ITV, Facebook Connect and the social election

As previously mentioned, I don't know a whole lot about politics, so after writing rather to much about it in the last couple of weeks I was far more interested in how ITV covered the first leaders' debate.

The Facebook Connect commenting box was a great idea when CNN ran it for the Obama inauguration in Jan 09, but Twitter has become a lot more important since then. While there was a steady stream of live conversation from the 'everyone' feed, everyone I know who was joining in live was doing it on Twitter. Obviously that's not the same for everyone, but surely there should be both options?

Twitter sentiment analysis sort of got hidden behind the video player, which was a shame as the volume of tweets (estimated at 2000 per minute according to a comment on Question Time) meant that sheer scale should have ironed out the imperfections in automatic sentiment analysis and averaged out a realistic result.

So live opinion results that were running live at the bottom of the screen were actually from pop-up surveys on the player page - not really taking into account the amount of discussion that was taking place away from the ITV site. Judging from the dramatic fluctuation in results I'd guess sample sizes were low (although there were several sets of results in rotation the 'Who do you think has won this debate' showed Nick Clegg winning with anywhere from 43% - 81% of the vote over a rotation)



These debates are a huge opportunity for the broadcasters to aggregate and analyse the conversations taking place around their sites, and to showcase their own use of social tools to add value to their programming. If I can stay awake through the next couple then I'd like to see how the other stations fare in comparison to ITV.

And my verdict on the debate? To nick a line from @wearenorth, 'Worst. Kraftwerk. Gig. Ever."

Twitter Promoted Tweets. Not Twitter Advertising

So Twitter has finally released the first signs of a business model into the wild. Twitter is (still) a guarantee of colum inches, so there has been a lot written about it in the last few days, and from what I can see quite a lot of it misses the point, because it talks about Twitter advertising.

(image courtesy of The Tech Update)

Now there are always going to be a few purist, extremist and nostalgic folk who object to Twitter having a business model. As a huge fan of the service I for one will ignore and unfollow them as I want Twitter to survive and flourish as a commercial entity. However, from what I can see of how Promoted Tweets will work they are named for a reason. If you think of them as advertising you will miss a lot of the point.

Much of the challenge for brands in the realtime web is about ensuring that the positive floats above the negative. Hence disciplines like Search Engine Relationship Management, which pushes positive news above negative in the SERP by leveraging the power of the brand's website to link to the positive. In the Twitter environment this hasn't been possible, so brands will tend to post more than they probably should do in order to appear top of stream as often as possible. What Promoted Tweets allows us to do (subject to resonance) is hold that position at the top of the stream (well, initially at the top of the search results stream). So far, so much like Google. But the key difference is WHAT brands are promoting. Surely the tweets that a brand will gain most from promoting are those that it hasn't written? The positive opinions of regular customers. Thinking about how to write copy for Twitter ads seems to miss the point that, according to Dick Costolo, 'Promoted tweets are not ads'. To me that means exactly that - they are tweets that the brand has chose to promote. Essentially retweets, but only of content that is likely to engage people, and therefore remain at the top of results through resonance algorithms.

Where the promoted/advertised line starts to blur is when Promoted Tweets move from the search page into the stream. Because what Costollo also says is that 'promoted tweets are just tweets'. Now up till now all the income that Twitter has received is from Google and Microsoft, to incorporate the full stream into real time search results - Google having changed their algorithm to incorporate realtime data. So as real time is promoted up the Google results page, and promoted tweets are just tweets, will they also be hovering at the top of the data that Google are buying?

The social centre of the British Isles

If you've ever tried to search Twitter for UK-related tweets, you'll know that the 'within xx km of place y' location functionality is a bit of a pain - even if you can run English-language only searches. I'm currently demo-ing a few brand tracking packages, and realised that if I'm paying for them then I'm going to have to do a bit more work on the actual location that I should be searching. So here it is: the geographic centre of the British Isles: Whitehaven. (or if you are using ViralHeat then Whitehaven, Cumbria, UK.The circle has a radius of 500km, and neatly covers the UK & Ireland.

Media Agency Twitter lists

so I made a list....

same as lots of other people have been doing on Twitter for the last few days. There are already a lot of great things to explore on Twitter lists (starting with Listorious). Lists make Twitter much more approachable for people first starting out using the service (who have tended to start off with celebrities if they didn't know many people using it - i know I did). They also make it easier to discover interesting people and stuff no matter how much time you have spent playing around with Twitter. Interestingly they also at the moment mean that you have to go to the web version. While Seesmic are already beta testing list integration, and Tweetdeck will no doubt be close behind, this can't hurt the traffic figures which Mashable keeps reporting as stagnating (do they think people really use the web version?)

Anyway, i started playing around with liststried to do something a bit different to recommending. I made a list of some good friends, some people that I do follow, and some that I have neither met, heard of, or followed, but who happen to work in the same same business as me - ie in a media agency in the UK. The filter to that being that they have used Twitter a fair bit recently. Unsurprisingly (or not, depending on your views on meeja agencies) I've found some interesting new people to follow, and hopefully I've made a useful kind of aggregator thing. It's sitting down the sidebar now, so see what you think, and let me know if you want to be added on.....

Twitter's deals with Google and Bing - changing everything and nothing

There's not been a lot made of Microsoft's announcement earlier in the week that Bing would include real time results from Twitter (and to a lesser extent Facebook) in its search results at some unspecified time soon. It has mostly been interesting to the likes of Mashable and ReadWriteWeb because of Google's counter a few hours later that they would also being doing so, so removing any competitive advantage that this might have brought Bing.

Leaving aside the debate about how scalable this level of traffic increase will be considering Twitter's notoriously unreliable infrastructure (discussed in the comments of ReadWriteWeb's coverage of the announcement), it also raises some interesting questions for brands that haven't so far found a role for themselves on Twitter.

In most cases brands that are successfully using Twitter at scale are succeeding because they have understood that it offers an opportunity for dialogue with their customers - whether that is Comcast's customer service, Compare the Market's advertising character backstory (Disclosure - client), or Ford's combination of one-to-one dialogue, customer relations and comms campaign amplification. Those that successfully use the service as a sales channel (usually based on exclusive offers) such as Dell tend to have an established two-way communication presence on Twitter before pushing sales messages.

This all makes sense, as to maintain any sort of following of the scale that would be useful to a major brand their Twitter stream will need to offer enough regular interest and value to encourage people to opt in to it. Sales messages alone wouldn't fit with how most people use the service. The resource cost of monitoring and maintaining this presence has tended to scare some brands away from getting involved with Twitter at all - there is no value to them in involvement at low scale.

Google and Bing's ability to index the real time web fundamentally changes this. Suddenly the value for brands pushing direct sales messages on Twitter becomes their SEO juice. It's fair to assume that Google sees Twitter as a threat, and that as people are increasingly searching for real time or as near as results, the best way to see off the threat is to push recency in their own results so that Google, rather than any development of Twitter's own underpowered search engine, continues to be the first place that you go to search. And as long as paid links continue to show up next to them, Google still hoovers up brands' marketing budgets. So results from Twitter are likely to assume a greater importance in SEO strategies over the coming months.

It will be interesting to see how the search engines rank the Twitter data they now have access to. I'd like to think that Google has acquired deep enough integration with the data to apply its own version of 'tweetrank' algorithms, but given the level of competition between the two this might be unlikely. Microsoft has already announced that Bing will search either by recency or relevancy. Either way, there is now no reason for brands not to be on Twitter, as even running a sales channel feed to no followers has a potential SEO benefit.

However, a brand Twitter presence, however one-way and SEO orientated, will still attract lovers and haters of the brand to start conversations with it - it isn't ever going to be just a box to tick o improve ranking. While SEO will be the reason to get involved, brands will need a defined Twitter strategy covering customer relations, PR, marketing and SEO. And by the sound of it, they will need one fairly quickly given that both Google and Bing are going to be integrating their Twitter data access this year (indeed Bing already has a rebrand of Twitter's own search in beta at the moment)

Thinking through this, I worried at first that this was going to deluge Twitter with the sort of random direct response ads that you see everywhere else - after all, there is a strong rationale for DR advertisers to do this. Then I remembered that it won't make any difference to my use of Twitter because I won't see any of them, as I won't follow the brands. So while it does change how brands should view and use Twitter, the announcement makes next to no difference for anyone else.

Twitter Times - Friend Powered RSS

(photo courtesy)


It isn't rocket science, but it is a really neat use of the API. I've moved away from my feed reader and spend more time on Tweetdeck recently, so this is something of a halfway house - friend-fuelled RSS if you like. Anyway, I was looking around at all the people who had remembered to buy a newspaper and wishing that I'd printed my Twitter Times. I don't think that this is what it was designed for, but I wish it could turn into that. A few months ago I made up some things that I thought the magazine industry could do, inspired by some famous magazine or other ceasing publication, including this

People like magazines (ok not enough to make them profitable). If you are using a site every day to check a few favourite feeds, then surely it should be able to learn enough from what you, other people like you, your friends, etc read to be able to put a pretty decent package of content together that you haven't read. And then your subscription could offer you a couple of printed copies per year (printed specifically for you, content specific to you that it knows you haven't read). (Perhaps when you book a train ticket you could be reminded to order it for delivery the day of travel) - the printed version becomes the personalised collectors edition.

There's not really been a way of making 'your friends' recommendations' a physical product like this, although most people have pretty good printing technology in their houses. OK you can print your Google Reader, but when you look at what something like Twitter Times could be when coupled with something like Ben Terrett and Russell Davies's Newspaper Club, which can provide the design templates and printing (I think that's what they're up to), or Marcus Brown turning his blog into a book then there are some exciting post digital niche publishing opportunities around, and one excited potential customer here

#atishoo - Kleenex UK Hayfever map

HT to John Willshire's comments page, but to be fair I'd spotted the concept before, back when Ben Marsh first created it on #uksnow day back in February. But this is a branded version of the Twitter/Google Map mashup that ticks lots of boxes - it is useful (especially if you're a hayfever sufferer like me), it is social (we like to find fellow sufferers to whinge to, and this helps build a national suffering map out of it. And that you must agree is a uniquely British socialness), it is shareable (both by contributing to it on Twitter, and by embedding it below. I think that might be the first time I have seen something created for an FMCG site that is easily embeddable), and it makes sense for the brand (he says from bitter experience). Only problem is that it is a bit late in the summer (hopefully). Anyway, top work Kleenex

Twitter and the FA Cup Final

ITV have been playing around with socially connected TV for a few months now, most notably with the pre-launch event for Primeval, and with @ITVinsider, their well-followed Twitter dialogue with their fans run by @benayers. Most of the interesting conversations have been around their flagship programming like Britain's Got Talent (as you'd expect given its social footprint). So the Twitterfall experiment in tomorrow's FA Cup final looks like opening social TV up to a new audience of footie fans. Nick Burcher has already detailed the potential that this has here, but it got me thinking about what social TV means to TV advertising (ITV's bread and butter revenue stream).

For someone who invests a lot of other people's money in TV advertising, I am not very good at ever seeing it live on TV. Sometimes through choice, but increasingly because I hardly ever watch live TV. Media planners know that there are a lot of other people who view it in this way, which is why genuine appointment to view programming like sports events are so valuable to advertisers and broadcasters, and why football rights in particular are so expensive. Once you know there result of a match, the value in viewing it on Sky+ goes right down. However, most of my viewing of live events is actually not in real-time, it is a few seconds or minutes behind. Close enough that the no-one is going to spoil it by telling me the result, but usually paused here and there during the match. Which then gives me two ad breaks during half time to fast forward and catch up with real-time events. This doesn't get in the way of discussing the action, as everybody in the room is viewing the same events at the same time.

But what I've noticed recently, in the Apprentice generally and the Champions League final in particular, is that viewing even a minute or so behind leaves me out of the wider conversation that is going on on Twitter. Access to a wider set of friends than the one in your living room means that viewing has to be synchronised if conversations are to mean anything. Which for sporting events means that appointments to view have to be live rather than near-live to get full value from them.

There is obviously a long way to go in the development of social TV, but experiments like this start to show how the social currency created by televised sports, reality TV and soaps can be developed into something that not only gives viewers more value for their attention, but also breathes life into the old TV ad model. The old model was based on the concept that content was king. Now content (as Cory Doctorow points out) is just something to talk about, broadcasters are starting to understand the value in the conversation.

(Moot point - will this Twitterfall generate the same level of abuse, swearing and general mischief as previous ones like Skittles or the Telegraph Budget Day? Given that it is designed for English footie fans, you've got to hope that ITV have a level of moderation built in for their own sake. How this affects the real-time nature of the event we will see tomorrow afternoon)

Twitter tools visualisation

Twitter tools are growing at similar exponential rate to the service's traffic this year, so it's always useful to have everything in one place. Mashable has been my preferred choice of reference points, but this visual from Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas is a neat framing of the best research tools around at the moment, grouped by what they are for. Great when you can't remember which of the ten you know of is best for a certain objective. And also great to play around with the new ones.

Mothercare's affiliates following me on Twitter

There's not many of my family currently using Twitter very much, so I don't put much on there about them. I do mention my son from time to time, but I was surprised to be followed by a parenting brand called @MothercareDeals. When you look into it a bit closer, their biog states:

We find bargains available at Mothercare. We are not Mothercare.

And they tweet about anything that is on special offer there and link to a WordPress blog called NipperNews with imagery pulled from the Mothercare site. Which then has links through to the Mothercare site proper, presumably on a percentage of each sale.So far the people they are following appear to be ones who have just had kids and announced it on Twitter, usually with a message of congratulations. While this does seem a little stalker-y, it is also a very relevant service, and the account does explain why it is following people if they ask. However, most of the references to Mothercare on TwitterSearch are of the 'WTF' variety.
While Twitter is very good at banning spam accounts, I think we will start to see more affiliate marketers who understand how it works really capitalising on Twitter's growing mainstream appeal. If the brands that pay them are not finding ways to be relevant (as Mothercare aren't), then they will take advantage of the trademarking wild west that currently exists on the service to maximise their sales.

The Telegraph's #Budget problems

(Photo Credit - Flickr user Noodlepie)

To give The Telegraph their due, they embrace technology more than their reputation (and particularly the reputation of their readers) would lead you to expect. Their newsroom apparently runs a Twitterfall display of breaking trends

(Photo Credit - OneManAndHisBlog)

and in the run up to Wednesday's budget, they had a go at rolling this idea out onto the budget section of their site, displaying every tweet that was either tagged #Budget or mentioned Alistair Darling. So while Skittles seemed happy to take the inevitable abuse that comes with the opportunity to post rude words in incongruous places for a good few days before switching Twitter to a dark recess of their new site, The Telegraph pulled the plug within a few hours. But fortunately not before people had had a chance to have a good giggle and take a few screengrabs, which are preserved here for your amusement.

(Photo Credit - Flickr user Noodlepie)

(Photo Credit - The FT)

(Photo Credit - The Guardian)

As you might guess from the links, there is a little hint of schadenfreude at the other newspaper groups. Can't see anyone hurrying to recreate this idea - it seems to be too much fun for people (particularly those on Twitter) to resist playing with.

Telegrams to the future and selling your soul: two extremes

ReadWriteWeb have done a bit of digging into the Magpie ad service on Twitter. If you haven't come across this before, it is basically a service that pays normal Twitter users to tweet on behalf of brands (usually for discounts, offers or special deals). Because the links are hidden behind a link shortener, like all links on Twitter (unless you make the very easy and free upgrade to PowerTwitter), you can't see where the link is directing you: ie the Magpie redirect gets very well hidden. The brands that are using the service, and attracting the fury of RWW, include Apple, Skype and Flip (well realistically its probably affiliates that get paid to shift coupons, but it is still on behalf of the brand).

Personally it doesn't bother me that people will take a few £$ to pass corporate messages on using Twitter, as long as they come with the #Magpie tag that the service recommends (I am pleased that I don't know if they tend to or not as i haven't come across them outside of tech blogs though). Where it starts to get a bit suspicious is if they aren't clearly marked: of the list in the RWW article only two of the Apple examples use the tag. Aside from the dubious ethics of taking cash to persuade your friends of something that you don't believe, this is also a pretty shaky legal position. Or at least it is in the UK, where it is illegal to post positive feedback on behalf of a brand that you are working for without full disclosure of the fact that cash is involved (whether as a one off payment or an agency relationship). (I'm sure it is elsewhere as well, it's just that I know the UK ethics and laws better). Which makes the international nature of brands and the internet, not to mention people's Twitter networks, a bit of a moot point. This is clearly advertising, and if people using the service are 'conveniently forgetting' to add the tag, then surely the responsibility lies with Magpie to comply with the laws of ALL the countries its messages are being viewed in?
In happier news, the Imperial War Museum in London has taken a novel approach to the recession by marketing money saving tips from World War 2. They are set up as telegrams to the future from a character called Mrs Sew&Sew, the Ministry of Information's voice of 'Make Do & Mend' in the 1940s, published onto a blog and a Twitter feed. While the recession tips give a very 2009 saliency to the War Museum, I love the incongruity of this very 40s voice appearing on Blogger and Twitter, alongside tip sheets like this one
While I can't see a huge amount of spreadability in this idea, it has taken an objective [sell War Museum tickets] and a strategy [bring to life the similarities between the Home Front and a Recession] and set about achieving them with warrmth and intelligence. Which makes it a refreshing change to the duplicitous stuff that Apple and Skype are involving themselves in
(HT to Brand Republic for the War Museum link)

ITV's Primeval Twitter simulcast

It looks like I'm not the only person to spend more and more time with Twitter open while watching TV: in the last few weeks I've not only been joining in real time conversations about things I'm watching, but also making more effort to watch things like The Apprentice and Masterchef live, so as not to miss out on the opportunity to chat about them. Hardly surprising, as the so-called 'watercooler effect' is what TV has always been about. Just that now the watercooler gathers people from around the country. So respect due to ITV for integrating the Twitter backchannel into their launch of the new Primeval season that launched this evening: running it simulcast online with the discussion below (and then repeating it online again afterwards), as well as publicising #Primeval on their website in the run-up. To be fair there weren't that many people discussing it (see Twitscoop stats), but then Primeval isn't appointment to view TV in the way that something like The Apprentice is. If a brand like ITV are going to host the Twitter stream on their own site then it makes sense to test things out in sci-fi drama, where the smaller audience are more backchannel-literate than jumping straight in to Corrie.

It'll be interesting to see where they take it from here: ideas like the CNN/Facebook link-up for Inaguration Day let you switch between the whole discussion and just your friends (ok so this was based on Facebook Connect, but surely also possible with the Twitter API). Is there a value in streaming conversations into the video player, as some US broadcasters have done? This might seem intrusive if it was simply a hashtag feed, but if it could sync SMS, IM and Twitter @ replies than that is adding some very personalised value (and could be done by adding an aggregator like Meebo or Digsby into the ITV player)

Hashtags and trends

Oh dear, third post in a row about Twitter.....

So we launched a really cool thing at work last week called REAL Social, which is a whole range of partnerships and projects bringing disparate parts of Publicis and external partners together and make working together faster and more fun. Nick Burcher has all the details, as he helped build it. And at the press launch on Friday there were lots of people twittering away, all using the hashtag #REALSocial. We set ourselves the not outrageous target of 80 or so tweets an hour (bearing in mind that there were 100 or so people in the room, and 50 more on webinar) that are generally needed to get a tag into the 'currently trending' type of lists on apps like Twitscoop.

I'm not sure if I'd missed something on how trendtracking apps work, but I've never followed any of them as i'm not particularly 'trend-y' and anyhow that isn't really what i do on Twitter. So it wasn't until other people who do subscribe to them started RT'ing that the #REALSocial tag was trending that i realised the relevance of this: so basically everyone who follows Twitscoop (7000 odd) gets a message to tell them 'this is important, you might like to find out more about it', with a list of the people who are contributing most to it for them to follow up. So suddenly we had gone from our own individual networks of a couple of hundred people, to thousands that follow each of the trend tracking services. Which made me think of this diagram.

(Pic Credit - David Armano)

And thinking about it, I clearly have missed a big chunk of how trending and hashtags work.

#TwitterNovel: Writing things (in 140 characters or less)

There's been lots of 'how to use Twitter' articles been flying around in the last week, some good (Wall Street Journal, FT), some less so (Shortlist). And ad agencies are not immune - this Slideshare deck from BBH/MadeByMany is a great intro that also starts to talk about how the service has been used to publicise things other than the people using it. The challenge for ad agencies joining in is all around the 140 character limit: what can actually be said in 140 characters (or less)?

In terms of narrative, 'flash fiction' predates short message formats, and although the genre tends to be Six Sentences, or even One Sentence that take the 'short story' to its logical conclusion, the genre tends to focus on narrative under 1000 words. The goal of this style of writing is to create narrative that exists in isolation of other reference points within pre-defined limitations. Kind of like what Twaiku (Twitter Haiku) does already within Twitter, but with more words to play with.

But for the communications business the 'in isolation of other reference points' bit is irrelevant: nothing exists outside of the framework of cultural and commercial significance, and everything contributes to it. So 140 characters is not the limitation for telling a story, rather an opportunity to reference the existing story.

So I was thinking along these lines after reading some Twaikus, and wondered how big an idea you can condense into 140 characters if everyone knows the original idea. My attempts are below, which I'll also publish on Twitter as it seems a much more relevant medium than here. Please add to comments if you want join in, but again, it seems like something that shouldn't really exist in a blog environment, so maybe better to use #TwitterNovel (actually that's giong to make it 127 characters or less, and every character counts...)

His Dark Materials

Most conspiracy theories are true, but only kids and physicists know it. BTW Milton was right, Satan’s a dude

Lord of the Rings

Get off your arse. You’ll be surprised what you achieve. Look, there’s King Arthur with the Romans

The Great Gatsby

Maybe boy meets girl, maybe girl rejects boy, maybe boy wins girl back. Who knows, sounds good though, eh?

Catch 22

War? LOL that’s sane compared to people. I’m the only normal one here. Don’t trust the normal ones. Jump!

The Beach

Smug narcissistic backpacker seeks similar for utopian idyll. GSOH unnecessary. May lead to reality TV show

Love, Sleep and Google

Been away for a while and now I'm back. And conveniently a data genius called Yvo Schaap has built this Twitter trend visualizer called TwitterThoughts so that I can see what I've missed. You can track references in a flash interface with all manner of sliders and dropdowns to customise (inluding stuff like total followers who have viewed a meme). and map movement over time (as in the image above). Yvo explains the concept as follows:

TwitterThoughts creates charts based on Twitter tweets in combination with lots of APIs: From a sample of 600 tweets/minute served by the Twitter Api that we send to Yahoo Pipes where it extracts all phrases from the tweet text and the latitude/longitude with use of Yahoo YQL. This Yahoo Pipe outputs serialized PHP back to our local update script that grabs every tweet and phrase and puts it in our MySql database. Daily overviews for fast rendering of the chart data are generated with a daily CRON update. Finally Google Visualization API generates an interactive flash chart based on our JSON data feed.

And it appears what I've mostly missed is love, sleep and google. So pretty much like any other pitch then.
(Hat tip to ReadWriteWeb)

Twitter business plan convincing some people

Today's announcement that Twitter has secured another $55m in venture capital suggests that whatever the revenue generation plan is, there are people willing to invest in it. Within the announcement was the detail that only around a third of Twitter traffic is on their website: the majority is through the API, which suggests where revenue generation is going to be focused. That feels important, in the same way that Twitter feels important. So as there isn't an easy elevator pitch for Twitter I'm finding myself trying to explain it more and more to colleagues, friends, and random passers-by that I have to apologise to when I bump into them while on Twitterberry. Just saying 'Facebook status on IM' doesn't really work any more; it feels like a copout, as even the people who don't understand Twitter know it is more important than that. Likewise I can't guess exactly what the business plan is, but it is clearly all about the service not the site.

Someone said it had been snowing....

Photo Credit
So lots of people in central London couldn't get to work yesterday. And lots of other people on the mainland and in North America understandably laughed at us for getting in such a fuss over 6 inches of snow (incidentally, is snow the only thing other than TV screens still measured in inches? I don't understand imperial measures on principle, but have spent the last couple of days converting centimetres BACK into inches, like it's the 1950s).

And once we'd finished our 'every five years sledging expedition', we turned the day into genuine English community spirit. Lots of weather to talk about, a proper reason to whinge about public transport, but an overwhelming sense of being sent home from school. London certainly turned into a bunch of kids for the day. And what means now is sharing experiences with as many people as possible. The BBC had the largest ever response to an appeal for photos, video, stories, etc. Much of the BBC news consisted of camera phone video: this was news affecting everyone and documented by everyone.

But it was also the day that Twitter showed its public service credentials.
Not for everyone, but anyone using it was at a distinct advantage. By 8am the overground rail companies' information boards had frozen up, the TFL website was buckling under the weight of traffic, but anyone following @uktrains knew exactly what their chances of getting anywhere were (slim to none). The app pulls feeds from the BBC, shortens them in Yahoo Pipes to 140 characters or less, and publishes them through Twitterfeed. More details here

We also joined in at crowdsourcing the weather forecast. From Sunday afternoon's excited but disorganised 'Its snowing in [wherever]' tweets, we had moved by early Monday morning to a semi official hashtag #uksnow, and a location based weight of snow system, relying on tweets including the hashtag, a postcode, and a snow intensity out of ten (eg. '#uksnow SE24 7/10'). This fed Ben Marsh's fantastic #uksnow mashup, showing live Twitter sourced weatherTo be fair this is more of a map of where it is snowing AND people use Twitter, rather than simply of where it is snowing. But you get the picture.

To me the really big and important mash-up will be when the BBC start broadcasting events like this using Twitter. We saw it a couple of weeks ago when Janis Krums' photo of US Airways Flight 1549 floating in the Hudson River made front pages around the world, but that was a single big event where he happened to be closer than the news crews. We also saw it pre-planned with CNN's Facebook Connect link up for the US presidential inauguration. Here, in a random weather event affecting half the country, the real personal content was there for all to see and mashup, and there was a major broadcaster desperately seeking real personal content. The BBC's coverage has been all the better for leading with non-professional footage, but next national story there need to be more integration.

Cigarettes and Alcohol

We tend to avoid the issue in this industry. We call things 'sticky' or 'engaging', when what we are really trying to do is invent stuff that is utterly addictive. So music really helped (see every kids' cereal ad ever). Now 'advertising' can be applications that make people's lives easier, we should be trying to create things that you really can't live without, things that compete with the best applications that aren't 'advertising'. This got me thinking about how applications become addictive. Facebook is a bit like alcohol: it facilitates social interaction, its all really good fun, but you don't want to spend all your time there after you finish Uni. First reactions to Twitter tend to be more like those of a first cigaratte; people don't see what all the fuss is about. It takes a bit of practicing to understand why people do it, and by the time you've put that effort in, you realise that you can't live without it. Not because it does anything flashy - it isn't a Saturday night site, it's a quick break from work for 5 minutes site. Break after break after break. I'm not suggesting that we should build another Twitter, rather that thinking small, building little things brilliantly, is the lesson that I'm learning as I explore Twitter.

Twitter is bigger than the Recession

Approaching the Twipping Point
I'm trying really hard not to get sucked into the general hyping of Twitter, particularly Twitter lingo (Twingo?) usage, but it is noticeable that more and more non planner or geek types are talking about it. I've only been hooked for the last few months, so I'm a bandwagon-hopping novice myself (albeit an addicted one), but I'm sure it is reaching much further into the real world than even a few months ago.

I started looking at what we can compare it to on Trends to see if there is any truth to this, and while it has nowhere near the volume of Facebook, as you'd expect, Twitter is officially bigger than the recession in the UK. Which is good news.... all they need now is a business model