What are you doing right now? Zymurgism.

… one of my best friends from high school has recently joined Twitter.

Louis and I used to surf the local East Texas BBS scene, and he and I were one of the first people to actually use the Internet in the area. He’s since left the tech field for greener pastures, but last month he finally got around to joining Twitter.

He’s also taken up the rare art of amateur zymurgism, or in other words he’s trying to brew some beer in his garage.

Rather than go through the trouble of creating a blog all about his microbrewery efforts, he’s decided to just tweet them.

“Most of what's going on with my beer can be done in 140 characters,” he told me. He added, “I’m going to start a second batch this week of ale.”

Given all the ridiculous volume of twitter talk in the tech blogosphere, I thought it was perhaps newsworthy that someone was actually using Twitter as it was originally intended.

You can follow Louis here on Twitter.

Your #@%# Twitter Conference, Part II

There are quite a few Twitter conferences that seem to be taking place today – I’ve seen quite a bit of press around the 140 Characters conference today.

I won’t say who it is, but I saw a name show up as one of the speakers at one of these Twitter conference events giving a speech that had to do with Twitter and charity or curing social ills or something like that who I’m quite sure has not a single charitable bone in his body.

I won’t go into the nitty-gritty details, but depending on whether you believe his version of events or mine, he cheated me out of either a couple grand or around $13k.

Beyond that, and more germane to the topic, he’s got at best a couple hundred Twitter followers less than I do, and is by no means any sort of expert on Twitter or charity.

There are some influential and interesting people speaking at this thing, and I by no means want to demean them. Without exception, though, every single person who matters and is speaking at this thing mattered before they got on Twitter.

Most of the speakers I’m seeing at these things are people with either a couple hundred or a couple thousand followers.

The bottom line – Twitter is a very nuanced and interesting tool.  Chances are, though, if you can find your way to one of these conferences, you’ve already found your way to millions of blog posts covering these very topics. Moreover, most of the best practices and power of Twitter can be discovered simply by using it.

I don’t need to pay $1,500 to do that, and chances are if you’re reading this, neither do you.

Twitter TV Show Official, But Not Exclusive [Tweets and TWiTs]

Update: Twitter issues a clarifying post, again.  MG has a good roundup of what it means, but I thought I’d just add the fact that they still don’t deny any sort of financial gain from the deal.

The implication, earlier today, was that Twitter was venturing into TV as the way they were going to make their money – the idea was that all the money would be made from licensing, as opposed to that pesky ad sales stuff that Twitter claims they know nothing about.

I’ve really only followed two stories this Memorial day – one is the continuing saga of the FTC vs. the blogosphere, and the other is this Twitter thing.

The Twitter TV venture was particularly interesting to me because of the idea that it theoretically infringes on Leo Laporte’s trademark of TWiT. There are several places where discussion broke out about that.

• Leo’s original Friendfeed thread.
• Leo’s other Friendfeed thread.
• SiliconANGLE blog post.
• the SA comments.
• This offshoot of the SA blog post on Friendfeed.

The bottom line from the discussion seems to be that neither side of the case is clear cut, but if Twitter is in any way making financial gain here, it’s obvious that Leo ought to try to defend his trademark, and will likely receive either points in the company or part of the proceeds of any such venture.

Twitter has tried to cut that off at the pass by issuing a non-denial:

There is no official Twitter TV show—although if there were it would be fun to cast! In dealing with networks and production companies we sometimes have simple agreements. Regarding the Reveille and Brillstein project reported today, we have a lightweight, non-exclusive, agreement with the producers which helps them move forward more freely.

It’s important to note that while they said the agreement was “open” and “lightweight” and “non-exclusive,” they never said “we’re not making money from this.”

The fact of the matter is that Twitter is giving their blessing to these occurrences, and it changes nothing (but the size of the pocketbook that Leo could theoretically attack) as to whether or not Leo should protect his trademark.

It’s also somewhat non-sequitur in the context of this post, but I think it might be helpful if I quote a bit of my comments here:

[W]hen I was a kid (about 13 or 14), I was a witness in a Federal trademark suit between an ISP called Neosoft and a software maker named NeoSoftware. The ISP was suing the software maker for rights to the name because they said it caused brand confusion.

It turns out that the suit was dismissed by the judge because it was revealed during the case that the ISP was planning on moving into software sales.

The point being, the burden here lies on the aggressor, the one trying to expand the scope of their brand, and the favor lies in the one who actually holds the trademark. Leo has a double-whammy here - he's already doing broadcast and video - something that Twitter wants to expand into.

I think Leo here has a very good case should he want to pursue it, and he's either going to end up with points in the company or a percentage of all profits derived by the name.

Leo’s trademark is designated for broadcast and multimedia. Twitter toed that line with their existing service, but have clearly given their blessing to cross that threshold.  A heads up and a clearing of the air with Leo is at least in order.

I’m Not Coming to Your @#%@ Twitter Conference

Steven Hodson noted last night that there is a crap-ton of Twitter conferences surfacing lately.

• 140 Characters Conference - $495 – $1,195
• Media140 Twitter Conference UK – it already happened, price not on site.
• TWTRCON SF 09 - $325 – 595
• 140/The Twitter Conference - $395
• Perkins Madrona Twitter Conference 09 – already happened, price not on site.
• Twitter Boot Camp - $299 – $1,500

If you want to know my thoughts on these things, ask Mona.  She was online when I first caught wind of the 140 Characters Conference, and then stuck around later when I apologized for exposing her to a stream of obscenities.

It’s nothing personal about the guys behind the conference either.  I have great respect for Jeff Pulver, and in general I think Twitter is a great and versatile tool. But, like Steven, I don’t think you’ll ever see me at one of these conferences.

It’s not that there isn’t something to be learned about Twitter still – but do we need to pay as much as a grand or two just to talk about how to manage an account that only allows 140 characters?

Seriously – just stop what you’re doing – take a breath – ponder that for a moment. $1,500 for a day’s worth of pontification about Twitter.

Are these conferences for people who are bad at reading blogs? Can someone explain it to me?  If someone can figure out how to justify this, maybe I’ll flip my position… you know I can talk about Twitter all day long, and I’m just dying to find a auditorium full of rubes willing to pay me $1,500 a day to listen to my blather.

Of Vampires and Gawker

Not to pile on the criticism, but Business Insider / Silicon Alley Insider got taken in by a PR / Marketing stunt that Gawker Media had bought a new blog this weekend. The story, as they would have had us believe it, is that Gawker bought a blog that writes about vampires from the perspective of a human who recently was turned into a vampire.

Yeah. Somehow this didn’t ring any alarm bells at all for them.  Somehow not a single genius analyst at BI / SAI was able to remember back to the last time Nick Denton made a statement about whether it’s better to consolidate media brands or expand.

It isn’t as if he kept it a secret. Wanna learn more about it? Try this blog post at the Wall Street Journal. Or this one on Gawker by Owen Thomas. Or this other one on Gawker by Hamilton Nolan. Or this coverage here at PaidContent. Or dozens of other posts like this one from indie blogger Jay Yarow. Or this post from the man himself.

So why, and I’m sincerely curious here, why would they not deign to question getting a press release from a company that isn’t Gawker.com, but an anonymous PR / Ad firm called “CampfireNYC” claiming to be trumpeting the news of a blog purchase? Why not make a call to Valleywag?

Look, I’m a nobody and a personae non grata when it comes to the who’s-who of NYC and Silicon Valley.  I live in Dallas, Texas for Pete’s sake. Sure, some people know my name on the coasts, and in the tech punditry business I’m fairly well known, but I’ve never had my pictures regularly in the pages of Valleywag, and I know I’m probably barely on Nick Denton’s radar, if at all.

How much digging did it take me to get his phone number this morning, though? Two tries going down the list of people in my GTalk list, and I had a number I was assured would get him wherever he was.

The truth is, though, that the thought of it is so ridiculous that Nicholas Carlson wrote a several page post about how embarrassed BI / SAI was and how ‘stupid and irresponsible Gawker was’ for sanctioning this.

If you want to see what a mad dash to recover credibility looks like, you should check out the post mortem write-up at SAI and the coverage over at AllThingsD.

The bottom line is that through insufficient legwork, SAI got taken in by a hoax. It happens to us all once in a while – it’s even happened to me before. You take your knocks, you say “good one!” and you move on. You don’t try to chalk it up and spin it to some sort of odd “the blogosphere needs to learn disclosure” trope. It was a hoax – granted a sponsored hoax – but a hoax none the less.

The moral here, though, is to follow your instincts, and if a story is too good to be true – pick up the phone.

TwitterMass Goes to Auction: Is It Worth It?

“[TwitterMass] is evil!  -Loic Lemeur

Right now, if you’re a developer and out of work, you need to be working on your own Twitter application. The ability to rapidly launch an application, monetize it and then turn it over for cash has never been easier.

I’ve been playing around, re-aquainting myself with the Twitter API lately, as I talked a bit about yesterday. I’ve also been monitoring the various web forums where a lot of these sales often take place, and almost without fail, Twitter applications of varying complexity and usefulness get snapped up at most a few days after they’re put up for sale (as long as they’re priced reasonably).

That’s why I’m not surprised that TwitterMass has chosen to put themselves up for sale right now while the hype is hot, but I am a bit surprised at the price: $250,000 (the BIN). The bidding is currently up to $13,000, but there’s plenty of time for the price to get to where it needs to be, since it’s a 30-day auction with 27 days left.

Is it a good deal? Let’s take a look at the metrics they’re offering for public view.

They say they’re pulling down 30,000 uniques a month, and ~150,000 pageviews. They also say that they’ve leveraged that into an income of $6,000 already – not the best monetization stats. There really isn’t a whole lot of ads being sold on the site, though, as the main focus is to drive users to purchase the service at the $99 pricepoint.

With better ad placement and representation (as part of a larger portfolio of sites or represented by a higher quality ad firm), monetization could easily add another $2,000 a month at current traffic levels.

There’s also an issue of scaling involved to consider.  Jesse Stay’s SocialToo does some of the same things that this product does, and he’s run into a number of problems providing those services without continually running into the API limitations of Twitter. Whomever takes this purchase is going to have to plan for scaling in that regard as well as scaling of the site as well, which is written in Ruby.

Could it make easily $100k a year?  It could.  Not easily, but it could. Costs on this project are undoubtedly going to rise, and the $250k pricetag is a bit unproven, given it only has one month’s track record.

My advice is that if this company appeals to you and looks like it’d fit in well with your portfolio, try to win it in auction, but forgo the “buy-it-now” pricetag.

[hat tip to Allen Stern @ CenterNetworks]

Google Can’t Launch Twoogle, I Did

Mark Evans yesterday mused what would happen if Google were to launch a microblogging service in a post called “What if Google Started Twoogle?”

It’s an interesting exercise, and a thought worthy of discussion (something I explored to some extent in this older SiliconANGLE story).

As you may have noticed a few weeks ago, I quietly launched an application I’m code-naming “Twoogle Reader.” It’s an add-on to my otherwise almost-useless and certainly superfluous URL shortener riz.gd.

I opened it up to a limited Alpha release, and a number of influential personalities and avid Google Reader users signed on, like Veronica Belmont, the famous Techmeme tweeter Atul, and Robert Scoble himself (a quick summize scan for riz.gd will give you a fuller picture of these early adopters).

I’m already starting to see some very interesting data emerge in terms of levels of engagement on Twitter, something I hope to analyze further and release as a SiliconANGLE Labs project soon. The data shows information that’s counter-intuitive to what you’d think would lead to higher engagement when it comes to how well known influencers versus those with small social graphs.

I’m also forseeing that this data I’m collecting from Twoogle Reader in tandem with the URL shortener (usage stats, metadata) is putting me in an excellent position to function as a bookmarking utility, a secondary lifestreaming tool, analytics provider, and a myriad of other applications.

The point in which a link is shared and when it’s clicked on by a focused audience is a neat place to be, and best of all, it’s providing a valuable service to the end users as well (instead of being a simply one-sided relationship like so many Web 2.0 tools). Instead of requiring the user to remember yet another social network to maintain, the aim of my application is to help unite the discovery and sharing process in a useful and transparent way.

Given that I’ve reserved my weekends for the last few weeks to tweak this service and haven’t said much about it publicly, I’d just figured a status report might be in order.

Current users – sound off! What do you love/hate about it? As I move it forward, what aspects would you like me to focus on?

Non-users – interested in participating in the Alpha and Beta tests? Think it’s just completely retarded or totally awesome? Let me know.