Twitter are busy buachaill’s

This week Twitter made a subtle but, very useful change, this was changing Replies to Mentions. Where once it said Replies in your Twitter sidebar you will now see your own @username. By clicking on this you’ll see a list of all tweets referencing your account with your @username anywhere in the tweet, previously you would have only seen the Tweet if your @username was at the beginning which is how it used to work. This is a feature I first came accross in Tweetdeck (BTW I use Tweetdeck as my primary Twitter tool), I wonder did the Twitter people see it here first. This new feature facilites the flow of conversations between more than 2 people, which is quite often the case in Twitter.

On April 1st (April fools day) Twitter annouced Discovery engine on it’s Blog.

According to the Blog, “When you do a search, you don’t go to another page, the relevant tweets instantly show up where you’d expect them to—right on your home page where tweets love to be.”

and “When you use search, you’re asking for any tweets that contain the word or phrase you’re interested in right now“. There will also be an save option for search that you may do on aregular basis. This is also a wonderful complement to trending topics. I wonder if this is a little stab at google, this feature when it arrives will be a another very useful indeed, will this be a service that people pay for?

I spotted this post on Nielson Wire - Twitter’s sweet smell of success, it says that Unique visitors to Twitter increased 1,382 percent year-over-year, from 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009, talk about incredible growth. This is a little greater than the 240 percent rate at which facebook has grown over the same period.

At the end of the blog a very valid point is made “In an unstable economy, it might prove to be an economical and important part of an employer’s marketing strategy that helps to keep consumers aware of and connected to their brand.”

There has always been a question over Twitters revenue model, I really think that they are accelerating towards this. How many people could do without Twitter now? Would they be willing to pay for an account or maybe a free account, with extra optional paid services such as the discovery engine, or analytics build into their account to enable an account holder to measure their social influence.

On thing is for sure, Twitter is a force to be reckoned with:

1. packed with great features,
2. a large and rapidly growing number of users,
3. ubiquitous accessibility via web, mobile and API’s.

The value for Brands and Conumers are huge, I feel they are very close to converting this value into revenue, but they need to “Strike while the Iron is Hot”.