Online social networking is still a very young industry and because of that there is still a ton of room for new ideas that can stretch and grow the current social landscape.

BrightKite is a new social networking player that’s bringing fresh ideas to the table. BrightKite combines a Twitter like social update service with mobile technologies to create a better networking experience.

Through BrightKite you can update your followers similar to how you update followers on Twitter. But BrightKite adds the ability to update followers on your physical location as well as your activities. Knowing someone’s location can easily open up opportunities for meetings and it adds a real option for creating solid offline social interactions and not just online connections.

According to the BrightKit website:

“Brightkite is a location-based social network that enables people to take their online profiles with them into the real-world and make real-world friends. Users can see where their friends are and what they’re up to all while maintaining comprehensive degrees of privacy to non-friends. Depending on a user’s privacy setting they can also be open to meeting others nearby.“

By Invitation Only

The service is currently in beta and they’re only accepting new accounts by invitation. Anyone can sign up to receive an invitation, but there’s a waiting list, so be aware. You can get an account early if you can find someone who’ll give you an invite.

This viral way of building a user base is absolutely genius. Google did this same thing when they originally launched Gmail and it created a powerful sense of exclusiveness that made people want to get in even more.

Now BrightKite’s “by invitation only” beta program is doing the same thing. By limiting how many people can get in they are effectively increasing interest in the service and raising demand for membership.

In fact, some people have started giving out BrightKite invitations as promotional items. Technosailor has been giving out ten invitations at a time as part of his efforts to promote his District of Corruption podcast. This shows that restricting the supply on digital goods creates demand and promotes a truly digital economy.

Searching Google

As of this writing, if you search for BrightKite in Google you’ll find that there’s quite a conversation happening on Twitter. According to TwitterStat results for the keyword BrightKite, the buzz around the service has increased sharply over the last month.

A side note here is that Google is indexing Twitter posts on a regular basis and people are using Twitter as a tool for getting into the search index. The search result for BrightKite is a good example of how Google is pulling in Twitter posts as part of the search index.

By Invitation Only

One interesting point about BrightKite is that even though membership is limited to invitations during their beta program, their overall system is still open for viewing and search. You can search for people by name, or geographic location and get back results complete with Google maps and comments.

This is another fantastic move by BrightKite because it lets people to see what their missing by not being on the inside. This increases desire for membership without increasing the supported size of your user base until your ready to open the doors to everyone.

Perspective

BrightKite promises to offer a better networking option than Twitter by adding location mapping which should help everyone create better connections. Twitter is good, but 140 characters can only go so far.

BrightKite is also showing their creativity and social awareness by generating buzz and interest in their service before they even open the doors to the public.

And no, I don’t have an invite. So, if you want to share the love, contact me and I’ll be sure to give you plug in my next update.

At home in my pajamas,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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Twitter spam is officially a thing. Today I was followed on Twitter by “signupnow” which links to bux.to, a site that promotes getting paid to look at ads. This is the second bogus follower I received in a week.

According to the follower’s website, “At Bux.to, you get paid to click on ads and visit websites. The process is easy! You simply click a link and view a website for 30 seconds to earn money.”

I don’t know anything about the site, but it smell funny to me and I’d stay away from it unless you can confirm if they are legit. My guess is NO.

This is the start of Twitter spam and it’s a sign that Twitter is coming of age. Age more people use it and people learn to exploit it, Twitter will see more and more spam followings.

Signupnow already is following over 2,000 people and if all of them click through to see what it’s about then that’s a good bit of traffic generated. The conversion rate is another story, but for now my guess is it’s an effective way to get attention.

One blog I read said this about the problem.

“I haven’t seen an issue with this yet, but as we shift from primarily early adopters to more and more mainstreaming, I expect it will happen. Especially since Google is ranking tweets and twitterers quite well- the black hat SEO people will soon notice and try to exploit” - Brian Carter

For now the best way to combat Twitter spam is to remove the bogus Twitter followers to minimize their reach. But a long term defense will have to come from the developers at Twitter. They will have to implement a solution that requires you to approve followers before they can show up in your list, or they will have to implement a timed follow limit that will prevent people from following more than five people in a twenty minute period. That way it would be a pain for would be Twitter spammers to follow people by the thousands.

How would you fight Twitter spam?

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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So, who are you following on Twitter? I mean really following? Do you have a list only of people you know or is it mixed between real personal contacts and complete strangers?

My guess is you’re like most people using Twitter and you have a mixed list. Maybe your following Darren Rowse and Yaro Starak. Maybe your following me. It’s hard not to have one or two curiosity follows. So, the next question is why are you following strangers on Twitter? Do you expect them to say something interesting or do you think they will one day be your close friend? Again my guess is your like most people and you don’t know. Let’s come back to this in a moment.

What if you don’t know who to follow? Maybe your new to Twitter and you want to follow someone, because that’s what your suppose to do right? But who, who do you follow in a sea of little thumbnail faces and cartoon icons?

Well whether you’re following Steve Jobs for no apparent reason or your looking for someone to follow, you might want to check out the Twitter friend finder tool at Twubble.com.

According to their website, “Twubble can help expand your Twitter bubble—it searches your friend graph and picks out people who you may like to follow.”

This is an interesting way to stalk, er research people to follow on Twitter because it gives you a loose reason to choose those people. Twubble looks at your follow list and tries to match you up with other people you might be interested in following. I’m not sure exactly how they determine who to recommend, but I think it has to do with common friends.

Twubble gives you a list similar to this one and you can choose who you want to follow from there. You can also Google search the person to find out more about them.

There is a transference of trust and an element of social proof that is carried in the list that is returned because Twubble tells you who and how many people are following the people they recommend to you. So six of your friends are following someone, you might want to follow them too.

Personally I see this as a research tool that can lead you to groups of people who are thought leaders in a particular subject.

Let me give you an example of why this might be useful information.

A few days ago I received an email from Twitter telling me that ObamaNews was following me. I didn’t think it too strange because I am following Obama and Hillary on Twitter. But when I eventually went to check out ObamaNews to see if I wanted to follow them I found more of an adsense site than a campaign site. This got me to thinking. Is it possible to follow people just to get them to follow you, or at the very least to visit your blog?

I think the answer is definitely yes. It is possible to find a Twitter group, follow everyone within that group and wait for them to either follow you in return or at least visit your blog to check our who you are.

This might not be your thing and you might see it as underhanded. I’m not debating that point here. What I am saying is that there are unexplored automatic response at work here that are largely untapped on Twitter. But, as people discover this you can bet you’ll see more of it and it will likely make some people a lot of money.

Perspective:

Take some time and evaluate exactly who you’re following on Twitter and honestly ask yourself why you’re following them. If there is a reason fine. If there isn’t a reason fine. Just know that there is more to Twitter than just following strangers for no apparent reason and don’t be surprised when people you don’t know start following you.

Use the tools we’ve discussed so far to find people to follow and look for trends and opportunity in the connections you create. You’ll be amazed at what’s there if you just that the time to look.

Researching,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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I’m on the road to Austin Texas today to visit the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Conservatory so this Microtween will be really short. Last time you learned that you can get a variety of Twitter stats by individual from TweetStats.com.

Today, let’s find out who the top followed people are on Twitter so we can begin to explore trends and look for people we might be interested in following. Remember, when we follow people they are inclined to do the same which in turn raises our perceived value. For a good example of this be sure to read my article on how Obama and Hillary are using Twitter for their political campaigns.

To find the top people on Twitter we’ll be using Twitterholic. According to Twitterholic, “Our twittastic robots scan the Twitter public timeline for new users to watch. A few times a day, we calculate individual statistics for each user in our database.”

Twitterholic provides a top 100 list of most followed people on Twitter. This gives us a nice list of prospective people to watch and analyze for trends. It also gives us the chance to drill down into their lists and look for people and trends that might be interesting.

Perspective:

Dig around with this tool and the other tools we’ve talked about to do your own research. See if you can find interesting connections between people and look for valuable conversations. Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters, but the frequency and nature of the messages may tell you all you need to know.

The next Microtween will be about how to find people to follow and we’ll talk about why you might want to target specific groups of people to follow.

Do you know why people are following you?

Off to the flowers,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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Yesterday you and I talked about using TwitterScan to perform keyword research on Twitter conversations. We discovered that we can explore what other people are talking about by searching for keywords and we can get an idea of what people are saying about a particular topic.

Now let’s talk about TweetStats, another Twitter research tool that helps us dig even further into the stream of on-going global conversation that is Twitter.

TweetStats offers the ability to search for tweets by username and then it analyzes what it finds. You can get statistics that are charted or presented as a tag cloud.

TweetStats will show you a users tweet timeline, aggregate daily tweets, aggregate hourly tweets, who they’ve replied to, and what Twitter interface they most commonly use.

Some of the information is a little confusing because aggregate data is mixed with specific data, like replies. But, overall if you’re willing to infer a few things, you can tell a lot from the information, especially if you run it against some of the most heavily followed people on Twitter.

Tomorrow I’ll show you a tool that helps you determine who the most followed people on Twitter are and then after that we’ll look at a tool that helps you find people in their lists that you might want to follow. Remember, following people is a good way to get your own followers.

Perspective:

Twitter has many uses and how you use the tool has a lot to do with your own objectives. Right now people are still trying to wrap their minds about what it’s for and how does it help them communicate. While everyone is learning it is important to pay attention to what is going on. Spotting trends before they happen is an important part of gaining an edge and these Twitter research tools will be a big part of gaining insight into what’s happening.

So, what do your Twitter statistics look like?

Researching,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Let’s follow each other on Twitter

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