my Twitter use.

In any case, I have been seeing an alarming number of followers with a huge ration gap of Following to Followers. And their twitter streams usually boil down to a bit of spam (see Nick O’Neill’s post on Twitter etiquette).

For instance here a couple I have received in the last few days tripixdesigns and even better was this one subbiejournal (this is an interesting one, check out the blog .. says her “Master” was sick the other day, so no spankings for her :))

Anyway, as this trend continues to increase, I wonder is this the future of Twitter.  is it to become the next MySpace where we are barraged with spam of all sorts and our meaningful converstaions with each other get lost in the mix ?

Have anyone else noticed this ?  Any thoughts ?