It’s a tool that lets you follow in real time what people on twitter are saying about a subject that you’re interested in.  Well, actually, that doesn’t work well either.

Let me try this one more time… you know what, forget it.  Just go to the site, type in a subject in the input boxes and sit back and watch what people on twitter are saying about that subject in real time.  Just keep an eye on the time because you may end up spending an inordinate amount of time typing in subjects and watching people twitter about them.

I think the best use for the tool is to find other people that have similar interests to yours on twitter, but your mileage may vary.

The tool is named Monitter, so go check it out.

It’s about 22 minutes and I talk about Twitter and your search engine rankings.

Leave me a comment and tell me what you think.

There is a common fallacy on Twitter and if you fall for it you’ll likely end up disappointed with your Twitter experience. The fallacy is the “follower fallacy.”

The common wisdom was, or is, that you need a lot of followers on Twitter to be effective. The more followers the better. The more followers you have, the more money you’ll make. The more followers you have, the more famous you’ll be. What this did was create a sort of “arms race” to see who could get the most followers in the shortest amount of time.

This line of thinking created the whole Ashton Kutcher and CNN “race to get to a million followers first” fiasco.

I remember participating in conversations where the talk was to “get more followers now before the celebrities discovered Twitter.” The theory was that once celebrities got on Twitter they’d suck out all the followers leaving the regular people like you and me with have no one following them.

I posit to you that the number of followers that you have is irrelevant. I also posit to you that the number of lists that you’re on is also irrelevant. The only number that truly matters is how many people pay attention to what you say. In other words:

What’s your circle of influence or reach?

I’ve wasted a lot time on Twitter getting more followers while ignoring the real measurement of Twitter success. Even if it’s only one person that listens to you that’s better than having 5000 followers that don’t.

Twitter followers are worthless, Twitter listeners are what counts.

Social media is about connections etc blah blah blah. Then make connections not followers.

I propose that you figure out who you listeners are and who you’re listening to and you go out and nurture those relationships.

Those connections are the ones that matter. Even though you won’t see that number listed anywhere on Twitter, that’s the most valuable number on Twitter.

Let’s end the follower fallacy once and for all.

Scott Stratten over at his unmarketing blog wrote a really good post about how businesses can use twitter to engage with clients in their local area. In a nutshell, the point is to stop marketing and start engaging.

Don’t just do a simple search for people on twitter in your local area and then start spamming them. Engage with them, get to know them, let them get to know you and take it from there. Scott advocates the use of various tools to make the sorting and engaging easier. One tool in particular, Twitter Grader, stands out to me.

By the way, I love the premise of Scott’s site, to stop marketing and start engaging. Awesome sauce.

Back to the point I was trying to make, my guess is that he chose Twitter Grader over another twitter ranking tool called twitterholic because twitter grader uses elements other than just the follower count like twitterholic does.  The thing is, that twitter grader will only list people if they have run the twitter grader report on themselves.  Which is fine if you’re in Toronto or another large metro area, but what if you’re in a smaller metro area?

Here’s my recommendation, use all of them. Use twitter grader, twitterholic, twitter search and whatever other tool is out there. Use them to find people, not to spam them. Once you find them, as Scott says, engage with them.

You’d be wrong.

Follow me down this path for a moment…

I was thinking about the fact that there are pornographers on Twitter. To me, it indicates that Twitter appears to be hitting it big enough that pornographers have decided to take a look at it for promotional purposes.  I’m not going to get into a moral and philosophical debate about porn. What I will say, is that people know where to go for porn on the internet. The porn doesn’t need to come find people, people will go out and find it when they want it.

Everyday, I have a few new followers that all have a similar profile, with identical tweets on them, and they all point back to some site where I can see someone’s “naughty pictures” or whatever.  Invariably, these profiles always have a few hundred followers. I don’t follow these profiles back, but other people are and do. Unfortunately, because of Twitter’s open nature it’s hard to get away from the pornographers.

That’s when it hit me.

Twitter’s killer app, in my opinion, is its ability to connect like minded people together. People usually follow people and topics that they are interested in. It’s never just a willy nilly follow everyone under the sun free for all. There are people that do that, but I think that for the majority of people, they want to follow people or topics that they’re interested in.

Like minded people connecting with each other. That’s the killer app.

site:twitter.com bio location tx 100…1000000 followers -400

Unfortunately, I don’t remember who posted it, if you happen to catch this post, please let me know so I can give you proper credit.  What that search string does, is it tells you all of the twitter users in Texas that have more than 100 followers.

The string is for an advanced search on Google. Most people never use the advanced search functionality, but every so often, I come across something that reminds me of why I like the advanced search functionality.

Here’s a breakdown of the search string:

“site:twitter.com” tells Google to search on the site twitter.com

“bio location tx” Tells Google to search in the “bio” section for the location of “tx” aka Texas.

“100…1000000 followers” Says find people that have between 100 to 1 million followers

“-400″ is the code that tells Google to exclude certain words from the result. I don’t know or understand why they wanted to exclude the text “400″ but that’s what’s being excluded from the search results.

For fun, I suggest you run this search in your own city and see who comes up. I found a lot of interesting people to follow using that little search string, you might too. Let me know if this works for you in the comments.

The new page pretty much tells you where Twitter is heading. It’s all about the search. Just replace the word “Pentium” with the phrase “search results” in this video. Yes, this song is stuck in my head.

On a more serious note, I do not think that Microsoft’s new search engine “Bing” is a real threat to Google. What I do think is a threat to Google is something like Twitter search, which provides instant real time human based search results.

When Twitter figures out how to get rid of spam from the search results, this little feature of the former Summize will be a force to be reckoned with.

Remember, way back when Google launched? Yahoo! was the 800 lb gorilla of search.

It’s all about the search results baby.

Having said that, there are some things both about Twitter and on Twitter that I find annoying. These are not show stoppers for my by any means, these things are just annoying more than anything else.

Here they are:

• Marketing bots. These are people that constantly send out affiliate links to whatever they happen to be an affiliate of. The big fad right now seems to be some kind of tooth whitening paste. It used to be get 16,000 followers in 90 days then something about making $125 a day guaranteed and something else equally as annoying. I’m not saying that you can’t sell stuff on Twitter, I’m saying don’t make commercial messages your only purpose for being on Twitter. If you buy something from one of these marketing bots, STOP IT. You’re only encouraging the next bot to try harder. Of course, I have the choice to unfollow, which I usually do, but it’s still annoying.
• Porn bots. What can I say about porn bots? Well, for one, they’re annoying. If I want to check out some porn, I know where to go find it. I really don’t need someone’s inappropriate, not safe for work picture cluttering up my screen telling me to go see their naughty pictures somewhere.
• Quote bots. I love inspirational quotes as much as the next guy, but, do you really have nothing else to say? Are you that uninteresting? I digress.
• The new follower/following interface. I thought I’d give it some time to see if I got used to it or see if maybe I could come to love it, but no. I don’t like the new interface, and I don’t foresee me changing my opinion until they roll out the next version of the interface.
• Facebook games. Those annoying Facebook games like the Mafia game, the Spymaster game, all that junk that makes the Facebook experience suck more and more everyday has found its way to Twitter. I hate those games on Facebook, and I hate them more on Twitter.
• Clicking on multiple links. I tweeted about this the other day. I hate having to click on a link, that has me click on a link to click on yet another link to read the full article. Just link to the dang article! Stop trying to game Digg!

What things do you find annoying on Twitter?

For those of you that don’t know what a tweetcamp is, it’s an unconference format, meaning that the attendees set the agenda of the topics on the fly as the day develops. I signed up to present about Twitter and your search engine rankings.

Here are some pictures of me presenting:

Here’s another one:

I had a great time presenting. I really enjoy speaking infront of the room. I learned a lot about how to use Tweetdeck and how to use Twitter as a media channel.

Can’t wait until I get to go to the next Tweetcamp

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