When you build a new house, most people want their house to be immune to the perils of nature and society, and such is also the case with Twitter. The average person, I imagine, wants a sustainable following who values them, and who, in turn, they value.

I see no value in new followers who have no followers themselves, are following thousands of people, and have very few tweets to share. What does this say about a person/organization? This says “I want results but don’t know how to achieve them”.  They are building mobile homes. No foundation, no worthwhile content, and certainly no class.

If you can’t afford to take the time to build a solid home, don’t build one at all.

With Facebook making many changes to the way that it manages user data and allows data to be used outside of the Facebook network, it is only natural, and expected that users would have concerns about how their identity, information and privacy was being treated. With change comes resistance, it has oft been said.  I’d like to present my side of the argument for more openess on the internet.

I would like to propose that, over time and with the advent of technology, the average person’s privacy has severely diminished.  I supposed that this has done two very important things to the world. 

1. It has helped fuel an information revolution.  The internet is fueled by information, and all information is, at various levels, of some private nature.  Whether that is information about objects, people, concepts, etc, the information comes from someone and ultimately holds claim to some level of privacy.  In greater and greater degrees, people have let go of some, and in some cases, all of that privacy for the benefit of mankind. 
2. It has created an environment where people should know and understand that nothing that they publish can be private.  There are ways to be private. Internet publishing services are not it.

It is my general feeling that Facebook is following a great path.  I truly feel that openess of information will lead to far greater developments and that open communication and sharing is the key to revolution.  That being said, I strongly believe that users are under-educated as to their responsibilities when it comes to their own privacy. 

Some have proposed an “opt-in” model, however, in so many situations, opt-in fails to generate any results. Take for example the graph below.

For organ donation opt-in, the results are tremendously low. But for opt-out, the results are significantly higher.  Most people follow the status quo.  If this concept is applied to privacy, information openness would never go anywhere if it were not for companies like Facebook pushing the boundaries.

I congratulate Facebook on their forward thinking.  Ensuring that they are leading the trend when it comes to openness of information ensures that they remain the innovative company that they have always been, leading the world to a new information era.

It looks like Twitter may be allowing multi-user support on corporate accounts as evidenced by Intuit‘s TurboTax account.

Note that under the tweet, it states “1 hour via web by TTaxChels“, one of their employees.  Prior to this point they’ve been using CoTweet and other methods but it would appear that individuals are now able to post under their own name.

New Feature?

These sorts of features could help Twitter move towards a Business friendly business model by adding such extra features for a fee. Other things that would be useful in the realm of business and could be coming soon:

• Long term archiving
• Tweet audit trail
• Assignment of tweets to specific users
• Tweet importance ratings
• Automatic searches and trending on company selected topics

Twitter could create a very effective and desirable revenue stream with these types of features.

Update (10:17pm EST February 24th)

It would seem that while Intuit’s Chelsea can neither confirm nor deny that Twitter has incorporated new features, Twitter is definitely working with large brands to ensure that their corporate Twitter experience is improved.

Presented for our consumption is the following set of statistics.

As per these new statistics on the use of Twitter in the UK released by Nielsen, it appears as thought 7% of all UK twitter users are creating 70% of the content, which Lee equates to a “circle jerk”.  I definitely agree that this statistic is not surprising and that if these 7% of Twitter users were to leave Twitter tomorrow, the service would disintegrate.

That being said, I firmly believe that Twitter is like the government.  For instance, only 3-7% of the population is employed by the government, depending on which statistics you believe, however, they are the decision makers. While they’re influenced by the greater population, they hold the keys to the creation of government content.

I feel like Twitter is much the same, except in a self-governed sort of way. Those who have stepped up to create the content have the opportunity to have their content consumed by everyone else and influence everyone else’s content.  So while the tool may be ephemeral, the impact of the tool is widespread.

We must remember that the medium of many-to-many media is still new in terms of it’s impact on communication evolution, and that Twitter but a building block to the overall evolution.  The influencers may move on but the impact will be long lasting to everyone, not just those involved.

I say architects of the future rather than circle jerk.

The new flavour, called “Connect”, was developed on Facebook through a contest, endorsed by Canadian celebrity Steve Nash.

I was very excited when Vitamin Water launched a few years ago as I’m a bit of an indie-beverage aficionado.  I love anything that is not made by the big beverage conglomerates. Think craft-brewed root beers and old fashioned Cream Sodas.  Then I disappointingly found out that The Center for Responsible Hydration is, in actual fact, owned by Coca-Cola.  After overcoming my absolute underwhelmedness, and drinking a delicious bottle of Fifty Cent’s namesake beverage “Fifty”, I once again became a huge fan.

Launching in March 2010, the new Connect flavour will be Black Cherry-Lime.  You can read about it further here.

Since the addition of the “Lists” feature, according to alexa.com, both time spent on site as well as pageviews per visit have increased.  Both these stats seemed to be in a slight decline over the prior month. While there was a spike, it will take time to see if this spike is sustained.

Mashable reported yesterday that Twitter has now added a ReTweet function.

While these features have slightly increased my Twitter.com usage, these alone won’t be enough to keep me from my Twitter clients. And I use a lot of them. For different reasons, on different platforms.

One reason that is likely for Twitter to be implementing many of these features to their site is to bring users back, and I would suspect it is in hopes of soon monetizing the service. I think Twitter would have a difficult time monetizing if users are using clients rather than the site itself. It might also have a harder time securing investors if its traffic numbers are trending negatively, which seems to have been happening since the massive traffic spikes it saw in February and March.

The problem that I see with what Twitter is doing is that it is in fact not innovating at all, but merely copying the competition, implementing features that have long been the reason that people have moved to clients like Tweetdeck, Seesmic Desktop, Tweetie, etc.

In the short term, Twitter may lure some users back to their homepage with these “new” features, but in the long run, I believe the only way that they can build sustainable user engagement on the site is to really innovate. Create new features that the community has not yet come up with without diluting the simplicity of Twitter.

Have Twitter’s new features brought you back to the site more often?

Pretty fantastic concept if you ask me!

The “Quest”, (there’s really no better way to describe it) has a list of some of Canada’s best known artists vying for the honour and glory of writing this album. Indie artists like B.C.’s Oh Susanna and one of my personal favorites, Coeur de Pirate out of Montreal are represented alongside well known artists such as Chantal Kreviazuk, Hawksley Workman and Sloan.  The entire line-up of proposed artists is fantastic and it will be interesting to see who gets to write these 13 songs.

While I haven’t heard too much about the song/artist search, I’ll certainly be following it moving forward.  I can see some really great, classic Canadian music coming from this.  My only criticism of the whole thing is that I didn’t find out about it sooner!