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

After many visits to the Disqus forums and multiple installations, I finally have Disqus fully and more importantly, correctly integrated within my blog. Their support staff was friendly, but they did have lacking response times. Normally, I wouldn’t think a 24hr response time to answer a support ticket was all that bad, but in the times of Twitter and the need to get blog comments up and running, 24 hours is almost too long to wait.

However, despite the installation problems and rocky support, I’ve decided to use Disqus over Intense Debate because of a few key features.

The first of these features is the Facebook and Twitter integration. Do you have a Facebook and/or Twitter account? Good. You can now use them to log in and use them to post comments. Your picture will automatically show up and you wont have to enter your name, email and website information every time you want to leave a comment. Don’t have an account with either of those services? No prob. Just keep doing the same thing you’ve been doing.

I also enabled the Seesmic video response option for you to use if you so choose. It’s a cool feature and adds a personal feel to comments and seriously if you’re not in the mood to type, now you don’t have to. If you don’t have a Seesmic account you can click here to sign up.

Do you use Disqus on your blog? Like it? Hate it? Let me know by commenting below. If you feel a little daring, leave me a video response. I’d love to see all your pretty faces!

The best thing to gather from this information is driving traffic to your new site isn’t impossible. As of right now, Twitter is my highest referring source with Google lagging behind.  I’m excited to see what these numbers will look like by the end of next month.

These statistics are from May 2009.

Remember to find other sources of traffic other than search engines to grow your reader base. If something doesn’t work, don’t scrap the entire site. Do some testing and make some changes. Eventually, you’ll find the right formula.

I’m writing this post based on my reaction to an article I was directed to on CNN Money titled “The End of Blogging.” With that said…

Hell no blogging isn’t dead.

Blogging, in my opinion, is a constant of the internet — much like message boards. Before blogging was ever concieved as a term, there were online journals or online diaries or web logs. These ‘web logs’, as they were called back then, recieved a lot of flak, much of the same flak Twitter is receiving now. The most common complaints were, “I don’t want to know what’s going on in your life” or “Why would I want to know what HE/SHE has to say?”

Fast forward to now.

Technorati indexes over 133 million blogs and tracks almost one million blog posts every 24 hours. With those stats, it’s safe to say blogging isn’t dead.

As I said, blogging is one of those constants just like message boards. Speaking of message boards, the ex-COO of MySpace just recieved 10 million in funding for his new project. TechCrunch reports:

What do we know so far about the company? Not a whole lot except that Redpoint and August are rumored to be “very excited” about it. The company is supposedly targeting the message board/Internet forum space with technology that aggregates content and serves advertising against it. Real time search may be part of the business plan as well.

Well look at that. A message board startup getting crazy funding. I rest my case.

Do you have insight I’ve over looked or do you have something extra to add? Please comment below.

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.

Courtasy of @jakrose and Mashable I was made aware of a new iPhone audio app for Twitter.

Enter TweetMic. TweetMic satisfies the need for audio blogging through Twitter over your iPhone and the entire process is super simple. Press record. Talk. Tap record again. Add a cool message. Click Publish to Twitter. Wash rinse repeat.

Furthermore, the coolest thing about this already amazing app is that TweetMic doesn’t limit your record time. That means as long as your iPhone has enough memory to hold the file, you can keep recording. Everything is stored on their servers so there’s no need to worry about hosting costs.

Just think about the limitless possibilites of this application. Interviewing someone? Hit record, place the phone on the table and talk away. Driving and don’t want to mess around with typing in TwitterFon or Tweetie? No prob. Record away. And oh…you’re not limited to 140 characters.

Here’s what @LoriRedding had to say about it:

Currently the app is listed for only $.99. Go buy it. Seriously. Now, leave me a comment and let me know how you like it. Listen to the quality below.

TweetMic Test

I’ve been hearing a lot of talk recently on people being confused over how to use Twitter and what Twitters real applications are. All I hear is that people don’t want to know if you’re going to the bathroom or what you ate for lunch. I’m hear to tell you that’s completely false.

Twitter serves more of a purpose than just informing people where you’re at or what you’re doing. It’s a constant stream of information. Not only that, but it’s a constant stream of information that’s updated in real-time.

If the following video doesn’t answer all your questions, please feel free to comment below.

**UPDATE** Yes i know I say ampersand (&) instead of the at symbol (@). It should be the at symbol (@). My bad.