According to Sysomos, just 6% of all tweets are retweeted and these retweets have a very short lifespan. Virtually all retweets happen within the first hour after the original tweet.

If you are looking to get retweeted and nobody picks your tweet up within the first hour, chances are that nobody ever will. Only 1.63% of all retweets happen in the second hour and a minuscule 0.94% in the third hour. The same is true for @replies, too; 97% of all replies happen within the first hour.

interesting. guess this means it better be very relevant, most interesting, and extremely timely if you want something to spread fast like a virus.

Twitter Tools

These tools will help you use Twitter more efficiently so you can make the most of what it has to offer and it doesn’t take up too much of your valuable time.

1. Twhirl. This desktop client helps manage your Twitter experience through such helpful features as URL shortening, new message notifications, image posting, and more.
2. QuoteURL. A great tool for summarizing a Twitter project, this tool will put different Tweets together on one page.
3. TwitPic. This app lets you share photos on Twitter, which can be useful for sharing visuals in class projects.
4. Tweetree. Put your Tweets in context with this app that groups entire conversations together.
5. bit.ly. Shorten URLs so that you use fewer characters when sharing web links with this tool.
6. TwitterNotes. This app makes it simple to keep private notes for yourself among your Tweets.
7. TweetScan. Get Tweets emailed to you based on keywords you select with this tool.
8. TweetDeck. This app allows you to create groups of Tweets to better manage all the information you receive.
9. TweetGrid. Create a customized search dashboard to facilitate your Twitter searches with this tool.
10. TwitterFone. For those on the go, this tool allows you to leave a voice message that will be turned into a Tweet.
11. Tweet Later. For reminders and announcements, use this app to write Tweets that you can schedule for posting in the future.

Finding People in Academia to Follow

If you need help finding professors, students, or other people associated with your field of interest, check out this list.

1. Twitter Professors: 18 People to Follow for a Real Time Education. Mashable’s Lon S. Cohen lists 18 professors you should follow and why.
2. Twitter Grader. This tool will grade your Twitter presence, but it also provides a listing of the Twitter elite in your area, providing an excellent opportunity to find people to follow.
3. Follow Fridays. This popular activity of recommending others to follow provides you an excellent opportunity to find professors, among others.
4. Tweetizen. Use this tool to find groups of others on Twitter with your same interests or start your own group.
5. TwitterLocal. Find local Twitter users based on whichever geographic location you supply. This tool is used in conjunction with Adobe AIR.
6. WeFollow. Add yourself and find others in this user-powered Twitter directory where you can search by hashtags.
7. Twubble. This tool searches your friend graph and selects others you may be interested in following. This is a great way to discover others associated with your school.
8. Colleges & Universities Directory. From Just Tweet It, this directory will connect you with others in academia–both professors and students.
9. Professors :: Twellow. Professors on Twitter can add themselves to this directory. Find out if there is anyone from your school listed here.

Twitter Guide Book – Mashable’s guide to using Twitter contains a lot of basic information very useful to new Twitter users.

The Ultimate Guide for Everything Twitter – An excellent post from Webdesigner Depot that covers a ton of different tips for getting the most out of Twitter.

Twitter: Why It’s So Great And How To Effectively Use It – A guide from Lost Art of Blogging that covers why you should use Twitter and how to get the most from it.

Twitter 101 for Business – A special guide from Twitter to help businesses get the most out of their Twitter usage.

Twitter Guide: How To Do Interesting Things With Twitter – This guide offers tons of great tips and hacks for getting the most from Twitter, including things like having your Flickr images automatically post to Twitter and how to report Twitter spam.

Twitter services enable a wide range of different uses for Twitter. There are too many services to go into in a single post, but here are some of the ones designers and developers might find most useful:

• Remember the Milk – If you use Remember the Milk to track your tasks and to-dos, you can set up a service that lets you add things to your list directly from Twitter. All you have to do is set up your Twitter username in your account and then tweet an @reply to Remember the Milk.
• TwitterFeed – TwitterFeed lets you automatically update Twitter and other social media sites whenever new content is posted on your blog.
• TwitterCal – TwitterCal integrates your Google Calendar with Twitter, letting you add events directly from Twitter.
• TweetCube – TweetCube lets you share files through Twitter.
• TwitPic – TwitPic hosts your photos and posts them to your Twitter account.
• YFrog – YFrog is another photo hosting service for Twitter that automatically posts links to your images to your Twitter feed.
• Tweetree – Tweetree shows you your Twitter feed in tree format, so you can see who’s replying to your tweets in a more user-friendly format.
• Monitter – Monitter lets you track up to three keywords in real-time across Twitter. It can be used to track hashtags, find who’s talking about your brand, and more.
• Grader – This tool from HubSpot grades you Twitter profile, based on your rank among Twitter users, how many followers you have, how many people you follow, and how many updates you’ve published.
• StrawPoll – StrawPoll lets you conduct a poll among your Twitter followers on any topic you want.
• Qwitter – Qwitter emails you whenever someone unfollows you on Twitter.

Some of the most popular clients are:

• TweetDeck is a free app that runs on Adobe Air. It’s also available as an iPhone app.
• Twhilr is another Adobe Air client for both Twitter and other social media services like identi.ca or seesmic.
• Tweetie is a Twitter app for iPhone.
• TwitterFox is a simple Firefox extension for using Twitter.
• Twittelator is another iPhone app for Twitter.
• Twidroid is an Android Twitter app.
• Swift is another Android Twitter app.

LazyTweet

Tweet your question, and add the words ‘lazytweet’ or ‘lazyweb’ in it. The inclusions can be as #lazytweet (or #lazyweb), or a reply @lazytweet (or @lazyweb), or simply include the specific words. LazyTweet scours the Twitter streams and picks them up and makes them available to the users who are following LazyTweet. Putting a question out via LazyTweet also makes it easier to track using tags.

5 more on the article at makeusof.com

Personalized Twitter Newspapers

If you sometimes find the default format limiting, here are two nice alternatives – Twitter Times and Paper.li. They will help you read Twitter updates like an online newspaper where messages are no longer sorted by time.

Twitter Times (example) determines the most important tweets in your timeline (based on retweets) and puts them on the top. Paper.li (example) arranges tweets in categories and if there are any videos or pictures in the timeline, they are also embedded in the same newspaper page.

 

What’s really unique about these Twitter newspapers” is that they will automatically fetch the full text of web pages that are mentioned in the tweets of your friends so you can read them inline without leaving the “newspaper.” And they are excellent “noise filters” as well.

Configure pages into newspapers using Twitter. interesting...

A huge percentage of Google's ad revenue comes from ads that only interest a few users a day. So to get a truly successful ad platform going, Twitter will need to identify and target much smaller groups of users who are involved in less popular topics of conversation.

This turns out to be a hard problem. The algorithms designed to extract meaning from a piece of text were intended for longer documents that usually provide plenty of cues to suggest the focus, Bernstein says. For example, a blog post about Apple's iPad will repeat the name of the product several times. In the cramped 140 characters of a tweet, users tend to avoid repetition, making it harder for an algorithm to identify the writer's focus. However, Bernstein says analyzing users' previous messages, as well as those of their networks of contacts, could make the process easier.

Annotating a single Tweet is uninteresting, it's when you hit the Twitter databases and gather together all the Tweets that share a characteristic that things get exciting. When those selected Tweets can then be cross-referenced with other sets of data from outside Twitter - that's when the word fecund starts feeling inadequate.

Show me all the Tweets from my friends that have links to music and play me those songs. Twitter clients like Seesmic, Tweetdeck and others are going to make viewing that kind of data a whole lot easier.

oh,...this is going to keep morphing and folding in on itself until its something entirely different - that, or until my head hurts.

The research / analytics / BI potential here is huge...

When Hunch asks this

@guykawasaki followers are more likely to answer:

Check it out and consider what I wrote below...

I'd like to know more about the back end of this tool but on the surface it seems to offer (assuming its fairly accurate) a way for you to do a quick profile for where to push ad dollars.

Here's an example:

You do a search for "@guykawasaki".

Maybe this is what you can infer about the average type of person that follows Guy:

• Probably more male than female.
• Probably older (35-49) with some level of capital/investment.
• Probably own either a blog with a unique URL or a business or both.
• Probably know themselves well, might see themselves as a combo of both idealistic / realist.
• Probably leans toward startups or starting businesses. Believes they are not a "risk taker" and instead see's it as calulated risk.
• Probably a good chance they are in a company of less than 50 employees (seed, early-stage or growth - maybe some funding or self funded)
• Probably in technology or social media and more likely in operations or marketing and at least involved - but maybe leading the social media initiative in their group or team.
• Probably fairly conservative.
• Probably has been overseas and knows people overseas and has had life experiences outside of the country.
• Probably uses Skype.
• Could have health issues, but probably not obesity - maybe lack of exercise. Probably know what they "should" be doing right.
• More likely than not, has dependents. Might have over-extended themselves financially. Probably own a home or condo or looking to.
• Might be fairly sophisticated. Might be metro-sexual. Might like sushi.
• Might be considered "creative" by others. Understands technology. has a smart phone. 
• Probably has heard of Malcomb Gladwell.
• Probably is a self starter and able to run with an idea - and maybe even build on it.
• Probably good at pulling the right people around them to build on something.
• Probably is competitive and likes to lead.
• Probably comfortable reading online. Or at least reads a fair amount of blogs and not always traditional media.
• Probably getting used to social comments, tags, editing web content and understands semantic web, virual marketing, tagging.
• Probably a good amount of marketers follow this person.
• Probably leans extroverted, intuitive, perceptive (understands or has heard of Myers Briggs Personality Testing)
• Probably outgoing personality
• Probably aware of healthy eating tips.
• Probably reads business books and might be an avid reader (more than 15 books per year).
• Probably has post-secondary education with high EQ.

Ok, now I might have blown this, but do a search on @Glennbeck and you will see an entirely different profile set. There might be a way to leverage this to research / profile groups and use it to target advertising dollars.

If there is anything to this, I might go so far as to say that if you want to target middle-aged successful guys in business that lead teams in small businesses - you might advertise on Guy's blog or at AllTop.

What are your thoughts?

The problem with having more than a million followers on Twitter, or even more than 1,000, is that you don’t really know who they are. But Hunch thinks it knows a lot about the followers of at least popular Twitter users. It is now pulling together detailed psychographic profiles of those followers with a new Twitter Followers tool.

For instance, Hunch suggests that if you follow TechCrunch on Twitter—as close to 1.4 million of you do—you are more likely to be entrepreneurial, very experienced in your career, and talk about computers “like a gear head talking about a four-barrel V8 engine.”

44% of news readers say they use social networks to share news and information. Of those, half use Facebook to do it; one in five use Twitter. Further, a recent Rutgers  survey of social use shows that 20% of posts in the “statusphere” come from “informers,” those that share news and information. The other 80% are “meformers,” telling their followers what they had for breakfast and what they’re doing with their day.

"informers"...interesting.

The new platform, called @Anywhere, allows websites to integrate Twitter more deeply.

The platform is launching with a number of media partners, including The New York Times, Digg, The Huffington Post, and Bing. Williams said it will allow users to, for example, discover and follow a writer's Twitter account simply by hovering over a byline in a news article, or to follow a band after finding its name in the text of an article.

The idea of the platform, Williams said, is to reduce the friction that prevents more engagement. If the platform is adopted, he said, it "should result in more followers for a site," as well as more community interaction. He referred to the platform as an "@" platform rather than an "app" platform.

Maybe the reasons for using Twitter are starting to be seen in ways we had not imagined.

To deliver useful search returns from the so-called real-time Web--such as seconds-old Twitter "tweets" reporting traffic jams--Google has adapted its page-ranking technology and developed new algorithmic tricks and filters to keep returns relevant, according to a leading Google engineer.

Twitter ended 2009 with just over 75 million user accounts.

The monthly rate of new user accounts peaked in July 2009 and is currently around 6.2 million new accounts per month (or 2-3 per second). This is about 20% below July’s peak rate.

A large percentage of Twitter accounts are inactive, with about 25% of accounts having no followers and about 40% of accounts having never sent a single Tweet.

About 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than ten times.

Only about 17% of registered Twitter accounts sent a Tweet in December 2009, an all-time-low.

Despite these facts, Twitter users are becoming more engaged over time when we control for sample age.

“The history of the Internet suggests that there have been cool Web sites that go in and out of fashion and then there have been open standards that become plumbing,” said Steven Johnson, the author and technology observer who wrote a seminal piece about Twitter for Time last June. “Twitter is looking more and more like plumbing, and plumbing is eternal.”

Really? What could anyone possibly find useful in this cacophony of short-burst communication?

Well, that depends on whom you ask, but more importantly whom you follow. On Twitter, anyone may follow anyone, but there is very little expectation of reciprocity. By carefully curating the people you follow, Twitter becomes an always-on data stream from really bright people in their respective fields, whose tweets are often full of links to incredibly vital, timely information.

just having a conversation today with a good friend of mine about how Twitter is an always-on data stream.

What, in 140 characters or fewer, is Twitter?

Algorithms judge the relevance of microblog posts containing 140 characters or less.