Nano2Sol by Marc Boucher

I joined Twitter on May 8, 2007 on the advice of my business partner at @SpaceRef @KeithCowing. Not too long after that we participated in a NASA conference at NASA Ames on Participatory Exploration where @Biz (Stone) explained to the audience what Twitter was and it’s participatory nature. Thinking on it now it’s kind of ironic that Biz was giving us the talk as we were using Jaiku, a competitor then, for the conference. Jaiku is now pretty much history after Google bought it and recently decided to stop working on it and make it open source.

After listening to Biz that day I still wasn’t convinced that Twitter was useful and would survive. In fact I sent an email to my contacts on LinkedIn asking what they thought of Twitter. I got back a variety of answers including; What’s Twitter? To how essential some people thought Twitter would become to their business. So I decided to keep using Twitter and subsequently created over 30 new Twitter accounts for various entities I was involved in including @GeneRef, @OnOrbit, @SpaceMeme, @HMP, @Hyperix etc. I’m glad I created all those accounts because now I’m starting to get some real tangible benefit from being on Twitter and being a part of the conversation. If you don’t know what Twitter is and need a quick simple primer than this recent article in the Vancouver Sun is excellent.

But what’s in it for Twitter? What’s the business model? (2) I don’t think Twitter’s not going to make money through advertising. The community could revolt and move to another platform. And if they wanted to place advertising on the service they would have, should have done so already. Twitter’s not going to make money charging a fee to access the service. That would just make their audience flee and kill the exponential growth they are now experiencing. So how is Twitter going to make money? In my humble opinion the basis of how they are going to make money all started when they made their application programming interface (API) available.

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Unless Twitter has released how many users they have and I’m not aware of it, then how many users they have is really up for speculation. And there is a lot of speculation going on.

I’ve read that Twitterholic has guestimated about 12 million users while Twitdir has just over a million in their database. If you do as I did and accidentally click the Google search this site button from the Google Firefox toolbar while on your Twitter home page, you’ll get back 3,770,000 users.

I did some simple math based on when I joined and when a friend joined. He joined just about six months later than me. I joined in early May of 2007 and he joined in early December of 2007. According to Twitterholic I was user 5,870,022 while my friend was user 11,197,712. So in the six months between us there about 5 1/2 million new user accounts. That was in December of 2007, and we’re now just about May of 2008. So how many news users have they added in the last 5 months? Well you would have to figure at least another 5 million bringing the total to around 16 million. But remember this is based on Twitterholic data. How accurate is it really? I don’t know. And how does this mesh with the 3.7 million accounts Google has?

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I have a secret, for the last couple months as a side project we’ve been crawling Twitter with the idea to create a small niche vertical search of tweets. But the more I come across cools applications like Twitterholic, Tweetstats, Twubble, Tweet Scan, twemes etc. the more I think we can do more with our data. So my question to anyone caring to answer is; If you had a rockin application you’d like to see built for Twitter, what would it be?

You never know, we might just build it.

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Say you’re at a conference and you wanted to track all the Twitter chatter on the event, well the highly recommended blog ReadWriteWeb has a Twitter howto worth reading and is timely with South by Southwest (SXSW) interactive conference getting underway today.

“In talking to people who are going to SXSW for the first time and who haven’t used Twitter very much, I realized that it could be helpful to create an easy way for them to follow the messages of the defacto leaders of the Twitter community. Enter the Tweeterboard 100, an algorithm driven leaderboard of the most talked-about Twitter users.”

Now suppose you want to filter out the same chatter? Just because you’re friends and contacts are at an event doesn’t mean you’re interested in it. There are several filter services out there but the ReadWriteWeb howto deals with FeedRinse.

“Take that RSS URL and go to FeedRinse. It’s one of 6 ways we recently profiled to filter an RSS feed, but it’s the easiest to filter things out with. You’ll need to quickly create an account there, then add your Twitter feed. Once it’s imported then you can “create new rules” (see below) and block anything with SXSW in it.”

With an API that is simple to use Twitter is fast becoming an every day need to have tool.