We’ve discussed Twitter countless times on this blog, and I’ve just realised that we haven’t covered the basics: How to sign up to Twitter. Here’s some instructions!

1. Go to the Twitter Home page and press the sign up button on the right hand side. This is what it looks like:

2. Next you’ll be on the ‘Create an Account’ page. It looks like this:

For Full Name and Username you’ve got a few choices. You need to decide who you are Tweeting as. Will your account be:

a) Personal (EG ‘Ken Builder’). In this case put your first and last name in and, and for a username write your name straight through. If it looks better seperate your first and last name with an ‘_’ underscore.

b) Business (EG WebEden). In this case put your company name in as full name, and for username write your company name again.

c) ‘On behalf of’ (EG Ken Builder on behalf of WebEden). In this case put your actual first and last name, and add your company name as the username.

Keep the names as short as possible - it will give you more space to Tweet with!

Make sure you include your current email address as this is where your notifications and password reminders will be sent to.

3. Then you get onto a stage where Twitter can search your Gmail, Yahoo or AOL mail accounts to see if any of your contacts are already on Twitter. Here’s what it looks like, but I’d skip this step if I were you!

4. Next up you can look for high profile users of Twitter who you might want to follow. This is what it looks like, but I’d skip this bit too!

5. And that’s it. You’re on Twitter! Time to experiment…

I’m not going to talk here about what to do, what to say, and who to follow, except to explain the links across the top of the page that look like this:

Here’s what these all mean:

Home: This is where all the Tweets of everyone you’re following plus your own will appear.

Profile: This is where all your Tweets will appear

Find People: This is where you can search for other users of Twitter, and follow them. Try searching for webeden!

Settings: This is where you can:

• Change your Username and Passwords
• Add your website address
• Add a 160 character biography about yourself
• Change Your Background
• Add Your Photo (if its a personal account use your own photo, if its a company one use your logo)

Now that you’ve signed up why not follow WebEden on Twitter?

Leave a comment if you’re having any trouble signing up.

A couple of months ago we talked about the ‘Real time’ battle being played out by Google and Microsoft. The emergence of Twitter has a search engine that can tell you what people are discussing right now, made both Google and Microsoft to develop their own angle on ‘real time’

Whilst Microsoft’s Bing opted to include Tweets from prominent Twitters within their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), Google decided to rapidly index and promote blog posts and other recently added online content.

Both major players have now elected to try and beat each other at the Real Time game by… doing exactly the same thing. A couple of week’s ago they announced that they would feature live Tweets from the full Twitter index.

This is how Paul Yiu from Bing put it: “Twitter is producing millions of tweets every minute on every subject you can imagine. The power of those tweets as a form of data that can be surfaced in search is enormous… Working with those clever birds over at Twitter, we now have access to the entire public Twitter feed and have a beta of Bing Twitter search for you to play with.” The service is currently only available in the US.

And on the same day, this is what Marissa Mayer from Google had to say “We have reached an agreement with Twitter to include its updates in our search results. We believe our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months.”

Bing is already starting to include Twitter results in the US. In the UK we have to wait; and everyone has got to wait a while for Google,

Seeing as they have decided to do exactly the same thing, the winner will probably the search engine that chooses the most effective integration. Twitter produces a lot of ‘noise’ – irrelevant or irreverent Tweets that people may well not find useful to see in the SERPs.

As for what it means to website builders and your social media strategy, this means that is going to be more important than ever to make sure you are effectively using Twitter to communicate with your website visitors about your website. If you use Twitter as a customer service and communication tool, more people than ever will witness your customer care. As we discussed previously, the SERPs for your brand searches influence a lot of potential visitors to your website. More than ever they need to see that yours is a website that they want to interact with.

Sometimes when I look at the number of followers I have on Twitter (580, very modest by general standards) I get all excited. What a lot of people! Are they really all interested in what I’ve got to say?

If you’ve read the guest blogs from Alison Cross, then you’ll know the answer to that question is probably no! Most of these people are following me just because I’m following them, so at the moment I’m following Alison’s advice and weeding out those that I’m not really interested in.

If you’ve signed up to Twitter, and have ever wondered how to turn your followers into money, a US based not-for-profit start-up called The Whuffie Bank is behind a new idea that rewards you for your online reputation.

The number of times your name gets mentioned, and the context of those mentions, can earn you ‘Whuffies’, a new digital currency that rewards popularity.

The Whuffie Bank then lets users cash in their Whuffies to buy virtual goods, and in the future even real-life products.

Using an algorithm, the bank monitors users’ activity across websites such as Twitter and MySpace, and then assigns Whuffies to posts, comments, and other mentions.

It also looks at when there is third party support of a positive Tweet or post, such as the number of times a Facebook post is ‘liked’, or their tweets are retweeted.

Participants can also trade using their Whuffies. For example, a user might offer 100 Whuffies for anyone to retweet one of their Tweets.

The website thewhuffiebank.org shows how many Whuffies each user has accumulated, along with some graphics that shows the rate of growth over time. All ‘Whuffiers’ are placed into a league, which hopes to highlight those with the best online reputation in different fields.

Looking at the league right now, it is topped by Rev Run from Run DMC. P Diddy ranks second.

Whilst this all seems like good fun, it has an important element. We’ve spoken before about the importance of having a social media strategy: in the online world, giving and getting feedback is so much more common than it used to be. As a website owner, you can put your online reputation to work, by getting good feedback and communicating with your users through social media. Take a look at how to integrate your WebEden website with Facebook and Twitter.

If you’re interested in finding out more about TheWhuffiebank, then you can start by measuring the strength of your online reputation over at Whuffiebank.org by entering your username.

Have you got a reputation that you’d like to trade on? Want to make some virtual cash out of your followers? Is this a good way to get you thinking about your online reputation? Check out TheWhufflebank.org and leave us a comment below.

Contrary to the pattern of growth for almost every other Internet phenomenon, Twitter has been largely ignored by Teenagers. This could be put down the amount of time they spend on Twitter’s social media rivals Facebook and MySpace. Whilst Facebook has been used by a broad spectrum of people including those much more senior, MySpace itself has been almost exclusively a young person’s place.

But according to new research from ComScore, young people are now signing up with Twitter at a ‘breakneck pace’.  Whilst overall Twitter users have streaked past 50 million it is the under 18 age group that is growing at the fastest rate of all.

Twitter has been mostly adopted so far by the older age segments, since news about Twitter was mostly from a business or political context.. This shift in growth to younger people has been largely attributed to the increased use of Twitter by celebrities who have a large number of young fans.

ComScore analyst Andrew Lipsman said: “I think that during the early adopter period back in 2008, Twitter was first gaining notoriety in business settings and via news outlets — particularly on CNN, which resulted in an older-skewing early adopter profile.

“But as Twitter began to filter more into the mainstream, along with it came a culture of celebrity as Shaq, Britney Spears and Ashton Kutcher joined the ranks of the Twitterati.”

ComScore have said that as more celebrities get into Tweeting, more young people will adopt the platform, in an “impending youth invasion”.

“Twitter is most definitely popular among younger users and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. They are fuelling its continued growth and pushing it ever closer to achieving critical mass.

“If that happens, it will be the first example I can think of where the younger demographics were not the critical early adopters of a new internet technology yet still played a vital role in its adoption curve. But it won’t be the last.” said Lipsman.

Why have you taken up Twitter – what was the straw that broke the camel’s back? And if you haven’t then why not so far? What would make you change your mind? Leave us a comment below.

In the previous two posts about search on Twitter, we showed you how to get more out of Twitter Search by using the advanced search form, and how to use advanced search operators on Twitter.

These are both useful way to find out a bit more detail about what people are saying on Twitter, and the context of those Tweets. By experimenting with these you should be able to drill down to exactly the right information that you want to find. Since it’s taken you a while to work out this the precise nature of your search, you don’t want to go through the whole process again. That’s where saving your searches comes in.

Any search you can think of can be saved so that you can come back to it later. On your Twitter home page there is a search box on the right hand sidebar. If you carry out a search from here, you have the option of saving this search. A ’save this search’ link appears on the top right hand side of the search results page.

Here’s what it looks like:

If you press ’save this search’, it will appear in the ’saved searches’ list underneath the search bar. If you want to quickly carry out this search again, just click on the link and the search will be carried out instantly. If you find you actually don’t need to run this search again, just click ‘Remove this saved search’ up on the top right hand side of the search results.

Here’s what that looks like:

That’s it for this mini series of getting more out of Twitter search. If you find anything that we could add to this series, please let us know and we can include it in a follow up post.

On Monday we showed you how to get more out of Twitter Search by using the advanced search form. Today we take you even deeper into Twitter search by talking about search ‘operators’.

A search ‘operator’ is a word or symbol used in conjunction with a keyword that specifies that you only want to find mentions of that keyword in a particular context. All search engines allow the use of ‘operators’, but they aren’t very well known.

For example, if you wanted to find mentions of the keywords ‘fast car’ on Twitter, you might type ‘fast car’ into the search field. The results will show mentions of the phrase ‘fast car’, but also mentions of just the keyword ‘fast’ or just the keyword ‘car’. This might therefore show irrelevant results. You might find mentions of phrases like ‘fast food’ or similarly ‘car servicing’. To be more accurate, if you wanted to find out when the exact phrase ‘fast car’ had been used then you’d need to use the operator “ “ in your search, as in “fast car”. The results will then just show when the words ‘Fast Car’ (those words, in that order) had been mentioned.

Operators perform many of the advanced search parameters used by the advanced search form mentioned on Monday’s post. The advantage of operators is that you type them directly into the search field, rather than filling out the form. They are popular amongst more advanced users, or those who come from a development or IT background, since they are a short cut but you do need to remember what they are.

Here is a list of all the advanced search operators on Twitter:

As you can see, an easy way to look for positive or negative mentions of a particular word is to use a :-) or :-( with your keyword.

Other operators include “near”,  to find out mentions of a keyword in a geographic proximity to a location.

For the most advanced, you can search for Tweets that just contain links to other websites, by using the operator “filter:links”.

If you want to find people who are just using Twitter from particular 3rd party applications you can do that too, by using the operator “source:Web” or “source:Tweetdeck” to find people just updating using the web, or Tweetdeck.

You can find a full list of operators here.

Have a go at using some advanced search operators on Twitter and let us know how you get on.

This is the first on a series of posts about how to use Twitter Search.

We’ve talked about Twitter search quite a bit on this blog. The chance to see what people are talking about in real time has been an exciting development in the world of search.

But searching on Twitter can give you so much more depth than finding out who is using particular keywords in their Tweets. Because thanks to Twitter’s Advanced Search Interface you can start looking for mentions of a particular keyword in very specific circumstances. And these can sometimes bring up very interesting results.

The place to start is the Advanced Search Interface, which can be found here and looks like this:

As you can see from the form, you can be very specific about your search. To start with, you can specify the keyword context. Are you looking for general mentions of a keyword, or only when it is used with other keywords?

You can then take a look at who is mentioning a particular word, and who is receiving this keyword in their @ Tweets. This might be an effective way of monitoring how your competition are using Twitter: Do they get asked for lots of price quotes? Or are they dealing with lots of support requests? Does this mean that they are using Twitter more effectively than you are? What can you learn from that?

You can also just look at Tweets that have happened within a particular time frame. This might be useful for trying to find out how a particular event has been discussed at the time of the event, compared to how it is discussed now. You could also use this to look at how your competitors are changing their use of Twitter over time.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of Twitter search is that you can also search for tweets that have a particular ‘attitude’. For example, if you want to find all the Tweets that mention a particular keyword in a positive way, then the results will show all those Tweets in the time frame that use common ‘Smilies’ and other positive statements. Once again, this might be a good way of finding out how you or your competitors are being mentioned.

Finally, it’s possible to specify the location of Tweets, and set a radius of miles around which you want to find all the mentions of a particular keyword. These use the location set by each user in their profile, but mobile users already have the option of including their actual coordinates. This might be good at finding out, particularly if your business has a fixed location (such as a shop), how frequently local people are Tweeting about you.

Twitter search can also go a lot deeper, but we’ll be covering that in tomorrow’s post on ‘How to use advanced search operators on Twitter‘.

Have a go on Twitter’s Advanced Search function and see what you can find out.

For the first time ever, more people in the UK are visiting Twitter than MySpace. According to Hitwise, this milestone was reached in the last week of August. This is the first of the major social networking scalps that Twitter has claimed.

Of the complete list of most visited websites by UK users, that means that Twitter now ranks 27th, one place ahead of MySpace.

For the social networking category, Twitter still has a long way to go. In the UK it lags behind Facebook, YouTube and Bebo. But with such a phenomenal growth rate, Twitter will shortly overhaul Bebo and must sure have YouTube in its sights. We all know what ambitious plans Twitter has.

Of course, these figures may mask a much larger userbase, since many people access Twitter through applications such as Tweetdeck, and through their mobile phones. And since Twitter has an open API, many choose to update it through other websites such as Facebook. As you know, its possible to send updates to Twitter from your WebEden website.

Whilst Twitter can do no wrong, it’s a different story over at MySpace, whose popularity is in sharp decline. If ambition counts for anything, it is MySpace who are cutting jobs at the moment.

Have you tried – and then gone off – MySpace? Which other social networks do you use? Time to face the inevitable and sign up to Twitter? Leave us a comment below.

Twitter: you can’t move for news of it. And this news is driving more people than ever to sign up.

But if you’ve opened a Twitter account, do you have trouble saying what you want to say in 140 characters? I know I do – and find that I’m breaking my Tweets into chunks, which really doesn’t seem to be the point.

Well if you’re like me and you have trouble keeping it concise, there’s a service out there that might be right for you: Woofer is a ‘Macro-blogging’ website, where you are limited not by a minimum but a maximum - of 1400 characters.

Calling itself the ‘anti-Twitter’, Woofer says that it allows users to really speak their mind, and free themselves from the shackles of brevity. The instructions for use go along the lines of ‘Be eloquent, use adverbs, and DEA (don’t ever abbreviate)’

Despite the ‘anti-Twitter’ moniker, Woofer is in reality an homage to Twitter.

The website looks almost identical to Twitter, the only main difference being the character countdown starting at 1,400 rather than that ‘normal’ 140. So far around 15,000 have signed up.

The people behind Woofer also developed an online game ‘Shuffletime’. And the fact that on Woofer there is a peel-back advert for Shuffletime in the top right hand corner of the screen makes you think that woofer has been developed solely to promote the other service.

There are also other short cuts: Rather than allowing real time search, the search facility simply redirects users to Google.

There are also lots of legal disclaimers on the site that make it clear that the website is not connected “in any way whatsoever” with Twitter. There is also a link that asks the questions ‘Is this Twitter?’. Click on this and you’re taken to a page that reads “No” in screen-high letters.

Whilst this all looks like a bit of fun, its interesting that it has already been tried out by so many people – maybe 140 characters just isn’t enough?

Can you say what you want to in just 140? Have a look at Woofer and then leave us a comment below.

We’ve made much on this blog about how to use Twitter to help your business and to market your website. We’ve discussed ideas that make Twitter worthwhile for business. And we also discussed Twitter 101 – the microblogging platform’s very own guide for businesses.

All this has been amid speculation of how Twitter intends to develop a revenue stream for what is at the moment an entirely free service. It seems that with an estimated $40m in the bank, Twitter isn’t in much of a hurry to start selling stuff.

So its with some interest that we came across the information released by co-founder Biz Stone that Twitter was in starting phase of developing commercial accounts in order to tempt business users to pay for ‘premium services’.

In an interview with VentureBeat, Stone said that the premium service would include services like detailed analytics. This would help business users analyse and understand how their users were interacting with Twitter, and how to make the most of that.

Stone said that Twitter was in the process of building a series of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that would allow developers to add on ‘business oriented applications’ for business users. (API is basically a mechanism whereby one piece of software can exchange information with another piece of software). These APIs would create a ‘commercial layer’ over the social network.

To reassure everyone about Twitter’s principles, Stone said “Twitter will still be free for everybody and we’ll still tell them to go crazy with it.”

He then added “But we’ve identified a selection of things that businesses say are helping to make them more profit.”

Twitter is also in the process of rolling out their “verified accounts” programme that we first discussed in a cyber-squatting post. These give followers the proof that the account holder is the official one for the business or celebrity, rather than a fake or pretend account.

Some celebrities including Stephen Fry have already been upgraded to “verified accounts”.

As to when all this launches, Stone wouldn’t be tied down.

For my part, I find it difficult to imagine the benefits of these ‘commercial accounts’ – I think I need to see it working, in the flesh, before fully understanding how it can help us website builders.

Do you think Twitter might be onto something? Have you got a suggestion of how they could make money? Leave us a comment below.