This is a guest post from Jamie Fairbairn.

The web is constantly evolving.

On July 15^th 2006 Twitter was officially launched and has since gone on to change the way many of us interact online.

As Twitter approaches its 5^th Birthday I thought it would be good to take a look at what it might be like if it was launching in 2011.

Read on below to discover my 10 point Twitter wish list.

Auto DMs wouldn’t exist

Isn’t it great when you follow someone on Twitter because you want to engage with them and have a conversation, only to find an auto DM coming your way?

“Check out my blog, Like me on Facebook” – or maybe that should that read “I couldn’t care less about you, it’s all about me”.

Certain words and phrases would be filtered out

Have you ever followed someone only to find they weren’t quite what you expected? Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a list of words or phrases you could automatically block? How about ‘make money online’, ‘get more Twitter followers’ and ‘instant traffic’ for starters?

I know you can block users but it would be nice not to have to do this manually and have your time wasted.

A daily limit on tweets

There’s always someone who takes their Twitter use to excess. You know the person you follow who is quiet for a while then suddenly launches about 40 updates in as many minutes.

I wouldn’t want everyone to be penalised by this though, so perhaps a ban could be only placed on those who took their tweeting to ridiculous extremes.

A ban on tweet scheduling

I don’t know about you but the relevance on some automatic tweets I’ve seen recently has been questionable to say the least. This week alone I’ve seen tweets with “10 social media rules for 2010” and similar outdated titles.

In my humble opinion, Twitter should be about real-time interaction and the example above demonstrates how automatic tweet scheduling can go badly wrong and ruin a user’s credibility.

An audio chat function

I’m not a technical person but maybe an audio chat function could work on Twitter? I realise you can go on Skype or pick up the phone but if you’re having a discussion on Twitter with more than one of your followers, perhaps a Skype type function could be incorporated?

I know there are other tools out there that allow for real-time collaboration in this way, but surely Twitter would rather people didn’t leave their site to do it?

A Twitter divide – business and social

Call me crazy (and I know many of you will) but I can’t help thinking it might be a good idea to split Twitter into two separate platforms – one for business and one for social purposes.

Now I know what you’ll be thinking – that just takes away from the whole point of social media, but to be honest I’m sick and tired of ‘business’ people telling me what they had for breakfast or how many pints of lager they drunk last night.

Since some people don’t seem able to post the inane things from their life on Facebook rather than their business Twitter profile, why not give them a separate social Twitter to blether away on?

An official Twitter jobs board

I think Twitter is missing a trick by not having an ‘official’ jobs board. It’s always said they’re looking for ways to create revenue but many third parties seem to be one step ahead – for example www.twitjobsearch.com seems to be doing very well.

An official Twitter jobs board would create revenue for Twitter while also giving its users a fantastic portal for employers and job seekers.

A smarter ‘who to follow’ function

I think the ‘who to follow’ function is a great innovation by Twitter but it could do with some modifications.

I recently checked out my ‘who to follow’ list and was pretty disappointed that it was full of verified Twitter accounts of people I’d never heard of and had no obvious connection to my industry or my existing followers.

A tweet improvement tool

No offence to anyone who uses Twitter but some people post a lot of nonsense. There are also others who post fantastic content but give it a weak headline so nobody clicks through to it.

With this in mind, I thought a built-in tweet improvement tool would be a good idea. Something that could scan what people had written and make some suggestions for improvement would make Twitter a better place for everyone.

A tweet spell checker

Nobody’s perfect and there have been times when I’ve accidentally tweeted something with a spelling mistake in it. Of course you can delete the offending tweet and post it again with the mistake removed.

Wouldn’t it be better for everyone though if Twitter had a built-in spell checker so you could be sure your tweets were error free before posting?

I’d love to know what you think of my wish list and if you have any suggestions of your own, please leave them in the comments below.

About the author: Jamie Fairbairn runs SearchBlogger – an online marketing blog for small business owners. Jamie has helped small business owners in the UK get more from the web over the last 10 years.

SearchBlogger was set up in October 2010 to share Jamie’s knowledge on all aspects of online marketing with a wider audience. You can find him on Twitter @SearchBlogger.

image: theOOBE

If Twitter Went Back to the Drawing Board originally appeared on Danny Brown - under a Creative Commons license.

One of the most useful features on Twitter is being withdrawn as of today – the hashtag.

For anyone not on Twitter, a hashtag is the universal # symbol, and helps to separate individual conversations from the overall Twitter stream. For example, if I want to just talk with people about silly jokes, I would use the hashtag #sillyjokes. This would help others just follow that conversation by opening up a browsing window just for that hashtag.

There are some hugely popular hashtags, like #blogchat – a chat about blogging, oddly enough – and #socialmedia – a topic about social media (who said us social media types weren’t smart?). But, as of today, no more.

Twitter issued a statement saying that they were stopping the use of hashtags because of its connotation with drug use. Hash is slang for hashis, also known as cannabis, a drug known for making you feel sleepy. Not something that’s much use when you’re on the fast-paced world of Twitter.

“While we recognize cannabis may be legal in some countries, it’s obviously a concern for us to be associated with drug use. Even if Twitter co-founder Ev might look stoned to some folks, we can assure you he isn’t – he’s just a laid-back happy chappy!”

The announcement probably doesn’t come as a surprise – Twitter is looking to monetize its service, and being too stoned to click on promoted ads isn’t beneficial to anyone.

So, farewell hashtag – we knew you when, and you were fun. Guess it’s back to the drawing board for the Bong Button that was due to replace the Tweet button…

More details of the Twitter ban on hashtag use can be found here.

Twitter Bans the Use of Hashtags originally appeared on Danny Brown - under a Creative Commons license.

From social media darlings JetBlue to Air Canada and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, it’s been a bit of a wake-up call for businesses that may have avoided social smackdowns so far.

And these are just the tip of the iceberg – Valeria Maltoni has a great post about the topic today, and how businesses need to stop with the bad planning and get into the mindset that you’re only one experience away from a social shit-storm.

So how can you prepare? How can you be ready for every single negative voice about your business? How can you take what’s being said and turn that into a positive?

Well, you can pop along to the #Kaizenblog chat on Twitter this Friday, August 13, at 12:00 noon eastern, where I’ll be co-hosting the chat with both Valeria and Elli St. George Godfrey on this very topic.

We’ll be looking at some of the things that have happened; how they’ve been dealt with (good and bad); what could have been done better; and how your business can use social media effectively and openly to repair the damage when the doors get blown off your business.

It should be a timely and eventful chat, and I’d love to see you over there. If you’re on Twitter, you can take part by following the #Kaizenblog hashtag and share your examples and ideas. Who knows, we might even help some of the companies currently struggling with their response…

See you there?

photo credit: lejoe

Saving Face When Your Company’s Doors Are Blown Off originally appeared on Danny Brown - under a Creative Commons license.

The company had already made a substantial update recently, with the introduction of HTML5 compatibility on its Twitter client. This update included site analytics via Google, geo-search options for local tweets, drag-and-drop image uploads and InstaLoad for better performance issues all round.

Now, however, it’s upped its game considerably and offers the best Twitter experience for business and personal use.

What’s New at Hootsuite

Today’s update takes Hootsuite from being a still great personal Twitter client to a fully loaded business Twitter client as well. Instead of just being another cool way to use Twitter, Hootsuite gets you (as a business) closer to the mindsets of your customers by positioning Hootsuite as a social CRM package.

So what are these goodies?

Filter by Influence

Using the Klout algorithm to determine how influential a Twitter user is, you can determine how a certain user’s information is listened to. Do they get a lot of retweets; are they speaking with the types of audience you’re after; do they have a wide reach? This is the kind of information that’s perfect for a social marketing or outreach campaign.

Filter by Keywords

Kind of like Twitter Search but specifically on filtered keywords, this allows you to track conversations relevant to your business, and that of your competitors. Think of how you can hijack their conversations if they’re not looking after their customers.

Follower Insights

This is, quite simply, an awesome addition, and lets you know where your connections are elsewhere online. Using a mix of usernames and public information, you can check other social accounts as well as what their business skill sets are. This could be a great recruiting tool, or simply a great way to enhance current relationships.

Organization View

Along with CoTweet, Hootsuite is one of the best Twitter clients when it comes to having teams from the same business working on the platform. Great for customer service or tech team support. With organization view, you can find and add team members more easily and make the whole team/user experience offering better-suited to your business goals.

Hoot to Zendesk Support

Tying in with the team option, customer service issues raised via Twitter can now become full-on raised tickets to that particular team. You can then track response time and how well a situation was dealt with – perfect for analyzing internal procedures and building customer/brand loyalty.

I’ve been using Hootsuite for the past month or so now, having been a die-hard Seesmic user previously. I still love Seesmic and the user experience it offers, but with the updates Hootsuite have made, it’s a different ball-game altogether.

And with premium accounts coming soon for those that want enhanced teams, analytics, social feeds, support and more, it looks like Hootsuite is going to be the measuring stick that other Twitter clients need to start measuring up to.

What’s your take? Big step for Hootsuite or not enough to make you change from your current client? And what would you like to see from its upcoming premium account?

Hootsuite Just Took the Lead in Third Party Twitter Apps originally appeared on Danny Brown - under a Creative Commons license.

A lot of that comes down to your belief in how social can work for businesses, and how you relate your client or boss’s needs into their social media equivalent. It’s not always easy, but it’s not rocket science either.

With that in mind, here’s the first in a series of presentations on how you can relate certain social media benefits to a business need. This time around it’s Twitter.  I hope you find it useful, and feel free to share with your friends, download, use on your own blog, etc. And if there’s anything you’d add to the presentation, drop it in the comments section below.

How to Sell Social Media – Twitter originally appeared on Danny Brown - under a Creative Commons license.

Therefore, I wasn’t using Twitter correctly; instead of following everyone back that followed me (which I should be doing, according to the email), I was obviously a snob that only followed the “elite” and I should “re-evaluate my Twitter use”.

The email ended by saying I shouldn’t advise on social media because I’m breaking a cardinal sin – which is, connect with everyone or don’t connect at all.

Okay….

So, I sat down and thought about it. Am I a Twitter snob? Should I follow everyone who follows me? Maybe. Maybe not. If snobbery is down to reciprocal numbers then, yes, I am a Twitter snob. But (and excuse my cussing), to me numbers on Twitter mean f**k all.

You can have 100,000 followers. But are they all live? Are they all human? Or are they a mix of humans, live accounts, dead accounts, spammers and bots? If they’re not all actual people that are active and engaging, then they don’t count. Unless you’re after false numbers, of course, to make you feel more important than you are. And there’s plenty of that going around…

So, fair enough. I have a skewed ratio. Which makes me a snob. But here’s the thing.

I’d rather be a snob with a skewed and (mostly) accurate ratio, than someone pretending to be something they’re not. Which, after all, is the real snobbery. No?

photo credit: teotwawki

I’m a Twitter Snob? Maybe originally appeared on Danny Brown - under a Creative Commons license.

As is usual when wide-scale changes happen at a company (or, in this case, on a digital stream), there are both fans and dissenters to the new proposals. That’s normal. But what if Twitter could bypass the need for changes like the retweet one?

Twitter’s reasoning for the change is that it can be a confusing mess for new users, and it’s one of the reasons a lot of new users give up within the first month.

While that’s true, a lot of that comes down to the fact that Twitter itself doesn’t offer a great user guide for newcomers. A really simple FAQ or intro sheet emailed to new users would make all the difference, and then they could advise of user-created options, how they fit in and how best to use them.

This would help settle in new users and create something similar to the WordPress community, where you’d have the official tools as well as the community-created ones that existing users can help with. It’d help people settle in more quickly and get the sticky factor that Twitter needs (if reports that 40% of all new users quit after one month is accurate).

But why stop there? There are other areas that Twitter could help keep new and existing users stay happy.

Kill the Private Spam

This is a major problem for Twitter. We know there’s a chance our public streams will have some spam content. But I don’t recall signing up for private message spam from third-party platforms that I didn’t even register for. Pirate games and mafia clans are just two current examples. How can they get into my private message area when I’m not a user? Not good, Twitter.

Make the Suggested Users List Relevant

When you sign up for a new account, Twitter gives you a list of suggested users. The problem is, this list is usually filled with either celebrities or Twitter “power users”. These accounts can often be amongst the most active and busy as far as content goes – how can that be a good introduction when you’ve just joined? Instead, why not work with something like Twellow, ask a couple of simple questions and use these keywords to offer suggestions that actually make sense? So, people in your locality, industry, interest zones, etc, and ease new users into the system as opposed to scaring them off with hyper feeds to follow.

These are just some options that Twitter could take to make the experience better. They’re nothing major, yet they could possibly make a big difference (at least from a user-friendliness viewpoint).

How about you – how would you make Twitter more sticky?

photo credit: Dustin Diaz

Making Twitter Sticky originally appeared on Danny Brown - under a Creative Commons license.

Personally, I’ve used the comments on some of my posts (and those on other blogs) as inspiration for new posts here. I’ll add my comment on the original post, and then expand on it with a new or slightly different take. That then opens the discussion up even further, both on the new post and the original (play fair – always link back to your inspiration).

While content may be the instigator, it’s the conversations by the community that often make the content. And maybe it’s just me, but Twitter seems to be taking more of the conversations and making them 140-character bites.

I’ve seen many great posts by some truly remarkable bloggers be tweeted, and the conversation remain on Twitter. Points and questions raised in the post start the conversation rolling, but instead of via the comments section on a blog, they take place on the little blue bird nest. And that’s a shame.

There’s nothing wrong with this, of course – after all, Twitter is the king of instant feedback and interaction. And weekly events like #journchat and #blogchat , and others like them, show just how effective a medium Twitter can be for conversations. And yet…

Imagine how much a conversation could build without the limitations of 140-characters. Imagine how opposing views could be fully fleshed out with unlimited text. Imagine how communities could be forged, and new friendships built, through the reasoning and acceptance that long tail blog comments can offer. Imagine being the catalyst or inspiration for a blog post by your favourite blogger, all from a single comment you left.

Of course, you could say that it’s down to the blogger to make the content as open as possible, to encourage discussion – and this is true. Yet at the same time, maybe we (as readers) need to take part more as well? Maybe we need to encourage bloggers more by being part of their community, as opposed to rubbernecking on Twitter?

There are a myriad of ways for conversations to take place. Sometimes little snapshots like Twitter are ideal, if you’re pressed for time. But isn’t it nice to get away from the noise at times, and relax where you have time and space to say what you really want?

What’s your take?

photo credit: Shirin K. A. Winiger

Is Twitter Killing Blog Comments? originally appeared on Danny Brown - under a Creative Commons license.

Why does a Facebook update affect you if you’re on Twitter, or writing on your blog? Think of your Status Update box. Many users of both Facebook and Twitter have their accounts synced, so when you post on Twitter it goes to your status box (or main feed). The same for blog posts – a lot of bloggers auto-update their Facebook status with their latest post.

Now, however, if that tweet or post includes an advertisement from the likes of Sponsored Tweets, or a paid review from a company like IZEA and other paid blogging services, Facebook would be in their rights to see that as part of their “unauthorized commercial communications”. This could, in return, see your Facebook account closed or deleted.

Of course, the easy thing to do would be for IZEA and other companies to talk to Facebook. Or, for people to stop syncing accounts and blogs (Twitter updates is something a lot of “just Facebook users” have already complained about). The question is, will people want to change their current set-up?

What’s your take? Do you sync accounts? Will this make you change or will you keep posting regardless? Or should advertising companies be the ones taking the proactive approach to work to a solution?

Twitter Advertising on Facebook? No Thanks originally appeared on Danny Brown - under a Creative Commons license.

I hope you check them out – they’re all worth getting to know.

1. Community. Kim Woodbridge (@kwbridge). I use WordPress for my blog as I love the whole WordPress community, and Kim Woodbridge sums up why perfectly. Always sharing great blogging tips through her wonderfully named (Anti) Social Development blog, Kim is wise, smart and uber-friendly.

2. Ladies of Twitter. Libby Unwin (@LibbyUnwin). Libby makes me laugh. She always has a witty quip ready for you, and she’s such a “girly girl” that it’s refreshing (and I mean that in the nicest way!). She clearly loves her family and anyone that hates bad grammar but can consistently forgive my typos is always alright by me!

3. Gentlemen of Twitter. Jon Aston (@JonAston). Jon could easily fall into the Marketing category, but he truly fits into the Gentleman one. He’s a continuous source of support, inspiration, knowledge, smarts and wit. He has time for everyone, and I mean everyone, and he’s probably the best mix of a post-hippy punk you could ever meet!

4. Non-Profits. Lotay Yang (@Lotay). Some people might say that Lotay already has more than 50,000 followers so why add more. It’s not about the numbers, though, it’s the person, and Lotay is one of the best. A businessman that created the Black Card Circle Foundation, encouraging affluent business people to combine for social change, Lotay is a true leader in the non-profit field and a constant inspiration.

5. Marketing. Anne Sorensen (@marketingisus). I love Australians. They’re some of the most laid-back and friendliest folk around, after Canadians, and Anne is no exception. Yet she’s also a great marketer that founded Marketing Is Us, and is one of the best examples of marketing and new media/technology coming together.

6. Public Relations. Narciso Tovar (@Narciso). What can I say about Narciso? Okay – he’s an outstanding PR pro. He uses amazing music analogies to tell the  stories on his blog. He writes in capital first letters on Twitter (love this trick!). He is a bundle of fun and energy. He’s friendly with a capital “F”. And much, much more… Go check him out already!

7. Social Media. Sarah Evans (@PRSarahEvans). Yes, Sarah could have sat nicely in the public relations category, but for the way she’s using social media to advance PR and more, she definitely falls within social media smarts. Just look at how she’s bringing journalists, bloggers, PR and others together with #journchat as an example. Or her use of social media to raise more than $100,000 for a local shelter? Awesome.

8. The “Everyone Should Know” Wildcard Entry. Lee Safar (@leesafar). Hey, another Australian – cool! Lee is a singer/songwriter that I only recently got to know via 12for12k. She has a great sense of humour, a really cool voice, a very cheeky attitude and is quite simply a blast. Just don’t mention webcams and dial-up technology to her…

Cheers, guys, for being who you are every day of the week.

From Twitter to Blog – #FollowFriday Vol. 6 originally appeared on Danny Brown - under a Creative Commons license.