Twitter has been hailed as an incredibly useful marketing tool for businesses and brands, both big and small, to disseminate information and engage with consumers on a massive scale. But what about non-profits? The ability to use social media to fundraise for charitable purposes has been questionable. A few months ago, the Washington Post reported that Causes, one of Facebook’s popular applications used by non-profits to raise money, was not netting much money for charities, despite its large amount of users (according to the application’s page, it has 26 million monthly users).

Twitter, the current darling of the social media world, is increasingly being used by charities. In addition to building awareness, Twitter has potential to raise charitable contributions. One of the more successful initiatives launched in the Twittosphere was February’s global Twestival, which raised over $250,000 for charity:water, a non-profit organization devoted to bringing clean drinking water to developing nations. The volunteer-run organization held events to bring Twitter communities in nearly 200 cities together. 250K sounds like an awful lot of dough to raise over the microblogging network, but this amount fell way below Twestival’s goal of $1 million.

For all of you World of Warcraft fans out there, there’s a new Twitter client that is worth checking out. TweetCraft is an in-game Twitter client for WoW that lets you send and receive Tweets within a game. If you are busy in the middle of a WoW match, you can put Tweets in a queue to send when it’s more convenient.

The client also lets you upload in-game WoW screenshots using TwitPic and will automatically send out Tweets when you log in, enter an instance or get an achievement.

Recently, I’ve noticed something. If you send me an email, the likelihood that I’m going to respond is pretty small. But if you send me a message on Twitter, the likelihood that I’ll respond is much higher. Certainly, part of it is that I get fewer messages on Twitter. But you might be surprised at how close it’s getting in volume when you add @replies to direct messages. The bigger factor for me, is the length of the messages.

If I open up an email and see it filled with paragraphs of information, guaranteed my eyes are going to glaze over. Certainly sometimes it’s an important message that I do need to read, but most of the time it’s just a core message filled with paragraphs of bloat. I don’t want or need the bloat, I need the core message. And that’s why I love Twitter. You simply cannot go over 140 characters. And more often than you may imagine, that’s enough.

Now, on the face of it, plenty of people will disagree with me on that point. But think about it. In an age where we’re bombarded by tons of information, from multiple angles, all day long, there is something beautiful about brevity.

Okay, it’s not exactly the Camp David Summit that took place in 2000 between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but sometimes the littlest gestures can go a long way.

A couple of days ago, upon hearing that Microsoft had officially joined Twitter, the official Linux account sent out a tweet welcoming them. “Welcome to Twitter, @Microsoft!,” they said. The tweet sat unanswered for over a day, and it seemed like Microsoft may never answer. But about a few hours ago, they did. “@Linux thanks, nice to be here,” they replied.

One of the most effective ways to amplify your message on Twitter is to get your followers to retweet it to their followers. Retweeting is also becoming a popular way to pass links around Twitter. They are becoming the new currency of the Web because of the power of passed links. One service in particular, Tweetmeme, is cornering the market on retweets by making it easy for blogs and other sites to add a retweet button to every page. You can see one at the bottom of this post. Just click on it, and it will take you to your Twitter account and populate a message with a “RT,” the headline, and a short link. Go ahead, do it now. Do it again. Okay, thanks.

Lots of sites use Tweetmeme’s retweet button, and it drives a lot of its overall traffic. Nick Halstead, the CEO of Fav.or.it (Tweetmeme’s parent company) says that the buttons are so widespread right now that they are generating 196 million impressions a week month. In other words, that is how many pages load with the buttons every month week, and some portion of those result in actual retweets. Halstead is making some improvements to the retweet buttons. Before each retweet generated by the button would include a promotional “via @tweetmeme.” That has now removed to make more room for the actual headline and link. Next week he is going to introduce an image button which can be included in RSS feeds and emails to spread the retweet love even further. And sites will be able to embed a retweet counter to show how many overall retweets they get every week.

You may have noticed that Twitter has started hyperlinking hashtags. Those are words preceded by a “#” which denote what the Tweet is about and makes it easier to search for Tweets about specific topics and events. For instance, try searching for #realtimecrunchup. Now that they are hyperlinked, when you click on a hashtag, you are led to the search result page for the specific hashtag. Others have been implementing this; FriendFeed (big surprise) has been doing this for awhile. Some of the Twitter clients, including the desktop versions of Tweetie and Seesmic Desktop also provide hyperlinks to hashtags.

For Twitter, search is a navigation tool, and this functionality is yet one more way to allow people to easily discover new Tweets outside their group of followers. This trend started when they added the search box to everyone’s home page last April.

Ever since its redesign a few months ago, FriendFeed has been one of the standard-bearers of the real-time web. That’s because while a lot of sites claim to be real-time, FriendFeed is one of the few that actually updates continuously as data comes in. Starting today, any search you do will also get that same real-time treatment.

Enter any query into FriendFeed’s search box and you’ll see a constantly updating stream of items related to it. It works for advanced searches too. Best of all, it also searches through comments left below items. And these results can even be embedded in other blogs, as you can see right now on the FriendFeed blog.

Really curious to find out how this is done exactly, but someone somewhere has managed to change a real trending topic on Twitter - #MrsSlocombe - into something childish, as you can tell from the screenshot above. Strangely enough, when you do a search for the less appropriate trending topic, not a single result pops up (for now).

Update: ok apparently it’s a legitimate trending topic (see origin here, it was meant as a tribute to British comic actress Mollie Sugden on the occasion of her death, so fans, celebrities and Brits in general started to tweet it) but Twitter is just blocking search results from appearing (which is good). Update 2: I’m not ‘pro-censorship’, but in this particular case it’s understandable behavior on Twitter’s behalf, period. I’m sure they didn’t mean to interrupt or ban tributes to a deceased person.

This may seem like something mundane at first glance, but many people (including reporters worldwide) track Twitter trending topics for breaking news, and it worries me that they can be manipulated.

Twitter has long had an official Facebook application that allows users to update their Facebook status with tweets. It’s quite useful for those of us who don’t want to have to spend all day updating multiple services with the same messages. The app has over 250,000 monthly active users. But if you’re not already one of them, I have bad news: You’re not allowed to use it.

For the past several days, anyone who has tried to install the app has been greeted with the following message:

Error while loading page from session test

There are still a few kinks Facebook and the makers of session test are trying to iron out. We appreciate your patience as we try to fix these issues. Your problem has been logged - if it persists, please come back in a few days. Thanks!

It’s Twitter day at Microsoft, apparently. Not only did the software giant announce that it would start adding tweets to its Bing search results, the company actually started officially using Twitter today.

To be clear, Microsoft had a rather large presence on Twitter before through its various departments/products/services, but now it’s using the main /microsoft account to tweet. The account is being run by its corporate communications team, consisting of four people. So far there have been only 2 tweets and the account only has about 1,000 people following it. That should change, fast.

Bing is something of a rarity for Microsoft these days: It’s a product that actually has good natural buzz. And for good reason too, it’s a solid product. For certain queries, it seems more useful than even, yes, Google. (And not just porn queries.) And Microsoft isn’t squandering away this opportunity, it’s keeping its foot on the gas, today attacking what is perceived to be Google’s weakness: Real-time search results.

While that’s a little misleading — Google actually does have plenty of data that gets into its system almost immediately — what everyone seems to mean by real-time results these days is Twitter results. And that’s exactly what Bing is adding. Kind of. As it notes on its blog:

There’s been quite a bit of controversy over the past several hours over words and images related to Twitter being used by third-party developers. Yesterday, Twitter seemed to threaten one party over the use of the word “tweet” and some UI elements that were similar to Twitter’s own. This morning, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone clarified Twitter’s position on this a bit for us, stating that, “As part of this support, we encourage developers of new applications and services built using Twitter APIs to invent original branding for their projects rather than use our marks, logos, or look and feel.”

But there was still some confusion about what Twitter was actually saying, and more importantly, what it was planning to do with violators of this. So now Stone has written a blog post further clarifying things.

We were just forwarded an e-mail conversation between a Twitter API team member and a third-party developer because the latter was using a UI for its web-based service that was admittedly very similar to Twitter’s web application.

The startup of course has the right to protect its assets and do its utmost to avoid confusion with users who might think they’re using a Twitter product rather than that of a developer making use of its API.

But something else caught our attention in the thread:

Hi,

Twitter, Inc is uncomfortable with the use of the word Tweet (our trademark) and the similarity in your UI and our own. How can we go about having you change your UI to better differentiate your offering from our own?

Thanks,

This guest post is written by Mary Hodder, the founder Dabble. Prior to Dabble, Hodder consulted for a number of startups, did research at Technorati and wrote her masters thesis at Berkeley focusing on live web search looking at blog data.

Real time search is nothing new. It is a problem we’ve been working on for at least ten years, and we likely will still be trying to solve it ten years from now. It’s a really hard problem which we used to call “live web search,” which was coined by Allen Searls (Doc’s son) and refers to the web that is alive, with time as an element, in all factors including search.

The name change to “real time search” seems a way to refocus attention toward the issue of time as an important element of filters. We are still presented with the same set of problems we’ve had at least the past ten years. None of the companies that Erick Schonfeld pointed to the other day seem to be doing anything differently from the live web search / discovery companies that came before. The new ones all seem to be fumbling around at the beginning of the problem, and in fact seem to be doing “recent search,” not really real time search. While I’m sure they’ve worked really hard on their systems, they are no closer than the older live web search systems got with the problem. All the new ones give a reverse chron view, with most mixing Twitter with something: blog data, other microblog data, photos, creating some kind of top list of recent trends. Some have context, like a count of activity over a period of time, or how long a trend has gone on or a histogram (Crowdeye) which both Technorati and Sphere experimented with in the early years. Or they show how many links there are to something or the number of tweets. All seem susceptible to spam and other activities degrading to the user experience and none seem to really provide the context and quality filters that one would like to see if this were to really work. All seem to suffer from needing to learn the lessons we already learned in blog search and topic discovery.

Twitter has just quietly rolled out a set of changes to its user interface on the “Following” and “Followers” sections of its website. These changes will clearly make it easier to manage who you follow as well as take actions, such as @replying someone or direct messaging them, directly from the page.

There are two new views for looking at these areas. “List” is a compact list of the followers, while “Expanded” offers more details including that user’s last tweet and their real name and location. On the Followers page, there is also a button that allows for one-click following of users who already follow you.

Earlier this month, Flickr started flirting with Twitter integration by allowing users to link their Flickr accounts to their Twitter accounts. The experiment was only for email uploads, which simultaneously created a Tweet with a short http://flic.kr link back to the photo on Flickr. Now that integration is an official feature called Flickr2Twitter.

In addition to email uploads, Flickr now lets you Tweet out any photos directly from the site. After linking your accounts, whenever you click on the “Blog this” button on any photo on Flickr, your Twitter account will be one of the distribution options. This works for both photos you’ve uploaded and other photos you find on the site. I have a feeling you are going to be seeing a lot of http://flic.kr links on Twitter pretty soon.

Yoono, an extension built to enhance both the Firefox and IE browser experience that comes in pretty handy when you go on the Internet mainly to interact socially with your peers and friends, has just released version 6.1 of its add-on, and revamped the interface along with adding a couple of useful features.

I’ve been trying it out for a couple of hours now, and I have to say I’d already miss it if it were gone from my Firefox browser (which, admittedly, I use less and less thanks to Google Chrome). Yoono is essentially a browser sidebar that aggregates and centralizes your online profiles, including from IM tools like Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk and AIM but also a wide variety of social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, FriendFeed and more.

The latest version of the extension, next to expanding support for Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace as well as the ability to easily share pages, images, or videos from your browser across all networks at once, boasts another useful new feature: real-time search.

If you own an iPhone, chances are you have at least one Twitter client on it. And while everyday seems to bring new ones into the App Store, at the end of the day, Tweetie always seems to be the one that I go back to. TwitterFon, Twitterriffic and most recently, TweetDeck, all are worthy challengers, but I find each of them lacking in some regard. Usually, it’s either speed or simplicity. Tweetie seems to be a perfect combination of the two. But a new app, Birdfeed, may be a little more perfect.

When you first boot it up, you may think Birdfeed looks a little sparse. But there’s a lot behind this simple design, it’s just tucked away, so as not to clutter the main experience, as so many apps do. The main Birdfeed screen consists of your Twitter timeline, a button to load newer tweets, a button to compose a tweet, and a button to your account — that’s it. Clicking on any tweet in your timeline will load it on its own screen and from there you can easily see that person’s profile, reply to that tweet, favorite it or forward it (retweet it, post a link to it, or mail a link to it).

A lot of people know that hunger is a major problem in Africa, but few people ever think about it, let alone do anything about it. One Twitter account claims to be trying to spread the message with the use of very straight-forward tweets pretending to be from a starving African.

The tweets range from “hungry,” to “really, really hungry,” to “belly. distending,” and variations on those. Whoever is in charge the the account writes in its bio, “Social commentary illuminating the startling gap between the haves and the have nots.” But is this just poor taste? Apparently the 300-some people that follow the account don’t think so.

As Twitter becomes the default conversation spot on the Web, we’re going to start to see tools which combine site-specific conversations with Twitter. One example is Tweetboard, which creates a Twitter-powered forum for any site. Once a site adds the Tweetboard code to their site, a site-wide tab appears which allows visitors to have forum discussions by simply logging into Twitter (via OAuth). All the conversations are threaded, and comments appear on Twitter as well, potentially drawing in a larger audience into the specific conversation.

One of the difficulties of following a conversation on Twitter itself is that replies to particular threads aren’t threaded together. On Tweetboard, all the discussions are threaded and nested together, similar to what you’d find on FriendFeed or Facebook. Site publishers can choose to set up a Tweetboard using their personal Twitter accounts or create a new one specific to each Tweetboard.