Gose Stories

This provides an interesting review of what people were talking about in 2009. I don't think anybody would have thought when Twitter started that it would encapsulate an entire year of news so well.

And, I'm pretty proud to see that Chuck Norris is on the list of people most Tweeted about.

Here’s my top 9 Twitter Directories to make sure you are listed on:

1. Twellow – Right now the crown jewel of Twitter directories.  If you only bother with one on this list, choose Twellow.
2. Wefollow – My personal favorite for the simple design and usability.  Built by Digg co-founder Kevin Rose.
3. Twittercounter – My 2nd favorite as it acts as a statistical tool as well.
4. Twitterholic – Another one of those directories that ranks users by followers.  Kind of fun to see where you rank based on filters.
5. JustTweetIt – A directory of Twitter users sorted by categories. Nothing groundbreaking here, but just another large directory to list yourself to be found.
6. Geofollow – GeoFollow allows you to list yourself geographically and categorically.
7. Tweetfind – Free Twitter yellow and white pages directory.  Not the best looking directory, but front page on Google for “twitter directories”, so worth the listing.
8. Twibs – Only really applicable to businesses, but everyone is selling something right?
9. Hashtags – This is simply a directory of hashtag users on Twitter.

What do you think? Is their value in these directories? Do you use them?

As a huge fan of LinkedIn, this is great news for those of us who are LI junkies.

Facebook is the primary social network on which consumer-focused companies maintain one or more profiles, cited by 83 percent of respondents compared with 45 percent for Twitter. Business-to-business companies maintain a presence on both social sites with 77 percent maintaining a profile on Facebook and 73 percent on Twitter.

Among those using social media for business purposes in their jobs, 62 percent visit company or brand profiles on social networking sites and 55 percent search for business information on these sites.

It's interesting that a higher percentage of B2B companies have a Twitter profile, compared to B2C companies. I would have flip-flopped the two.

LinkedIn had a chance to be THE place for businesses but just simply dropped the ball. That's my "expert" evaluation.

Come 2010 and there will be more tweets on this planet than the tweeps that exist. This is what it seems like if we go by the number of tweets Twitter users post each day. Oh, if you you're all new to this Twitter fad, tweeps are nothing but the twitterised term for people on Twitter.

So, what we are on about here is that Twitter seems to have recently crossed the 5 billion tweets barrier with a Twitter user Robert Sloan managing to post the tweet numbered 5000000000. Now, it certainly does mean it was the tweet number 5 billion, but was it really the five billionth tweet considering there were millions of deleted tweets and of course pre release test tweets on the site? We never know unless of course Twitter comes with a detailed blog post on how it counts tweets. Anyway, that doesn't seem to matter here anyway as long as the tweet is numbered 5000000000.

The Pentagigatweet as Robert Sloan has named the hapless five billionth tweet was eventually deleted by him making things more confusing. So, the 5000000000th tweet no longer exists on Twitter and we do not have a clue who's tweet was next in line to Robert's so that the person can be given due credit.

Now, for some mind boggling facts. The five billion figure mark for any website in terms of anything is impressive. Be it the page views, status updates, number of users or anything else for that matter. That taken into consideration, it was just in November 2008 that Twitter had passed the measly one billion updates mark! In the 11 months after that, there has been more than fourfold increase in the number of tweets. Going by the way things are moving it could be just a few months until there are ACTUALLY more tweets on the planet than there are humans. So, what are you doing?

Love the graphic.

According to a new survey of 1,400 CIOs of companies with 100 or more employees, 54% now completely block employees from accessing social networking sites at work.

Only 10% of those surveyed let employees use social networks however they please, while the remainder all impose at least some restrictions on usage, like limiting it to business purposes only.

I'm not surprised by this but it's disappointing. To me, it's always been a management issue -- not a technology one. It wasn't that long ago that only a few employees had email access. That changed over time and so will this.

Companies will find it hard to recruit new employees if they block too much access for invalid reasons.

1- Start a Twitter account then don't use it.

2- Don't track your brand in social media using either free or paid monitoring tools.

3- Start a social media program, but don't tell the rest of the company about it.

All content copyright B.L. Ochman