Alright, so last post I flooded you with numbers and info on the type of people who can be found on Twitter and stuff. Why would I do such an awful thing? Well, we have to stay informed on who Twitter’s users are because 1) they’re the service’s indirect source of revenue, and 2) because they create the content. I already discussed revenue from ads and investors in a previous post, so let’s address the “2)” — Content. Here’s the question: Who owns our Tweets? Do we, the users? Or does Twitter? Let’s find out!

Let’s start at the source, Twitter. In their terms of service they state:

Just like ma & pa always said, you're responsible for your own sh*t

So it seems like we own our tweets, right? Yeah, okay, but now imagine, as Shea Bennett, the kid who founded Twittercism (another blog that explores the various aspects of Twitter), did, if Twitter decides to produce The Book Of Tweets, and selects 10,000 of the greatest-ever updates for publication, or something. Can they do that without the permission of the authors?

The answer is YES. They can. They have the right to distribute tweets royalty-free and without any other kind of compensation wherever and to whoever. But hey, you still own the content of your tweets, if not where it ends up.

"You own it, theoretically, but we kinda do, more."

So we own our Tweets. Theoretically. Now what if someone outside of Twitter decided they wanted to use whatever we wrote for whatever reason. Is that allowed, and if so, what is the proper etiquette? Should you cite me if you use my Tweets? Are they public property or private intellectual property publically viewed?

Back to Twitter’s Terms of Service:

Twitter to You: It's your prob, deal with it.

If your content has been rebroadcasted? You are responsible. If other users use your content without your consent? You are responsible. For all consequences and liabilities faced as a result of your content, you are responsible. Twitter isn’t.

And hell, that’s the way it should be, in my opinion. If you’re going to write controversial stuff that can come back to haunt you, make your profile private or don’t Tweet it at all. Why join Twitter in the first place if you don’t want people reading or sharing your stuff? I mean, it’s Twitter. That’s kind of the whole point. What did you think was going to happen?

Anyway, let’s say something bad does happen and you really need to do something about it. Like, you accidentally post the results of your top-secret, soon-to-be Nobel Peace Prize-winning material on Twitter. Is there a way you can protect your intellectual property? According to their Terms of Service page, yes:

Twitter is like the older brother who is going to beat up the bullies for you

This would also suggest that if someone’s going to be repeating what you wrote somewhere else, they have to cite you, because your content is copyrighted. However, because Twitter and Tweeting is such a new development, there still isn’t really a universal or standard way to cite Tweets. Be creative.

Anyway, for some people, Twitter’s lax rules over our Tweeting rights aren’t good enough. In the past, Twitter advised users looking for more protection to look into licensing. That’s where TweetCC came in.

This rooster symbolizes your copyright power over Tweets

They’re nobly attempting to apply a Creative Commons License to Tweets, so that whoever risks using a Tweet that has been protected by TweetCC without naming the original author could be risking a court battle. In order to be a part of TweetCC, a Twitter user would simply have to Tweet the phrase @tweetcc: I license my tweets under a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication. Currently, 3,697 Tweeters have.

However, many sites have brought into question the need or effectiveness of applying a Creative Commons License to tweets. An article on The Blog Herald, for example, states that, “Simply put, most tweets aren’t likely copyrightable.”

According to WIPO magazine, this may or may not be true, but most experts agree that it’s a gray area:

Most experts agree the response should not be an all-or-nothing answer, but rather “it depends.”  While most tweets would not pass the “copyrightability” test, some might meet the minimum amount of originality demanded by copyright law. For example, in an Internet posting by Michael F. Martin for the broken symmetry blog, the author states that a tweet reflecting a selection or arrangement of facts, rather than a rote report, might make the subject matter copyright-eligible. Other experts claim a collection of tweets – taken as a whole – may meet the criteria to be copyrighted.

Regardless, if users are really concerned about the ownership and use of their Tweets, they should Tweet the TweetCC disclaimer. Better safe than sorry, right?

What if someone decides to use their own Tweets, though? Take Justin Halpern, who decided to make a book off the Twitter account he owns that features shit his dad says. The account, in fact, is called Shit My Dad Says and so is the book. Oh, and so is the website. Go. Read. It’s funny.

When a friend suggested Justin start a Twitter account, he did, and in three days he had 100,000 followers. It was an internet phenomenon and Justin began picking up a few hundred new followers a day. Today, he has nearly 1,400,000 followers and a few hundred more follow him every minute.  That kind of insane internet popularity attracted offers from literary agents and book publishers.

Sh*t his dad says in book form, for a small price...

Justin got a ton of offers, but he accepted and signed with HarperCollins Publishers. His book was published in May 2010, and, at the moment, can be bought for $8.79 and up from a number of vendors, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Borders. The book is a New York Times Best seller.

In addition to the monetary perks of being a successful author, this Justin dude has been on numerous shows getting interviewed by such big shots as Keith Olbermann, Carson Daly and Motley Crue’s Nikki Sixx.

If that’s not enough for you, imagine this. CBS picked up the idea and is going to make a sitcom out of it. It’s going to run on Thursdays at 8:30 after Big Bang Theory. The director of the pilot was James Burrows, who directed the pilots of Cheers, Friends, Will and Grace and a bunch of other famous, successful shows. Warner Brothers and CBS even allowed Justin to co-write the pilot. To top it all off, as Justin eloquently wrote in his blog, “HOLY SH*T! WILLIAM F*CKING SHATNER IS PLAYING [HIS] DAD ON TV!” Now that’s making it big.

So, Twitter can definitely help you become a celebrity. But what about people who are already celebrities? Who owns their Tweets and who can use them?

I mentioned earlier how Twitter retains the rights to use and distribute your Tweets with third-parties however they choose, right? Well, this doesn’t stop at celebrities. In fact, they probably have even less protection just because they’re always in the spotlight anyway, with the most private details of their daily lives constantly being shared with the public.

There are plenty of celebrities and public figures on Twitter. Here‘s a list.  We of course know how nutty the community is about celebrities, so it isn’t hard to imagine how interested people are in what these people have to say.

One day, some clever individuals asked themselves, “how can a Pop Culture-conscious individual keep up with and sift through the hundreds of celebrity Tweets fresh on Twitter each week?”

Faces we worship (for some reason)

They came up with the answer. Sites like CelebrityTweet.com, which is powered by Twitter and showcases the “latest celebrity Tweets,” make it easier to “stalk celebrities on Twitter.” This site even has it’s own app that you can download (for free). Then there’s E!online’s CelebriTweet, which is a Twitter account that follows all the celebrity Twitter accounts. These Tweets are then channeled onto an easily-accessible widget on  E!online’s über-blog, creating a major source of content for E!online.

However, E!online’s dependence on Twitter for content goes beyond CelebriTweet. E!online will actually write entire celebrity news articles based off of what happens in the Twitterverse. The LA Times even dubbed Twitter “the new go-to site for celebrity feuds:”

First embraced by entertainers as a promotional platform, Twitter has evolved into a forum for candid and surprisingly crass postings by actors, singers and athletes. The intimate, instant and unvarnished nature of the microblogging site, which allows users to post public messages of 140 characters or less, is serving as a fertile incubator for the unchecked emotions of stars.

And they’re increasingly using it to rant about each other. In the new and expanding twitterverse, where the rules of etiquette and exchange are still being written, celebrities are establishing a level of discourse that won’t soon be confused with the Sunday morning political talk shows.

Usually the content involves spats between celebrities and each other or with haters. A rich month for celebrity Twitter spats was Sept. 2009, when Demi Moore traded insults with blogger Perez Hilton, singer Chris Brown took a swipe at talk show host Wendy Williams, and reality show star Spencer Pratt went after Ryan Seacrest. Biggest of all was the Kanye West/Taylor Swift MTV Video Music Awards fiasco. He was bombarded with angry postings  from fellow entertainers such as Pink and tons of other enraged Tweeters.

Ouch! And that was one of the nicer comments...

An example of how E!online uses celebrity spats (or what they choose to perceive to be celebrity spats) from out of the Twitterverse as content came on June 8, 2010, when Katy Perry supposedly commented negatively on Lady Gaga for the blasphemous imagery used within her “Alejandro” music video. She’s quoted as Tweeting, “Using blasphemy as entertainment is as cheap as a comedian telling a fart joke.” E!online wrote a short article on this one Tweet, which got nearly 200 comments (imagine how many more views?), so imagine how much content they get from the truly juicy Tweets and Twitter exchanges!

Christian imagery and lots of overt sexuality. Classic Twittergument material!

It’s not just Hollywood celebrity news based sites that use celebrity Tweets out of the Twitterverse as a major source of content, though. ESPN has offered Twitter integration into its website, too. With what it calls the WNBA All-Star Live, ESPN.com features Tweets from “Swin Cash,” the All-Star Game MVP, other players,  ESPN television personalities, fan questions, comments and polls, photos, ESPN Stats and Analysis research notes and more during games. Since 2009, they’ve been working on furthering their models of social networking integration further:

ESPN Digital Media is currently building and testing modules designed to publish Twitter and Facebook entries simultaneously on ESPN.com, SportsCenter.com, Page 2, ESPN Profile pages and other similar pages across our web site and mobile platforms. The plan is to fully deploy these modules this fall.

Celebrity tweeting ushered in a new age of celebrity journalism, because now reporters have easy access to the events in celebrities’ daily lives as they happen, and can get a direct quote from a celebrity without actually having to interview them. It’s successful because turning an update from Twitter into a news post requires very little resources.

Alright, so celebrities, like us, own their Tweets, but if made accessible by the public, can pretty much be used by anyone for anything.

Before I conclude this, I’m going to warn you that the US Library of Congress has got it’s hands on our Tweets.

Big Brother is on Twitter. He may be harmless looking now, but...

Every public Tweet in the history of Twitter will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. Hear that?? The government has got its eye on everyone Tweeting publicly, so you better watch what you Tweet! Big Brother’s got his eye on you, and although they claim it’s for research now, whatever you Tweet may just come back to peck you on the ass later!

Friends: User demographics and opinions

Ok, so I’m now going to bombard you with numbers. No one likes having numbers thrown at them, so I’m going to present everything in an easy-to-absorb manner via diagrams. Yay!

Those flying Twitter

Unlike most social networks, Twitter was initially more popular with adults, until celebrity tweets caught on and mainstream media started talking about the service more.

Today, the user demographics pretty much look like this:

I got these awesomely illustrated stats from iStrategyLabs.com. Peter Corbett, the CEO, worked them out and they represent findings from ’09.

Users and non users have very differing ideas on Twitter. Just as an individual partaking in the Twitterverse, I have plenty of friends who say they just “don’t get it.”

Aside from the usual skepticism, there are other reactions. An interesting article I found points out research done by the Harvard Business Review that shows although there may be more registered female Tweeters than there are male, men have 15% more followers than women. Men also have more reciprocated relationships, in which two users follow each other. An average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly, an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman.

Another interesting point brought up was that Twitter, like all other social media, merely mirrors the hierarchies that exist in the world. People who are famous in real life tend to have a larger Twitter following than those who aren’t. Generally, men tend to be more involved in politics and technology. So if you follow people who tweet about politics (pundits, reporters, elected officials), chances are that on Twitter, just as in reality, these people are overwhelmingly men.

Finally, Twitter has a huge drop-out rate, so maybe all those women who joined just don’t tweet?

Well, according to these stats, even after taking drop-outs into consideration, women are still much more active on the Twitterverse than men:

Foes: Competition and copycats

Twitter is big, but nowhere near as big as Facebook. Facebook is definitely Twitter’s main competition, and although users may not have a problem eking their attention out equally to either service, the two services definitely believe the competition is there. Both are looking for ways to do each other in. Facebook’s reaction was to develop a friend feed and all kinds of other streams to help users stay extra-wary of what their friends are up to on the site.

Facebook cluttered itself the hell up in response to Twitter's growing popularity. Shame.

Another approach they’re working on is integrating their status update platform with Twitter’s. With a Twitter application called “Penguin FB” that resides on Facebook development servers, users could publish updates to Twitter automatically from Facebook. Personally, I think it’s a great idea and I’m hella excited.

Facebook engineer Blake Ross posted a “test" tweet from Twitter app “Penguin FB”

Some are hypothesizing other internet-based services to be upcoming competition.

The major one worth paying attention to is Foursquare, according to Pete Cashmore, founder and CEO of Mashable, a popular blog about social media. It is a location-based mobile startup that serves a simple purpose: it lets an individual share his or her location with a group of friends. It’s also a virtual game in which participants earn badges for checking in at various locations; those that check in most become a venue’s “mayor.”

Some of the merit badges you can earn

Some of Foursquare’s perks include getting discounted deals from frequenting places. For example, Starbucks rewards frequent customers with the Barista badge and is now going to reward Foursquare mayors with a special “Mayor Offer,” which offers customers a $1 discount on a Frappucino. The special greets mayors with this message:

“As mayor of this store, enjoy $1 off a NEW however-you-want-it Frappuccino blended beverage. Any size, any flavor. Offer valid until 6/28.”

Pretty cool, I guess, and you can’t say Twitter does the same (although I did get to chat up a musician I like and scored some free music from him, so hell, Twitter is rad in its own way!).

Others argue that although Foursquare may be gaining in popularity in the near future, it works in tangent to and with Twitter. For example, it was only with users’ “check-ins” being posted to Twitter that Foursquare was able to gain a foothold in much the same way that YouTube built its lead from videos embedded in MySpace pages.

Stalking just got that much easier!! Thanks, Foursquare!

Furthermore, Twitter is rapidly building out its location-based features, with a location API that directly challenges Foursquare. Besides, the service has an edge because it already has numerous users and eager developers going for it. I guess only time will tell!

By Layla Al-Ghawas

Chirp-ching!

So people have heard about Twitter. Plenty of people use Twitter. Plenty of rich, rich businessmen are cah-raaaazy about Twitter. That’s cool. But the the question is, WHY are these heavy-briefcase wielding men so excited about Twitter? How does the service’s popularity translate into revenue?

The answer is simple. For these companies, Twitter is a great place to get a company’s brand name out and about. It’s a great way to discover what people are saying about products. It’s a great place to answer queries and concerns people may have about products or services. And of course, it’s cheap. All someone has to do is make a free account and Tweet away.

Sorry, but I'm not retweeting this. I'm a loyal PC.

Apparently these promotional Tweets do amp up sales. Dell claims that it’s action of using Twitter workers to scout out Tweets and jump into conversations has successfully boosted their sales by $500,000 in recent months. And according to one blogger, through the use of Twitter and Twitter apps, his company has seen “consistent growth in our monthly income.”

In 2009, Twitter expected their first revenue of $400,000 to come in Q3 2009 (or July ’09 for people who have no idea what Q3 means – like me). This was to be followed by a more robust $4 million in Q4. By the end of 2010, Twitter expected to be at a $140 million revenue run rate (they probably blew straight through these numbers, though).

As of February, from the $55 million they had raised, the company had $45 million in the bank. The expected cost of each Twitter user to the company is said to be just over $1/year.

Even though these stats were reported little under a year ago, these projections are probably now highly inaccurate and nowhere near the actual amount of revenue Twitter is making. Unfortunately, because it is a private company, there is no way to know how much they’re making unless they kindly choose to share it with us. They haven’t.

We do know, however, that it’s backed by investors, which include Benchmark Capital, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. In September, the company raised $100 million in a funding round that valued the company at $1 billion.

Aside from investors, Twitter made some revenue by striking deals with Google Inc and Microsoft Corp for the inclusion of Tweets to their Web search results last year.

Money makes Ev happy

Although we may not know exactly how much revenue Twitter is raking in, we do know that it’s going to increase exponentially in the near future. At this year’s SXSW, Twitter announced that it will launch a new ad platform called “Promoted Tweets.” Essentially, this will allow for a business or brand’s tweets to remain unburied by the historical flow of Tweets. Initially, the ads will start with search, with advertisers being able to buy keywords.  A Promoted Tweet will appear at the top of the search results when a user’s search includes that specific keyword. The system will be tested by pre-determined advertisers like Virgin America, Best Buy, Sony Pictures and Starbucks initially before including more brands.

As Twitter broadens the program to include more advertisers, keywords on Twitter’s search engine will be opened to competitive bidding by advertisers, similar to the way that Google’s paid search advertising program operates. In addition, Twitter plans to eventually serve Promoted Tweets ads beyond its search feature, offering the ads directly within users’ message streams.

Personally, I don’t mind Promoted Tweets appearing as a search result. But I really hope they don’t make it so that these promoted tweets find their way into my stream when I’m not specifically following a brand or searching for a brand. The ad becomes unwanted — an infiltrator. No one likes ninjas. Ok, they do. But not evil ones who are all up in your personal space.

There are all kinds of other ideas people have on how to monetize the system, such as introducing subscriptions, or perhaps using promotional tweets every once in a while tied to the words in tweets (still annoying in my opinion). But so far, there is no news of these suggestions or others coming to light.

In conclusion, Twitter and brand promoters who use it are making tons of dough. As for us users, Twitter might get real annoying real fast. But who knows. We may as well stick around and find out.

By Layla Al-Ghawas

Ev, Biz and their love child

In March 2006, a couple of dudes named Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams founded Twitter, the social networking and micro-blogging service you know and love so well (I’m assuming). It was launched publicly in July of the same year.

Twitter is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is privately held and employs 180 employees.

Biz Stone, a graduate of Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts, Boston, is Twitter’s creative director who also helped make Xanga, Blogger, Odeo, and Obvious. Previously, he was a senior specialist at Google Inc., a creative director at Xanga Inc. and a designer at Little, Brown and Co. It was actually at Google in 2003 where he first met and collaborated with Twitter co-founder Evan Williams.

Evan “Ev” Williams, current CEO of Twitter, also co-founded Pyra Labs (he is also said to be responsible for inventing the term “blogger” and popularizing the term “blog”). Pyra was eventually acquired by Google and Ev left in 2004 to co-found Odeo, a podcasting company. In late 2006, Ev co-founded Obvious Corp with Biz and other former Odeo employees. Obvious Corp. has acquired all previous properties of Odeo, Inc., including Odeo and Twitter. In 2007, Obvious Corp. made Twitter it’s own separate company.

The company has filled out its management team with executives with experience at Google and Walt Disney Co’s Pixar Animation Studios over the past year.

It’s backed by investors including Benchmark Capital, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. In September, the company raised $100 million in a funding round that valued the company at $1 billion.

Now, the question is why are such important people willing to leave their jobs at Google and Pixar to come and work at Twitter? Why are people investing millions into this company? Personally, I think a lot of it has to do with the influence these guys must have had when working at Google. I’m sure they met lots of people and as the smart business men that they are, kept in touch. Just like a professor of mine said, “When the big boys get excited about something, you better believe that you’ll get excited about it too.”

Basically, what he’s saying is that when convinced that Twitter is the next best thing, these huge businessmen will MAKE Twitter the next big thing. And there’s no denying that the big boys are crazy about Twitter, even if the users aren’t really there in number to justify their excitement. This may come as a shock because all we hear all day is how popular Twitter is, but guess what? Farmville has more users than Twitter does. Yeah. Believe it.

Round 1: Farmville wins

Still, to be fair, Twitter is said to be the third most popular social networking site, behind MySpace and Facebook.

Anyway, Twitter became a big deal during the South by Southwest multimedia festival in Austin, Tex. in March of 2007, when the service was named the best blogging tool and attendees used it to meet up at parties. Since then there has been a lot of hype as well as skepticism about the service.

I have stumbled across plenty of sites and articles heralding Twitter as the changer of times, the gathering place of political activists and more. Ridiculous? That’s up to you to decide. But everyone’s heard about how Twitter told the tale of the Iran Election, so I guess they’re not too far off in that respect. A quote I found from an article in the Telegraph pretty much sums it up:

“Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences.”

Basically, Twitter serves anyone and everyone’s publicity needs. If you’ve got a message you’d like to share, no matter how trivial, Twitter is the place to do it.

Other predictions have more to do with making revenue. The idea is that as Twitter grows it will increasingly become a place where companies build brands, do research, send information to customers, conduct e-commerce, and create communities for their users. Having the opportunity to tell customers about attractive sales and new products can be done at remarkably low cost while providing for greater demographic accuracy.

In addition to working in promoters’ favor, Twitter also works in favor of regular users because, ultimately, they are the ones who define the site’s rules for conduct.  Users have the power and control. Twitter is “self governed” by its members and companies must take that into account as they join the service, or else they’ll damage to their brand name and lose consumers.

Aside from business promotion, as in the case of H&R Block (HRB) and Zappos that use Twitter to respond to customer queries, there are other things different groups can benefit from Twitter. For example, market researchers look to it to scope out minute-by-minute trends. Media groups use Tweeters as first-to-the-scene reporters, as in the case of the May 12 China earthquake. Techno-junkies, excited by the loads of new applications and services that are growing around the Twitter platform, suggest that the microblogging service could become a powerhouse in social media.

Maybe it’s not too far to say that Twitter is “changing the world.” Personally, I’m a little skeptical, but as my professor and this one dude named Fred Wilson (a partner at Union Square Ventures, an investor in the first round) said, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

By Layla Al-Ghawas

I'm a bluebird, and soon you'll be one too!

On December 2nd, 2009 you could buy these Twitterific little figurines at the San Diego Comic Convention. Named “Ollie the Twitterific Bird,” these toys were created by David Lanham and produced by StrangeKiss Art Toys and IconFactory. Ollie will be available at designer toy retailers in two different versions: normal vinyl and flocked vinyl. At the time of the convention, Ollie was being auctioned, with all proceeds going to charity. Today, however, you can purchase both versions of Ollie off IconFactory’s website for $19.95 and $26.25, respectively. Approximately four inches tall, Ollie is a small but real testament to the growing popularity of Twitter.

Chances are that shoppers and passersby (as well as you)  didn’t need the “Twitterific” to realize that the toy was based on the Twitter bird mascot. Twitter is that popular.

History/Context

Founded in March 2006 by a San Francisco based company called Obvious Corp, Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send 140-character long “updates,” or text-based posts, via SMS, instant messaging, email or an application such as Twitterrific to the Twitter website. In April 2007, Obvious, LLC spun off the service as a separate entity under the name Twitter, Inc. with Jack Dorsey as CEO.

I dare you to not recognize these icons!

Most likely, you don’t need me telling you what Twitter is used for. I’m sure if you found your way here, you have found your way onto Twitter at least once. Just recently (April 14th, 2010), current CEO Evan Williams revealed a bunch of stats at Chirp (the official Twitter developer conference).  Twitter shared that it has 105,779,710 registered users, new users signing up at the rate of 300,000 per day, 180 million unique visitors every month, and users that are, in total, tweeting an average of 55 million tweets a day. Furthermore, Twitter’s search engine receives around 600 million search queries per day.

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If you haven’t noticed, these are some crazy stats. It’s not only the number of people joining and participating that’s mind boggling, but the rate at which people continue to join and participate.

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User Demographic

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It may or may not come as a surprise to you that the majority of Twitter’s users are lower income female adults, aged 18-30, earning less than $30,000-75,000 and living in urban areas. In addition, more African American individuals use Twitter than Hispanic and White individuals.

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What this information is useful for is advertising purposes. With this specific data, it becomes easier in the future for companies to design Twitter based ads directly targeting people of these demographics. It’s actually even easier than that because people, of all races and income levels, can choose to follow their favorite celebrities, brands, businesses and television programs and receive tweets updating them on their latest activities and promotions.

Twitter-based Starbucks Promo

What makes this all the more genius is that followers can retweet these promotional posts, which ensures that people who are not following, say, Starbucks, will still know about the promotional offers and may choose to partake because a) their friends are or b) they want to.  The best part of all of this, of course, is that it’s free, and of no cost to businesses or corporations.

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Furthermore, at this years SXSW, Twitter announced that it will launch a new ad platform called “Promoted Tweets.” Essentially, this will allow for a business or brand’s tweets to remain unburied by the historical flow of Tweets. Initially, the ads will start with search, with advertisers being able to buy keywords.  A Promoted Tweet will appear at the top of the search results when a user searches for that keyword. The system will be tested by pre-determined advertisers like Virgin America, Best Buy, Sony Pictures and Starbucks initially before including more brands.

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If you’re anything like me, this sounds like bad news. However, there is one thing giving me hope. Twitter is going to measure an ad or bought keyword’s impact to gauge just how successful the ad is. That’s good news to me because maybe that means they’ll monitor these ads, and any that are not attracting attention but are just being bothersome will be removed or allowed to be buried under new tweets.

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Synergism

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A lot of Twitter’s popularity stems from the fact that it is easily accessible via smart phone, or what Twitter calls, “Device Integration.” According to its CEO, of Twitter’s active users, 37% use their phone to tweet (including me) and 60% of all tweets come from third party applications. There are currently over 200 Twitter apps designed that allow users to do anything from use voice recognition technology to tweet to simple but relatively creepy things like trace a tweet’s location. One interesting app you may have heard of is “TwitPay,” which is powered by PayPal and allows users to transfer money over Twitter.

TwitPay: Taking you one step farther from physical social interaction!

Although the majority of these downloadable apps are free, not all are. With TwitPay, for example, the recipient of the payment is required to pay PayPal’s commercial transaction fee of 2.9% + $0.30 as well as “any other applicable fees.” Although initially $0.30 is not a big deal, we all know that numbers add up. With enough uses we’re easily spending a lot of money, and PayPal is easily making a lot, lot more.

Twitter apps are available for the Android, iPhone, Blackberry and even iPad. It was announced at Chirp that Twitter would be working with Android to produce an official Twitter app of the phone.

Aside from apps and toys, there are other ways that Twitter is being commodified and sneaking its way into our everyday life. Christopher Weingarten, recognized by Flavorpill as “one of the top ten music critics to follow on Twitter,” is now making his dedication to writing about music available for purchase. Last year, the Brooklyn-based freelance journalist promised to deliver 1000 music reviews in 140 characters or less through his Twitter account. He is now selling those tweets in the form of index cards with his tweets printed on them in a wooden box. Included in this “box set” is an introduction from Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield. As of now, only 30 boxes were made and are selling for $115 each on Christopher Weingarten’s website.

Box set with cards.

In addition to this guy’s box set of music commentary, there are also more normal things relating to Twitter that one can buy. Just go to Amazon.com and enter “Twitter books” into the search bar. I did, and came up with 794 results.

Conclusion

Twitter started out as a micro-blogging, social networking site and shows promises of becoming something much, much greater. The bird icon is so recognized and the site is so popular that toys have even been inspired by the mascot. Hundreds of books have been written on how to use Twitter and hundreds of apps have been developed, accessible to anyone who has a phone or computer that can connect to the internet, making Twitter one of the most visited and known sites on the web. It has even mildly revolutionized advertising, as brands now have a unique and relatively unobtrusive way to promote themselves, their services and products via Twitter without being all up in your face as they are on TV or other internet sites. Rather, these promotional materials are available only to those who follow the brands or search specifically for them on Twitter.

Personally, I’m a fan.