The Twitter War: Men vs Women – Who’s Winning?

In a recent research study conducted by the Harvard Business School (May 2009), it seems user activity on Twitter doesn’t follow normal social networking trends. In fact, the men seem to be winning the Twitter war!

Surprisingly, the average Twitter user contributes very little. The median number of lifetime tweets per user is just one little tweet. How lonely it must be! According to the Harvard study, “This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days”.

Some more interesting facts:

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Twitterrific And Twitpocalypse

For those of you feeling the pain of not having access to Twitterrific for your iPhone, good news is on its way!

The developers of Twitterrific 2.0.1 have just released Twitterrific 2.0.2 to the iPhone App Store, and are awaiting approval.

Hang tight folks, it should be available shortly!

For those of you wanting to figure out what the heck the Twitpocalypse is in the first place, please see Twitpocalypse & Who’s Affected?.

Twitpocalypse & Who’s Affected?

If you’ve used Twitter within the last 12 hours, you no doubt have seen the non-stop “Twitpocalypse” tweets. Next to the Great Facebook Land Grab, it’s definitely a hot topic, affecting thousands of users, and their favorite Twitter applications. So what the heck is “Twitpocalypse”?

In a nutshell, the Twitpocalypse is similar to the Y2K bug. There is a unique identifier that is associated to each tweet sent out over Twitter. It is assigned an incremental number value. That indentifier has now exceeded 2,147,483,647, officially at 2009-06-12 23:52:04 GMT.

What’s so special about this big number? Simply put, it’s the limit of a signed interger; the way data is stored in a computer’s memory. Not surprisingly, it’s a pretty complicated value, with that one sentence I didn’t even manage to explain properly. Those of you wanting the real scoop of what an “integer” is, feel free to visit Wikipedia – Integer.

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China Blocks Twitter, Wordpress, Hotmail & More

As the 20th anniversary of the horrific bloody massacre at Tiananmen Square looms near (June 4), it shouldn’t be any surprise that the government of China has now cut off yet another form of communication. As of approximately 5:00pm (9:00GMT), access to the ever popular social sites Twitter and Flickr have been denied.

In addtional to the blockage of Twitter, there are widespread reports of denials for Hotmail, Live, and Wordpress. Internet users had already lost access to YouTube back in March, after graphic footage of China’s crackdown on protests by Tibetans back in 2008 were posted.

However, the sheer idiocy of blocking blogs boggles my mind. I guess having spent my entire life living in a democracy, I just can’t wrap my brain around being denied anything such as this. Considering blogs are used for so much more than just personal diaries these days, it seems that a very large section of the internet has now turned into no-mans-land for over a billion people.

For those of you in China wanting an easy way to evade the block, Twitter can still be accessed via third-party applications. These include TweetDeck and iTweet, to name a few. Your favorite services such as Hotmail, Flickr, and Live can also be accessed via a proxy.

Food For Thought: Does anyone think this may cut down on the amount of spam coming from China?

What’s All The Twittering About?

The use of Twitter has tremendously grown as people from all walks of life take to it. For those of you new to Twitter, there are a few things you should know before getting started so that your page is effective and useful both for you and your followers.

Firstly, sit down and figure out why it is you want to use Twitter in the first place. Many use Twitter as a marketing or networking tool for their business, while others as a simple add on to their web-sites to send out updates to their customers.

Using Twitter for social networking can be both risky and smart. Be sure that you target the right kind of people to follow and have in turn following you. If you are chatty and just want to talk about your favorite T.V. shows, seek out like-minded people. If your more conservative and want to discuss world and political topics, then essentially, your followers should be the same.

For the everyday blogger, Twitter comes in handy for drawing traffic to your blog. Once you begin building a following, updates will draw in your readers, increasing both your RSS and email subscribers.

Remember though, you only have 140 characters to get your point across, so be sure to use it effectively and wisely! If you need to post a website URL, be sure it’s not a long one, and if it is, there are many URL shortening services you can utilize. These include bit.ly, twurl.cc, or tinyurl.com. People want to read your updates, not a big long link. Make sure you use these free services whenever you can.

If you want to post tips, post descriptions or just say a little something about what you have to offer, keep it brief. Use your words wisely and cleverly to keep your followers interested. Stay on topic to what your niche is about. This keeps your followers attentive and anticipating your next update. There is nothing that drives many tweeters to the unfollow button faster than someone jabbering about everything and anything. Most simply don’t have time to wade through it all in order to find something that MAY be relevant to what they followed you for in the first place. However, be sure that you also dont over do it by spamming. This will chase your followers off quicker then a bucking bronco.

As long as you’re social and not constantly pushing hard sell tweets, your followers will tell their friends about you. Be sure to keep up with your following by saying hello once and awhile, answering direct messages and just by interacting with people. Don’t let it all be about what your trying to sell – build relationships too.