And yet we make it work.

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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.

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.

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 Fri, 07 Mar 2008 11:39:04 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Twitter just announced that it has received another round of funding. According to TechCrunch, Twitter raised a total of $35 million in this round, which was led by Benchmark and Institutional Venture Partners. Altogether, Twitter has now raised a total of $55 million. According to Biz Stone, Twitter wasn't actively courting new investments, as the company still had enough money in the bank, but given Twitter's current growth, the company decided to accept the offer.

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.

My modest proposal? Get Twitter to have a setting that allows you to specify the number of followers it will display on your profile. You want 50,000 followers? Key it into the field and hit submit - you got 'em! True, they're completely imaginary, but let's face it - so is any hope that the followers you get in one of these schemes are going to listen to a thing you say. (Unless it's a promise that you can get them even more followers.)

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What do you think? Participate in our poll below and leave a comment if you wish. p.s. thanks Polldaddy for the flash-looking new poll!

A Cautionary Tale

To some degree, this is really a cautionary tale, as we almost fell for this story ourselves. Only after we asked the Twitter user for screenshots did we realize that the user obviously had Power Twitter installed. This was an honest mistake all around - both by the Twitter user and by the blogger who first jumped on this story. A new ad format on Twitter, after all, would have been a great story to break.

As of now, though, the story about the ads is starting to spread on Twitter, and it will be interesting to see how far it spreads before users notice that Twitter isn't actually testing a new ad format on its profile pages.

But This Would Be a Smart Way for Twitter to Advertise

The ad format that Power Twitter chose, however, makes a lot of sense - not just for PowerTwitter but also for Twitter itself. One interesting aspect of the ads in Power Twitter, which tend to be for relatively obscure products and companies, is that the ads give you the option to forward the ad to your own Twitter stream. This format, we think, would make a lot of sense for Twitter as well.

By allowing users to essentially forward these ads to all of their Twitter followers, Twitter wouldn't have to insert them into a user's stream itself. This would also give Twitter and its advertisers a very good metric for consumer engagement. After all, if a user is willing to tweet about an ad, that's a very strong sign that the ad was relevant to the user and, by extension, also probably relevant to the user's followers.

The future of IM functionality on Twitter is blurry at best. What is clear is that this feature has been put on hold indefinitely. The company feels that this feature will be much better to manage and provide better stability to users if it were built from the ground up. However:

"Based on our analysis, the cost-to-benefit for IM for the most users is not as high as some other things--so it will be a while before we tackle it. Like any budget (in this case, the budget of our limited engineering time), tough calls need to be made--especially in these times. And while we don't expect everyone to agree with this decision, we at least want to be straightforward with you."

We Doubt It

We appreciate Twitter being straightforward about the feature. While we're a little disappointed to see that it won't be officially from Twitter, the functionality is still capable of being implemented by third party developers. Twitter recommends checking out Excla.im, a jabber bot IM service that allows you to update your Twitter status. However, Excla.im does not allow you to see your friends updates (yet). Just don't expect to see IM functionality back before the end of the year, or maybe even next spring.

Many new services struggle to build a developer community around their platform. By being compatible with Twitter, though, Identi.ca's developer pool is now virtually identical with Twitter's developer community, which means that it is only a matter of time before Twitter clients like Twhirl, Snitter, or TweetBox will make posting to Identi.ca an option.

As Twitter is making it more and more difficult for some third-party developers to hook into its API by severely restricting the number of calls any given application can make within a certain time period, Identi.ca will probably see a lot more interest from developers in the near future.

Clearly, adding search - and adding persistent searches in the sidebar especially - is a way for Twitter to get users to come back to their homepages regularly. For Twitter's most active users, the current homepage simply doesn't offer enough of the features they are used to from their desktop clients. However, if Twitter wants to monetize its service through advertising on its site (and the small ads that started to appear on the site in the last few weeks make us believe that this is the way Twitter is planning to go), it will have to give users a reason to come back to its site.

Twitter has also clearly recognized the real value of its service, besides offering a way for users to communicate, is in its real-time search.

As of now, Twitter is only testing this new homepage with a select number of users. The company will test the current iteration of the homepage with these users and then roll these features out to all users "as soon as possible" - assuming, of course, that the Twitter team doesn't decide to go back to the drawing board again.

Mac users can upload and post with a desktop widget, everyone can use the web interface and a cross-platform AIR app is forthcoming.

There's some kinks to work out still, but none are show stoppers. The possibilities for further feature development are many but I expect Twittershare to stay simple. Just like Twitter itself - simple is often all you need.