Twitter on TIME Magazine Cover

"I've written this week's TIME cover story about how Twitter is changing the way we live--and showing us the future of innovation. Buy a copy!"

I think it's significant that TIME chose iPhone as the Twitter platform. If you don't see strong relationships between Twitter and mobile, put it this way, you don't blog on your mobile but you tweet on your mobile. And you know why.

By the way, Oprah has been on Twitter for a while too. (Visit Oprah's Twitter)

"It's entirely possible that three or four years from now, we'll have moved on. But the key elements of the Twitter platform will persevere. Every major channel of information will be Twitterfied."

"Twitterfy" is another new English verb.

"Although Twitter trails over Web giants, its explosive growth over the past year means it could soon catch up"

1,298% growth? I blinked and squinted at the number (literally).

"Websites that once saw their traffic dominated by Google search queries are seeing a growing number of new visitors coming from "passed links" at social networks like Twitter and Facebook. This is what the naysayers fail to understand:it's just as easy to use Twitter to spread the word about a brilliant 10,000-word New Yorkers article as it is to spread the word about your Lucky Charms habit."

"In short, the most facinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it".

P.S. I took all of the photos at Borders and had a second thought and bought a copy.:P

Read more...

How Twitter will change the way we live.

Twitter vs. SMS

We all know that Twitter and SMS were born for different reasons. Twitter came to us to provide a platform for microblogging while SMS was invented to let you send messages to your friends.

This title is a bit misleading because I am not trying to compare these two services(technologies) in terms of pros and cons or argue which one is better when it comes to mobile marketing. But I want to point out that there was a time when people would think mobile marketing equals SMS marketing, and one thing is obvious now: we don't live in that era any longer.

Other forms of messaging services such as Twitter are becoming more and more available on mobile phones thanks to the rapid growth of mobile internet and popularity of touch screen smart phones such as the iPhone.

My question is: Is SMS marketing actually competing with Twitter business now? or Are Twitter and other forms of HTTP-based messaging services going to revolutionize everything in mobile marketing in the near future?

Well, I have no idea. I could only come up with some silly example like Barack Obama might be paying a large sum of money for SMS services to reach out to people if there was no Twitter and his 768,759 followers on it.

So, I did some research on Google with "Twitter vs. SMS" keywords and found some interesting blogs which I want to share:

Mellow Machines

The author has an interesting opinion. "Twitter as a service might not compete with SMS today in terms of reach and revenue. It might not replace SMS, but I think time and momentum are on the side of HTTP-based messaging cracking into aspects of the SMS market eventually."

He also shares a very interesting experience he had at iPhone developer conference (360|iDev) where Twitter was the central medium for attendee networking and meta-conversations during sessions.

I agree to his idea that HTTP-based messaging is becoming more and more mainstream. So the question is how we're going to embrace services like Twitter to our advantage so that we can re-sell its services to our clients as added value to our services.

Since I am a tech guy, this is the first thing that came to my mind "why not add twitter as additional entry source?" We currently have 3 different entry sources, SMS, Web and email. So why not twit? For example, we can use our moderation service to filter out offensive Twitter messages before sending out to big screens. Well, it doesn't sound that compelling, but I am just brainstorming.

Finally, watch this funny video too good to miss (also found on the same blog).

Tweets: for fun or for business?

Despite what some people think, tweeting isn't just for fun and lofty status updates. A recent survey of Twitter users revealed that some 56% of people tweeting do so for business-related purposes. 

Twitter has become a forum for social-media gurus and marketers where they can freely interact and exchange ideas, and provides a place where businesses can directly communicate with their consumers.

Thousands of people are using twitter for things like gathering and sharing information, getting inspiration, or finding out the insider scoop on their favorite brand. 

The statistics were revealed at Gravity Summit on Social Media at UCLA Wednesday by social-media expert Rodney Rumford, who called Twitter "a goldmine." For more information, read the article here.

TwitterBerry.

TwitterBerry is awesome. Created by Orangatame Software, TwitterBerry is a native mobile app for posting updates to Twitter. It works over the data network, so it doesn't require SMS.

Supported devices:

• BlacKBerry Storm (garbage)
• BlacKBerry Bold  
• BlackBerry Curve (8300, 8310, 8320, 8330) Series
• BlackBerry 8800 Series
• BlackBerry Pearl (8100, 8110, 8120, 8130, 8220, 8230) Series
• BlackBerry 8700 Series
• BlackBerry 7130 Series
• BlackBerry 7100 Series
• BlackBerry 7200 Series
• BlackBerry 7520