With this comes questions:

“How do I get started?”

“Who do I follow?”

“You get twitter on your iPhone?… how?”

I’ve always been a strong proponent of the idea that twitter is what you make it: a resource for feedback, a place to quickly see what your close friends are up to, or a way to keep your finger on the underlying pulse of nearly everything. So rather than fill this site up with my ramblings about how to do everything from change your background to send a direct message, I decided that it would be best to provide a repository of links to the best blog posts and news articles to help new users decide what they want to use twitter for and find people they might be interested in following. The huge lists of “100+ Posts About Twitter” and the ones like it are overwhelming, so I want to keep this to a short list of only the best resources I can find… I wont find them all, so send me your suggestions.

After you have been on twitter for a little while, there are quite a few interesting tools out there to get some insight into your own twitter stats or to use the site from nearly every electronic device in existence, so I’ve included a couple lists to help find those as well.

Last but not least, I’ve created a feed of all the tweets coming in from users asking for help on twitter in the hopes that some more advanced twitter users will shoot these new users a message either giving them some advice or maybe pointing them in the direction of the blog post or how-to guide that helped them really ‘get’ twitter in the first place.

Take a look around and let me know if you think anything is missing… and if a link here really helps you understand twitter or helps you find that ‘one app’ that you have been searching for, let me know that too.

I’m currently working on version 2.0 which will incorporate community submissions and rating separate from those which I select to feature…

Enjoy.

-Andrew

(@acafourek)

“What a day . Wed, 08 Oct 2008″

At first I thought this was just some random thing but then I realized that a lot of the accounts sounded pretty spam-focused and it hit me: Twitter Spam (‘Twam’?) is now legit. Lots of people have questioned the validity of twitter spam in the past because spammers could not create a long-term benefit from it. They could create as many fake profiles as they want but they will never get anything more than maybe an initial traffic spike generated by people getting “You have been followed by ____” emails and checking out their new contact. After that, they would just be stuck with a profile and its 4 followers.

But now, someone came up with the rather brilliant idea of harnessing groups of these accounts and sending out identical messages in order to show up as a trending topic. (see screenshot below) It is not a perfect model but it still has the potential to pull in a few thousand views from people checking out the pulse of twitter. Now spammers can send out a thousand updates with a specific keyword and either an ad message or a link, resulting in either a few thousand clicks or a few thousand impressions for each mass tweeting.

I am not convinced of the long-term viability of such a model, but it seems like it could work for now since the trending topics feature is just an automated data aggregator. Its also pretty impressive that before twitter itself has developed a solid revenue or monetization scheme, spammers have already figured out how to pull in views, clicks and impressions by simply using the tools twitter already provides.

I wonder how long it will take for users to overrun the ‘trending topics’ feature with advertising: either spammers or real users collaborating to manipulate the network.

UPDATE: I just realized that it could just be a twitter glitch displaying the timestamp for tweets, but the volume then would be much higher.  Also, if you now go to the trending topics page for “What a day . Wed, 08 Oct 2008″, and then click to view any of the tweets listed there, you get twitter’s 404 error.  Very odd… either twitter is deleting these or some spmamer got a hold of a lot of people’s login credentials, tweeted on their behalf and then the user deleted the fake tweet.  Thoughts?

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I came across this on this French site. the original post is:

Pour comprendre le microblogging (phénomène Twitter), la dynamique des sites sociaux, le user-generated content, les objets sociaux, et le futur de l’interaction Web + Mobile, voici le slideshare qu’il vous faut !

Créé par le fondateur de Jaiku, une plateforme de microblogging comme Twitter, cette présentation éclaire bien des choses.

Bonne lecture.

French => English translation (done by myself, so if you identify any errors, please let me know)

To understand microblogging (phenomenon Twitter), the dynamics of social sites, user-generated content, social objects, and the future of Web+Mobile interaction, here is le slideshare that you need!

Created by the founder of Jaiku, a microblogging platform like Twitter, this presentation explains many things.

Enjoy!