"Twitter @earlybird Exclusive Offers are special time-bound deals, sneak-peeks, and events that are promoted by the official Twitter @earlybird account. We partner with select advertisers and retweet offers that they have crafted only for the Twitter community."

If this is another arguable Twitter ad success story, the thought occurs, what other types of accounts could Twitter launch in this arena?

As of Tuesday afternoon, no deals are up on the @earlybird account, but that could change at any moment.

And yet we make it work.

More Noise to Signal

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A few of the statistics announced this morning include:

While the company is making several announcements at Chirp, including the archival of all public tweets since 2006 with the Library of Congress, these statistics confirm the impressive growth and potential of Twitter.

And my friends delivered twin girls on Friday evening.

Some people would say that puts it all in perspective. Me, I figure it just makes it easier to find responses to your live-tweeting of the birth.

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It doesn't look like Harvest on Twitter supports starting the timer, though that would be nice for anyone who does work away from a desk that needs to be timed.

When Danny Wen of Harvest emailed us to let us know about the upcoming Twitter integration, he told us that the company looks at "the integration as a start of bringing more business use cases to Twitter." We agree, and further it could signal a potential business model for Twitter. While currently everything on Twitter is free -- from setting up an account, to running a bot, to using the API -- it seems plausible that Twitter could start charging for business uses.

Harvest is essentially using Twitter to power a quick mobile interface with their application and that's something that perhaps Twitter should start charging for.

Lately, Twitter has been more stable than we've ever seen before. Earlier this week Twitter had some scheduled downtime, but apparently it was for a good reason. However Twhirl hasn't been giving me very many errors these days. I also haven't received a "pause" message from Twhirl either. On the other hand, it's recently been announced that Twitter has upped its API limit to 100 requests per hour - with the goal of keeping the limit to least 70. Don't believe me? Check Twhirl.

The Future of Twitter and Clones

The biggest question at this point is: will this be consistent behavior from Twitter from now on? While we're sure FriendFeed will be safe from any repercussions, what will this mean for the clones such as Plurk, identi.ca, and kwippy? We'd love to hear your comments about the increase in the API limit and the future of the many Twitter clones.

It looks like Twitter itself has started to tackle this issue too, with its Clever Twitter Accounts blog on Posterous.

The blog starts out with how people used Twitter in Chile to find missing persons and moves on to a San Francisco specific Twitter account meant to receive 311 complaints.

Gray notes how most things Twitter does explode immediately in popularity, pointing to how many followers both @twitterapi and @twitter have, but so far @cleveraccounts, the account associated with the blog, hasn't given us all that much to chew on quite yet.

So, while getting a nod on the "Clever Twitter Accounts" blog isn't likely to tip your follower scales the way the now-deceased Suggested User List would have, we'll be keeping an eye on it to see if any new twists on Twitter use pop up.

Maybe, the thing is, we already "get it". If you have a friend who doesn't appear to get it yet, though, send 'em on over. Maybe they'll be convinced by knowing they can follow the Japanese prime minister or navigate New York's busy streets - all with the help of Twitter.

Update: It looks like we jumped the gun a bit: the official Twitter account just sent this tweet: "None of the promos currently running in the sidebar are sponsored (it just says that because of a bug that's being fixed right now)."

You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Rick Turoczy, Sean Ammirati, Lidija Davis and Phil Glockner.

Now, when web users click to see lists of the people they follow or who follow them, they will see more information than just avatars and usernames. The new, improved pages contain full names, locations, most recent tweets, a one-click follow button, and a drop-down menu of possible actions, including @replies, DMs, and blocking. UPDATE: After a commenter pointed out that scanning for non-following users just became more difficult with the new interface, we would like to point out that there's an app for that. You're welcome. We love you, too.

Here's what the options look like for users you follow:

And here's what they look like for users following you:

Also, you can browse through other users' followers/following pages and exercise about the same list of functions:

Finally, users can toggle back and forth between a simple avatar/username list and the new, expanded list. The drop-down menu and follow buttons remain:

On our wishlist of Twitter improvements, getting more follower information was quite high, and this improvement does a bit to meet that need.

"Starting today, you can tag Tweets with specific places, including all World Cup stadiums in South Africa, and create new Twitter Places. You can also click a Twitter Place within a Tweet to see recent Tweets from a particular location."

Other features of Twitter Locations include the following.

• Foursquare and Gowalla integration. If you click on a Twitter Place, you will see standard Tweets and check-ins from Foursquare and Gowalla
• API. API functionality that lets developers integrate Twitter Places into their applications.
• Support for more browsers. Add location to your Tweets from any browser--Safari and Internet Explorer, in addition to Chrome or Firefox

Twitter has more detailed information on how to use Locations here.

Imagine a place where the most famous and fabulous people in the world emit short little pearls of wisdom throughout the day, every day, in a public forum where anyone can enjoy them. Stars of stage and screen stepping right into your living room - 140 characters at a time! That seems to be what Twitter aims to be now, or at least part of it. We asked (on Twitter, of course) what other people thought of the idea that Twitter should be more mainstream and for their suggestions as to how that could be accomplished. Below are my favorite parts of the conversation so far.

SmartTwitter helps strip out all of the Twitter mumbo-jumbo so all the rest of your non-tweeting Facebook friends can finally understand what you're saying.

From the app's description:

Smart Twitter was written out of the frustration with the existing Twitter-to-Facebook apps. They either copied everything, or required an arbitrary hashtag to post updates. It should be possible for a computer to figure out which Tweets should be copied to Facebook and which ones should remain on Twitter.

While copying your tweets to your Facebook may be considered lazy social media practice, there are many of us out there who do it nonetheless. If you're one of the offenders, we strongly encourage you to check out SmartTwitter.

Never fear, RSS filtering is here! Below are instructions for some simple ways you can accomplish either of the goals above. See also our post on the apps most likely to break out for the first time at SXSW. Update: Tweetpeek just launched and takes care of much of this functionality.

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 Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_ramp_up_or_filter_out_the_sxsw_twitter_experience.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_ramp_up_or_filter_out_the_sxsw_twitter_experience.php Events Guide Fri, 07 Mar 2008 11:39:04 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick In a move foreshadowed by Twitter board member Fred Wilson's blog post earlier this week, Twitter has announced that it bought third-party Twitter client Tweetie.

According to the company, Twitter has entered into an agreement with Atebits and will be renaming the app "Twitter for iPhone", which will be available for free, instead of $2.99, in the iTunes AppStore.

As part of this agreement, Atebits president Loren Brichter will join Twitter's mobile team, helping to create "Twitter for iPad" as well.

With Apple's announcement yesterday of its new mobile ad platform, iAd, we can see Twitter finally coming through with its own ad platform in the near future. Having its own native app for the iPhone is certainly a smart move in that direction - and it isn't as if we haven't been expecting Twitter to go in this direction.

In the announcement, Biz Stone says that Twitter is now in a position to "begin building revenue-generating products." Twitter also expects to grow its team in the next year.

Web vs. API

One interesting (though not unexpected) statistic in the funding announcement is that Twitter now gets almost twice as much traffic from its API than from the web. That number will surely drive how Twitter plans to monetize its service. If only a few people come to Twitter's web site, then just putting advertising on the site will not drive enough income to Twitter to keep the service afloat in the long run.

Twitter also announced that it grew 900% in the last year.