The rest of the winners and shortlisted twitterati can be found here.

It’s Monday. Almost an average Monday at the office, but today I went above and beyond my routine and made myself a salad for lunch! Partially due to the fact that Fresh Direct came this morning and partially because I’ve been attempting a gluten free diet, this leafy green point of pride made today special and I couldn’t wait to share it with the world. Some may call me an oversharer (cough: @barneyrobinson) and some may make fun of my food Instagram tweets (cough: @saneel), but I wasn’t going to let either rain on my parade. So, I sat at my desk savoring my spinach and beet salad, fork in one hand, iPhone in the other snapping away to get just the right shot, then scrolling through to apply just the right filter to capture the magic of my homemade goodness. And I did. And I sent my color saturated, Lomo-fi filtered picture straight to Twitter. And guess what happened? Within 5 minutes @PretzelCrisps had started following me and had Tweeted at me.

Of course I immediately DM’d back, excitedly starting a conversation with a brand that I had no opinion of about 5 minutes prior.

As you can see, the conversation centered around what they could do for me and they always responded within a minute. All in all, an extremely, and refreshingly human exchange.

This experience got me running around, ducking in and out of offices to tell people about it. Everyone was in awe of @PretzelCrisps’ behavior, as well as how they continued to engage me. It was a quick, powerful burst of brand dialogue, in the vein of a social media fling. @PretzelCrisps just proved that creating a relationship isn’t that hard in a conversational environment when you’re adding to the experience (complimenting me) and not asking much for much in return (an address for instantaneous delivery). They just made a huge impression on all of @BBHNewYork, both as consumers, and as industry folks aspiring to help make brands human.

Kudos and thanks @PretzelCrisps.

The question-and-answer site Quora is a big deal. It has some powerful supporters, with early content posted by a diverse group of digerati from Steve Case to Robert Scoble. It’s the talk of the media (see Google Trend of the word Quora).  There are weekly articles on how Quora will be bigger than Twitter.

So, I guess it was inevitable that I’d hate it. To clarify, it’s not that I don’t like Quora. It’s that I hate it and want it wiped off the face of the earth. In a missionary effort to reach those few that are yet to form an opinion on this site equivalent of an Uwe Boll movie, I offer the following 3 reasons to resist boarding this bandwagon.

It’s spam.

This site diabolically infects those with the largest spam potential. I guess when a site is launched by the former head of Facebook Connect, it’s inevitable. By launching after Facebook established critical mass and Twitter became a big deal, Quora made a splash in the saturated question-and-answer site category. So, giving people the opportunity to be in the spotlight with their answer to an already-answered question is an ingenious way to drive audience and usage by appealing to ego. And I don’t even mind ego-stroking. I just don’t want to be repeatedly spammed across my various feeds as people whose content I otherwise love and trust fall victim to name-in-lights syndrome. Then again, if I could convince people I invented tape, it might be worth it….

There are dozens of Quoras about what Quora is.

OK, so maybe #Twitter was a trending topic on Twitter the first 6 months. But those conversations were focused primarily on usage and innovation with the platform. The Quora self-referential conversations are literally people scratching their heads looking for value. There’s no better sign that the emperor has no clothes people. But until we admit it, we’ll just keep tweeting how awesome he looks in that special toga (author’s note: this has nothing to do with how awesome I think the hashtag #emperorsclothes would be, promise).

Quora is attempting to differentiate itself via answer quality.

This is defended through its use of Facebook Connect (real people!) and an interest graph (curated topics!). Here’s the thing about quality: it’s inversely related to scale on the web. Generally, users or an algorithm are required to remove the noise. Last I looked, countless services already do this. They go by ticker symbols like GOOG, have David Fincher movies made about them, or add a new user every second (most of whom request a professional recommendation after a single meeting together).

So, let’s sit this Quora thing out. We were able to resist Google Wave and Ping. Let’s make it three in a row that we tried and let pass quietly. This isn’t to say I don’t respect the effort or experimentation of any company trying something new (Google & Apple are incredible at innovation investment). In Quora’s case, I just think if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it via my newsfeed.

Now world, if you’re not on board, pretty please give me a heads-up that I’m taking on a lost cause.

Then I can start a new Quora-related Quora: “How can I get a job at Quora?”

{Update: I’ve agreed to write a follow-up post to either eat my words or discuss what I got right after some, ahem, encouragement from readers. So keep an eye out!}

{Update #2: We asked Leslie Barry to elaborate on his comment below and he’s posted a rebuttal, explaining the unique value of Quora I’ve neglected in the post above.}

As we’ve said many times before, we like nothing more than a great idea put to good use and we’re very happy to say BBH London have just created exactly that for AMREF (African Medical Research Foundation).

Kim & Mareka, the creative team who dreamt up the idea, told us more about it.

What’s the idea in a nutshell?

The idea is that you simply lend your Facebook status to one of 7 Africans, thereby giving them the opportunity to let more people know about their lives. Your status is updated morning and afternoon for 5 days on your behalf, with the real stories of daily life in Africa. As part of the sign-up process, you can also lend your Twitter account, and even your Facebook profile picture to your choice of person – from a Nairobi streetkid or a Nomadic tribe member to a Flying Doctor or Traditional Birth Attendant.

What inspired the solution?

We were inspired by the fact that we are personally able to divulge the minutiae of our lives on a whim via Facebook, and that people in our social circle pay attention to these bitesize updates. We thought that if we could translate that platform to broadcast revealing and hard-hitting truths on the state of daily African life, it would be effective and create a buzz. We also had no money and no media, this being a charity project, so it changed the lines of our thinking, and Facebook seemed an ideal environment to try and spread a message.

What are you looking to achieve with this?

We are hoping that people take this very simple opportunity to do something charitable, and help spread awareness of the plight of Africa. We also hope that the harsh realities are brought home somewhat, and people also become aware that there is important work being done on the ground by AMREF, to improve African life for the future.

Is this a first for Facebook?

Using status updates to communicate automatically on behalf of a cause or topic you believe in is not new per se – it’s just been used more often to spread news and announcements, eg. Obama’s election campaign polling day call, or as a way for people to sign up under a unified message. We believe our campaign feels like a true and human use of the Facebook medium – an opportunity for the telling of a number of very personal stories, broadcast on a global scale.

Are there any plans to continue the campaign?

Whilst donations can be made to AMREF via their Facebook page and their website, we will be developing an engaging online method to donate directly to the charity in future (we’re not ready to give the idea away just yet, so please watch this space!)

Tell us the story behind how this idea came about – what’s BBH’s relationship with AMREF, what was the brief?

AMREF has a corporate sponsor in Diageo, a BBH client. The Johnnie Walker team came to us looking to raise awareness for the charity principally, and then hopefully drive donations. This piece of communication through Facebook is designed to fulfil the awareness part of the brief, and then there is a ‘Part II’ in the pipeline we’ve hinted at above – an exciting and innovative donation driver.

Anything else we should know?

We’d love everyone to sign up to the app on FB, spread the word amongst their friends, tweet about it. And, yes, if you know any celebrities in the Twitterverse or blogosphere that they think would lend some weight behind the campaign and talk about it, that would be a massive boost.

Here’s the link to the app again: http://apps.facebook.com/statusofafrica

And if you are interested in getting involved in AMREF beyond the app, take a look here: http://uk.amref.org/get-involved/

Credits:

Creative Team: Mareka Carter & Kimberley Gill

Creative Director: Johan Tesch/Rosie Arnold

Digital Producer: Tove Svensson

Account Director: Emma Brooker

Engagement Planner: Daniele Orner-Ginor

Junior Creative Technologist: Luis-Daniel Alegría

AMREF: Victoria Rugg, Tracey Carter & Tyler Stiem (Tyler originally bought into the idea but has now moved on from the charity).

Diageo: Peter Dee

PR: Romy Miller

Production Company: Chris Maltby and Matt Lynch at Feed Communications

Pius Omoding

Dr Asrat Mengister

Came across this today. Tweet-o-Meter (link) is the beta version of a platform created by University College London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. The Tweet-o-Meter supposedly updates every ten seconds (not sure it does quite do that right now), showing the number of tweets in each city per minute. The ambition is to log and analyze all geo-located tweets in these major cities. Once logged, they will be used to show Twitter activity over time and space. Various kinds of maps will be the main output. I imagine a variety of delicious visualizations will be forthcoming.

We are possibly attracted partly by the simple analogue-feel, dial-based interface. But we’re also struck by yet another work-in-progress attempt to bring life to the data spawned by Twitter (see also Getting to Know Your Twitter Followers & Why that Matters from earlier this week).

Tweet-o-Meter is part of a broader project called NeISS (National e-Infrastructure for Social Simulation), another UK Government-funded project. Read more about it here.

And of course it also reminds us of of the work by Google’s Aaron Koblin on visualizing SMS messages sent on New Year’s Eve in Amsterdam in 2007 (see below). We imagine as Tweet-o-Meter moves forward through beta they’ll need to figure out how to marry Koblin-esque visualizations to their gushing pipe of data. Bringing magic to the mayhem.

Amsterdam SMS messages on New Years Eve from Aaron on Vimeo.

Amsterdam SMS messages on Queen’s Day from Aaron on Vimeo.

Last week Aaron Richard (@ralphthemagi) contacted us at BBH Labs with something pretty cool, and we wanted to share it.

Aaron was most recently a digital strategist at Big Spaceship in Brooklyn. A while back Aaron created a map showing where @bigspaceship’s many thousands of followers lived (or claimed to live). I contacted Michael Lebowitz at BS and asked how they’d done it . . . a few days later Aaron wrote to us with our very own version of the data, mapped and analyzed. Brilliant.

Aaron goes into great detail on his site about how he did this, the problems he encountered, the choices he made in filtering, and so on. In short, he used the publicly accessible Twitter API combined with cURL software to play around with the data shared by our c.12,600 followers on Twitter.

After some fairly smart sounding parsing of the follower base to weed out spammers (or at least people who looked most like spammers) and non-actives (see his post for the detail) Aaron pulled down the following public data on each of the remaining followers.

• ID
• Name
• Username
• Location
• Profile Bio
• Profile Picture
• Web URL
• Privacy Settings
• # of Followers
• # of Friends (“following”)
• Account Creation Date
• # of Favorites
• UTC Offest
• Time Zone
• Per-tweet Geolocation Status
• Verified User Status
• # of Tweets

He then used one of Google’s Lab projects, Fusion Tables, to geo-code the massive amount of information he had in CSV form.

The result was two forms of map. First, a fully interactive Google map (launch it and take a look, click on the dots for detail), and second a heatmap showing concentration of followers by major cities. With the interactive map it’s possible to click on a follower and see the data that Twitter holds for them (which is a little scary, but I guess comes with the territory).

Aaron also looked at our follower data and pulled put out some insight about our followers, which we found fascinating.

• Average # of followers: 1,746 | Median: 163
• Average # of friends: 982 | Median: 206
• Average # of tweets: 987 | Median: 247
• 6% of followers keep their tweets private
• 9% have per-tweet geolocation enabled
• 12 followers are “verified”

As Aaron notes, one can see by the deltas between means and medians, all followers are not created equal.

So all this is fascinating to us (for example, to learn that @bigspaceship and @BBHLabs share the same two followers in Iceland . . . hi Islenka and Finnur). But I wanted to see what additional uses might be made of this kind of data and insight. For example, for brands, or for non-profits, or just for individuals. I pinged Aaron a few questions on this theme:

BBH LABS: So Aaron, thanks for this – this is fantastic. But thinking more broadly of potential uses of this kind of insight for marketers, brands and individuals, how do you think this might be used in a more applied way?

AARON: I think this kind of information can be used for setting better goals. Asking better questions and finding better answers. I think a lot of brand teams have this preconceived notion that they are using social media effectively if they have a lot of fans, followers, etc … I just don’t think that’s true.

BBH LABS: Give us some examples of what you mean.

AARON: The particular data set I pulled for BBH could be used in a number of ways. For example, say you wanted to give away something to a few Twitter followers with the goal of growing your network. Send them an iPod Shuffle, get them to tweet about it, drive a little positive PR. But how would you decide who to give stuff to if you wanted to maximize every give away?  Well, with data like this you could easily find the top 20 people with the most followers and target them. Or look at the top 50 people with the most followers, then look at those with who have the least number of tweets (there’s something interesting about people with a lot of followers and few tweets, because when they do tweet their message tends to get retweeted a lot and cuts through the clutter).

BBH LABS: And for brands, can you give us an example of how they might make use of this? Maybe to make their stream more relevant? Maybe to get closer to their most valuable customers?

AARON: Sure. You can start to see how you might use this kind of information to challenge large incumbent brands. Imagine you wanted to take on Comcast as a small regional ISP. You could pull the data for everyone who follows Comcast Cares [on Twitter] then look at all the people in your region and start following them or sending them public messages. You could even target the people who are pissed off at Comcast and give them a special offer. Dell Outlet [on Twitter] has +1.5m followers. That’s 1.5m potential new customers for HP, if they provide the right incentive to get a customer to switch.

BBH LABS: This is only one particular series of API calls, as you point out. What else can you envisage coming out of the Twitter API?

AARON: Absolutely, this is really just one tiny piece of the data that’s available. I did this more for fun and to get a better idea of how to manage large API pulled data sets than I did to answer a specific question. Twitter has calls for search, tweets, retweets, lists, etc.. If, for example, you wanted to track something like brand mentions you could do that—and not just by using the regular old search.twitter.com or paying for something like radian6 (who’d never give you the raw data). You could look at all tweets by keyword, replies, retweets, etc., and then figure out who’s saying these things, where they live, and what (or who) they have in common.

I’m going to do a followup to this that talks about how to use API data in a more tactical way, using Facebook (and probably Coke) as an example to find the answer to things like, “What day of the week should I post something in order to maximize likes, comments, etc.?”

BBH LABS: Thanks again Aaron. Keep us in the loop. We’re keen to learn more as we go.

—

If you have any questions for Aaron feel free to post them under this post, or on Aaron’s own blog.

 ”There is no longer any interaction that an individual may have with a brand, company, product, or service that disconnected from all the people they know, and the people that share their interest in that experience.”

So we were more than a little taken aback by the findings of the latest Edelman Trust Barometer that shows we trust our friends and peers as a source of information considerably less than we did two years ago. The decline is particularly marked in the US where just 25% of respondents view friends and peers as very/extremely credible-a decline of 20 percentage points on 2008-but is also reflected in the global data.

It’s an extraordinary finding which calls many of our assumptions into question. The trust consumers place in peer to peer recommendations versus corporations has been one of the primary drivers of the social web, the excitement we feel about the potential for social business and the shift of marketing dollars from above the line to social media.  

So has all our excitement been founded on a false set of assumptions? Is this simply an anomaly in the data? Or is social media sowing the seeds of its own demise?

 It seems to me that there are a few different factors at play here:

In difficult times, we are drawn to authority: we want there to be expert opinions and definitive answers. There was a strange exhilaration around the collapse of corporate institutions 12 months ago which coupled with the explosion of the social web and the power of the Obama effect created a mood of revolutionary empowerment. Never mind social, people were talking outright socialism. But change has proved slower than expected and economic turmoil has led not to a new world order but to a tougher and leaner version of the old.

As the network expands, connections weaken: It is perhaps inevitable that the bigger our networks get, the less absolute trust we have in the individuals within them. There is, after all, a limit to the number of people we can possibly have meaningful relationships with. Leaving aside for a moment the challenges pay-per-tweet creates in itself, it’s interesting to note that it appears to perform better on smaller networks-to quote Jan Schulz-Hofen of Magpie:

 ”Smaller accounts tend to have a more hands-on approach with their followers and this results in a higher interest in advertised tweets. While the initial reach per post may be smaller, the response is overwhelming when compared to larger or celebrity Twitterers.” So can social media scale or do we need myriad small initiatives?

As social media adopts the behaviours of old media, it loses credibility: We’ve pay per tweet, but the influx of blunt commercial messages into Social Media does seem to be impacting trust. The very forces that drove the social web and the power of peer-to-peer networks- authenticity, independence, touched before on the potential problems of individuality-are challenged by the adoption of old world tactics in a space where there is so much opportunity to deliver genuine utility.  

Genuinely useful and relevant uses of the social graph have been slow to emerge: Some of the developments we’ve collectively been most enthused by seem to have stalled in development. Adoption of Open ID or Facebook Connect by those services where it would be most useful is slow. The compelling vision of having our friends everywhere we want them on the web offering recommendations and advice still feels, for the most part, a long way away.

So if these are some of the challenges we face, what, as lovers of the social web and indeed as marketing professionals should we be doing? I certainly don’t have all the answers and I’d love to know what bigger and smarter brains think. Some starters for ten that occur though are:

Learn how to marry authority and inclusiveness: Too many brands in recent years have taken the undoubted truth that consumers no longer want to be dictated to and concluded that, therefore, consumers no longer want brands to have a point of view. “Marketing” has become a dirty word. But what the data tells us is that oftentimes, and particularly in uncertain times, certainty is compelling. Demonstrating expertise, confidence and authority is not a relic of a dictatorial past. It’s just that today we need to find new and engaging ways of demonstrating that authority, making consumers part of our experiments or our evidence.

Ask yourself if you’re offering anything useful: If you’re not offering something genuinely useful or entertaining in the social space, you’re simply polluting the stream. As tempting as it may be to simply get your brand’s name in there a lot, ultimately you’re damaging a medium that could do much more for you but may not be around forever if you don’t think carefully about how you use it. As Elin Sjursen of Made by Many points out, the current state of Facebook marketing may well be digging its own grave.

Find new ways to use the social graph:

As I’ve touched on, genuinely compelling uses of social data remain thin on the ground. So why aren’t we mashing up social data with purchase and location-specific data more? Why can’t I quickly and easily see what my friends are buying, rating and rejecting today? Innovations in social and real-time search are a major step forward but there is so much more we could do with e-commerce and beyond.

Consider the possibilities of smaller, tighter networks:

Smaller, more meaningful networks was one of David Armano’s key predictions for 2010. At the time, it seemed counter-intuitive as I considered the all-conquering power of Facebook and the wisdom of fishing where the fish are. But now, when I consider the potential of scale to dilute influence I begin to wonder if there is a role for smaller, specialist communities of interest or at least for a much more nuanced and selective approach to filtering. As my network expands, I may not want everyone with me everytime but I may want my movie-loving friends to come to Netflix with me, my geek friends to come phone shopping with me, my fashionista friends on Net a Porter with me encouraging me to buy more shoes…

But how else can we prevent social media from self-destructing? Thoughts, comments, inspiration welcome…

In the early weeks of 2010, there’s already been considerable debate (and indignation) around brands, businesses and even bands incentivising users for Tweets. Twincentivisng, if you like (and I must admit I can’t resist a pun).

Is everyone an advertiser? Image by Mike Cogh, Flickr, under a creative commons license

Should brands pay for tweets? Should twitterers take the cash or resist? Is there a sustainable paid for media model here or a fundamentally misguided reaction to the rise of social media? Is pay-per-tweet the end of the Twitterverse as we know it?

In many ways this is an inevitable response to a number of factors:

• The extraordinary rise and equally extraordinary media profile of Twitter
• The increased premium placed on peer to peer recommendations
• The collapse of on-line display advertising and the rise of SEO
• The socialisation of search

Any and all of these factors suggest a pressing need for brands to find a way to harness the power of social media and for media agencies to find a way to monetise it. Viewed from one perspective, the asymmetric nature of Twitter relationships make it particularly ripe for the adoption of a “broadcast” model.  1 in 5 tweets already mentions a brand so monetisation of these mentions seems, from that perspective, to make eminent sense.

So it’s inevitable that  businesses will experiment with a range of commercial models in this space from pay-per-tweet to pay-per-click to promotional access for tweets. I don’t personally feel huge moral indignation (perhaps it’s the ad-girl in me..). Brands will experiment with these businesses. If we don’t experiment we won’t learn. Some initiatives will be more successful than others and the ones that have a measure of success will probably involve some combination of:

• Transparency: Are the brand and the user open about their commercial relationship?  Disclosure policies are becoming an increasingly important aspect of the pay-per-tweet business
• Authenticity: Does it sound like the user is talking? Is it something they would say or a product they would endorse?  (Quite a challenge with auto-tweets and a point in favour of those services allowing users to generate their own copy)
• Complicity: Does the brand feel like they understand the platform and its users? Does it feel like a tech-savvy brand talking to tech-savvy individuals? Early FourSquare drinks/dinner promotions for example tapped into users’ mania for checking in and racking up points and so, although fairly basic, felt like they “got” it.  Playing with the currency of the Platform-the mayorship-also created that sense of complicity and playfulness. Likewise, the Pearl Jam tweet-for-download mechanic felt like a way of engaging and rewarding fans rather than anything more cynical.

Four Square promotions

Yet while I don’t feel outraged or betrayed, I do feel a little disappointed and a lot sceptical.

The ease with which we can identify influencers and super-users is a hugely welcome benefit of the social web. Once upon a time, identifying opinion formers was something of a dark art (usually involving lurking in hipster bars). Now there are any number of algorithms designed to map patterns of influence, identify lovers and loathers of brands and quantify their sway.  If we’re feeling unloved, we can even quantify our own Twinfluence.

But if identifying the influencers has become a science, influencing and activating the influencers remains an art. There is a huge opportunity in marrying the skills of PR experts and cultural mavens with hardcore data analytics to deliver robust, strategic, quantifiable (and cool) peer to peer programmes.  Yet pay-per-tweet feels like a fairly blunt instrument.

Treating users as media spaces to be bought and sold seems to me to impose an old world model on a very new medium-and as we are constantly reminded, the old model is broken. The age of interruption is over. Where it still scores is when we need serious scale (10s of millions of eyeballs), seriously quickly. But to impose an interruption model on Twitter seems to offer the worst of all possible worlds-interruption without scale.

So as business model, paid-for Tweets seems fraught with problems. But it does arise from a set of very genuine problems and opportunities. So what more exciting uses could we make of these opportunities?

Co-creation: If we want smart, engaged and opinionated people talking about what we’re up to, why not involve them early? We are Social’s “The Marmarati” work for Marmite is a great example of how bringing super-users into the development process pays dividends. Using a brand’s super users as its consultants, collaborators and Beta-testers drives genuine excitement and dialogue.

Social gaming: I’m pretty sure no money changed hands, but boy did Spymaster pop up in my Twitterfeed a lot at one point. Likewise FourSquare. Imagine if either one of these properties-or the juggernaut that is Farmville- had been branded. A surefire way to rise through the social search rankings in an organic and entertaining way.

Surprise and delight: Now we can identify who’s talking about our brands most and quantify their sentiment surely there is much greater opportunity for pro-active, real world customer service? Take the recent Eurostar PR traumas. Or any of the many airlines experiencing delays or cancellations in the poor weather. It’s relatively easy to spot the most vocal and influential users of social media and to see when they’re experiencing peak moments of frustration. So upgrade them. Give them free lounge access. Give them a cupcake (please). I guarantee they’ll tweet about it-we all love surprises.

The Marmarati campaign

Simple social sign up should become a no-brainer and of course, if we want to get people talking the fundamental imperative remains to do something interesting. But what else could we do with the data now at our disposal, with the ability to spot influencers, quantify sentiment and micro-target? Am I missing something and is pay-per-tweet the wave of the future? Or are there more interesting futures out there?

I had a message from my brother Tim (@malbonster), co-Founder of social media agency Made By Many in London, when I woke up here in NY. Tim is ‘into Twitter’. His message was subject titled: ‘I hope it’s not, but the fun bit feels like it’s almost over’. He was lamenting a tweet he’d read this morning from a friend (@netgrrl) which read: ‘Ah… I’ve mentioned coffee too many times now, I’m being inundated with follows from coffee marketers.’ Yes, I found myself nodding subconsciously, it’s being ruined. The crazy experimental bit with no rules, where no one has any idea how to monetize, or even whether it will be successful, and where marketing has been wrong-footed; that’s all gone . . .

(for full post click below)

Yet almost immediately I recalled a blog post by John Winsor (@jtwinsor), Exec Director Strategy & Innovation at Crispin, from last week. In the post, ‘Does Twitter Really Matter?’ John was recounting how only 1 in 70 (yes, one in seventy) students in a senior class he was teaching at Boulder was using Twitter, and only one-third had even heard of it. This raises the question, as John puts it, are we just talking to ourselves? Or to the early adopters, ahead of the curve? He’s almost certainly right – a very small group of people are far more ahead of the majority than they would imagine.

But given this echo-chamber reality, is it possible Twitter can already be on the verge of being ruined by marketing (and what would that really mean, in any case?). Or is it more likely we’ve just seen the end of the ‘launch’ period?

The swirling winds of change continue to pummel us, there’s no doubt about it. The departure of social media pin-up children to more grown-up & well-funded companies where ‘social technology … can transform businesses, not just be used for viral marketing & word of mouth’ (see David Armano’s move to Dachis Corp), and the arrival on the scene of new ventures such as Twitter Partners, a company that helps big brands manage their identities on Twitter, confirms some structure is starting to be baked into the chaos.

Twitter has always had structure, but it’s been the awesomely simple internal discipline of 140 characters. These emerging and more external structures, and the organization of something that was previously wonderfully loose and liberating are undoubtedly going to transform Twitter and may indeed make it both better and worse, depending upon who you are and for what you use it. It’s certainly the case that Twitter skews older than many might have expected, and maybe this will impact the way it develops and is eventually monetized. It’s also certainly the case that there are some perception issues from which certain heavy users suffer. The most common of these being the disconnect between the frantic activity on one’s Tweetdeck or Tweetie app and the much less frantic readership of the tweets one actually puts there; it’s easy to mistakenly believe that one’s participating in a gigantic conversation featuring half the entire world when in fact only a tiny handful of people see most things posted (see Mike Brown’s comments under Winsor’s post for more on this). This might be creating the illusion of importance and/or Twitter overload in small numbers of hyper-connected people. And finally, it’s certainly true that just about everyone seems to be experimenting with how dollars might be squeezed out of Twitter; to some extent the tentacles of marketing are beginning to make themselves felt to everyday users. All true.

So where does this leave us, three years in? Steve Rubel (in today’s AdAge) boldly asserts that Twitter is now peaking and will soon be abandoned – by the geeks at least – for something newer, shinier and more edgy. I’m not so sure, I think the best is yet to come. This still feels like the start of something that has many iterations and plenty of nuances still being worked on in tiny start-ups or gestating in people’s brains (premium versions, groups, mobile functionality, ad models, video Twitter, family Twitter). It may simply turn out to be microblogging 1.0.

Whoever ends up being right about Twitter, the reality is probably relatively simple, and is most economically summarized by Sir Winston Churchill: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

But I’ve become addicted to the data which bit.ly provides on every link you shorten. Because with bit.ly the shortening is just the beginning of it’s magic. If you register on the site you have a record of all the links you’ve shortened. And if you hit the ‘Info’ function underneath a link you are presented with a treasure trove of metrics & insight. Traffic (clicks) with time & date information, geographical location, platform used to access the link, conversations the link featured within, RTs, and so on.

So one learns that a link posted on Twitter that touches on industrial design is 50% more likely to be clicked on in Brazil than in the UK. Or a link that relates to LEGO is three times as likely to be clicked on in Denmark than in Canada. Or that the optimum time to post is 10pm ET, or that actually one needs to re-post because the two peaks are 10pm ET and 10pm GMT, or that if you want to provoke an Australian audience one should post after 11pm ET. Much of this might seem intuitive, but accessing the data that proves (or refutes) some of the assumptions we work with when we share links is a revealing exercise. Above all, it provides much greater depth of feedback on what’s popular (or not) than simply the crude measure of how often your message is RT on Twitter. And it’s not just Twitter – you can add a bit.ly add-on to your Gmail (http://bit.ly/Xd1yM).

Bit.ly allows you to do a whole lot more than fire-and-forget; it promotes smart linking, and that makes it cool in my (Excel work) book.