What is Analytic.ly?

So, what does this tool do? For a start, it shows Twitter conversations – that is, tweets – from users across the world. However, the conversations is not presented in the conventional “raw” form. Instead, PeopleBrowsr shows them in custom graphs as well as fancy reports. These tweets will also be stored as well as indexed. The purpose of this is to help professional and other researchers in getting both historical as well as current data related to their topics.

The new interface is also very user friendly. Most users will find it extremely easy to search through the twitter conversations. For those users who subscribe to the premium features, PeopleBrowsr will also provide a multi-feature dashboard that is going to take the experience of research to a new level. However, subscription is not free; it costs at least $20 every month. The price increases with the number of features subscribed.

So far, Analytic.ly represents the most developed application designed for analyzing the information available through tweets. The competitive advantage of Analytic.ly is the high number of features it provides. This makes it possible for users to quickly find and record information on how users of Twitter perceive current events and brands. On the other hand, brands can find which users like their brands the most, and which users influence other users about their brands.

However, the benefits of Analytic.ly are not limited to its users only. The developers will have access to the data and tweets of almost a year. This makes it possible for them to keep track of new applications, products and services. In addition, they can know the keywords which are currently popular among users.

Twitter has just announced their revenue model (sort of) via ads which they are calling “Promoted Tweets“.

Basically it will allow advertisers to “promote” their regular tweets for more eyeballs and thus it will show up in the twitter search and also in user’s timeline based on the context. John Battelle has a great post up on his blog where he compares the program with Google Adwords. Like adwords, Promoted Tweets seems to have certain elements/checking that will ensure that only ‘well performed’ ad lives. (Just Like Quality Score of Google Adwords). John also believes that this will be welcomed by developers because they will finally find a way to monetize their efforts!

But What about the publishers?

Who made twitter, “Twitter”? Its Us! Our time, our efforts and our 140 characters of tweets has made twitter this big today. Twitter/Developers by right doesn’t own any of the content, we (publishers) own our tweets.

One of the main reason for which Google’s Advertising platform – Adwords is so successful today is because of its other side – Google Adsense. Thousands of publishers were pretty much promoting Google’s advertising platform for free to the whole world when they opted in to that service. And thats how all the online advertisers eventually got to know about adwords. Because of adsense, the advertisers also believed in the platform — Ad inventory is the key and google is by far the biggest due to adsense. Adsense did our web economy a lot of good too – It encouraged new publishers to come in and produce more content which now powers the whole web.

So when twitter says that they are going to put “promoted tweets” on my stream, it sounds insane. Twitter don’t own my tweets, how can they just insert a paid tweet inside? Imagine if Google didn’t had Adsense porgram today, They could have started framing every website that it sends traffic to from its search and on top of the site they could show contextual ads inside a frame. How irritating would that be?

I’m glad they didn’t do it! Because Google doesn’t own the content of the web. They are just a medium for users to find me. But what google did was smart, they made an option for me to OPT-IN to their program that allows me to show their ads and receive a ‘cut’ for it. That’s fair I’d say.

What Twitter Needs to do

If twitter’s revenue model is really “Ads” (I thought there were other cool ones) they really need to get us (publishers) involved in it. Our tweets combined actually make twitter. So twitter shouldn’t be making money on what we are creating. Well, they certainly can if they get us inside their advertising eco-system.

So will this work? Well I don’t have a full proof plan yet, but this is what I can think of right now. We (publishers) can opt-in to twitter’s advertising platform which will give access of our demographics/profile information to the advertisers. So an advertiser like DELL can choose to promote a tweet to all the tech enthusiasts in “USA & Canada” or the whole world. As a publisher, I’ll agree to auto “re-tweet” the advertisers message to my followers using the twitter’s official re-tweet function. This way my followers will see “Dell” on their tweet stream and not me, but they will know that they are seeing that on their stream because of me.

Since the ads will be engaging, my followers can interact directly with Dell. But twitter should be able to track that “my re-tweet” to my followers actually converted into a conversation between one of my follower & Dell. (a conversion for Dell on this case).

Based on my performance (no of conversions/actions taken), I can be given a small percentage of the advertiser’s ad spend. The percentage may vary depending on my account performance and this will encourage publishers to write ‘better tweets’. I’ll engage more with my audience (my followers), and eventually they will be more supportive of my stream. And its a win-win situation for everyone. If a particular user doesn’t want to see ads, he/she can simply choose to un-follow the publisher.

What do you think? Comment here or reply via twitter - @saadkamal

What others are saying:

The Twitter Ad Model Revealed (What Were You Expecting, a Pony?) – GigaOm

Full Details On Twitter’s Long-Awaited Ad Platform: Promote – Techcrunch

Twitter’s Advertising Scheme is Delightfully Boring – Just As It Should Be – Read Write Web

But instead, @ev threw a brand new thing to the crowed called – @anywhere (“AT ANYWHERE”). Now what is this @Anywhere? Well I can hardly tell you much about it as twitter themselves didn’t reveal much about the service other than a very vague intro and some logos of partners who are already on board with this brand new feature of twitter.

What is Twitter @Anywhere?

Twitter @Anywhere is basically a platform that hopes to bring the functionality of twitter on different websites & portal rather then keeping them all confined in one place (Twitter homepage). You can compare this with what Facebook has already done with Facebook connect. Basically facebook connect allows developers to build community around their websites by seamlessly integrating Facebook using the facebook API and leveraging the 400 million users base that Facebook already has. But integrating Facebook connect does require a bit of technical skills and its not everyone’s cup of tea.

However, it seems like Twitter @Anywhere would be very easy to implement. You don’t have to be a developer or need to work with APIs to make it work. They clearly mentioned on their post that Twitter @Anywhere will work by simply throwing in few lines of JavaScript on your website. So sounds like this is going to be more like an embedded object (like the Facebook Fanbox Widget) that will probably be located at the end of articles/blogpost or can even be at the side bar. Using this object, site visitors will be able to follow you or your brand, write a comment about your site or an article, and participate in discussions with other readers. Whatever interaction your readers perform via Twitter @Anywhere, will obviously go back to twitter thus creating possibility of your content to be exposed to a much larger audience.

Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone writes:

Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page—and that’s just the beginning. Twitter has proven to be compelling in a variety of ways. With @anywhere, web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more.

So what do you think of Twitter @Anywhere? I know this isn’t a new concept, however I don’t see any reason for anybody to NOT use it.

The site is very easy to you, there is a big search box right in the middle where you can put your search query, or select from the pre-programmed channels or trending topics, and start listening to tweets right away. I know this may sound a bit geeky at first, but just try it and I bet you will find it pretty hilarious.

Well frankly no ‘text-to-speech’ sounds perfect, because after all its a computer that tries to mimic a human’s voice and vocal pitch. But i guess for tweets its even worse because, people don’t use proper sentence structure and punctuation because of the 140 character limit. But they tried to make it less monotonous by mixing up the voice of different AI robot.

In their about page they writes:

At tweetrad.io our mission is to index all the world’s information; however, unlike google we plan to be really evil in the process. We’ve started by seeking out the most relevant scholarly data on the web. Naturally Twitter was where we looked first. Using our unpantentable Tweet-to-Speech™ technology, we’ve made it possible for billions of people to hear the “Pulse of the Planet” as never before.

Mashable has made a screencast of the service in action, have a look:

So what do you all think?

Sometimes I feel that there are just way too many applications and services surrounding twitter, but hay – if they are cool and useful I love to plug them and share it with everyone.

Today I stumbled upon Twi.tt – A new web service that lets you SHARE almost anything on twitter.

As you can see, by anything I mean absolutely ‘everything’ from pictures, videos, audio, poll and even documents! There is no sign up necessary, if you have a twitter account then you should be able to login with your twitter credentials and use their service.

The best thing about this service is, they allow multiple ways for you to give them the content that you wish to share. For instance, for image sharing they allow you to upload an image directly from your computer, from a web url, from your webcam (coming soon) & also via email (coming soon). Similarly for Audio, you can upload it as an audio file or record directly from your microphone (coming soon).

The only thing that I feel is missing from their service is the basic url shortening. Twi.tt is a great domain, so adding a url shortening service with stats (like bit.ly and su.pr) would be a great addition.

On their settings page they mentions that soon users will be able to send their media files from any email client & mobile phone that supports email.

So try Twi.tt and let me know if you like it!

BingTweets does a really good job of bring real-time conversations about the trending topics and at the same time bringing up the web search of that particular query on the same screen. Thus users will get a context of what these trending topics are and at the same time get more real insights on some of these topics. Because the fact is 140 characters isn’t enough to convey a full news to someone, however if people starts talking about “X” and it becomes a trending topic, then clicking on that will not only show you the conversation that is happening about X but at the same time give us some real insights from the Bing search results for that particular query.

One of the neat thing about BingTweets is, it pulls in trends from Twitter and automatically filters into categories such as “Popular Now,” “People,” “Places” and “Products” enabling easier navigation of the ever changing trends on the Web. You can also fire off a search on any topic of your choosing to see the related search results from Bing and Twitter discussion.

Whitney Burk, Director of Bing Search writes:

…when Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince comes out tomorrow, you may want to scan the official reviews, local theater listing, AND the latest Tweets on the movie to help you decide whether to rush to see it. With BingTweets, you can cover all that ground in one place.

So check out BingTweets and let me know if you find it any useful!

Read what other says about BingTweet:

Federated Media Teams With Bing For BingTweets. It’s Exactly What It Sounds Like – Techcrunch.

BingTweets: Bing + Twitter Search Results Side-by-Side – Mashable

BingTweets Integrates Twitter and Bing Search, Literally – Search Engine Journal

Twitter always had a functionality to mark a tweet as “favorite”. However, I personally never even bothered to use it that often because it just didn’t have any good use. I only used it more like a “tweet bookmark” tool to save certain tweets which I wanted to come back to later.

But it looks like that Favstar.fm is going to change the way Tweet Favorite is being used. Favstar is looking at twitter favorites more like a social vote. So basically their main home page currently shows tweets that has been voted (a.k.a favorite’ed) a certain number of times. If you sign in via your Twittter login information, favstar also gives you a whole range of functionality, including the ability to follow people from directly from Favstar.fm and see what tweets your friends are favoriting. Also, by signing in it is very easy to see who is favoriting your tweets which in my opinion is an excellent insight for any twitter user.

Apparently there is another service called Favard that does something similar.

(via Techcrunch)

After a little digging i found four Twitter Image Search engines that does a really good job of indexing and displaying all the photos on twitter. But before I go any further I must warn you that the content that you will see on these photo search engines are all ‘user generated content’ and not moderated by anybody. Thus, you might come across pictures that are potentially dangerous for you and your children.

1. Twipho – Twitter Photo Search

Twipho is a relatively new twitter photo search engine developed by Mark Goddard. It has a very simple and straight forward interface that lets you search for pictures on twitter. Simply pop in your search query into the box at the top of the page and wait for your results. No need to press any buttons or hit the enter key. Twipho starts piling up images within seconds of you typing something on the search box. You can also change various search parameters such as image host selections. Twipho also gives you the ability to send images to your friends using email, retweet the images you like the most and view full size images as well as quick thumbnails. Take a look at their results page:

2. Picfog – Realtime Twitter Image Search

Picfog is a real time twitter image search engine, which keeps on popping images on the screen in real time as they get tweeted on twitter. Every second 5-10 new pictures gets added and shown in real time on the home screen. It has also a search box where you can specify keywords to make it only show pictures related to that word/phrase. If you move your mouse over in any of the images it shows you the complete tweet along with any message/text that was included originally. Picfog also gives you the ability to follow that particular user or Re-tweet the image to your own followers. Here is a screen shot of how the home screen looks like:

3. Twicsy – Top Twitter Pics of Past Hour

Twicsy is a twitter picture search engine that particularly shows you the top twitter images of the past 1 hour. They also have options to show you top pictures of – 2 hours, 4 hours, 12 hours, day and week. Basically they keep count of how many times a picture gets re-tweeted to determine the popularity of an image. Twicsy lets you see who has re-tweeted the images and also lets you do the same. Here is a screen shot of how their homepage looks like:

4. Twitcaps – Real-time Pictures From Twitter

Twitcaps is yet another real-time image search engine for twitter. Twitcaps allows you to search, browse and capture the latest images posted to Twitter via any of the popular Twitter image services (Twitpic, yFrog, Twitgoo, etc). From the Twitcaps interface, you may capture an image for later use, re-tweet the image on your own Twitter feed, or share the image on any number of social linking services. The feature of letting user “capture a picture” is something that I haven’t found in the other twitter image search engines. Basically capture in this context means that – while browsing images on Twitcaps, if you come across a picture that you really like, you can capture the image and save it under your own twitpic service. This means that if the user who originally posted their image should later decide to delete that image, then you will STILL have your copy of that image available to your Twitter account on both Twitcaps and Twitpic.com. This way, you can feel safe in re-tweeting the image or posting the image to any number of social linking services. Because you now control the image, you can be confident that the image will not disappear and the link to that image will never go away (until you delete it from Twitpic.com).

Twitcaps also has some advanced image filtering options. You may filter image by image host (e.g. Twitpic, flickr etc.) or you can also filter by language. Twitcaps also has a built in translation functionality that will help you to translate tweets on the fly. Here is a screen shoot of their home page:

So did I miss any other cool twitter image search engine? Let me know via comments!

Here are some of the other reviews of these four Twitter Image Search Engines:

TwiPho Your Ultimate Twitter Image Search – Blogging Tips

TwiPho – twitter image search with a nice UI! – Twi5.com

PicFog Displays the Strength of Real-Time Image Search – Mashable

PicFog: Search For Images Shared On Twitter – MakeUseOf.com

Twicsy Is A Killer And Kind Of Creepy Way To Search Pictures Shared On Twitter – Techcrunch

Twicsy.com – Search Pictures Shared On Twitter – KillerStartups

Twitcaps – see what photos are being shared on Twitter – DownloadSquad

TwitCaps: Watch the World in Images, Real-Time! – Tnerd

According to Techcrunch’s report, Twittorati pulls in the Tweets published by bloggers from Technorati’s list of Top 100 Blogs, which is basically determined by Technorati’s Authority Ranking. Authority Ranking is calculated via algorithm of inbound links from other blog posts, and weights those based on timing, relevancy and the inbound link’s site source Authority Ranking.

On the home page, they currently have 4 main section to show the most popular links that bloggers link to, the most popular photos, the most recent tweets by the top 100 bloggers and also the top 100 blogs with all the authors twitter profile. If you are looking to follow bloggers from the Internet’s most influential blogs then you should head over to this page.

The twitter feed on their home page, which shows the most recent tweets of the top 100 blogs can be sorted by authority as well as by most recent tweets. Clicking on the name of any of the top blogs in the sidebar nicely groups all the tweets from the authors of that particular blog.

Even though Twittorati is nothing ground breaking, but I think its a decent tool to keep your tabs on the tech industry. You can follow Twittorati on Twitter: http://twitter.com/twittoratinews