Twitter's Who's Who

Image via Gizmodo.com

Lady Gaga has some 6.7 million followers, the most of any user but she doesn't crack the top 100 most influential Twitter users.

Cornell University has a new formula to determine who human users are actively following; measuring retweets from folks as the primary factor in calculating a user's influence. Although the study was aimed at calculated the most influential media-news agency, it's just great to see a best of Twitter that didn't involve Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber. Check the full list here.

Oh and a special congratulations is in order to the folks at Gizmodo for making top 10.

New Scientist via Gizmodo

Shots Fired! This is heating up.

Hey all you PMBs out there, 9-to-5 Mac is reporting that Samsung is so confident in their Galaxy S that they will give any iPhone 4 customer one for free if they're willing to switch. That's more than just big talk, that's calling you out then trying to eat your lunch.

According to the data on 9-to5, each 16GB phone nets Sammy $50 while each 32 GB phone nets them $75; this ain't peanuts we're talking about. So act now kiddies, if you're willing to give up your iPhone, as Samsung's UK twitter indicates there's only a few left.

Samsungukmobile (twitter) via 9-to-5 Mac.

Cosmic 140 - If you're not in this constellation map, you're just not worth 140 characters

I love infographics. I just do. Maybe because I'm an information sponge, maybe because I have too much time on my hands; but whatever the case is the Cosmic 140 by InformationArchitects (or iA) is nothing short of amazing. IA compiled the 140 most influential people on Twitter and charted their position in the twitterverse. It's really nothing short of breath-taking.

Via Gizmodo

All Your Tweets Are Belong to Bing!

Not to be out done by Google, Microsoft's Bing has sealed a deal with Twitter and Facebook allowing them to search your tweets and status updates in real-time.

Here's how it works:
"The 'tweets' will be integrated universal-search style, ranked alongside the other [different types of] results, and you'll be able to click on those results and go to a page that shows only 'tweets' and real-time updates," said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, in an interview after her appearance on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit to announce the news. Users will also be able to restrict results to Twitter posts from the get-go using the engine's filtering controls."

It is worth mentioning there is no exclusivity to this deal and Google has also made an agreement with Twitter to search and offer them up to their searchers as well.

The War of the Search is here. Bing is definitely trying (really hard) to eat Google's lunch.

Bing Lands Deals with Twitter and Facebook via PC World

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Destroying Twitter... in a good way.

I will admit that I am new to this tweeting thing. I was never one for social networking. My Facebook page sits there collecting dust. The most I would do on it is update my status, simply just for the heck of it. With that in mind I decided to try Twitter since it is for the most part just the “status” aspect of social networking. Though I had been thinking of going Twitter for some time, what really brought me to tweeting was a good looking Twitter application: DestroyTwitter. More specifically this is DestroyTwitter 1.7.2Beta.

What first caught my eye is how simple and great DestroyTwitter looks. It reminds me of my current Adium setup, simple gray window with white text. The home screen shows tweets of the people you are following as well as your own tweets. Other menus such as Replies or Preferences open in the same window, so there aren’t a bunch of windows cluttering your desktop. Clicking “Home” sends you back to the Home screen, and it all works like its supposed to. Which reminds me. I found DestroyTwitter to be very newbie friendly. I am never sure how to add links to my status, whether it be Twitter or Facebook or some other form of status, they seem to handle things slightly differently. With DestroyTwitter you just copy and paste the link in a little field under the body of your message and it auto-magically adds it and shortens it to better fit your tweet-character limit. Since I linked my Tweets to my Facebook status (through the Twitter application on Facebook) I can just tweet and my status is up to date, without having to touch Facebook. Going back to the links, the shortened links created in DestroyTwitter make things look neater on the Facebook end as well, though not everyone may know what “http://tr.bibimbap” would be all about.

Another cool bit that reminds me of Adium, and is probably my favorite feature, is that you can customize the theme of your DestroyTwitter window. This can be done through the Theme Builder at the DestroyTwitter website (requires login using your Twitter account) or through the Themes page, where there are themes created by DestroyTwitter users. I played a bit with the Theme Builder and it is quite fun to create new color combinations and there are many great themes to choose from on the themes page. However I haven’t actually changed my theme because the default is just so flippin’ good looking. Kudos to the developer for making the application sexy out of the box.

There are a few cons, in my opinion, but these aren’t deal breakers. For one, I don’t know if I need a dedicated Twitter application on my Mac. I don’t think I tweet that much, so part of me wants to just use Twitter through Flock instead. But DestroyTwitter makes some actions as described above extremely convenient and newbie friendly. Also it requires Adobe AIR to be installed (but installation for both AIR and DestroyTwitter is quite painless). Sadly that means more of Adobe’s apps and plugins that you may only use sparingly taking up space in your hard drive. Also the Theme Builder on the site requires the latest version of Adobe Flash. Knowing Adobe the version you have now isn’t new enough. Update. Now. Most people have already installed these plugins at one point or another, so I don’t think it is that big of a deal. In exchange you get a solidly built, easy to use and great looking Twitter client.

There's tons more to look at, and playing with it for a week I've only begun to scratch the surface. I'm sure there are more snazzy features that I may have not mentioned. If you need a stand-alone Twitter client I can absolutely recommend DestroyTwitter.

Pick it up at: DestroyTwitter.com. The developer also has an interesting blog worth checking out.