This new service allows one to directly download files from one personal computer to another and thus eliminated the need to store these in servers in the middle.

People can also view these files with any browsers. Though similar technologies have been developed for tech-sawy consumers, but this required new software and took more time in uploading these files and so on. This new release was announced by the company in the most popular social networking site, Twitter on June 16. This news has also lead to the rise in the share price of Opera in the past week.

This has made them earn around $2 million via Twitter referrals for their scratch, certified refurbs and previously ordered Dell items. They also took another $1 million from people who went to the Dell proper from the outlet to buy new stuff.

Dell has a twitter account that is only for this commercial purpose and has more than 600K followers. This makes the company one of the top 50 most allowed Twitter users according to reports from the Twitter counter.

Source: wired

However, Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO says that they are looking for becoming a partner of the micro-blogging site.

We know well what happens in the world of social networking whenever some new site emerges, as it’s not a skeleton in a closet that what Facebook did with MySpace and now what Twitter is going to do not only against Facebook or even many other bigwigs of the web seem somewhat dazed with its rapid success. There were rumors that aside from many other big players of the tech world, Apple also wanted to acquire the micro-blogging site, but up till now none seems to succeed in these efforts.

Why everyone wants to acquire the Twitter, I think it’s not hard to find at all, as it has emerged as the third most visited social networking site in the United States in a very short span of time.

It allows users to post their thoughts, news and actions instantly, but the real thing behind its staggering success is the way it was hyped and the way celebrity-charm power was used for its popularity especially Oprah played an important role in its current popularity.

Google search engines takes considerable time to update, but it is quite understandable why it is so, as these search engines focus on the accuracy of the results rather than speed. But now, as the worldwide internet community seems to demand that they require faster information than ever before and Twitter seems to leave Google behind in this wake.

In his closing address at Google’s Zeitgiest conference, Page says: “ Now more and more looking to do things in real time and no doubt about it that Twitter is doing a great job in this connection, and I think we haven’t done something remarkable to create things that work on per second basis.

He also told the audience that he was asking his team to get even faster than ever before.

However, he admitted this fact that there is a vast different between ensuring the accuracy of the information and make them available instantly.

When asked about the buyout of Twitter, Schmidt declined to comment on the issue and just said that they are doing quite a good job right now.

Source: guardian.co.uk

Jack Dorsey’s simple need to know what his friends were doing led to the creation of Twitter, launched in August 2006 and today, you have Barack Obama sharing his thoughts on Twitter.  It had a growth of 1382% as of Feb 2009, which is the highest among all social networking sites.

Twitter is an online application that is a micro-blog, social networking site, cell phone/IM tool all combined into one.  You want it explained in simpler terms?  Twitter is a free service that allows you to say anything to anyone with 140 characters at your disposal, using web form, text message or instant message.  These posts or messages are called tweets and they can be anything; from questions as to what the user is doing, responses to other tweets or pointers to online resources, just like regular blog posts, but small in size.

Just as with other social networking sites, Twitter is outfitted with tools that allow subscriptions, sharing, friends or follow as many twitter feeds as one likes.  One of the main tools is the SMS functionality for desktop and web-based applications allowing users to send and receive small text messages, which includes updates on e-mail.  Twitter blocks is a visualization tool for recent updates from friends and their network of friends.

Every user with an account at Twitter and their followers is a content channel by itself.

While Twitter is used by some as purely a general communication medium, more and more people today are using it to monetize their Twitter channels.

Before we actually get down to looking at some monetization methods of Twitter channels, it helps to understand the basics, especially for those of you that are new to Twitter.
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Basics

• Sign up to a Twitter account. Pick a memorable username for branding purposes. e.g. http://twitter.com/technologygear
• Read the Twitter help guide to help answer all the questions you may have when starting out.
• Once you are done with account creation, you will be given a home page and a profile page.  You will be given your own URL to promote as you like.  It will be the main Twitter website address followed by your username.  You can put a short bio and the URL of your website on this page.  Just remember that every visitor to this profile page is a potential visitor to your site too.  But make sure your profile is free of sales pitch or hard sell with a number of links.  The goal here is to build relationships and network.
• Upload a photo to your profile.  Make sure it is your photo as people are interested in communicating with a real person and not a company or some cartoon picture.  This gives them the confidence.
• Dress up your Twitter home page with a good background. It’s a great branding touch.  Here’s a tutorial on how to create Twitter backgrounds.
• Set up a page for new Twitter followers.
• Before marketing anything, start out by sending a few tweets and let people know about you or join a conversation.  This will give people an idea of who you are and why they should even be following you.
• Follow people who you find interesting and respond to their tweets.  Don’t stuff your website down their throat but first discuss your interests and ideas.
• For every one promotional tweet, you should have at least 10 conversational tweets.
• Use tools like TweetLater, TweetBeep or TweetTree to know when people are talking about you or your website.

For a marketer, Twitter is an extension of everything you do, from branding to PR.

Now how do you monetize Twitter for your business?

As with all social networking, the more you give, the more you’ll receive in return. Whether on Twitter or your web site, find ways to be helpful and useful.

If you have joined Twitter with an intention of monetizing your channel, then you would be already having a business of some sort that revolves around a product or service in a particular niche. If you are new, then choose a niche of your choice and create a website or blog around it.  Then use Twitter for promotion and finding customers.

First things first…

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Build Your Following

The whole point of social networking is to have large numbers of followers.  However, if you’re going to be promoting your business, getting your ideas to the right people is essential.

The easiest way to have a number of people following you is to follow others.  Start with the President, Barack Obama who will follow you back instantly.  Use the search function on Twitter and use keywords related to your niche.  You can even use a service like Twilert or TweetGrid to search using multiple keywords and get email alerts when someone in the Twitosphere is talking about your niche.

Follow everyone that might be interested; people who like you as well as who hate you.  Make your profile interesting as the first thing people do is check the profile and then decide whether to follow or not. Join the conversation when you have something sensible to say.  People usually follow people who provide something of value.  It’s all very good to ask the “how are you” type of questions for them to get to know you, but if that’s all they are getting from you, you are surely not going to get a huge following and even if you do, they will not be the potential customers you seek.

• Connect with people
• Share information
• Answer questions
• Re-tweet messages
• Participate in conversations

And create value…..  This value creation is like a magnet that will attract the right kind of followers.

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Promote Your Niche Using Tweets

While gaining targeted group of followers on Twitter is crucial, the number of followers is not the only factor that helps with successful monetization.  The idea behind having followers is to be able to profit from them; albeit in the most non-promotional manner.

To achieve this, you should tweet about your niche.  When tweeting, due to the character limit, use a shortened URL back to your site.  To generate more eyeballs and potential sales, you could also write about any special deals.  Live tweets can be sent talking of developments in your niche. This can also be in the form of niche-related news sent to your followers through RSS feeds.

Use this useful application – TweetDeck , with which will be able to group users together either organizing them by interests, influence or others.

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Promote Your Product Or Service With Content

Who really cares about your products or services?  What people care about is how you are able to help them.  What is in it for them?  What problems are you solving?  These are the questions you must ask yourself.

If your content is not good, then it’s going to have an adverse and opposite effect.  You must understand that bad word-of-mouth spreads much faster than a good one – think real life.  These are real people after all.

One of the most important things is adding of unique and useful content.  Provide them with information they are looking for.  There is no confusion here, just look at it as blog posts.

This can be done by posting useful and helpful information on your blog or website and use RSS feeds to promote it using Twitter.  You can earn a good name for yourself by providing links to all great sources; newspapers, YouTube vids, magazines, other blog posts, websites etc. as long as the information is great.

Keep a list of keywords ready, be it your website, products, services or some jargon from your niche.  Use Twitter Search to find discussions about your keywords to see what the Twitter audience are discussing about.   Make a note of the Feed for this query icon as you will need it later. Subscribe to the results in Google Reader.  This will help you archive all the keywords that are most popular, for you to take advantage of and provide content related to what’s actually being talked about in your niche.

If you are planning to use Twitter for heavy promotion, a great free tool to use is Tweet Scan, which is a search service for Twitter content.  This searches Twitter and emails you the results from actual Twitter posts or content using your keywords.

Whenever you are tweeting, it helps to use shortened your URLs.  Other than tinyURL, there is Bit.ly link shortener that gives you analytics too. With this, you can even monitor the number of clickthroughs on your links.

If you are promoting a blog post or something else, don’t always add a direct link to it, try and add a twist to make it more interesting.  You can ask people if they have any thoughts on it.  You can use twitterfeed to feed any RSS feed into a twitter account.  Make sure not to get carried away and send too much content as that will only end up turning off followers.

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Pointers To Promoting Through Tweet Content

• Add content
• Re-tweet other people’s good tweets
• Add questions as tweets
• Add links to other good web pages you like as tweets
• Add your blog or website posts
• Add random thoughts

Here is an interesting resource that can help you understand in-depth.

Monitor How Your Followers Are Finding Your Content

Proper monetization of Twitter content channels is only possible when you know how your content is being received by your followers.

Here are a few ways to keep track:

• Re-tweet - How many of these people are actually re-tweeting your posts?  Re-tweets are viral marketing at its best. A re-tweet happens when your followers find your tweets so interesting that they share it with all their followers.  This opens up a whole lot of new audience and potential customers.
• Direct messages – Twitter provides an excellent potential for one-on-one marketing.  Check out the @replies and direct messages.  Make sure you respond.  The number of people @replying is a great indication of your influence on Twitter.
• Hash tags (#) – It is difficult condensing great news or content into 140 characters.  But this helps in avoiding any fluff and getting to the point.  If you feel your followers will find the topic interesting, use hash tags to link to URLs for your followers to get more on the subject being discussed.

Okay, we’ve discussed using URLs to lead people to your own blogs and websites where you profit by selling products or services. What about affiliate links?

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Profit From Affiliate Links On Twitter

You can of course use URLs to affiliate links that lead directly to a sales page as long as it is something that is useful.  Be like an over-protective parent and see what the perceived value is for your followers.

A little imagination goes a long way and you can serve up well-targeted affiliate links on Twitter.  You are going to get un-followed as fast as you were followed if you throw spam at your followers.  You certainly should not be linking to a sales page that is selling a worthless e-book just because it’s going to net you big dollars.  Let me share a nice affiliate marketing trick that works wonders when you use the TwitterLit account, which provides users with a daily quote that is taken from the first line of a novel. This comes with an Amazon.com link to that novel.

This is found to be successful with people clicking on the link because they find the great first-line interesting and peaks their interest.  Nobody calls these TwitterLit Tweets spam; in fact, they look forward to receiving them.  The earnings may not be huge but bloggers with a lot of followers can use this successfully.

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Monetize Through Ads

Another form of monetization of Twitter is using ads for promotion. Many people simply post ads as updates using their Twitter account. However, since your followers don’t necessarily opt-in to advertising when they decide to follow you, it can affect your credibility if it happens to backfire.

You can now earn ad revenue on Twitter through different means. With services like Tinker, you will be part of a revenue share network with other micro-bloggers. Magpie is another network you can check out, which is similar to Tinker except that it will show ads that are based on relevant interests and not specific events.

If you want to do it on your own and don’t wish to be part of a network, then

Twitter brand Sponsor ads by Sociable Ads from Mashable is a great option. This can be implemented on a WordPress platform. What you can do is monetize the Twitter accounts of brands you want to be part of. Since there is no forced advertising through tweets to your followers, you don’t have to worry about losing credibility.

TwittAd is a service that connects advertisers and Twitter users. You just list the number of followers you have and how much you are willing to sell an ad on your Twitter page and TwittAd will match you with the advertisers. This ad is placed on the left hand side of the Twitter page that is empty. These ads are unobtrusive and don’t look bad.

Twittertise is yet another service intended for marketers ad an advertising platform to track the success of their branding. Twittertise allows people to create and schedule promotional campaigns in the form of tweets with a URL.  Then it uses Bit.ly to shorten the URL and once the tweet is live, the user will be able to see the stats on how many people have clicked on the link and where the traffic is coming from. While this may not exactly be advertising, it can still be very useful for marketers relying on Twitter for promoting some product or service or even making an announcement. It lets the users know how efficient their messages are and if people are interested in what they have to say.

Here are some interesting thoughts about how Twitter’s SMS functionality can be used.

You should be clear that the monetary value one can get out of Twitter is based on generating qualified leads and having an effective product or service that provides something of value to convert these leads into customers.

Finally…

Twitter is not rocket science and doesn’t need a plan of months to execute.  Just enjoy helping people and you are all set to win them over and profit in the long run. Don’t be shy mixing personal tweets with business. While it is possible to use Twitter to get nothing out of it, it is also possible to get a lot from it – profiting you’re your business, forming relationships, learning etc.

Twitter

“MikeyyMikeyy is done ….Mikeyy I am done,” and “Twitter please fix that” were messages that were seen by some users’ pages on early Sunday.

However, security engineers at the emerging social networking site have succeeded to clean the site, but they took enough time in fixing them as Michael said that he couldn’t expect that Twitter security engineers would take so much time to fix the issues.

In a post at Twitter blog, co-founder Biz Stone says “The first attack was launched on early Saturday and that emerged from four new accounts that compromised nearly 90 accounts.

These worms didn’t cause any serious harm, except modifying profile pages and spreading to the followers of the users.

Till Saturday afternoon, nearly 100 further accounts compromised in the next wave of the attack that followed another on Sunday morning. Stone says that almost 10,000 infected tweets that caused to spread the worm have been deleted from the site.

On Monday morning, another serious attack was launched on the site and according to Stone they secured the compromised accounts and deleted all such materials that could propagate the worm further.  The worm seems to damage a cross-site scripting that is a common vulnerability in the web applications.

On a more technical side of things, Twitter is powered by Ruby on Rails which allows the team to quickly change, test, and deploy new features into their ever growing site.

On the note of ever growing, according to Alexa.com, Twitter is the 79th most trafficked site (till to date) on the Internet with an almost vertical growth in terms of reach. Alexa currently estimates that Twitter reaches 1.37% of all Internet users and it is constantly growing.

With a site as large as Twitter, you’d think that they’d be making tons of money from their business, right? In fact, they’re spending more money than they’re making. Twitter has a business model that is still in research, but when implemented will be extremely successful pulling in tons of revenue.

Twitter’s main focus though is to keep things simple. You use twitter by logging in to your account then typing in a message less than or equal to 140 characters which is your status. The main idea though, is that with Twitter, you follow other users’ updates and other users follow your updates. If you’re interested more on the history of Twitter, I’d recommend that you click here. If you’d like to understand how Twitter works from a video stand point, you need to watch the following useful video in this regard.

Twitter was designed using Omnigraffle and Photoshop to allow a very flexible range of opportunities. It focuses on a simple two column design with all of its features (which include direct messaging, replying, and status updating) right there in front of you for easy access.

The main objective of Twitter is to be able to see what other users are doing at a moment’s notice. As far as design goes though, Twitter allows its users to customize their homepage with custom backgrounds which are used on their profile as well. Twitter.com though isn’t the only place you’ll find features. Twitter has their own API which allows developers to have services based around Twitter which expand so much on what you can do with your Twitter profile.

With such a huge success on so many levels, many people have been finding Twitter to be rather effective with marketing. Twitter helps to market your business in several ways. One of these ways is that it allows users to connect and build relationships which can lead to sales. Another way is that once you build up your following of Twitter users, you can easily just Tweet an update about your new product or service and almost instantly have users running to your website to see what’s going on.

Users are genuinely interested in knowing what your business or brand is coming up with next and by utilizing Twitter to establish a following of customers or potential customers, you can build relationships on a personal level with your customers that can lead to potential business opportunities which can lead to profit.

Another wonderful feature that you need to be utilizing on Twitter if you’re using it for your business or brand is the “Twitter Search“. The search function allows you to search the “public timeline” which is basically all the updates from all the Twitter users in a simple design. By searching for keywords such as “hiring developer”, you can find potential jobs or even work.

On the note of Twitter mash ups again, I’d like to take a moment and tell you about the best ones. One of the most widely used Twitter mash ups is TwitPic.com which allows the user to post a picture from a mobile phone or computer and have TwitPic update your status with the caption and link to the photo. Another interesting Twitter mash up is “TwitterVision” which allows the user to see Tweets from around the world in a Google Earth style setting. Some other very cool things that you need to take part in are desktop clients such as TweetDeck which allow you to view your public timeline side by side to your replies and direct messages.

All in all, I love Twitter and I think you will to. If you’re not already using it, you need to be a part of it today and start connecting with other users to build relationships or even your business.

Happy Tweeting!

iStockPhoto is a photo store that was acquired by Getty Images in 06. All the users of the website have been asked to change their passwords and the homepage of the site has also been taken down.

At present the site is not accessible, but according to Sean Locke, a brief explanation has been provided this evening.

A phishing attack has been launched in the forums as well as in sitemail this afternoon. Under this attack, a false istockphoto.com login screen is created and that prompt users for a password and username, saved them to a malicious server and then redirect users back to the main page of iStockphoto.

”It was serious attack on iStock, but our security team has succeeded to discover it in time. For security purposes, we took down the website for a short period of time, but it will soon be up,” a note on the site says.

Twitter has been known as a free space for all kinds of boundless expressions, live footage postings, sharing with every one without restriction. It all has been free, now this restricted keys stroke is a step towards revenue generation.

These money making measures are intended to take place in the coming summer. Yet the results are suspected due to the present financial crisis. Regardless of the speculations, Evan Williams, co-founder Twitter Inc., says, “We don’t see any reason why this can’t be a very large and profitable entity.”

Twitter is a renowned and sensational website ranking with YouTube, MySpace and Facebook in fame and usage. More than 6 million people are currently using Twitter and posting their comments and personal experiences on the site.

Facebook offered Twitter Inc. a takeover in exchange of $500 million, which was rejected. The increase fame Twitter is gaining is mostly due the postings made by famous personalities. These personalities include Barack Obama, with more than 265,000 peoples tracking hi smessage, which have not come on site since he became president.

Other personalities include basketball star Shaquille O’Neal and MC Hammer former rap music celebrity. Anyone can post a comment by setting up a free account; these messages and comments are known as ‘tweets’. Tweets can be now sent through a mobile phone or computer.

Twitter has been widely acclaimed as a current news breaker.