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.

Library of Congress To Archive Drunk Tweets

The Library of Congress has partnered with Twitter to start archiving your drunken tweets as well as all others, starting from the first tweet in 2006. The Library of Congress announced the partnership on their blog yesterday. There are currently several billion tweets which account for about five terabytes of data. This will be on top of the current 167 terabytes that the Library of Congress has in digital assets. The Library of Congress noted that the data would not be made available for commercial use. After a six month delay, the data will be accessible "for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library, and preservation." One big sticking point concerned the use of URL shortners. We have seen numerous URL shortners come and go, what will happen to those tweets that use these services? The Library of Congress looks to be working on a solution to preserve the links, but a solution will not come for some time.

Twitter News Roundup

Official Twitter Apps - Twitter recently acquired  the parent company of the Tweetie app, release a new Blackberry Twitter app, and is developing a official app for the Google Android. All of these apps were referenced as "Official Twitter Apps", but Twitter quickly retracted the "official" label due to backlash from the developer community. This anouncement worried third-party developers that Twitter was going to buy or develop competing "official" apps. Read more  

Promoted Tweets - Twitter is going to place promoted tweets within their search results. These promoted tweets will allow companies to only promote their own tweets. Users will be able to to reply to them, retweet them, and add them as favorites. The promoted tweets will come with real-time analytics, which is one piece of the soon to be released business accounts. Here is a cool tool that displays the sentiment on the topic of promoted tweets.

Twitter Releases Data - During their Chirp conference, Twitter released some user data. Twitter reported 105 million users and is adding 300,000 users every day. They mentioned that they are currently handling over 600 million search queries each day, almost as many as Yahoo. Another interesting fact is that 75% of traffic comes from third-party applications. These third-party applications account for 60% of all tweets sent.

Twitter Places - A new app that allows users to check-in at different locations by attaching geo-location data to the tweets. The app will aggregate what people are saying, who has been their, as well as the opinion of the place. Some see this as a competitor to FourSquares and Gowalla.

User Streams - Twitter launched a developers network site at dev.twitter.com. With this new dev center, they are providing a new streaming API. This API will allow developers to have near-realtime access to various subsets of Twitter public statuses.

Twitter To Have Major Redesign

Doug Bowman @stop (I like this handle), the head of Twitter's design team released a sneek peek into an upcoming site redesign for the Twitter web interface. The picture shows some additional stats and a more rounded layout. See the Twitter redesign picture.