Remember that crazy red headed guy from Mythbusters, Adam Savage? Yeah, the guy with the goatee and thick black frame glasses. Well, he made the news recently and not because of some crazy debunked myth. Adam racked up an $11,000 cell phone bill while in Canada.

Apparently the problem was with the USB modem plugged into his laptop. The wireless plan he had subscribed to was only suitable for the U.S. not Canada. AT&T claimed that he accumulated 9 million kilobytes in uploaded/downloaded data. For those of you who can’t do the computation, that’s 9 freaking GIGS!

Being fed up with charges, he did what any faithful Twitter user would. He complained to the masses. Within the day AT&T became a trending Twitter topic and soon the chatter was too great for AT&T to ignore. Needless to say, AT&T dealt with Adam’s charges to his satisfaction.

Cool huh?

Now you can add this to your book as another useful way to use Twitter. As for me, I’m just going to try to NOT rack up an $11,000 cell phone bill.

Photo cred: noelzialee

For those of you who don’t know, Squarespace is, as noted straight from their website, “A fully hosted, completely managed environment for creating and maintaining a website, blog or portfolio.” So then, what’s the problem?

They’ve generated quite the controversy lately as noted by the tweet below.

Why all the hate? Well, people are pissed because Squarespace found a way to game the Twitter system. They created a simple contest, found a product people lusted after, and the rest is history. Now everyone’s Tweeting the Squarespace hashtag. A relatively unknown company has made a huge splash to millions of people for just under $6000 or 30 $199 apple gift cards.

That’s just brilliant in my book.

I think people should be a little less pissed off and a little more open to learning from the success of others. Squarespace took what they knew about Twitter, followed the rules, and made an irresistible contest. Good for them.

I’m interested in their traffic numbers. Obviously the contest was to increase name recognition, but does that correlate to increased traffic or better yet increased sales?

What do you think about Squarespace? Are they in the right or the wrong? Comment below and let me know! Hey that rhymed…

Photo cred: piez

I was the first one at work to sign up and begin using Twitter. Back in the day, ahem, six months ago, I was a huge advocate touting Twitters innovative and simple features. I’d tell everyone I knew to sign up, but few listened.

Out of the handful that hopped on the Twitter bandwagon, many sent out one tweet “checking out this Twitter thing” and that was that. The rest did something completely different.

The others began following people, but never joined the conversation. They leave TweetDeck open religiously, but never say a word. Weird? Yes. Wrong? No.

Twitter, like most things, is whatever you make of it. I don’t think there’s a wrong way to use the microblogging tool – other than spamming the shit out of it.

What type of Twitterer are you?

Photo cred: 42dreams

No I’m not talking about some Hindu belief  - I don’t believe in that stuff. Rather, I’m talking about an extremely useful, third party Twitter app.

Ultimately, Twitter Karma scans everyone linked to your Twitter account then displays everyone in an easy to view grid. From here, you can see everyone you’re following and if they’re following you back. Furthermore, Twitter Karma lets you batch follow or remove people.

Seeing who follows you back makes a lot of sense when putting that data against people who actually join your conversation. Plus it makes your Twitter spring cleaning so much easier.

Photo cred: vramak

Three weeks ago, David Martin, Vice President of Nielsen Online, wrote a blog post titled “Twitter Quitters Post Roadblock to Long-Term Growth” which positioned Twitter as a fleeting fad that can’t retain users. David wrote:

Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent. For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention.

What are these retention rates based on? Unique page views? It must be because David talks about users returning to the site. Well, I don’t know what your Tweeting habits are, but mine definitely don’t include visiting Twitter.com. I prefer to use the service through third party applications — TweetDeck is my application of choice — and I tweet daily.

Judging from this report, only 31.99% of users use the web as their Twitter client — EVERYTHING ELSE is either third party apps or services. Does the Nielsen report factor in these users? For a service like Twitter I think unique page views is the worst identifier of unique traffic. I mean one user could visit Twitter.com with 3 different computers from 10 different locations…not to mention the visits from a mobile phone.

David ends his post with this:

Twitter has enjoyed a nice ride over the last few months, but it will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty. Frankly, if Oprah can’t accomplish that, I’m not sure who can.

Seriously? Oprah? She doesn’t even use the service correctly. Most celebrites don’t for that matter. I can only think of a select few off the top of my head who actually @reply and follow people back. If Oprah isn’t showing her users the right way to use Twitter, of course they’re going to be turned off. They’re not being given the opportunity to see Twitter’s full value.

What are your thoughts? Do you think the Nielsen ratings are correct or skewed beyond belief? Is Twitter just a fad or is it the beginning of a new way of communicating online? Please comment below.

When starting a new business venture or heading any new project for that matter, it’s crucial to form a brainstorming group to think about the future of your business, product, or project.

Where will you be a year from now? Five years from now? Where do you WANT to be five years from now? How will people use your product five years from now?

These are all important questions to answer if you want your final product to be a sustainable throughout the future. Lucky for us, the founders of Twitter did just that.

Little did I know that the 140 characters Twitter lets us type isn’t just some arbitrary number. The 140 character limit is a well thought out value that actually centers around SMS messaging.

At its inception, text messaging was set at 160 characters. Twitter used this knowledge and applied some forward thinking and decided sending tweets via SMS messaging would be a necessity within the near future. So what did they do? They hacked off 20 characters to make room for the user names and then made text messaging a viable way to send tweets. You go Twitter, you go!