Crenk

Like any good addiction, the first step is always admitting you have the addiction. For many of us, Twitter is that addiction. We find ourselves Twittering from work, twittering from parties, from events, from weddings, from bar mitzvahs, from the car, from our mobiles, you name it, we addicts are Twittering from it. On the other hand, there are still a few that remain of the mindset that Twitter is a time waster and provides no value.

Well for the addict like you and me, we are introduced to Tweetrush. A very systematic web app that provides you with your Twitter usage metrics. Now, after typing in your handle in the search bar, you can receive a breakdown of your usage and find out just how addicted you are.

Tweetrush was built on the analytics engine called Rush Hour, which basically looks at actions taken by a user, such as typing and sending a message via Twitter. Tracking can be done via the website and also through the various API’s that exist for the web application.

Information can be tracked for the last 7 days of usage:

The tracking can even break down by the hour of usage:

No matter how you slice, it, Tweetrush is an excellent tool for measuring your addiction, providing useful information on usage, but ultimately also reveal just how much of your life Twitter has taken over. Give it a try and learn to live with the addiction, Twitter is not going anywhere soon!

Just recently I’ve been able to play with the new relaunch of Strands. The social networking site falls in line with popular sites like FriendFeed and PlaxoPulse, and looks to aggregate your social networking habits all in one place, but extend to even recommending things you might like.

Some will say that the multitude of social network platforms are watering down the market, and while that may be so, there are always small distinctions that separate them from one another. I for one thoroughly enjoy my Strands account specifically because of recommendations. Now even though I am new and still meeting people on there, I enjoy going through profiles and looking through recommendations.

Strands single handedly battles the information overload and filters your “feeds” from different social network sites. You set up your profile the way you want Strands to respond. What I find especially interesting is that Strands does not just support the major players in the game, but also reaches out and taps into lesser known social networks such as Hype Machine and Meneame (Spanish Digg clone). This really creates a sense of inclusiveness as opposed to exclusiveness.

Strands “evangelist” Drew Olanoff on Twitter is a great person to follow on Twitter for day to day happenings with Strands. Sure he incorporates details of his personal life, but he works to build strong relationships with the communities he’s a part of and welcomes feedback on Strands.

If you’re looking for a method of “life streaming” that is functional and easy to use, definitely check out Strands. I don’t see it knocking off the heavy hitters like FriendFeed just yet, but I do see some major success for this social networking site.

Currently the site is still under private beta, but you can sign up at their site to receive an invite, or if you’re really nice to a certain someone on Twitter, perhaps…just maybe an invite might float your way!

In what may become to be known as the “Great Twitter Outage of May 2008″, with people getting agitated over lack of service on Twitter, a new rival has stepped up to take its place. Will it succeed and become the new miniblogging application of our generation? Only time will tell.

I was referred to Plurk earlier on by someone on Twitter who said that they were fed up with not being able to have all the features that we were so accustomed to just the other day. With Plurk, first of all, it just sounds like a really bad name. I mean, you can say “what are you Twittering?” and that sounds good and tells your audience something, but with Plurk, what can you say that sounds catchy?

Aside from the name, Plurk has some pretty good features that combines Twitter with another up-and-coming application: Brightkite. Not only can you list in 140 text characters what you’re doing, simliar to Twitter, but you can upload photos and videos associated with that update and share with your contacts. Definitely a big plus compared to Twitter.

From an aesthetic standpoint, it looks relatively clean, but somewhat busy. Twitter was simple in their design and you could see your followers and their updates. That’s basically all that people required. However, Plurk includes a timeline at the top -half of the page where you can see your followers and their updates and when specifically their updates were. For better or worse, Plurk has a definite advantage over Twitter right now.

Now keep in mind that Plurk is still in its infancy and Twitter has had some time to grow and make some serious significant updates, but Plurk allows you to follow people without being their friend. Just become a “fan” of them and you’ll be able to keep track of their updates. If you add your GTalk or other IM application to Plurk, you should be able to update your status that way, but unfortunately, you’ll also get EVERY update that your people makes which makes it kind of annoying.

Perhaps just a fancy feature to have as well, Plurk offers you the chance to earn more “karma”. They term it as:

Every plurker has his/her own karma value. It is recalculated every day and falls within these intervals:

• 0.00 to 21.00: You are in the state of creation
• 21.00 to 41.00: You are in the state of maintenance
• 41.00 to 61.00: You are enlightened
• 61.00 to 81.00: You are so close to Plurk Nirvana
• 81.00 to 100.00: You have reached Plurk Nirvana!

Your karma score is directly influenced by you and your friends Plurk activity. The more active you are, the more points you’ll get. Using various features of Plurk such as instant messaging or uploading a profile image will also help.

So basically, karma in Plurk is just a novelty status item for people to add to their daily enjoyment. This is probably an unnecessary item unless the creators decide to implement some other reward-based value add system at a later time. And one thing that most applications dealing with the social web should probably think about is an easy way to find your friends. Unfortunately when I set up my account, I had an awful time adding friends by search. Instead, I needed to physically type their user names (oftentimes a guess) into the Plurk URL path and then find them.

I’d say go ahead and sign-up for Plurk. There are definitely rooms for improvement in terms of features and that can only lead to better services for its users. So sign up today -if anything, it’ll give you some time away from Twitter while it’s down, but won’t prevent you from going cold turkey. You can find me on Plurk too, so stop by and say hi!

If you’ve used Twitter in the past couple of weeks, you’ve encountered something a bit amiss: you can’t use it. Yes, that’s right…Twitter has been down. More than usual too. The loss of our beloved web application has resulted in the masses at a loss for what they should do now to let their friends and network know what’s going on with their lives. I suppose you could rely on Facebook to update your status, but that seems so limited. You could update your blog, but that’s just so tedious and pointless to have a 140 character status update on a post.

But wait! FriendFeed to the rescue! Yes, FriendFeed is slowly dipping into the market share of Twitter without having to do any work. Why is Twitter easily giving up their users to a new application? In an article on CNET.com, the heads of Twitter put it simply as:

Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not designed as a messaging system, however. For expediency’s sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content management system…

So basically since your success from 2007’s South by Southwest, you never thought that you could amass such a following of users? And now, seeing that everyone from the Average Joe to mainstream media is using your service, you’re now thinking strategically and then going back to reinvent the wheel? That’s bad…and has definitely caught the ire of TechCrunch’s own Mike Arrington, Dave Winer, and hundreds of other users.

Twitter is obviously responding to these charges and annoyances, but the more that it results in outages, the greater the impact it’ll have on the number of users abandoning their platform and seeking satisfaction elsewhere, perhaps on Seesmic, Utterz, Pownce, or even FriendFeed.

I’m sure that Twitter will be back up and running, but this is something that most of us can expect to happen with any successful application that hits it big and secures major financing. In addition, there’s discussions in the web realm about Twitter perhaps charging for their fees. Is this legit? Who really knows. There are plenty of blogs and videos about the text-messaging/SMS service ultimately delivering status updates for a small cost, but would I pay right now? Probably not…if it results in me paying just to have it work, then no, but if it’s stable 99.99% of the time and has a high ROI and value, then perhaps.

But until then, let’s just hope that there won’t be something “technically” wrong…make it work FIRST, then let’s talk about what we’re willing to put up with.

With yesterday’s startling news that CBS Corp. was going to purchase CNET Networks, it was just another sign of media companies gobbling up social media sites. Web 2.0 is seemingly becoming another era of startups blossoming once again and then reaching that desired nirvana - being bought out by a bigger company whose only hope is that their purchase will help win more profits for the stakeholders. And before you think of CNET Networks as only that site where you can get all your great tech news and reviews, think of it more of a series of websites. CNET owns and operates TV.com, News.com, MP3.com, and Radio.com - all which will be impacted by the purchase by CBS as this gives a great advantage to migrating current radio and TV/news programs from the offline to the online.

But isn’t it more about the advertising opportunities? That’s what’s bringing in the dollars to these companies, right? With more things going digital and mobile, people will flock to CNET’s websites to find out reviews on the latest gadgets and tech news and why not allow CBS to sell its products or having other advertisers reach a captive audience? More inventory in high-traffic sites can lead to greater revenue dollars. Isn’t that why Comcast bought Plaxo yesterday as well? Sure, this “partnership” is meant to service the customer and offer a benefit of transporting your data from media to media and allowing you to keep track of your friends, but Comcast wins out because they are able to offer that advertisement to a much wider audience. Plaxo merely gets that one extra benefit which far underweights the benefit of Comcast.

More media companies are gobbling up digital media service companies on a rather interesting rate and I can see it as an effort to promote more advertising and get a bigger audience interested in their product. A recent eMarketer.com report stated that online video watching grew 13% in the US between February and March 2008 and over 64% in the past year.

Look at the above graph: nearly 60% of the top online video properties have a television entity or some other media organization. With that type of capability, it’s no wonder that they’d like to snatch up social networking sites in order to reach their target demographic, most likely the heavily desired 18-35 year old range. CBS snatching up CNET is a big step in reaching that audience…now will the service increase as a result or will we see more banner ads for CSI, Shark, and Two and a Half Men on our favorite websites?