Euro RSCG Amsterdam and Perfect Fools claim to have created the world’s first Twitter Race for Citroën, with users tweeting the driver into where to go next.

The livestream will be on Citroën’s Netherland Facebook page and you can follow the updates on their Twitter account.

Now we just to need make this happen on reality shows. Just kidding.

Source: Perfect Fools

YouTube Video

Facebook will always be a mistress. Twitter is my social web love.

From Pages to public profiles and events, could it threaten Twitter? Or even Bing?

Using an iPhone strapped to their arms and an earphone, simply by pressing a button, the runners were able to share their experiences with the world in real time. The voice message was turned into a text message that was automatically published at thehumanrace.com.ar/envivo/, in their Twitter accounts, and banners on sports vertical portals and news sites.

Good run by BBDO Argentina.

Asking the right questions

Jonah Lehrer in “How we Decide” explains the way audience research is flawed: when presented to the pilot shows of Hill Street Blues or Seinfeld, focus groups reacted with bad reviews, on what was mostly a response against novelty. On this particular behavior, Brian Graden of MTV Networks rightfully says “Quantitative data is useless by itself. You’ve got to ask the data the right questions”.
The main concern when judging similar situations should be “to sort through these emotion mistakes so he or she isn’t misled by the audience’s first impression. Sometimes people like shows that actually stink and reject shows that they grow to enjoy”.
As with Twitter, people might not always get things on their first time, but it will grow on them, they’ll get used to it and eventually find their own way to enjoy it. Oh, wait: that’s the whole story of the Internet.
Nielsen is acting like TV exec that misinterpreted the data. From the fact that most of the Twitter traffic is done by the API on desktop or mobile applications to the hidden truth that many people do comeback a few months later (see graph below), I felt misled when reading the original link-baiting report that lacked any careful analysis, and when later clarifying the report (i wonder why), they still kept comparing apples and oranges.

Understanding the Twitterverse

Nielsen did a fine job of getting the data, but showed their lack of knowledge about the Twitterverse (the twitter universe, both the ecosystem and the platform).
The service itself is low on friction, which explains part of the dropout rate. But if you think closely and have been around on Twitter for a while you realize that many of these dropout users are lurkers, spammers, pseudo-consultants, squatters, etc. They seek instant gratification and are all about their narcissistic broadcasting practices. No wonder the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets.

Source: TechCrunch

The platform also hides many of the massive usage from desktop or mobile users. Ask any user that has been using the service for longer than one month and they’ll tell you they mostly use Tweetdeck, Twhirl, Nambur, Twiterific or the sorts. Realizing that users are more active once they learn about these tools, Twitter now promotes apps on the sidebar, a win-win for both developers and the service.
It’s been said before that the “what are you doing” claim is so not about Twitter as it has changed the way people interact using the web, being simple but versatile enough to be used in multiple ways, with a level activity that surges ahead of some high level websites like NYTimes or Digg. Beginners feeling the service is over simplistic and mundane, it’s kind like asking on late 90’s regarding mobile phones, “Why would I ever carry a phone around when I have one in my kitchen?”, as Biz Stone says.

No Media Hype to see here, move along

I’m being a bit too negative on Nielsen, but perhaps that’s because i’ve seen great web services being misunderstood by the ad media, that loves to have a good startup bloodbath.
Media hype has already caused their share of problems to ideas like OLPC or Second Life, but other products and companies like Google or Facebook have managed to float above this by focusing on people and building great products. If Twitter keeps focusing on building a great product, supporting the ecosystem and letting on thousand apps bloom, they will get by this kind of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) and then achieve mainstream adoption.

Old media will keep having a vetted interest in downplaying the importance of digital communication, from reports about the bad consequences of social networking to the cyber-bulling threat. New technologies are hard to understand at first, but as they get adopted and new behaviors more widespread, Twittering will soon turn into a common verb. Just google it.

With over 60 comments and hundreds of ReTweets, it grew to a meme dimension. Unfortunatelly i really didn’t saw all that coming, and having planned a whole weeked in the mountains, totally unplugged, surprise hit me when i checked my mail and stats this morning.

For now, i’ve hosted the domain TwitterPower150.com with a static version of the original post, but as suggested by Marc And Joseph Jaffe, i’m thinking already on a live version with real time updates. If any Twitter ranking services are interested in supplying the rank, please contact me (or i’ll figure out the algorithm myself).

The folks at CleverCogs also kindly registered the Twitter profile @Power150 (convenient, as i was offline). Marjolein migrated today the account to me, so you can also check what Power150 is doing, with possible integrations with the Twitter API on TwitterPower150.com. Which brings me to the most important part of this post:

What are your ideas for the future of Twitter Power 150? What are the requested features? Would you change anything?

From a Twitter Auto Pack (group follow all the featured users) to an RSS feed with the latest tweets, the ball is on your side, with a chance to choose what will be the next release of Twitter Power 150.

P.S.: Thanks for all those who followed me @armandoalves. On the updated ranking (offline) i jumped to #101.

With over 800 bloggers it would be really hard to track down all the twitter profiles, so i focused on the top 300 and with the help of Twitterank and Dapper, and partly inspired by Mack Collier’s Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs, here’s the January 2009 list for the top 150 twitter users with advertising and marketing blogs:

The sweet irony is being left out of the list, with a close call at #156. So, you know the drill: if you appreciated the hard work (i had to visit each blog to get the usernames i didn’t follow already), start by following @armandoalves and help me reach the top 150.

The PHP script that parsed the Power150 OPML file was programmed in less than 1/10th of the time it took me to figure out all the twitter profiles, so feel free to comment  if your blog is on AdAge’s Power 150 and you would like to be added to the remaining 700 profiles.

I had a few surprises along the way, with nearly 20% of the 300 parsed blogs not having a Twitter account and having to decide which profile to rank on multi-author blogs (i ended up choosing the user with most followers). Also worthy of notice is the inverted pyramid for SEO/SEM blogs. In the end, Twitter is more conversational and not very friendly for “get rich today” tweets, and that gets reflected on the top tweeple listed.

Update:

Seems the list is getting some buzz, and it starts to makes sense to build a live ranking.that hopefully will be at: http://www. twitterpower150.com

Illustration by me

The tweetup takes place this Wednesday at 7:00 pm, right downtown at the HardRock Cafe, just in case we have beer scalability issues.

Downtime is no excuse to miss it.

If you want to learn a thing or two about word-of-mouth, you’d better talk with Ze Frank. Despite ending his popular show, he knows how to stir things up, judging by how the Color Wars meme spread among the twitterati (did i just wrote that?) in less than a day.

UPDATE(20/03/08): ZeFrank explains the whole thing on a blog post.
Keeping truthful to ZeFrank spirit, the thing doesn’t make any sense at all, and basically invites you to follow a Twitter user with an alias @colorteam, and change your avatar according to the selected color. At the moment, you can join the teams:

• @greenredteam
• @redteam
• @purpleteam
• @blueteam
• @orangeteam
• @yellowteam
• @verygreenteam
• @pinkteam
• @goldteam
• @plaidteam
• @noteam
• @clearteam
• @whiteteam
• @stripeteam
• @FF1CAEteam
• @blackngoldTeam
• @tartanteam
• @PussyPinkTeam
• @rainbowteam
• @offwhiteteam
• @noteam
• @redandwhite

Update: Gary Vaynerchuck is all excited (as usual) about the whole thing, and shot a video explaining why he joined the @verygreenteam.

I’m not even bothering counting how many followers each team has.
Do i find this useless? Absolutely. But then again i do browse occasionally at icanhascheezburger.com.

As i’m bit curious how big Twitter is in Portugal, I’d like to challenge the portuguese twitters to follow the @greennredteam

On other Twitter trivia, you can use Tweet Scan to your advanced search needs, a feature the application is in desperate need, just like FriendFeed did.