To end with 2008 – New page, modifications of design

As you may have noticed, the design of the blog has been slightly modified.
IE7 users, my apologies – I still cannot figure out why it doesn’t work with Internet explorer. Still need to work on it … Maybe for 2009 🙂

Recommendations, suggestions, ideas and comments are more than welcome.

A new page has also been added on the tabbed menu at the top of the screen : Text 100 Radar is a collection of what is said on Text 100 in the social media (twitter, youtube, flickr, blogs, etc). You might already track these on your RSS reader – feel free to make recommandation about it, if you wish to add services, etc …

Twitter – looking for someone ?

Maybe it’s time for a wrap up of ’08: Winner for the social media of the year would be … Twitter, I guess … With 5000 to 10 000 new users everyday, about 5 millions new users have joined twitter in 08. I’ve attached for reference hereunder the full study by Hubspot, if you have haven’t already seen it.

“A year ago Twitter was a relatively small community of techies and Web 2.0 geeks, now it is going mainstream,” the report said.

“Twitter is not only being talked about and used by a lot more people, but more and more marketing industry events and conferences are using Twitter as a standard means of communication,” it said.

HubSpot said 35 percent of Twitter users have 10 or fewer “followers” — people who subscribe to receive their 140-characters-or-less messages — while nine percent of Twitter users follow no one at all.

The average number of followers for a Twitter user is 70, it said, and the average person follows 69 people.

The report said Twitter traffic was the highest on Wednesdays and Thursdays and dropped off by about 30 percent over the weekend.

Source

And what now if you want to look for someone ?

For a long time, finding new people to follow on Twitter was really painful. But recently, Twitter relaunched the search engine for people, which is way more efficient (if people have given their real name).
http://twitter.com/search/users

Another tool that appeared recently : The Twitter Grade, which measures the reach and authority of a Twitter user

http://twitter.grader.com
Pretty convenient to sort out people.
Especially since they released a very interesting ranking – the Twitter “Elite” : http://twitter.grader.com/topusers

Chris has already covered in the past tools such as twellow to identify users
In the news category : http://www.twellow.com/category_users/cat_id/50)
In the bloggers category : http://www.twellow.com/category_users/cat_id/78

Worth to be mentioned : this wiki with people from the media on twitter.
http://mediaontwitter.pbwiki.com/

I also liked very much Twitdir, which seems to be off for maintenance these days …
http://twitdir.com

And to conclude, the shorty awards indicated by Erica will also be a good way to explore new contacts.
http://disruptionblog.com/?p=559