Mobsters, Likeness, Top Friends, Super Wall, Own Your Friends, Bumper Stickers, Movies and Poker - this is just a sampling of the highest engagement applications on Facebook and MySpace. What these applications all have in common is a mass market appeal. They are general enough that just about everyone can find something cute or fun about these applications for at least a day or two. The applications measure success in installs, page views and virility. However, another classification of application, specific to much smaller audiences, is emerging as a stronger player in the application space which requires a different measurement separate than the categorical classification that application developers can choose to place themselves in.

The goal of these other applications is not monetize via CPC, CPM or CPI advertising, nor to be bought by the large application shops RockYou, Slide, Zynga or SGN. Instead, these applications exist primarily to provide a service to their users. These applications will fail when measured using the traditional methods of installs, daily active users and day over day growth. The audiences are much too small. They require a new metric to measure their success. Success within this category isn’t reaching 22%¹ of Facebook’s user base. Success for these applications is defined as increased affinity for a product, service or company. It needs to be measured and reported differently.

This might be measurable through acquisitions, loyalty, usage or retention. Using Twitter as an example, it’s certainly capable of becoming a mainstream product, but hasn’t reached mainstream adoption - at least not yet. Twitter currently reaches an estimated 2.2 million users a month². It’s regarded by some as having moved beyond the early adopters³ and easing into the early majority on the technology adoption lifecycle. The Twitter application launched May 25th along with the Facebook platform. It currently boasts 64.5K monthly users of which is hardly chart topping - in fact, it’s really quite dismal - it’s not even one of the top 500 applications. What the application does though is provide enhanced user experience by integrating status updates between the two sites.

The Twitter application is valued by Adonomics at approximately $105K. However, this number means nothing! The goal of the application isn’t to sell it or even monetize the traffic. Even the overall ranking of the application is irrelevant. A better way to measure the ROI of the application is to measure the interaction and retention. This metric that can accurately quantified by answering a series of questions.

1. Does the application impact the retention and interaction of users for Twitter?
2. Does the application increase usage of Twitter?
3. What overlap in the userbase exists between Facebook and Twitter?

Lacking quantitative data from Facebook and Twitter, you’ll have to settle for my observations.

Does the application impact the retention and interaction of users for Twitter? Yes. I suspect if we could peek into Twitter’s database, we’d see that interactions for users continue for longer periods if they’ve installed the Facebook application. Why do I think this? Read on…

Does the application increase usage of Twitter? Yes. I know from personal experience that I’ve continued using Twitter longer than I had expected to because of the integration. At times I’ve used it only as a status update tool. Sending a SMS or using a phone specific tool is easier than the mobile facebook application available for my phone. Other times I use it as a conversational tool. The main point here - I continue to use it.

What overlap in the user base exists between Facebook and Twitter? Again, this is an estimate but nearly 100%⁴ of the people I follow on Twitter have Facebook accounts. However, only about 20% of my friends on Facebook have (or use) a Twitter account. While Twitter clearly has the potential to be a mainstream tool, it doesn’t have the presence that a MySpace or Facebook does.

The Twitter application likely has positive reprecusions for Facebook as well. By integrating the status update directly from Twitter, Facebook continues to get more content contributing to the “virtuous cycle of sharing” Mark Zuckerberg spoke about at F8 ‘08. Wouldn’t this classify the application as a success? As of this writting, Twitter doesn’t have an official application for MySpace. I expect we’ll see if MySpace allows applications to update the users status.

The question remains, how can we take these difficult to obtain numbers such as audience overlap and integrate it with the more available metrics? We need a metric that holistically evaluates an application. Measuring mass alone is no longer sufficient to define success. I propose they’re measured by interactions, retention and perception. Mix into that formula monthly reach and install and we’ll be able to arrive at a value that more accurately ranks and sorts applications on the whole.

¹ Slide FunSpace reached 22.3 million Facebook users according to the monthly active user count on September 5, 2008

² Compete reports 2,218,330 visitors to Twitter.com in July of 2008.

³ Robert Scoble stated April 9, 2008, “Anyone who joins Twitter after today is not an early adopter. So, not interesting for me to follow.”

⁴ Conducted using PollDaddy and an analysis of people I follow.

Surprised by this one from @ev tonight, seeking a date for a “friend”. This @ev guy, for those who don’t know, is quite the catch. For silicon valley and anyone looking to be well connected, you would do well to be in his book. He did afterall sell a company to Google and is a founder of this odd little company called Twitter.

This morning I decided to follow TheOnion on twitter. I love how TheOnion is leveraging twitter, effectively to reinforce their brand. Much to my surprise I received a direct message shortly there after…

i suppose we should thank u for following us, but do the gods thank man for his dutiful sacrifices? we’re watching you.

Robert Scoble posted a tweet today calling out an interesting visualization of Twitter client usage up on Neoformix. Being a big fan of data visualization and of course the methods of Edward Tufte, I took a look. Unfortunately the graphs aren’t exactly of the same caliber as the work Tufte promotes - they were non the less interesting. There’s also another interesting visualization of usage patterns for the top Twitter users and how much they use twitter. It’s clear it’s increasing for all of them.

Curious how big the extended twitter universe (twitterverse) is, I decided I’d do my own investigation and provide results I found as a list of tools. Basically, it’s BIG. Google returns ~69.3 million hits for “Twitter.” Below is what I found relevant in the cream. You’ll notice I skipped Mac/PC clients. There are lots of great clients that people use for platform specific updates (perhaps a future blog post worth).

Websites:

• FriendFeed: Leverages Twitter Feed
• Quotably: Leverages Twitter Feed
• Twitter: The original site that started it all. Unfortunately it’s been highly unreliable over the last few weeks.
• Twitter Digest
• Twitter Mobile: Twitter’s official mobile website.

Spotting Trends (Techcrunch tweeted an even better one than these but I can’t for the life of me find it):

• PicoBuzz
• TweetVolume
• Twends
• Twitscoop
• TwitterBuzz: Tracks URL usage on Twitter (lots-o-TinyURL here)
• Twitt(url)y: Realtime tracking of “hot” URL’s

Tracking, Leaderboard, Ranking and Visualization:

• 5K Twitter Browser
• Tweeterboard
• Tweetmeme
• TweetWheel
• Twerp Scan: Users spewing SPAM
• Twist
• Twistori
• TwitDir
• Twitstat
• Twitter Blacklist: Users spewing SPAM
• Twitter Quotient: Brutally honest!
• Twitter Spectrum
• Twitterholic
• Twitter Stats
• Twubble
• Visual Twitter
• Who Should I Folow?: Find new folks to follow on Twitter

Voice Tools:

• TwitterFone: Private Beta Only
• TwitterGram

iPhone Specific:

• Hahlo
• iTweet
• MobileTwitter
• PocketTweets
• Twinkle: Requires Jailbreak
• Twitter for iPhone

Web Browser Plugins (a very short list):

• TwitBin: Firefox
• TwitterBar: Firefox

Social Networking Sites:

• Grazr Twitter Reader: Facebook
• Twitter: Facebook
• Twitter SyncMySpace
• Twitter Box: Second Life

Mobile Applications:

• Fring
• Jargong
• jTwitter
• Mobio
• MoTwit: En espanol (Spanish)
• Slandr: WAP site
• Tiny Twitter
• Twibble
• TwitterBerry: BlackBerry client
• WidSets - Twitter: Java client

Desktop Apps (Adobe AIR):

• Snitter
• Spaz
• Tweetr
• Twhirl: “a twitter client” is understated. Definite must have

Search:

• Flaptor Twitter Search
• Hashtags
• Summize: Amazing results
• Terraminds
• TweetScan
• TwitterSearch

Photos & Images:

• Mobypicture
• TwitPic
• TwitterGram: FlickrToTwitter

Mashups/Geolocation:

• TrackThis: UPS/FedEx/DHL etc package tracking
• TwitterLocal
• TwitterVision
• TwitterPoster

Blogging Tools (a very short list):

• Twitter Feed
• Twitter Tools: WordPress Plugin
• TwitThis

News & Politics:

• Alltop
• Politweets
• TweetWire

Survey Tools:

• Poll Daddy
• StrawPoll
• Twitter Census
• Twitter Answers
• Tweetburner URL tracking

Special thanks to franticindustries, Mashable and all of the assorted the commenters for the initial inspiration for this list. Also see Twitter Fan Wiki for a comprehensive list of apps. There are some big ones missing I’m sure, so YMMV with that list as with this one over time. All links/sites were active as of May 27, 2008.

Doing some reading this morning lead me to this site which has a collection of 10 bits of code that you can tweet. Reading this reminded me of the 5Kb website challenge. The premise was to create a functional website in 5Kb of code. That included all images, javascript, css, html… EVERYTHING! I recall there were a number of very complex graphic manipulation tools and even a shopping cart. Today I’m building out a new design for a client and my CSS include alone is already 3,197 bytes. This got me to thinking, we need a new 5Kb website challenge.

So here it is! What can you make in 5Kb?

Rules:

• All HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Images and any initial httpRequest() content loaded at startup must be less than 5Kb
• Content loaded via AJAX (if used) must be less than 5Kb per load request. In other words, it it loads a json object that references an image, the image + json must be less than 5Kb in size.
• The site must “do” something.

Prizes

I’ll give the three (3) best entries a 512Mb Memorex Mini USB Thumb Drive. Entries must be submitted by June 16, 2008 to be eligible for a prize. Submit your site and description in the comments below.

Judging and all that good stuff is subject to participation. If we have enough entries, I’ll open it to the community - otherwise, I’ll be the judge. I’m off to get started on my (non-eligible) project.

Today marks a milestone for my Twitter usage. I tweeted my 1,000th tweet. What does that mean exactly, well, honestly not very much. However, as I scanned over the last 2-3 hours of tweets when I woke up this morning I noticed the increasing number of flame wars between thought leaders in technology frustrating. A feed of 20-30 tweets might contain 5-6 messages back and forth between folks who are in some sort of pissing contest about who’s right, wrong, cool or whatever.

It’s kind of sad.

As everyone struggles to really figure out how to effectively use Twitter it becomes hard to determine the best method for leveraging the technology effectively. I’ve been using it to keep up on industry insiders thoughts (which is probably why I get so much noise and childish banter in my feed). Others use it as initially intended, to tell folks what they’re doing and yet more for shameless self promotion.

I’d love to see more quality information from the industry visionaries who could all take a lesson from @jowyang and @guykawasaki and less banter about who’s right and who’s wrong. Guy and Jeremiah, and I’m sure many others, somehow keep above the fray and still add value to my Twitter experience.

I’ve been experimenting with twitter a lot lately. Generally, I find it’s something I use more away from my computer than while I’m at it. However, I’ve been frustrated by my mobile experience more than a few times and I’m not sure where to head next. I have a BlackBerry Curve with service via AT&T. I’m reasonably happy with the phone. If you think of twitter as SMS² you’ll start to understand how I’ve been using it. When I’m at my computer, I reach out to individuals, I connect with co-workers via IM, Skype, Email, Facebook, MySpace etc. When I’m away from the full glory of my machine, I do lighter communication - SMS and twitter. Keep in mind, this is a generalization.

Currently as a BlackBerry user, you’ve got a few options for accessing twitter (options are good right?), each of which I’ll get into more detail about below:

1. m.twitter.com - the mobile phone optimized version
2. twitter.com - the full blown site
3. TinyTwitter
4. TwitterBerry
5. GTalk

This chart summarizes my experience using the different methods of accessing twitter, but keep reading for more detail.

(more…)

I’ve been experimenting with Twitter for just over 4 months now, using it in my personal and professional life. There seems to be a large and still growing developer community building up around it churning out great applications, including one I heard about (via @purplecar on twitter of course). The application by tweetclouds.com aims to create a tag cloud (much like the one on this and many other blogs) from your tweets; you can see mine here in all it’s glory.

If you’re on twitter, follow me - I’d love to hear from folks who are experimenting with new ways of extending twitter.

Some other interesting tools include Twitter Stats, which received some coverage on TechCrunch in January.

Quite possibly my favorite is TwitterVision, a nice mashup leveraging the public tweet stream and google maps to visualize the public feed. Incidentally David Troy (the author) has also created FlickrVision, basically the same app but using photos instead.

There’s also Twitterholic a top 100 twitter user board, Twubble a great way to find people you might be interested in following (recently featured on FaceReviews), Twitterverse another cloud app but for the entire twitter universe and if your totally lost as to why anyone uses twitter, I recommend the Twitter in Plain English video by CommonCraft.

If I’m missing a way cool web based app, please let me know in the comments below. I’ll save desktop applications for another post, there certainly are plenty of those too!

I’m onto my third Blackberry in the last 12 months (my second in 30 days) and I’ve put this together as a list of the applications that I constantly need to re-install as I’m getting the device back up and running. If anyone has some that should be on the radar, please let me know.

• Google Maps - The built in GPS + Google Maps = navigation!!!
• Twitterberry - Twitter on the go
• OperaMini - While the built in browser works, this gets the sites that aren’t so handheld friendly.
• Y! Go - I’m a huge fan of Flickr and use this to title, tag and upload photos.
• AT&T Blackberry Start - AT&T’s website for changing the device (without redoing all your email setup)

For anyone using their device as hard as I do, I recommend picking up a microSD card for photos and ring-tones (if your into that sort of thing.) It’s always easier to swap the card out than fight with buying and downloading them again.