Well now you can find out with Super Chirp and it’s basically adopted the iPhone App model by keeping 30% of the charge for its service and you receive 70% (is this going to become the norm why doesn’t someone try 75% / 25%…)

The service takes all your followers and allows them to sign up on its service you can then send these people direct messages and charges very between $0.99 to $9.99.  Something interesting that TechCrunch pointed out was that Britney Spears has over 1.7million followers and I’m sure there are quite a few followers that wouldn’t mind paying $1 – $10 for personalised tweets directly to them. Now imagine 100,000 sign up at $10 per month thats a nice little $700,000 extra per month, not too bad plus SuperChirp gets $300,000 (Maybe I should start up a competing site)

Pity I only managed to stay for half of the conference it was still worth my while! At the Old Mutual Business School in Pinelands, Cape Town, they had put up a nifty separate screen showing tweets from the people attending the conference with TwitterFountain – see below (try spot the spammers!)

This proved pretty useful in posting questions and just general comments during the day the one problem how ever was that #netprophet quickly rose on Twitter Trends to the Number 2 spot which was quite impressive. The problem their though is that spammers pick up on this and quickly start writing random messages or trying to promote their business and just add in the tag at the end.

Twitter definitely needs to try sort the spam out!

Some of the speakers were Arthur Goldstuck and the CEO from MXIT which both I found pretty interesting. ACtually most of the speakers were good and interesting just depends on what level of knowledge you were going there with. But was definitely a good turn out for the conference and good for South Africa in terms of the growth of our online community. Read more about the speakers here.

There has been a lot of press lately regarding the huge strides Twitter has been making around the world, example of Opera getting online and featuring it on her show plus the recent race between CNN and Ashton Kutcher to get to 1million followers. But now a report has been released from Nielsen indicating that most people who join Twitter don’t come to it, in fact they say that an amazing 60% of people don’t come back.

Just from my own personal experience with Twitter:

I first heard about it quite a while back but only registered sometime towards the end of last year. Once I was registered I was like ‘Now What?’ and I left it and didn’t come back for another 3 months, after that time I had read up more about it and find some people I wanted to follow and started to actually make some tweets and gain some followers.

So now lots and lots of people are registering and trying to find communities to become a part of and not quite sure what to do. I know lots of people who are on Facebook but either can’t get access to it because of work policies or just don’t bother, do people then say that Facebook doesn’t have this retention rate?

I’m actually glad because I’m finding lately on Twitter that there are lots of bots going around trying to gain followers and also the ‘I follow you so now you follow me’ people who simply decide to follow 100,000 people and hope that at least 80% of those will follow them back. Surprisingly people do which is a pain!

Twitter is a very useful tool but you just need to give it time, get used to it and make sure you follow some people you actually know and who follow you back to get you started.

You can follow me here.

Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) currently has 912,624 followers, 3 days ago he only had 850,000 and he challenged Twitter users that if he reached 1million users before CNN or (@cnnbrk) who has 945,903 followers now, that he’ll “ding dong ditch” the billionaire Ted Turner who is the founder of CNN. Video clip here:

The very next day Larry King gets involved threw down the challenge with these words: “Do you know how big we are? Do you know what CNN is?!”

King promises to take on any challenge from Kutcher and will even try get him and Turner in on his show, video below:

@EA or Electronic Arts then tweeted out that for the millionth user they will put into The Sims 3 and that the follower will receive every game that EA makes this year. Nice publicity stint by EA to join in on this coverage…

The final interesting bit about all of this is that the CNN account (@cnnbrk) isn’t even owned or run by CNN but rather by a James Cox – CNN how ever has now acquired this account from James for an undisclosed amount, read here for more.

Think I may unfollow @aplusk and watch it closely to drive be the millionth!

A while back there were some stories of Samsung teaming up with Yahoo to develop a widget platform that would work on Samsung’s LCDs/Plasmas.

Here is a photo release of what it will/could actually look like:

Currently there are a dozen or so working apps but this app could save a bit of time say if you watching the news etc. But not too sure if I would like little pop-ups every 5min while I’m watching a movie. The one thing that it will work well with is allowing us to comment to our friends while’st watching live breaking news events/sports events etc. Similar to what Facebook did with CNN this year.

Future apps coming later this year are 2 ‘premium’ video apps from either Netflix, Amazon and/or Blockbuster.

Samsung says that this platform will only be placed on mid to high-end TVs.

Now this kind of thing will scare big corporates like SkyTV(UK based) and DSTV(SA based) as this will offer definite options to having satellite TV. For me instead of developing this we all should just be getting a computer/TV in one or have one computer for your household but have 3/4 different LCDs/Plasmas running off it.

Either way its got to merge sometime soon.

Earlier this week Gmail crashed for half a day and caused quite an uproar as personal and business accounts couldn’t be accessed. Now if we compare the Twitter Trends over the last couple of days against the same time as the inauguration of Obama happened. Interesting stuff:

Something else that is interesting is that their is now a Google account on Twitter, does this mean that Google does not intent to acquire Twitter or is merely testing it out. Either way it would have helped if Google had the account on Monday to let us know whats happening with Gmail as a blog post about it took quite a while to come up.

Facebook offered $500million for Twitter last year… wonder how much its valued at now especially after it received another round of funding at $35million. There is a lot of talk that this could be the next ‘google’.

Wow, who would have thought how many people would be affected by Google’s Gmail going down for a bit. You’ll be pleased to know if you are reading this now that it is back up and working but no official explanation as to what happened.

When trying to load Gmail earlier you were greated with this image:

People who were tweeting about it on Twitter actually brought Twitter search down also due to the sheer number of people searching for similar tweets etc. I wonder what sort of spike Hotmail received today…

So after this rapid arise of charity driven twestivals held around the globe Cape Town is to get its own and best of all the funds raised will go to the charity : Water.

If you don’t want to donate your hard earned money to ‘water’ then go along and donate your bucks to Cycle2Learn.org – mates of mine who are cycling from Cairo to Cape Town to build 2 classrooms for a rural school in the Eastern Cape.

Jennifer Connelly in charity: water Public Service Announcement from charity: water on Vimeo.

CharityWater is a legit site and is looking to raise $500,000 and awareness so join in for an evening of fun and games. CharityWater is trying to bring water to the people in need, a worthy cause if I say so myself and knowing that hundreds of cities around the world will be doing the same thing on the 12th is awesome.

So, after slightly manipulating Shakespeare’s famous words into a Twitter like feel I can start my article on the pro’s and cons of Twitter.

For those of you who don’t know and really there seem to be so many lines like this (everyone should know by now) – Twitter is a blogging/social service that limits your blogs to 140characters and only people who ‘follow’ you on Twitter will receive your 140 characters.

You can have thousands of follows or none and follow thousands yourself, you can even follow me but if you don’t say anything useful no one will follow you! So why use it when you can just use Facebook updates and let all your friends know whats going on, for me this is what kept me off Twitter for ages. I signed up towards the end of last year and only really started posting my ‘tweats’ this year, think I just reached my 100th tweat!

I’ve come to realise that Facebook is nice to keep track of my friends and see whats going on in their lives but with Twitter for me its more business like in a sense that all the people I follow are people I find interesting and who I think have interesting things to say. If you just had your mates on there there would be just random crap going to and fro.

Now I can get updates of John Battelle or Guy Kawasaki which I find pretty interesting except that post tweats at an incredible rate. Its a great way to network with all your relevant peeps and keep track of what they are up to, its also a great way to market yourself, your website or anything basically.

Now what I have against it is the potential spam one could receive from it – you can setup an outside/external program to twitter to run through all twitter profiles and add them as your feed. All these people will receive an email saying that ‘YOU’ are now following them and generally they will click through to see who you are and if they want to follow you back.

Now if you do this with 20,000 peeps thats not bad marketing, whether its good PR is another thing. I don’t think it is, I’d rather have 20,000 people re-tweeting away about a new blog I just posted or website I just launched.

Twitter was recently rumoured to have been valued at $250million which isn’t too much but this is the first rumour… the next one could be way higher considering the press its starting to receive and the increase in traffic.

Either way I find Twitter very useful and urge you all to sign up and to start tweating away!

So, over the last couple of days I’ve been getting quite a few more people following me on twitter. I was wondering how they found me as they had around 20k followers and they themselves were following around the same number.

Now, I’ve only been on Twitter for a short period of time and still only have a small following and don’t follow too many people yet. So how did they find me?

JonIn60Seconds tweeted about it and I replied and then he wrote an article on it.

In his article he managed to find out what was causing this to occur, Tweetmanager.com. Jon was quite upset with this website and looked to get more people to spread the word about it. He even had Bill McIntosh the founder of Tweetmanger.com comment on his story trying to justify it.

I think the arguments they both make have their merits: