Ten Twit Preventing Tips for Twitter

Twitter has hit the internet, and the media by storm, so much so I think we have safely call Twitter the Internet's newest wunderkind.

So I've come up with these ten steps to getting started with Twitter, since it seems that everyone has, will be or should be starting on Twitter.

1. Understand your playing field. If you work a company other than your own, check to see if your company has a policy on employees using Twitter while at work and/or Twitting about work. If they don't have a policy then ask specific questions about what you are allowed to do on Twitter and get the answers in writing. You don't want to be facing the unemployment line because you twittered-inappropriately about work.

2. Join and participate. Sign up in your real name with a bio and picture so the rest of us know who we are talking to.

3. Select your Twitter voice. Is the main focus of your Twitter account business or pleasure or both? (check item # 1, to confirm that you can twitter about your business)

4. Follow people who find it useful and watch how they behave. Follow some top people to start with and invest some time in reading their tweets and clicking on the links they include in their tweets. You will start to understand the power of Twitter.

5. Get over that uncomfortable feeling and start to twitter.

6. Download and use a client such as thwirl or tweetdeck, or my personal favorite hootsuite. .

7. Find people who share your interests using tools such as Tweetscan or Tweetgrid and see who the important people in your locality are with Twittergrader.

8. See what everyone else is talking about and emerging topics by using Twitscoop. Need some help on what to tweet (verb: tweet – the action of writing on twitter) about?

Here are some winning practices of top tweeters:
* Don't be pedantic. We don't care what you're eating for lunch, or that you just woke up.
* Don't use Twitter just to pimp your blog posts.
* Don't pimp your clients all day
* Don't over-tweet. If you need half a dozen tweets to make your point, do one that points to a blog post.
* Do link to interesting articles, sites, blog posts.
* Do include links in as many of your posts as possible
* Answer and ask questions
* Be polite and don't be boring.

9. There are serious news issues being covered on Twitter such as the coverage of the Mumbai bombings and Hudson plane crash. Follow your competitors and what others are saying about them by entering their name into search.twitter.com. You might as well search your companies name as well – you might just come up with some interesting research.

10. Relax and give Twitter a chance. If Twitter doesn't work for you, then at least you'll know and you’ll already have a Twitter account and some Twitter experience if you ever need it in the future. If Twitter is keeping you more informed, helping you connect with customers and/or friends, then you can call yourself part of the Twitter Nation!

Is Cloud Computing Really Computing in the Sky?

Is Cloud Computing Really Computing in the Sky?

Ah, no. Cloud computing has nothing to do with sky, weather, satellites or clouds for that matter. You may have heard about cloud computing this week in relation to the Google Gmail outage on Feb 24th and TechCrunch's explanation on the cause of the problem.

Cloud computing is considered the next step in the growth of computing and the Internet, where software (like office suites, and development platforms) are found on the Internet (in the cloud) and not on individual hard-drives. Examples include Salesforce.com and Google Apps which provide common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers.

That's it for the explanation on cloud computing - the debate on the pros and cons of cloud computing will be saved for another time.

The Internet is Big ... And Going to Get Bigger

The global internet population has crested over the 1 billion mark according to ComScore.

Even as the internet population passes the one billion mark, only 41% (416 million) of adults (15+) in the Asia Pacific are online while in the US only 28% (185 million) of 15+'s are online. That leaves a lot of room for continued growth.

"Surpassing one billion global users is a significant landmark in the history of the Internet," said Magid Abraham, President and Chief Executive Officer, comScore, Inc. "It is a monument to the increasingly unified global community in which we live and reminds us that the world truly is becoming more flat. The second billion will be online before we know it, and the third billion will arrive even faster than that, until we have a truly global network of interconnected people and ideas that transcend borders and cultural boundaries."

Sites that Top the Global Internet Traffic Mountain

It should be no surprise to anyone who has even a basic understanding of the internet these days that Google is the "King of the Mountain", with over 775 million visitors. Yikes ... remember 8 years ago when Google was breaking into the search engine market? Google was named the top search engine by PC magazine in 1998. The most prophetic statement in the short PC magazine article, "There's much more to come at Google!, but even in its prototype form it's a great search engine.", truer words have not been written.

Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL hold positions 2, 3, 4 and coming in in 5th position is the Wikipedia Foundation Sites. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone and that aims to provide free encyclopedic information to its readers that was founded in 2000. and it can boldly hold claim to the success of user-generated content. As of Jan 25/09 Wikipedia contains 2.7 million articles.

If you think it's too late to claim your corner of the internet? Think again. The internet is only just beginning and one can only imagine that new businesses and innovations the next billion internet users will bring.