Neville Hobson: 5 Examples of Twitter Innovation

Neville Hobson, a blogger about social media (albeit from an older generation than C-Mac, et al) recently wrote about Five examples of innovation with Twitter from five major companies.

He in turn is pulling these examples from Entrepreneur magazine, as linked in his blog. To be honest there isn't a lot of analysis here beyond a vague description of the campaign. But look at the total number of followers - 6,000 for Subway, 4,700 for McDonald's, 38,000 for Dunkin' Donuts? And have you looked at what those accounts post? As Aaron explained yesterday, this is almost a lesson in how NOT to use Twitter, right?

Twitpay for your newspaper

We have discussed the concept of Twitpay before, and Scott noted the possibilities of creating a platform for making quick and easy payments even from phones.

An easy, comprehensive service like Twitpay makes more and more sense the more I think about it. For example, take Mark Cuban's "Note to Newspapers" ideas and consider that in order to pay the LA Times or whoever you could use your existing Twitpay (or PayPal) account and just zap them the $0.50 for the in-depth article you want to read, or the $1.99 for today's paper online, or even the $50 for your yearly subscription, or whatever the amount comes to. The main point of Cuban's that I completely agree with is that people use Amazon all the time because it's super easy - they have one-click payments, remember all your info, keep your queue, make recommendations, etc. The ease-of-use features that make Amazon great drive more sales than obtuse systems for payment, shipping, and all that.

I was also surprised to see that iTunes leads online marketplaces in number of active users with 100 million, compared to Amazon's 94 million and PayPal's 75 million. Do you think that if a service like Twitpay or PayPal became a more comprehensive platform for easy online transactions, it would grow its market share versus that of iTunes or Amazon? Or do you think those two existing marketplaces will instead grow their services into arenas like the one Cuban talks about?

Why hold cash when you can Twitpay?

I just heard of Twitpay via CNBC, and then found this post on the interwebs, and find the concept fascinating!

Protest Follies

Direct from the twisted Twitter feed of Shawn Elliott - a former games writer and oddball - comes a series of failed protests. (Warning: these links are okay, but many links in Shawn's feed are NSFW)

Celebrity Twitter accounts - who cares?

Everybody is on Twitter these days, but almost nobody is interesting - especially Tweets by famous people.