Jason Calacanis (founder of Weblogs, Inc., Mahalo) caused quite a stir today when he offered a serious sum of money to Twitter to be listed on the “suggested users” list on Twitter. A little bit of background: the suggested users list has catapulted people like Britney Spears and Kevin Rose to 250,000+ followers. I can understand Jason’s offer and his frustration as well – this user list has been seemingly arbitrarily put together and has converted to a phenomenal amount of followers for the people in question. There is immense value in a massive list of followers that are genuinely interested in following you and your updates – for example, let’s say that 10% of your followers list will view your link or view your message details – that’s almost 25,000 people at that instant. And that’s not counting retweets, social bookmarking, and digg referrals.

This 10% number is not out of thin air, however. I measure the clicks on the links that I tweet out through Hootsuite every so often. Out of the 160 followers that I have, on average – I usually receive 25-30 click throughs. Assuming that some of these clicks might ahve been for fun, a 10% rate is a conservative amount that could maybe be applied to other users and the nature of their followers. No one’s saying that it can’t be higher, however.

This has also serious implications about a potential revenue stream for Twitter. If people or even companies are willing to pay to be on this list – maybe, just maybe, there can be a sponsored users list. I’m jumping to naming this list the “sponsored” users list, because once the online community realizes that this list has been tainted with users that are paying themselves in, the genuine suggestive nature of the list can be seriously compromised.

Link: The amount and value of Twitter traffic

Here’s a little fun tool from Waggeneredstrom, a worldwide communications firm. They’ve utilized Twitter’s API to analyze “twendz” on Twitter: essentially, rating positive and negative feedback using key words scattered in tweets. This technology works by running every word they see related to the particular brand or product in question with their “positive/negative” ranking database. For example, “suck” and “poor” and “horrible” would be negative words – in a massive database of ranked words.

What happens next has phenomenal online “environmental assessment” implications. Each “keyword” you search, if popular enough, will have around 70 tweets that will be analyzed by this service at any given moment. It will gauge the positive or negative sentiments surrounding your brand or product at any given time.

It still has its flaws – for example, keywords like “Rogers” can me mixed with people like Ted Rogers – a lot of keywords can be mistaken for another thing. There is a lot of potential with other tools like this though – Twitter – as I’ve mentioned before – is now truly becoming the real true realtime search engine for anything (public opinion, and, even health trends).

Link: Twendz

Google is taking over the world – as in, they are now prowling through your search behavior and serving ads based on what you’ve seen and what you’ve searched. Creepy, yes, effective, yes (has some caveats though, for multiple users accounts) – taking over the world, yes.

Obviously, this is significant to internet marketers because now ads are served in an even more targeted manner. My problem with this, however, is that as much as we think that targeting ads more specifically and more intelligently is the way to go – it’s the nature and look of the ads that are desensitizing people to even pay attention to them in the first place. Google needs to work on refreshing the look of their ads to make them look more purposeful and useful – we know how design can be manipulative – design can play on the shallow-nature of the average schizophrenic internet surfer – and turn these ads into an item of interest once again.

Link: Google: Interest Based Advertising

Our addiction to real-time, concise, brief, and ADHD-enhanced media is causing blogs to lose their authority in the “statusphere”. According to Brian Solis at TechCrunch, with over 133 million blogs today, their value is dwindling.

Although I disagree that we should ignore blogs or even start phasing them out – they are the true content creators. Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, and other social tools only share original content. In Groundswell’s Social Technographics: we see the importance of content creators. Blogs are the perfect platform to ensure brevity, completeness, and true online media coverage and content creation.

A brilliant takeaway idea for this would be a micro-feed specialized replacement for Technorati: a specialized search engine and ranking system for real-time, micro-sharing services. I think this is an idea that Twitter should definitely experiment with.

Twitter’s search engine, purchased from Summize a few months ago, effectively cements Twitter’s enormous potential as being the first true real-time search engine. Ranking trackbacks, re-tweets, and other connections in and out from tweets would be a great way to link buzz-generating resources connecting in and out of Twitter’s sharing platform. Twitter is, essentially, a sharing platform as well.

Link: TechCrunch: Are Blogs Losing Status?