Recently in Social Networking Category

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.

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.

I'm doing some research on social networking and in particular Twitter. So if you Twitter please forward me your thoughts or post your comments on it here. I'm curious to know how it affects your daily routine, how many of your friends or colleagues use it, do you use it with some mobile technology etc. Thanks.

Revised: I've decided to expand my focus on this questions to other social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal or blogs in general, Stumbleupon, Flickr etc.