Chrysler Drops The F-Bomb on Twitter

Apparently someone at Chrysler's social media company posted a personal tweet that included the F-Bomb to the official Chrysler Twitter account @ChryslerAutos. It looks like the individual selected the wrong account to post the status update to.

I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the #motorcity and yet no one here knows how to f**king drive

Chrysler released a statement on their company blog apologizing for the incident. They also noted that the employee was terminated, which seems a bit harsh. I know when managing multiple Twitter accounts from a dashboard like TweetDeck, I have inadvertently published a post to the wrong account.

Charlie Sheen Joins Twitter and the Mayhem Follows

It was the next logical step in the "Crack is Whack" tour for Charlie Sheen to hop aboard Twitter. For those outside the US, Charlie Sheen has been publicly going through detox and hitting every news medium to get his story out. Only problem is he has been a bit crazy in his rants. Any ways I would suggest that you start to follow @charliesheen and grab some popcorn as he unravels on Twitter. I feel sorry for the guy, but there is a lesson here...Crack is diffidently whack!

Google's Twitter Directory

Google ventured into tweeting in 2009 from the @google account. They soon grew to over 129 Twitter accounts as of today. Google has now created a Google Twitter Directory to help you to navigate this huge list of Twitter accounts that they manage. The Google Twitter Directory allows you to narrow the list by category, language, and region. From this page you can also find a list of Google Blogs, their Facebook directory, and YouTube directory.

KFC Scholarship Contest via Twitter

The restaurant chain KFC is giving away a $20,000 scholarship via Twitter. KFC wants students to write in 129 characters or less why they exemplify Colonel Sanders' commitment to education and enriching their community, and why think they deserve a college scholarship. The contest runs through November 26 and KFC ask that the #KFCScholar hashtag be used for all submissions.

Twttr Old Skool

Techcrunch points to there very very first post about Twitter back in 2006. Michael Arrington wrote:

I imagine most users are not going to want to have all of their Twttr messages published on a public website.

That statement is quite funny now. But the other historical item noted in the article is that Twitter was actuall Twttr. They have a old green logo of Twitter on the post as well.

Twitter To Offer Official Tweet Button

Twitter is rumored to be launching a new Tweet Button potentially this month. The Tweet Button would provide the same functionality that we are accustom to with the Tweetmeme buttons. Since Twitter will be aggregating the data, you should be able to see a more comprehensive look into the sharing stats for links being shared. The new Tweet Button will allow web site owners to easily insert a single line of code to enable the button. The button will be offered in three sizes, 110×20, 55×20, 55×63. 

Mashable's article, "Twitter Launching Official Tweet Buttons This Week [Exclusive]", has an example of the embedded button as well as some additional screen shots with additional information about the new service.

Twitter Moves One Step Closer To Business Accounts

Twitter recently announced the acquisition of Smallthough Systems. Smallthough had provided Twitter with two internal tools, Dabble DB (an online database tool) and Trendly (an Google Analytics tool to analyze trends). Some have speculated that the acquisition of this company brings Twitter one step closer to business accounts. The Trendly tool looks like it will help bubble up trending data within Google Analytics. The Dabble DB tools looks more like a CRM system. Not sure if this program would be integrated into the business dashboard, but it could be.  

Twitter Rolling Out Official URL Shortner

It looks as if Twitter will be rolling out their new URL shortner service this summer. It is currently being tested with Twitter employee accounts and will take the structure of http://t.co. Twitter is currently integrating their own URL shortner (http://twt.tl) within Direct Messages (see Twitter Quietly Rolls Out Own URL Shortner). Twitter also goes on to state that there will be some sort of integration within the interface to automatically covert long URLs to http://t.co/  URLs. This has been a wanted feature for a very long time as users had to use a third-party URL shortner and copy and paste the link into the status update form. They also mentioned that third-party apps will be able to use this URL shortening service. Not sure if all links from these third-party apps will be automatically converted.

With the roll out of this URL shortening service, I believe that this is one step closer for Twitter to provide analytic link data to the user. So my guess would be that we will be seeing some sort of stats dashboard in the near future.

For those technical folks - you will want to stay away from shortening a short URL (i.e bit.ly to t.co). This will cause a "chain redirect", which Google frowns upon. If you shorten a link like bit.ly you are now producing a 301 redirect from t.co to bit.ly. The bit.ly URL will produce a 301 redirect to the original URL, thus causing a "chain redirect".

The End of Paid Tweets

The latest Twitter blog post, The Twitter Platform, discusses Twitter's long term strategy for their advertising business model. Buried within the middle of this post is a reference to paid tweets.

"...we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. We are updating our Terms of Service to articulate clearly what we mean by this statement..."

It looks like the end to third-party sponsored tweets.  A wise man once said, "Never build a business model off another business' API.".

Twitter Filtering Out RT in Search Results

It looks as though Twitter has started to filter out Retweets (RT) from their search results. Now this algorithm change has only affected the "integrated search" algorithm according to @Charles (Twitter UX Supprt Team member).

What is "integrated search" exactly? It looks to reference the search box within your profile page. I tested the home page search box as well as search.twitter.com, but this functionality has not been implemented yet. @Charles goes on to further explain "RTs are usually a lot of noise in search results/ Excluding them makes the results cleaner and (in most cases) better.".

@RayBeckman posted, "Has @ Twitter Declared War on Traditional Retweets? #TR", about his disgust with the removal of RT from the search results. He points out that he is more upset that Twitter did it in a "..sneaky, slient, back-door way.". He has started a petition at http://twitition.com/2sri3 and urges Twitter users to use "TR" instead of "RT" to signify "Traditional Retweet". @RayBeckman also notes that "TR" has been used in the past to represent "Translated" tweets (which I did not know).

As of yet, the only official response has come from @Charles and the Twitter blog has made no reference to this change.