Drew Olanoff will tattoo your Twitter username on his left forename if you’re willing to make a bid for it. But it’s for a good cause, all the proceeds go to the Make-A-Wish Foundation. This reminds me of the GoldenPlace.com stunt where people were paid to tattoo their body in order to promote the site but this one has a charity twist, it ain’t all about profits and business.

Twitlet may just be one of the fastest ways to send out tweets. It’s a javascript bookmarklet you can click to open a pop-up box to type in your messages. It’s faster than clicking to twitter.com or opening up your favorite twitter client. But as a speed tool it faces stiff competition from some other Firefox clients like TwitterFox (update with two clicks from status bar) and TwitterBar, which alows you to post to Twitter from Firefox’s address bar itself (very easy and quick).

If you’re bored of the usual Twitter clients and ways to update Twitter, you can try writing a tweet via email. Twittermail allows you to post to twitter by sending an email to an address they give you when you sign up for an account. Not only that, you can send a message with ‘friends’ or ‘f’ as the subject line to get the last 20 posts from all your friends. TwitterMail also allows you to schedule your posts by adding something like ‘+4 hours’ to your email subject line.

Paul Bradshaw has created a slideshow that’s a beginner’s guide to Twitter. It basically explains what Twitter can do for you although it would be great if we could hear the actual presentation. Some people are still baffled by the purpose or meaning of Twitter and these slides should give them a very rough overview of how Twitter’s possibilities. For complete beginners, I recommend viewing the famous common craft video (see below):

The Traveling Librarian blog has an simple post on how to create a Twitter conference feed so as to share content and messages about the specific conference to others who are attending or not. It’s quite easy to do and very useful especially if you are the organizer for the conference and are placed in charged of media communications.

I would add that one should designate the hashtag beforehand and actively promote it along with the account via the official marketing literature. Perhaps the conference account can be included in a press release to be sent out to the media as well, should they be covering it. This might provide them a greater experience of the conference especially if they are not attending in person.

Twitter is a tool to broadcast messages to people you know and people you don’t know. At the heart of it is the central problem of what to tweet. What should you write and what should you say? What do you want to transmit or share that represents who you are? What do you want people to care or know about?

I think one of the main problems is the question you’re asking. The default question you’ll see on Twitter is ‘What are you doing now’. The question determines the answer, so one way to tweak Twitter into something that works for you is to change the question. Instead of ‘what are you doing?’, ask something else. Maybe the following:

Twitter friends is an analytics tool which gives you more information on your Twitter social network. What kind of information? Who messages you the most, who you talk to the most, the average number of daily tweets and even your average tweet length. It also allows you to retrieve an archive of all your conversations with a specific user, just by entering his/her username against yours.

Maybe Twitter did pay attention to some of the ‘how-twitter-should-monetize’ ideas floating around the web. The co-founder of Twitter, Biz Stone talks to Marketing Magazine on Twitter’s possible business model:

Co-founder Biz Stone told Marketing: ‘We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them. We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts.’ He would not be drawn on the level of charges. Stone said it could also create revenue-generating features to tap into the way brands use Twitter as a hybrid marketing and customer-service tool.

While it still doesn’t offer the ability to group friends yet (coming soon), the new twhirl release (0.9) is terrific. It’s a great Twitter client for many reasons, as Loic Le Meur excitedly points out in his blog post. Here are the new features:

1. Spellchecker (currently English only, can be deactivated in settings if you use Twhirl in other languages)
2. your Twitter @replies will display even if you are mentioned in the middle of a tweet
   don’t miss anyone quoting your name
3. share all your updates to all your favorite social software via Ping.fm support: Twhirl now posts to Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and more

More irrefutable proof of Twitter’s continual growth and surge into the mainstream. Hitwise reports that last week Twitter became one of the 100 most visited websites in the UK for the first time.

It ranked 91st within All Categories, placing above online heavyweights such as Expedia UK (96), Gumtree (100), easyJet (101), Digital Spy (103) and Money Supermarket (105). Twitter traffic has already more than trebled this year, and much of that growth has come since we last wrote about the site in January… Over the last 12 months traffic to Twitter.com has increased 27 fold. However, the service is likely even more popular than our numbers imply, as we are only measuring traffic to the main Twitter website.