Kosuke Tsuneoka, a Japanese freelance journalist captured in Afghanistan, posted a short but very powerful tweet on September 3rd.

Since being taken into custody on April 1, not one person had heard a single word from the brave reporter. But fortunately last week, with the help of a not-so web savvy jail guard, Tsuneoka was able to share his message (that he was indeed alive) with the world. Read an exerpt from the incredible story below:

The guard had heard of the internet but didn't know what it was, so Tsuneoka called customer care to activate the phone and configure it for internet access. He showed the guard how to perform a Google search of Al Jazeera, and then he talked about Twitter. But if you are going to do anything, you should use Twitter, he said he told the guard. They asked what that was. And I told them that if you write something on it, then you can reach many Japanese journalists. So they said, Try it.'

Full story at Wired.

Hat tip to @BillMeade

Total Twitter coverage.

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Japanese reporter Kosuke Tsuneoka disappeared without a trace on April 1st in Afghanistan. Nothing was heard from him for five months when he was able to update his twitter status using a Nokia N70 that had been newly acquired by one of his captors.

Tsuneoka managed to fire off the messages when his cell guard showed him his shiny new phone and asked him how to put it to use. The reporter showed him what it could do, then suggested that he might like Twitter and managed to fire off the aforementioned and pictured updates.

It was a slick but dangerous move, but it didn't do Tsuneoka any harm he was released the next day anyway. [Gizmodo]

The following is a guest post from one of my favorite young bloggers Onibalusi Bamidele (he's 16!) who has previously written a great analysis on the top 5 blogs and now is taking his evaluation to Twitter.

Twitter is one of the largest social networking sites, featuring users from various walks of lives. Twitter has a wide range of benefits from communicating with friends and families to building a brand for your business.

What I discovered among most Twitter users nowadays trying to be a top (or power) Twitter user is that they seem to automate everything. On Twitter, it's not hard to find a lot of accounts now with thousands of followers and tens of thousands of tweets, only to discover that their profile has no value because they have the same following to follower ratio, they have lots of spam messages in their tweets, and their tweets hardly get any retweets. It is very clear that you can't automate social media.

This post will analyze the top ten users on Twitter, what they all have in common, and what we can learn from them in order to build a better and valuable Twitter profile.

The top ten Twitter users referenced in this post were taken from Twitterholic.

1. Lady Gaga
2. Britney Spears
3. Ashton Kutcher
4. Barack Obama
5. Ellen DeGeneres
6. Justin Bieber (who has his own dedicated servers at Twitter)
7. Kim Kardashian
8. Oprah Winfrey
9. Taylor Swift
10. Katy Perry

If we take a look at all of the above Twitter users, we will observe the following.

Your Status Matters

Twitter is not just any kind of social networking site. It has an algorithm that favors your status. If you take a look at the ten people listed above, you will notice that all of them are celebrities. They have a name outside Twitter and it is that name that helped them build such a powerful Twitter profile.

Even though it is good to have a Twitter profile even if you don't have a website or name, having an audience before having your Twitter profile really helps and makes things easier. Of course, there are also Twitter users who started out solely online, but even those users had a status that mattered.

Following to Follower Ratio

Many people think becoming popular or having a strong Twitter profile is all about following a lot of people on Twitter. No! It is not about that. You will notice that almost all the top Twitter users listed above hardly follow many people. They only follow a few.

If you go about following people in order to build your profile, the end result might be inactive people or bots or those who will add no value to your profile following you back. It is not all about the numbers, it is about the results. There is no result in having thousands of Twitter followers if they would not pay any attention to you.

Number of Tweets

One thing I notice about a lot of so called Twitter experts is that they go about tweeting everything. Having a gazillion tweets is no guarantee of being a top Twitter user. You will notice from the above that all the Twitter users have a low number of tweets and they don't just tweet about everything under the sun. They only tweet useful, helpful, and valuable information.

Promotion on Twitter is not Bad If Done Right!

Many people are under the impression that it is not good to promote on Twitter and that Twitter should only be used for personal things. No! This is not true. If we take a look at the profile of Justin Bieber, we will notice he also promotes his product on Twitter but does not spam. Here is what I found in his bio www.BieberFever.com Request my single SOMEBODY TO LOVE featuring USHER!! and thank you for making a dream come true. MY WORLD 2.0 Get that!!. You will notice he promote things but not in the spammy way most people do today.

You don't need to tweet your product hundred times a day before it is seen. That is what the bio is made for.

As a note, I am not saying being a top Twitter user means you should not promote your products via tweets, but I am just saying it has to be minimal.

Personality is Important

By taking a look at the recent tweets on the above Twitter accounts, you will notice that they all have a personal relationship with followers and they answer questions from their followers. For example, here is a recent tweet taken from Ashton Kutcher's twitter profile: @problogger bummer I'll be there 1 week too early.

You will notice that many Twitter users don't even care if about their Twitter profile, and all they do is automate everything.

Your followers wants to see a personal side of you and not just the automated part.

Branding is Important

Sometimes, little things make a huge difference. Many people who want to be power Twitter users don't even have a branded Twitter account. You will notice that all the top Twitter users listed above have their image branded on their Twitter profile, and they also have a branded background.

Branding your Twitter profile makes it unique and also makes it easy for people to relate with you. Having a branded Twitter profile also bring about your presence to anybody who follows or wants to build a relationship with you.

Joined Date

Does this really matter? Yeah! As I said above, sometimes, the little things make a huge difference. At the time of writing this post, out of all the top Ten twitter users, the individual who joined last joined 18 months ago (1 years 4 months) while the individual who joined first has been there for 43 months (3 years 9 months). What this means is that success doesn't come overnight, so don't expect to join Twitter today and go popular tomorrow. Everything has a time-frame and you have to build your profile over time.

One of the best ways to achieve success is by learning from those who have been there, and the above tips are 7 great things we can learn from the top 10 Twitter users.

Onibalusi Bamidele is a young entrepreneur living the internet lifestyle, subscribe to his blog for more great posts. Also, get his free traffic eBook called the ultimate traffic formula.

Photos by Shutterstock.

[ Analysis of The Top 10 Twitter Users and What We Can Learn From Them is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Read more about The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, a primer to social media marketing. Or you can subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week, I wrote a story for PC World about Gmail's priority inbox feature, which flags unread messages as important depending on previous interactions and other cues. My hope was that the same idea algorithmic sifting of the web's information overload would find its way to other services like social networking and RSS feeds.

Turns out, there's a free app for that. It's called My6sense, and it launched today for Android phones, though it's been available in the iPhone App Store since last year.

My6sense connects with Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz (in Android only, for now) and RSS feeds, and tries to display the most interesting content on top. At first, the selection is a crapshoot, picking out stories and status updates that are getting a lot of responses. Over time, the app digs through everything you click on to determine your favorite publications, authors, keywords and topics. It also considers how long you spend reading a particular story, separating skimmed articles from ones that hold your attention.

I haven't used My6sense enough to get past the initial stages of randomness, but already I can tell that the app is throwing away some insubstantial news articles and Tweets about breakfast. Even when you command My6sense to include status updates that don't have links, it still puts a heavy emphasis on link Tweets.

This is clearly a consumption tool; you can share stories, but can't post any original content to Facebook or Twitter from the app. In that regard, I see My6sense as part of the new breed of apps and services that distill social networking into pure content curation. But while Flipboard and paper.li rely on other people to pick the best stories, My6sense trusts the process to a computer algorithm. Which system works better is, fortunately, still left for humans to decide.

The Change-maker Daily, from a Twitter list created by Socialbrite.

And a Q&A with a representative of the new service about what's ahead

By Jessica Haswell
Socialbrite staff

Do you love Twitters serendipity the cool way it surfaces links that hit just the right spot but aren't too thrilled with the free-for-all jumble of tweets that race past you?

Struggle to find the jewels amid the chaos no more: paper.li is a fresh new take on Twitter that organizes not just the tweets but the content from the links. The free service assembles the heart of the Twitter content you care about into one graphically pleasing magazine-style layout.

This morning the Swiss-based start-up answered a few questions about what's coming down the road including a paper.li online newsstand. See below for the Q&A.

Anyone can create a paper.li in under a minute see below for how to do it. Your paper is updated every 24 hours, making it easy to stay on top of the tweets of the folks you follow. In a word, it offers context. Not only that, but paper.li enables you to reply, retweet, follow, unfollow or favorite through pop-up tabs on the site.

There is currently no other website quite like this, but I'm sure that won't stay true for long. (For a different example, check out The Twitter Tim.es.) For a nonprofit, business or any organization, this is a fast, easy, terrific promotional tool to educate your followers about your cause or mission. It merges a diverse collection of links about niche subjects into one slick package.

What do you think of paper.li? Please leave a comment below.

How it works: Publish your paper in a hot second

Interested in setting one up? Here are the steps to take:

1) Go to paper.li and click the Create your own daily paper button.

2) Sign in to your Twitter or Facebook account to authorize the app's access to your account.

3) The site creates a paper for you click the my paper.li link. You can also also click create a newspaper to add a Twitter user you follow, a #tag (though this doesn't always work) or a Twitter list.

Shazam! You have a newspaper!

Noted blogger Robert Scoble calls paper.li a Flipboard for those of us without iPads. Rita King tells us: I like paper.li because it's amazingly accurate in its perception of what will interest me.

And educator Kathy Gill adds: I love it because it's another form of discovery. It's a great way see what other people thought was important in the prior 24 hour period. It puts an ephemeral Tweetstream into a snapshot that is more than minute here-or-there by letting you look at a stream.

Here's how the Causes Daily looks:

The Causes Daily

Tips on creating your publication

There's no catch. The service is free, permitting anyone with a Twitter or Facebook account to create up to 10 papers. It's a creation of SmallRivers, a small start-up in Lausanne, Switzerland, located on the Swiss Institute of Technology EPFL campus. The service rolled out earlier this year in alpha (the stage before beta), so expect to see a lot of changes in the coming months. Follow the latest developments on the paper.li blog.

Here are some other things you may want to know:

The developers wanted to keep things simple, so currently you can't do any tailoring or fine-tuning of your publication. That is, you can't decide which tweets or accompanying media to highlight; paper.li uses an algorithm to highlight important or newsworthy content, though how it guesses which items to highlight is a bit of a mystery.

The service pulls some of the tweets you send, but most of the publication's content comes from the people on Twitter whom you follow not the people who follow you. For accounts like Socialbrite, which has an open door policy of following back just about any legitimate Twitter user, this makes for a less focused newspaper experience. However, using a Twitter list or #hashtag is an easy way to bring a focused theme to your paper.li. A site like Guy Kawasaki's Alltop also solves this by creating niche Twitter accounts, posting updates to each and following nobody. Thus, the Alltop Social Media Daily grabs updates only from @Alltop_Social because Alltop_Social follows no one.

Q&A with one of the site's developers

Here are some questions we put to the site's developers. Ed from SmallRivers responded earlier today:

How will readers be able to navigate paper.li newspapers? One can search by keyword, but there's no directory of papers created.

We are working on a paper.li newsstand. You'll be able to search papers there with many more criteria than only keywords.

Will future releases let publishers customize the display of their papers?

To a certain extent, yes. But we really want to keep it as simple as possible (and that's THE challenge).

Will publishers be able to mash up multiple tags, lists or accounts into a single newspaper?

We are working on enabling users to build more targeted papers. Multiple criteria is one of the ways we are currently looking into.

Paper.li is still in development. What are some of the upcoming features you're planning to include in future releases?

Sorry, we can't disclose now.

We see this as an easy way for nonprofits to create a pretty cool promotional vehicle for their cause or mission. What benefits does paper.li offer to nonprofits in particular?

It is clearly seen as a good place to show the output of a distributed collaboration. We see many nonprofits promoting new hashtags (specially made for paper.li) and inviting their supporters to contribute. It is also seen as a relevant resource center (see World Wildlife Funds WWF Climate Daily).

Will there be a cost for creating newspapers at some point?

Not for the types of papers you can see now. But some advanced features might be premium (small monthly fee).

Papers to check out

Here are some of the papers we like do a keyword search to explore ones that match your own interests.

WWF Climate Daily

Causes Daily by JD Lasica

#climate Daily

Social Entrepreneurs (#socent) Daily

EdTech Daily

EdChat Daily

Robert Scoble's Most Influential in Tech Daily

Chris Brogan Daily

Socialbrite Team Daily

Microfinance Daily

TechCrunch Daily

Have your own favorites? Please list them in the comments.

Backupify, a cloud computing service that backs up data on other cloud computing services, has raised $4.5 Million in Series A funding co-led by Avalon Ventures and General Catalyst, with Lowercase Capital and First Round Capital participating in the round.

Founded in 2008 by Rob May, Backupify backs up all your data on services like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Flickr, WordPress, Blogger, and YouTube. The service keeps all the raw data for you and creates a downloadable PDF with, for instance, all your Tweets, direct messages, followers, people you follow, and profile info. Backupify offers free and premium versions of the service.

The company says that its offerings is gaining traction amongst enterprise customers who are looking to preserve data from social media outlets, and help backup data in the cloud. This latest round of funding will be used towards product development capabilities while expanding its focus on data management services that target the increasing amount of data that enterprises store in cloud-based applications.

Earlier this year, Backupify, which was launched last June, raised $900,000 in seed funding led by First Round Capital. Other investors included General Catalyst, Betaworks, as well as angel investors Chris Sacca, Jason Calacanis, Andy Swan, and Bob Saunders.

If anyone thinks that technology doesn't massively change the world I'm going to slap them with a rotting tuna.

A couple weeks back we learned that our son, Milan, is autistic. Instead of coming to my blog and holding court I thought I'd just tweet it. I did that with an audio recording done when I got out of the doctor's office with the diagnosis. We've known for some time that he wasn't developing normally, after our friend's kids could speak at two and Milan is having trouble getting a word or two out at three, but we didn't know what was causing the problem and now that we know we're getting him the best treatment. Thanks to everyone who has sent tons of feedback and things for us to read. Maryam and I really appreciate that and it shows how world-changing Twitter and Cinch are.

Since starting this blog on December 15th, 2000, I've seen countless examples of how technology is changing the world, even from small companies, like Cinchcast is today, and Twitter was back in 2006.

On other Cinches I've discovered just how our mobile phones are changing my world.

1. When I was at YCombinator's demo day I interviewed Message Party's CEO Amanda Pey about controversy surrounding her launch (people in the press were saying that adding a chat room to each location would basically cause the downfall of society because people wouldn't, gasp, talk to each other.
2. When Amplify shipped some new features I called its CEO, Eric Goldstein, and recorded the call, which was shared immediately after the call with my Twitter audience. In the call you learn about what Amplify is and what Eric is trying to do with it. (It's conversation engine for the social web).
3. When Rocky and I visited Microsoft and had a meeting with Frank Shaw, who runs PR, after visiting Microsoft's Research, I quickly recorded my thoughts of the day. If I had to wait to blog I would have forgotten them. I did that while walking around a parking lot.
4. I was walking through a Safeway grocery store when I read on my iPhone a ReadWriteWeb report that Louis Gray had taken a new job. I immediately called him and got him to talk about the new job, which I learned was working for My6Sense. It is one of the few places you get to hear Louis tell you in his own voice why he took a new job. All done while I walked around a Safeway. World-changing? Well, before these new technologies hit you couldn't break news from a grocery store easily.
5. On our trip to Boulder, I met a guy who worked for Microsoft in Bing's labs. He got us a tour, here's the audio I recorded during a thunderstorm out in the parking lot where they have five petabytes of storage in a shipping containter.
6. An hour after Facebook announced its new Places location service I was hanging out with Whrrl's CEO in Seattle and turned on my iPhone to get his reaction.

Anyway, back to the day we shared Milan's autism with the world:

The reaction was quick, and from all over the world. People emailed. Facebook'ed. Tweeted. Chatted. Oh, and lots have come up to me in real life.

To anyone who previously said Twitter was lame and not world changing I now swing that rotting tuna your way. I remember lots of people in 2006 and 2007 saying Twitter wouldn't make it and that it was a lame idea.

I hear people say that about EVERY world-changing technology. Look at how people are treating location services now. How many of you are writing off Foursquare or Gowalla?

Anyway, Rocky and I have been doing quite a bit of traveling this summer looking for stuff that is changing our world and we've found a bit of it. So much so that I changed my title tag on my blog to searching for world-changing technology. I did that because finding it is what makes me happy and the search for it is sublime. Here's some of the things I've found this summer:

1. We met Stanley Hainsworth in Seattle. He was the creative director at Lego, Starbucks, and Nike and now runs his own design shop. He had just completed a redesign of the Gatorade bottle. Think that design doesn't change the world? Sales are way up. Hear his thoughts on how your brand is telling its story.
2. Scott Cook has been near the top of Intuit for longer than Mark Zuckerberg has been alive. Think about that one for a moment. He's one of the few people who has gone to bat against Microsoft's billions and survived to talk about it. Here we talk about the things that he sees changing the world.
3. CouchDB is a new kind of database. One that's easily replicated and that's small and scalable, but that is document centric rather than relationship focused. Lots of new things are being built on it. I visited their offices to learn more about it and how it's changing the world.
4. Since it's back to school week I wondered what is changing about technology that would help my sons learn better? Livescribe's founder came to my house to show me the latest iteration of his world-changing pen.
5. I've been fortunate to see three great startups this year before almost anyone else. Siri, who was purchased by Apple, Soluto, who won Techcrunch Disrupt, and Flipboard, who is changing the world of the iPad and real-time social publishing. Here you meet the VCs behind Siri and learn why Apple wanted that company so badly. Part I and Part II.
6. Flipboard continues to change my expectations of what a Twitter client should do (they have a new version coming any day which I've been testing). Here's my original interview with Mike McCue, founder.
7. Compasslabs is building a new advertising platform that lets Twitter client developers get better advertising that converts better and pays more. Here's the details behind how, with founder Dilip Venkatachari.
8. The Economist Magazine and other professional publishers are now using SocialFlow to figure out when to tweet to get maximum audience receptivity. The way it does this is pretty ingenious. If you are interested in the future of publishing you should listen to founder Frank Speiser discuss how it works.
9. We're expecting augmented reality to show up in a big way soon, but how do you map virtual information onto real-world things like storefronts or museum displays? Omniar, in Boulder, CO, showed me how they are able to easily map real-world items using the cameras in their cell phones and their unique technology.
10. You might think that email signatures aren't something that can be innovated on, right? Are they world changing? Well, for a million users, yes! Here's the founders talking about how they made signatures better.
11. Search is done, right? Google has won, right? Well, Google has definitely won, the founders of Blekko told me, but search is not done and Blekko has a new way to search that's very social and power users will love it.
12. I visited with PayPal's VP of platform, mobile and new ventures, Osama Bedier, to find out where PayPal is going. He told me that and more in a conversation I call the future of payments.
13. We wanted to learn how London would use technology to map out the London Olympics, so we went to the folks who did the Beijing Olympics, Waterstone, Inc, in Boulder, CO, and we met their executives who showed us their interesting 3D mapping technology.
14. We've needed a way to filter Tweets for quite some time, and in the next few weeks DataSift will ship their new sifting technology that brings a new programming language and system that lets you sift the best stuff out of Twitter's firehose feed. This is so important we spent 40 minutes with founder Nick Halstead to learn more about it.

This week we'll be at Google, Seesmic, and a variety of other companies looking for more world-changing technologies.

Got any? Email me at scobleizer@gmail.com.

Twitter newspaper service Paper.li has changed the way its promotional tweets work after high profile Twitter users accused them of being little more than spam.

In case you're unfamiliar with it, Paper.li a service that organises links from the people you follow on Twitter into a newspaper-style' web page. It can create a daily newspaper from any Twitter user, List or hashtag.

A nice idea, but its automatic tweets have proved a major annoyance for many. Tweets like The John Smith Daily is out featuring @user, @AnotherUser and @SomeoneElse have become especially irritating for Twitter users with many followers. Why? Well, popular TV comedy writer Graham Linehan summed up the problem yesterday. Over a number of tweets he wrote:

Guys, the Daily Newspaper thingis there something in settings where you can remove our usernames from the notifications? it's all very flattering, but it's rendering my @replies stream unusable. Getting almost as many tweets hating on the Daily Newspapers as I'm getting Daily Newspapers.

Robert Scoble decried the tweets as Spam while our own Editor in Chief, Zee summed up his own frustration succinctly:

die paper.li die.

It's easy to understand the annoyance of all your Twitter replies being mentions in online newspapers. Now the people behind Paper.li, SmallRivers, have acted to quell the bad feeling by changing their promotional tweets.

On the Paper.li blog today they write:

We hear the complaints, and are looking into ways to satisfy paper.li users while reducing the spammy feeling for others. We are thus testing a new type of tweet. It doesn't just say a daily is out it shares the top story of the day. We believe such a tweet clearly conveys more interesting info for followers. It is quite close to a retweet really so something that basically says: this is relevant for me and the group of people I follow you should probably read it too.

Here's what the new default tweet looks like, so all those people annoyed by their Twitter streams clogging up should be satisfied Twitter username mentions in the tweets are no more.

The tweets are opt in, so auto-tweeting should be kept to a minimum and if they still annoy you, it's the user, not the service that you can direct your anger at.

Original title and link for this post: After a Twitter revolt, Paper.li makes its auto-tweets less spammy

Are you ready to get buzzed by Tweets? Twitter confirmed last week that it is experimenting with and will soon roll out push notifications through its official iPhone app.

What does that mean? It depends on how exactly the company lets users manage and receive their notifications, but it's not to early to start thinking about how push could change the Twitter experience. We asked a number of experts in the field of User Experience design what they thought about Twitter push notifications and several of them predicted it will be a game-changer for mainstream users.

Sponsor

Charlene McBride, a self-described "cranky UX designer" from Boston, says first what we're all probably thinking: "I think it could be an interesting way for users to prioritize certain tweets, but I also wonder what keeps it from becoming yet another firehose of status updates."

Let's look past the risk of information overload for a moment, though, and assume that Twitter implements the feature well. What might that mean?

Right: screenshot captured by Nick Starr.

For me, getting replies and direct messages sent to me by push notification (I've been using Notifio) has been really nice. Twitter can be both synchronous (a real time exchange) and asynchronous (I'll see your posts when I get around to it) but the addition of push notifications brings the personal communication of replies and direct messages firmly into the synchronous experience, even when I'm not at my computer or looking at a mobile app. It really adds to the flow of using Twitter. The asynchronous part of Twitter is most suited to non-personal messages broadcast by the people I'm following.

That's my take on it, here's what some more UX pros have to say.

Push as SMS Replacement

Cindy Alvarez, author of the San Francisco-based blog The Experience is the Product, sees some potential for push notifications to supplant SMS and win some new users to Twitter:

The non-Twitter-users I know say, 'If you want a reply, you text or email [a recipient]; if you don't need a reply you post to Facebook, what is Twitter good for?' Bringing a more SMS-like experience to the desktop (where you don't incur $0.05 per text charges) might win over a different audience.

Twitter and SMS coming together again, just like the product's creators originally envisioned? That's crazy talk - but it could lead to some truly far-out use-cases, too.

"[Push notifications] really start to blur the lines between what we traditionally think of as a Twitter client and SMS," says Dwayne King, User Experience Strategist at Portland, Oregon design firm Pinpoint Logic.

"Not knowing for sure what options they'll open up for push, it could expand beyond the bounds of what something like SMS could do. Where SMS requires some sort of pre-existing relationship between the texters, Twitter and push via hash tags or geographic location opens up a new avenue for meet-ups, flash mobs and such."

Bringing Celeb-Tracking Mainstream Users Back to the Good Old Days of Twitter

The most compelling take on the User Experience implications of Twitter push notifications may come from Aviel Ginzburg, UX guy at Seattle-based Untitled Startup, makers of Twitter bulk-conversation analysis tool RowFeeder. Ginzburg thinks that the addition of push notification tools could help make mainstream users, who have been introduced to Twitter as a way to passively consume updates from celebrities, aware of the service's incredible potential as a communication tool.

"Those of us who have been using Twitter since the days that it was largely (entirely) text messaging driven perceive Twitter much differently than mainstream users.

"She has been using Twitter like people use Facebook, as a way to consume (mainly) and share content in a 'on your own time' fashion. When she uses Twitter, she really uses it, but in controlled bursts when she is physically engaging.

"The way that the site has been restructured in the past several months including the new search, celebrity, and brand focus, categories, featured tweets, promotions, etc have drawn in the mainstream in such a way that they aren't perceiving Twitter in the way that the early adopters do - as a real-time communication platform that will one day replace text messaging, email, and even phone calls. Just look at the Twitter homepage... it's a text media consumption site.

"With the announcement of push notifications, they're bring the messaging platform core value proposition back to the forefront, and pushing the mainstream, who joined Twitter for entirely different reasons, to experience Twitter in the same way us early adopters do -- as a real-time communication channel that you never disconnect from. The concern of course is: have these users really signed-up for entering a service where the are expected to be available and engaged at all times?

"It may seem like a small and logical update (cut out the text messaging middle-man), but really, Twitter is going to be dramatically changing the way its mainstreams users experience and use Twitter."

What do you think the implications of push notifications in Twitter's own mobile applications will be? Are you looking forward to it? Do you think it's something only power-users are really interested in? Do you think it will change peoples' SMS habits?

I realise this might sound like politician calling for a new taskforce, or a businessman calling for a new tax break, but: we need a new social network.

By this, I don't mean that we need a new standalone service for sharing a kind of media, be it short messages, photos, videos, sound, shopping lists or anything else. Rather, what's needed is a framework to pull all the existing Web 2.0 services together in a way that's fluid, attractive and easy to use.

Social networking versus social publishing

In the beginning of the internet, much time and energy was spent discussing its potential to enable people to reach outside the boundaries of their everyday lives and connect in communities of shared interest. The internet enabled us to explore areas of interest our real' lives didn't allow us to investigate: people who lived in small towns with no galleries could learn about art; fans of obscure bands or niche cuisines or unusual hobbies could connect all around the world.

Equally importantly, the web allowed us to adopt a second identity. People could embrace interests that might not be socially acceptable from kinky sex to stamp-collecting to simple silliness without risking their real-world reputations.

With the advent of Web 2.0' and the development of ever more methods for people to create and share content online from Flickr for photos to YouTube and Vimeo for vidoes to Blogger, WordPress and Twitter for written thoughts this potential of the web was enhanced. Secret identities are no longer the preserve of superheroes: now each of us can have a second persona under which we publish all manner of content and connect with strangers all over the world.

But just as these services were developing, a funny thing happened: real life started to intrude. Facebook, launched in 2004, grew like topsy to become the website many people spend most time on, and the most vital to people's lives outside email. In the process, it became the default method of sharing photos, videos and writing for millions of people.

Facebook's success stems largely from one thing: its grounding in real life. You join under your real name, with a real photo, and connect with your real-life friends. From its origins as a tool to grease the wheels of the stratified social scene at Harvard University, it's become the online complement to people's real lives, used to share holiday snaps and plan birthday parties with existing friends far more than it is to meet new people. It's a true social network' the only true social networking site because it exists almost exclusively as an extension of, and facilitator of, people's real-life social lives.

There's nothing wrong with this. Facebook demonstrates that many people probably the majority are happy interacting online under their real names, and have no great desire to adopt a second persona or make contact with strangers who share their interests.

But at the same time, the continued success of self-publishing services like Flickr and Twitter shows that there remains a substantial demand for services which let you broadcast to the whole world, rather than just your own social contacts, and which let you adopt a second identity to enable you to say things you daren't with your first. The success of Twitter, in particular, shows the power of this freedom many people I know joined Twitter with a username based on their real name, before adopting a name that's less identifying to free them to be silly or profane.

Millions of people have a non-identifying username which unites their online publishing activity on a host of services: Tumblr, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, as well as endless comment forums. Each of these sites has its own flourishing communities.

But here's the thing. Facebook is so popular because it enables you to see what your friends are up to, across all different media, in one place. That's why Facebook, while technically inferior to Flickr as a photo-sharing site, is now the biggest photo-sharing site in the world it's convenient to share photos with the network you've already built.

But in the wider world of Web 2.0 services, there's no united network. My Flickr contacts can see my photos, but not my tweets; my blog subscribers can't see my YouTube uploads. Each service provides tools for finding your connections on other services, but it's laborious and you still have to visit each separate site to see what your contacts are up to. I check Facebook every morning, and frequently again later in the day. It takes a few minutes.

If I checked Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, Flickr and Vimeo every morning to see what all those I follow were up to, it'd take an hour or more.

What's needed is a portal which lets us conveniently and easily see what all those we follow are up to across the different web publishing services: to add social networking to social publishing. And it's needed for more than just convenience. As Facebook's power grows, there's an increasing danger that the convenience if offers will lead people to abandon other services and simply share through Facebook. Already I find myself clicking the Like' button where before I would have Dugg' a web page, or shared it on Twitter, because it's so damn easy. If young people joining the internet get in the habit of doing everything through Facebook, the whole idea of distributed Web 2.0 services and of the freedom to adopt a second persona online could wither on the vine.

More than the stream

The most successful attempt at this so far has been Friendfeed. The site, launched in 2007, does a pretty good job of aggregation' pulling in your contacts' activity on various web services into a single stream. Friendfeed was bought by you guessed it Facebook in 2009, and development of the site has basically ceased while its former owners are put to work on its parent's site. But even if it hadn't been effectively abandoned, Friendfeed has serious limitations. To follow a contact, they need to have signed up for the service themselves, rendering it useless for those whose contacts aren't signed up yet. It's ugly, better suited to sharing text-based items like tweets than photos and videos, and it displays links rather than whole entries for blog posts.

Moreover, Friendfeed offers you your contacts' content in a single stream, with photos and blog posts jumbled up with tweets and bookmarks. To be easily useable, a new aggregation service needs to be smarter, automatically separating material of long-term interest like blog posts and new batches of Flickr photographs from short-term material like tweets and TwitPic photographs, and showing them differently.

What's more, Friendfeed offers only aggregation. It does have rudimentary social networking features like messaging and groups, but they're secondary the focus is on, as the name implies, the feed.'

Let me sketch out what's needed from this new social network.

1. Users should be able to sign up using any of the services they wish to include, if those services offer a system for signing up to other websites (like Twitter, for example).
2. When a user adds a service to the site, they should see the entries of all the people they follow on that site in their unified feed, whether or not those they follow have joined the site. (This will depend on the service in question's API, but should generally be possible). For example, I should see all my Twitter contacts regardless of whether they've joined the site themselves.
3. Where the same person is a contact on two services, but they're not a member of the site, the site should suggest joining them together into a single virtual contact' based on username (so for example, my friend Joethedough's Tumblr and Twitter, which share a username, would be suggested as a virtual contact for me to approve). If that user then joined the site and connected the different services themselves, the virtual contact would be upgraded' to a real one.
4. The service should smartly separate long-form content and display it in a different, less-frequently-changing area to the main feed. For example, if a contact uploaded a single Flickr photo, it'd go in the feed, but if they uploaded a set of 50, it'd go in the long-term section.
5. Users should be able to filter the feed in advanced ways, limiting it to a single service, type of service (photos/videos/blogs/etc), or by groups of contacts. Service-based contact groups like Twitter lists would be imported and you could add to them on the site. For example, I have a Twitter list of tech journalists; on our new social network, this would show me not just their tweets but their Flickr accounts and blog posts.
6. As well as sucking in information from various services, users should be able to write information to those services from the service. If you want to add a short message to your profile, for example, you'll be able to post to Twitter from the service, adding the message both to your Twitter profile and to your aggregated service profile. Not using a particular service yet? You can sign up, with one click, without leaving the social network site, with an account based on your existing username and password there.
7. Users should have a profile' showing their own feed, and long-term content area, for all the services they've added. They should have considerable control over the colours, fonts etc of the profile (but they should not be able to dump in random HTML, MySpace-style).
8. A user's profile should be able to function as their OpenID provider, giving people a common, effective hub' to use as their online identity across the web (and acting as a counterweight to the growth of Facebook login).
9. Users should be able to message each other, form groups, organise events, and do all the additional things which social networks enable. Ideally these too would be based on external services, with users able to (for example) email each other at their registered email addresses through the site, or organise events through a sevice such as EventBrite.

Ideally, this service wouldn't need to store or produce any information whatsoever on its own systems, besides the basic network of users and their connected services. Everything else would be done through external services that users had connected.

None of this, to the best of my limited technical knowledge, is beyond the current potential of services' APIs the systems by which they let different web services talk to each other (for example, Twitter apps like TweetDeck use Twitter's API to read and write information). But put it all together, and you have a recipe for a fast-growing, super-useful site that could provide the natural balance to Facebook. Each morning, you'd look at Facebook to see what your real-life friends are up to, and our new site to see what your virtual friends are up to. Just as your Facebook profile is becoming a hub for your real-name online activity, your profile on this site this would become a hub for your online identity, perfect for putting in email signatures or on address cards.

You'll notice I haven't said anything about privacy. Facebook's complex and often-changing privacy features have put privacy issues at the heart of the debate about social networking. But for this project, I don't see it as a top priority. Users should probably have the ability to show parts of their profile to only certain people, and information imported from external services should be subject to any privacy controls the user has applied on that external service.

But when you look at the services this network would be designed to aggregate, you find their privacy features are basic and rarely used. Only a very small proportion of Twitter users protect their tweets, and only a small proportion of Flickr users post private photographs. These services are really about publishing in the literal sense of making things public, submitting them to be found and enjoyed by the world. It's normal to follow strangers, and be followed by strangers, on Twitter. That's why it's so vital this new service allows people to mask their real identities frankly, that ought to be privacy protection enough, at least at the start.

Why existing services won't do

There are a range of sites currently vying to be people's online hub. But none of them will do:

1. Facebook.

Facebook actually does aggregation very well; its Platform API makes it easy for services to create applications to suck your tweets, photos and blog posts into your News Feed. Indeed, Facebook's attractive previews of links in messages, and embedding of videos and photos, makes it a better displayer of someone's tweets than Twitter itself. And, with its recent moves to encourage users to share more information publicly, it's making a wholesale bid to be the centre of people's online lives as it is the online centre of the offline lives.

But Facebook's networks are, and will always be, based around real-life connections. Most people with some notable exceptions don't want accumulate hundreds of random strangers as Facebook friends' the way they do Twitter followers. And there remains the problem of Facebook requiring people to use their real names.

The recent introduction of Facebook Pages, which are automatically public and well suited to aggregating information, provides a partial answer. But while actors, musicians and politicians and even some journalists might find it appropriate to complement their personal profile with a public Page, most people find the idea nonsensical. And Facebook has recently increased its restrictions on the names users can give to Pages, making them no more psuedonym-friendly than personal profiles.

What's more, part of the purpose of a new social network would precisely be to counterbalance Facebook, which is acquiring a degree of dominance many find disquieting.

2. Google.

Google's Buzz' was generally tagged as a Twitter rival when it was launched earlier this year, but it's fair to say it's also intended as an aggregator it can automatically import Blogger blog posts, YouTube videos, and Twitter posts. But its appearance is heavily text-based, and it doesn't feel like it's committed to aggregation there's no reason to believe that Google would want to enable users to import content from the video site Vimeo, for example, as it's a direct competitor to YouTube, and the same applies for WordPress in relation to Blogger. It doesn't even import RSS feeds, which is pretty much the baseline feature for a decent aggregator.

Google is gearing up to incorporate Buzz into a new, expanded social network, a full-on Facebook competitor, later this year. But the signs are that rather than complementing Facebook's focus on real-life relationships, Google will seek to beat them at their own game. A recent presentation by Google employee Paul Adams, who's believed to be working on Google's putative social network, focused on how online networking can be made to more closely mirror our offline day-to-day activity. It's well worth a look at, and it suggests Google Me' might be really useful. But it's not an answer to this problem, which is not about interacting with your offline social network, but precisely about building new communities and connecting new ones online.

3. MySpace.

Once upon a time, MySpace fulfilled just this function people's public-facing home on the web, a place where bands, celebrities, microcelebrities and regular folk mingled and connected. Had MySpace seized on its potential as people's public-facing alternative to their Facebook profile, and quickly wired in advanced, attractive aggregation, it might have had a chance. (Imagine for a minute if MySpace, not Facebook, had bought Friendfeed, and launched a radically overhauled service with aggregation at its core. Wouldn't that have been something?)

But services with 250 million users don't tend to carry out radical overhauls, especially when they're owned by irascible conservative media tycoons. And MySpace has now fallen so far, in user visits and above all in prestige, it's simply impossible how they could experience any sort of renaissance. Besides, the latest plan for reviving the site is pretty much the opposite of what I'm describing, focused not on social media but on centralised traditional media like TV shows and record-company-approved music.

4. Twitter.

By rights, Twitter should be considered one of the many services to be aggregated by a new social network, a self-publishing platform like Flickr or WordPress. But there are signs that Twitter is becoming, almost by default, the leading aggregator of people's content most services offer tools to automatically update Twitter when there's a new photo upload/blog post/video, and it's common to look at a friend's Twitter feed and see their actual messages outnumbered by auto-generated announcements of new content on other services.

The problem is that as an aggregator, Twitter is really, really bad. An entirely text-based service, it's useless at showing links, photos or videos. A whole industry link-shortening services has sprung up to deal with its inability to handle long links. And it's also not much of a social network: there's no capacity for groups, event management or messaging of more than 140 characters.

5. Diaspora.

The young developers behind a new social network project called Disapora got a lot of attention earlier this year, becoming the focus of attention of the growing mass of people seeking an alternative to Facebook and its (supposedly) cavalier attitude to privacy. The four young men are smart and idealistic, and Diaspora sounds like a great idea. But I strongly suspect it's doomed to fail.

Diaspora's founding principle is that no central hub should be required for people to communicate with each other. They're proposing that users have their own node,' installed on their own server, which can channel information from different web services to their contacts. It's a good idea. But it's impossible to think that a service that requires users to install software on their own server will ever reach beyond a narrow tech audience.

Of course, a central site could offer hosted nodes,' much as WordPress.com offers the experience of a self-hosted WordPress installation on a central site. But nothing I've heard from Diaspora so far suggests this service will allow for the kind of richly multimedia and easy-to-set-up profiles and feeds this service will need to take off.

To provide a really good experience, I think this has to be a centralised, hosted service from the off. That does make it reliant on one company, but because the information being shared isn't stored on the service just on whichever external service the user adds it to there's minimal risk of data being lost if the service disappeared overnight.

It's also not clear how focused Diaspora are on easy aggregation from other web services. Right now their focus seems to be on building an internal structure for sharing messages, links etc. And, Diaspora's system appears to be based on symmetrical' relationships that is, user A and user B have to agree to friend' each other to see each other's content. This new service should be based around asymmetrical' relationships, as used by Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr and most Web 2.0 services, where following' someone's content doesn't require them to follow' you back.

So far, Diaspora seems to be intended as an alternative to Facebook, a tool for messaging and content sharing, for the tech-savvy not unlike a decentralised Pownce. Good luck to them, but it's not what most users are looking for.

6. VIRB.

Possibly the most worrying precedent for this new social network would be VIRB. The little-known social network was launched in 2007, aimed at attracting web-savvy creative types the same types who were fleeing MySpace in droves, but weren't attracted to Facebook. It offered aggregation of external services, messaging, groups, attractive profiles with design tools, and many of the things this new social network all to have.

And it failed. Earlier this year, VIRB announced a total change of strategy, shifting from a social-network model to one of simple website provider. Users were invited to convert their profiles to standalone sites, and pay a monthly fee for them. The direction Virb was headed, just wasn't working for anyone especially our users, explained founder Brad Smith in a blog post. It was time we made an epic course correction, allowing our product to regain pertinence. Virb is not an answer to those seeking a Facebook alternative or a better-looking MySpace.

Pretty depressing stuff. But though VIRB got a lot right the importance of allowing users to style their profiles without letting them make them hideously ugly, for example it just didn't offer a rich enough experience to grow. Setting up a profile was pretty laborious, with profile information needing to be entered and decisions required about layout and theme. Aggregation was basic, with only a FriendFeed-style text-based list of aggregated material and no photo or video previews. And while you could aggregate all your services to your profile page, only certain services Flickr, blogs and Twitter, if I recall correctly could be properly integrated with the site so your contacts were aware when you'd imported new material.

Above all, what all these services have in common is that they require users to rebuild their contact lists on the site. The most crucial aspect of this new service should be that you don't have to do that each time you import a service, you import your contacts from that service, and the service helps with connecting the various profiles of a contact into a single presence in my network, even if that person hasn't signed up for the site themselves yet. This means people could begin using the site every day as their social media hub even before their contacts join, preventing the user-inertia problem that's killed so many aspiring social networks at birth.

If you build it, they will come

Tech is a business, and services aren't built simply because some blogger sees the need for them. But I'm convinced that a service such as this could be a viable concern. If getting started was easy enough, it could quickly become the chief place users go to check their contact's online activity outside Facebook giving decent potential for advertising without extravagant costs for servers, R&D, staff, etc.

Who'll build it? Well, in the industry of a thousand startups, it could be anyone. But here's an idea. Every major, independently-owned social publishing platform Twitter, Tumblr, Vimeo, FourSquare is threatened by the growing domination of Facebook and by the trend towards sharing with real-life contacts replacing social publishing. So why not work together? Each are small companies, but each could spare a little engineering time. Smaller companies still, who could stand to gain most from being plugged in to a service with built-in users, could contribute smaller amounts of time. These businesses could help the new startup get funding (and, of course, benefit from the ultimate advertising revenue). Users, eager to have a central home for their online identities and just one site to check in the morning after email and Facebook could make donations to help get things started, much as they did earlier this year for Diaspora.

Am I crazy? Probably. But you only need to look at the flurry of press surrounding the threat Facebook's new Places feature poses to Foursquare to see that the community of independent social services need to do something to combat the ever-growing Zuckerberg empire. By banding together maintaining their separate communities but adding a service that lets their users meet each other and subscribe to each other's additional services they can carve out a strong second network of social activity on the web to rival Facebook's. A user who thinks they need to check their Flickr, Twitter and Tumblr contacts' activity is likely to give up, not bother and just check Facebook.

Above all, users need this. What Facebook has done in helping people use the web to enhance their offline lives is admirable and valuable. But, if the social web is to fulfil its true potential as a place for people to connect and grow, to share interests and experiences, and to be creative, there must be a strong network of places where users can publish and network without using their real names.

Eric Schmidt of Google made headlines earlier this week when he predicted that, in the future, it would be routine for young adults to change their names to disassociate themselves from all the embarrassing youthful indiscretions recorded online in photos, videos and status updates. But you don't have these problems if people are free to use a pseudonym. And as well as reducing privacy problems, you get more interesting content put online. There's ample evidence that when forced to use their real name online, people are far more circumspect about how they interact and what they publish.

The web helps us do many important, everyday things shopping, organising events, sharing memories. These are great, and important. But much of the most exciting potential of the web lies in exploring interests and communities and building identities outside the boundaries of our real' lives. For that area of the web to survive and thrive, we need a new, public social network where people aren't restricted. I don't know what the name should be, but I can think of a slogan Be yourself.

Just a few hours ago, the superstar rapper let loose a barrage of 70+ tweets, starting with a declaration of his love for Twitter and ending with an apology to Taylor Swift. His apology refers to last year's VMA incident, where West rushed onto the stage and interrupted Swift's acceptance speech for best female music video. The incident has since turned into an Internet meme. More importantly, the 33-year-old rapper was vilified by music fans, the media and even President Obama.

Yes, the rapper apologized on national TV and on his blog, but he has never been able to shake off the 2009 VMA incident, and if his Twitter is any indication, there are a lot of people that (understandably) won't let him live it down.

For whatever reason though, Kanye West decided today to make his case, and he used his brand new Twitter account to do it. Whether you think his stream of consciousness is the rambling of a broken man or his most heartfelt attempt yet to put the incident behind him, you can't help but appreciate the rawness of each tweet. There is no filter or middle man between his thoughts and the rest of the world.

I won't repost all of his tweets (check out his Twitter stream if you want the whole thing), but I do want to highlight a few of the tweets that encapsulate the raw nature of today's barrage of tweets:

- Had to let employees go for the first time I felt the impact of my brash actions I felt the recession from an ownership side

- How deep is the scar I bled hard.. cancelled tour with the number one pop star in the world closed the doors of my clothing office

- That's when you realize perception is reality. I've been straying from this subject on twitter but I have to give it to you guys raw now.

- If you google Asshole my face may very well pop up

- I'm the guy who at one point could perform the Justin Timberlake on stage and everyone would be sooo happy that I was there

- When I woke up from the crazy nightmare I looked in the mirror and said GROW UP KANYE I take the responsibility for my actions

- These tweets have no manager, no publicist , no grammar checking this is raw

- It starts with this

- I'm sorry Taylor.

Communication Revolution

A few months ago, we would never have heard something like this from Kanye West. That's because his publicity team would never have let him say these things. Then he got a Twitter account, giving him an opportunity to talk to his fans and to the rest of the world directly, without anybody to say no.

Social media has changed the way we communicate. Information has never traveled faster. It has created frank and transparent conversations. It has given people a chance to directly express their thoughts to the rest of the world in a mater of seconds.

For years we've chronicled the amazing impact Twitter has had on our world here on Mashable. In 2008, a Berkeley grad student used Twitter to tell his friends he was arrested in Egypt, leading to a mobilization effort that got him out of jail. Last year, Twitter rose to prominence for its role in the Iran Election crisis. Earlier this year, Twitter showed us the devastation in Haiti in a way that has never been possible.

These are just a few examples of what Twitter has done. While Kanye West's tweets don't come close to the level of importance these events carried, his raw line of communication is another shining example of just how Twitter has changed our lives. Information has been set free.

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You'll forgive me for sneaking in some pop culture in the mix because it's Saturday and all, right? Rapper Kanye West is having a bit of a moment on Twitter the past few hours, apologizing for the Taylor Swift incident from last year when he stormed the stage during the artist's acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards to complain that Beyonce should have won the Best Female Video award instead.

But not just that. He's also making it crystal clear, as others have before him admittedly, that Twitter has changed the way celebrities interact with their fans and anyone who's interested in what they have to say really. And slamming mainstream media in the process.

So reading about four pages of tweets by West, there are some interesting gems to be found in there besides his apologies to Swift and his complaints about the massive backlash he's received since then, receiving death threats and getting booed off stage and so on.

This blog reposted the long rant (easier to read).

Here's part of his rant against mainstream media, and his love for Twitter:

Man I love Twitter I've always been at the mercy of the press but no more The media tried to demonize me

She deserves the apology more than anyone. Thank you Biz Stone and Evan Williams for creating a platform where we can communicate directly

and

These aren't regular tweets this is stream of consciousness I want you guys to know and feel where my head is at

These tweets have no manager, no publicist , no grammar checking this is raw

True enough, the rapper could have written a thoughtful blog post (or a letter) on the matter and it would have been picked up by followers and celeb watchers just the same, but the beauty of Twitter is that it enables, encourages even, people to be more concise and direct.

You can consider his tweets insane rambling by a celebrity who is up late and possibly drunk, or as some lame way of getting attention (if it is, I'll take this over most publicity stunts I've seen over the past three decades).

Or you can look at it this way: 5 years ago, how were fans able to get this much insight into their idols' thoughts and feelings? Answer is they didn't.

Twitter announced yesterday that they now have more than 145 million registered users. That's a lot, but how much is Twitter actually being used? Turns out that there's more activity on Twitter than ever before, and it keeps increasing.

Twitter processed 2.64 billion tweets this August, an increase of 33% over May. Not a bad increase over just a summer. In August, an average of 85 million tweets passed through Twitter every day.

And if you look at the whole year so far, the increase is even more impressive. Activity on Twitter has already more than doubled this year (August had 115% more tweets than January).

Note that the above chart shows the total activity on Twitter, both Twitter.com and tweets sent via Twitter's API, i.e. from all Twitter apps.

Last year was a breakout year for the service, and that trend seems to continue.

It's a luxury problem, but this rapid growth of course puts a lot of strain in Twitter's infrastructure (they've had their hands full). No wonder Twitter is moving into its own custom data center this fall.

About the data: If you're curious how we calculated the number of tweets per month, check out this post, the methodology is listed at the bottom.

Is the term social media hurting strategic communicators in the digital space?

Before you tell me I'm crazy, stop and think for a second.

Plenty of people have wondered about the term before (Google social media term and you'll find a 2007 post from Jeremiah Owyang on the topic) but I'm thinking of this from a slightly different angle.

Is the term social media leading clients to take the wrong approach to their online activities?

How many companies have you encountered taking a scorched earth approach to their social media activities? I'm not naive enough to think that two words would lead us to a silver bullet situation, but do these two current words adversely affect some companies' approaches to online interaction? I'm not suggesting we change the term I think it's here to stay in the short- to mid-term, at least. However, perhaps identifying challenges can help us on the agency side to address them.

Consider the term for a second.

Social media.

What image does that conjure up? Videos with comments enabled? Text with sharing features enabled? Tweets of links to stories about you? These might fall into a definition of social media, but they're not really two-way not truly. What's more, they do seem to embody the approach taken to social media by many organizations public and private alike.

Suppose for a moment we drop social media as a term and adopt a much more simplified online networking. We'd be using a term that, inherently, implies two important characteristics:

• Two-way interaction. Networking is, at its core, a two-way interaction. You need to speak and to listen. Networking doesn't involve broadcasting.
• Long-term. Networking involves relationships. Relationships take time to nurture.

Nothing rocket-science based here, right? This is stuff that's preached all the time. However, if it's that easy, why are companies still engaging in marketing activities that essentially consist of one-shot, one-way fire-and-forget promotions that do nothing to shift the needle in the long term?

Back to online networking. What changes if we use that term?

• YouTube: Videos with comments becomes Engaging people in a story, or enabling other people to tell your story as they see it
• Blog: Text with sharing becomes a genuine conversation, where you solicit and respond to feedback from your stakeholders
• Twitter: Tweets of links to stories about you becomes an opportunity to engage in real-time conversations with people

Changing a term won't solve a widespread problem, and there's much more to the issue than just a simple term (inter-discipline differences, for one, are another huge gap). I'm not suggesting we drop social media for online networking. However, if shifting the way you think can help even slightly to put you in the shoes of the people you work with, and that can help you to identify problems and solutions, then surely it's worth it.

What do you think?

There's a saying, technology changes, people don't. Yet, when we consider the impact of technology on our daily lives, some very interesting observations surface

A pen now feels awkward to hold and as such, our penmanship is deteriorating.

It's now common to sit at a dinner table with family and friends where some are actively communicating with others, listening to music or gaming via mobile devices.

We are redefining the perception, boundaries and thresholds for privacy as we once knew it.

The future of the art of long form writing is at risk of becoming shrtr and less formal #forrealz.

For some, technology encourages immersion and introverted experiences in public settings, reducing the natural human dynamics of engagement. To counter, coffee shops and cafes are becoming laptop and WIFI free.

For others, social networking online is converting introverts into digital extroverts, rewarding participation with confidence boosting actions such as responses, likes, friend requests, shares, etc.

To connect with other human beings now in the future is not only changing, it's evoking a sense of Digital Darwinism. The mantra of Engage or Die! was born to make the point that what was, what is, and what will be are no longer linked to all we know and instead, demand an expanded perspective.

Social networking is pervading led by the clicking, connecting, and sharing of hundreds of millions of Internet denizens around the world. While Facebook is the digital equivalent to your online residence, Twitter is reflective of the me in social media. Twitter is not a social network, it is a series of disparately connected personalities linked through friendship, admiration, education, and context. How we embrace and invest our persona in this paradigm says more about the future of digital culture and ourselves than we might imagine.

With the introduction of Apple's new pseudo social network Ping, conversations lit up Twitter ultimately sparking a trending topic, we don't need another social network. Indeed, there is a prevailing sense of social media fatigue (aka social network fatigue (SNF). But as good friend Sarah Lacy recently said, If You've Got Social Media Fatigue, UR DOIN IT WRONG.

At a recent Girls in Tech event hosted at KickLabs in San Francisco, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams inferred that Twitter is actually a cure for information overload. Williams likens Twitter to a recipient-driven medium where people who have something to say can now find and reach the right audience, That's a much better situation for both the publisher of the information and the consumer of it. So recipient-based media can scale better in a world of infinite information.

@Ev also discussed the future of relevance and how Tweets will adapt to your interests. He compared the experience to Google, Google is very good at I need to solve a problem, I need to buy something, I need an answer. Twitter is more I'm interested in many things, I don't know what I need to know.' What we need to get much better at is scaling that system so you don't have to pay attention to everything, but you don't miss the stuff you care about.

The State of the Evolving Egosystem

Over the years, measuring the impact of Twitter as a medium, proved difficult and elusive as details and numbers did not emanate from Twitter itself. Third-parties using APIs helped us paint the landscape to visualize the tremendous proliferation of what started as a microblog and later evolved into an intricate system for sharing, discovering, and voicing our inner monologue. To help, Williams posted details, stats, and direction to the Twitter blog. As a result, some very interesting usage patterns and adoption rates were revealed.

First, Twitter boasts over 145 million registered users. In April at its inaugural Chirp conference, Twitter announced 105 million users tweeting upwards of 65 million times a day. The number of active accounts however, remains unknown. As Twitter better explains its mission, purpose, and value system to everyday consumers, the number will only continue to grow.

Evan Williams also shared a glimpse of the Twitter ecosystem and how individuals connect to one another. If the Web is Dead Twitter users have yet to hear the news. Twitter.com and m.twitter.com account for 92% of all access and communica