• Let’s face it, besides #muscimondays, finding music and tracking popular tracks on Twitter (or online in general) has been quite the daunting task. The Billboard 100 moves too slow these days (not to mention sucks), Pandora doesn’t always feed me the tracks I want to hear and my personal favorite, HypeMachine, can eat a significant amount of time to find music I’m going to download (i mean, buy). No more, now that the guys behind HypeMachine have created the Twitter Music Chart to begin the real-time Billboard 100 based on Twitter and powered by BackType.

How does it work?

The application monitors Twitter for links pointing to tracks on the Hype Machine.  Each of those tweets is given a number of points based on the number of followers (and the ratio of friends & followers) that person has. Finally, all the points are added up to figure out which tracks are tweeted by either the most influential twitter users, or by the largest group.  Simply tweet a link to any track on the Hype Machine and it will alter that track’s position in the chart. You can also monitor your Twitter Music Chart influence by checking how many points you tweet is worth for promoting a song up the charts. There is even a leaderboard
for the most influential users.

How is the Twitter user score determined?

Here is the actual formula:

round(( 1/3 * (twitter_followers / 10) ^ 0.5 ) * (twitter_followers / twitter_friends) * 10), 2)

The follower/friends ratio in this case has a floor of 0.25 and a ceiling of 3.0 to limit certain extremes.

• Are you following us on Twitter? Get all you daily up to the minute TinyComb stories by following @tinycomb.

• Twitter and it’s army of investors are getting a little too big for their britches. The micro-blogging phenomenon that has taken on a life of it’s own, says that that they will eventually be able to compete with Google in a different kind of search model. It’s because of this potential it sees in search that the Twitter co-founders walked away from a $500 million offer from Facebook, says Todd Chaffee, an Institutional Venture Partners general partner and a new Twitter backer. {adAge}
• Where as Google indexes everything available on the web, Twitter is the only search that can give people an immediate answer to “what’s happening — right now, or what was being discussed about a specific topic” Once the search platform becomes more robust and Twitter users become increasingly obsessed with hash tags, an AdWords type of business model could erupt. This is one of Twitter’s many “wild cards” says Chaffee. Once users are further trained, Twitter Search, just like the micro-blog platform, could take on a life of it’s own. What exactly do I mean? Let’s say every time you have a question on Twitter, and you add the hash tag, #question, to your query. It would be able to show up in the real-time Twitter Search engine to the entire community who could shoot you back an answer in seconds. Question/Answer based search is huge in places like Korea, where Google and Yahoo have failed miserably to break into the market. In the US, both Yahoo and Mahalo have tried to replicate the success of real-time human answers, but have had limited success…so far. It may just be Twitter that will be the one to do it, however the founders have no control over it. Twitter is having success for all different reasons, such as having mainstream news and blogs syndicating their stories, replacing the traditional RSS reader for most people (myself included, thanks to tweetDeck).
• I personally think that the ideas thrown around in the past to monetize Twitter, such as charging companies for Tweeting @ their followers is a ridiculous model. Continuing to build the platform and training users how to interact with the rest of the community through Twitter Search is a much better concept. Search is till a very small part of Twitter, but at the end of the day, I truly believe this is the only way that they will find any scalable model for making money. Even though I’ve heard the lame stories of Dell making $1 million through Twitter, there is no fair way to charge them for the service, when small businesses will just slide by. People don’t want to be pestered by companies, it just so happens that they don’t mind having to look at ads as long as they are relevant and wrapped around a service that is giving them something they can’t live without (this is why Google succeeds). So will Twitter be able to compete with Google? That’s for Twitterverse to decide and no one else.

• A post by InternetNews reveals that Dell has made $1 million in sales directly from sending product alerts to people following Dell’s Twitter account.
• This news comes at the same time that Twitter is in the process of hiring a product manager to head up the task of monetizing the micro-blogging service.
• We reported earlier on Twitter CEO Evan Williams’ statement that he doesn’t want to raise any money in ‘09, going further to promise the service will turn on a revenue stream in Q1 of the new year. He was so confident that in November the company turned down a $500-million-in-Facebook-stock acquisition bid.
• Dell has shown that even without a business model, Twitter is being put to commercial use quite successfully. Twitter just has to figure out how to get a piece of the pie.
• Even if a business model doesn’t arrive tomorrow, you can bet that a service that companies are deriving real value from won’t go away anytime soon.
• I’m personally waiting for spam to hit Twitter hard. There are lot of affiliate marketing opportunities on the service that have not been exploited yet and it won’t be pretty.

• Via Sean Percival’s recently launched  LaLaWag:

BizSpark, a program designed to help support startups in their early stages, is having their Los Angeles launch party Wednesday, Dec. 10 from 7 to 10 p.m. at Beso in Hollywood. Partnering Microsoft Startup Zone with Stephanie Agresta and Brian Solis of The TechSet, BizSpark is hosting local startups to present their wares to the crowd.. as well as stuff everyone silly with free hors d’oeuvres and drinks.

• We’re looking forward to catching up with California’s other tech hq. Updates from the event on twitter.com/tinycomb

• Evan Williams, Twitter CEO, says the service is on track to turn on a revenue stream in Q1 of ‘09.
• Williams: “I don’t want to raise money in 2009.”
• Twitter is reportedly in talks with “large consumer packaged good companies.” So… basically this could be anything.
• Will Twitter crack the code? Can’t wait to see what they come up with.
• Williams must have faith in the model: Twitter recently turned down $500 million in stock from Facebook.

• Splitweet is a new, useful tool for “heavy & corporate” Twitter users.  They provide three main features:
• The ability to post to multiple Twitter accounts through a single entry box.
• Users can track whenever their brand is mentioned on twitter, and who posted it.
• Finally, people using splitweet can also see tweets from anyone following them.
• Seems pretty useful.

Mash

• A few weeks ago Facebook offered to buy Twitter in exchange for $500 million worth of Facebook stock (at Facebook’s $15 billion valuation by Microsoft).
• The talks are now over with no sale planned.
• Looks like Twitter walked away due to a) price — they wanted to get in at Facebook’s $5 billion valuation, not $15, and b) they still think they can monetize the service.
• Twitter had 6 million users in October, up 600 percent year over year.
• Thus far Twitter has raised $20 million at a $98mm valuation.
• We all know what would have happened if Zuckerberg had sold the first chance he got, but that doesn’t mean its never a good idea to. It will be interesting to see how Twitter tries to monetize the service. I would look into a self serve ad system that lets people bid on keywords that individual people tweet. The ads would have to fit Twitter’s 140 char. format and be tweeted to users once every ___.

Do you think Twitter should have sold?

BoomTown

• It’s official, Shaq is now on Twitter.
• Add that to the list of celebrities now Tweeting.
• Follow Shaq @the_real_shaq

TwitterBlog

• Twitter has just passed the one-billion Tweet mark, according to the Tweet counter at GigaTweet
• It’s been quite the year for Twitter, and this is just one of the next great milestones for the micro-blog service.
• What year will Twitter get to a Trillion?

Tc

• Since last Tuesday’s historic election, Barack Obama’s Twitter account hasn’t posted any updates.
• He didn’t even use Twitter to announce his transition website, change.gov
• Who’s next to give up on Twitter…..Britney Spears?
• @ Barack: WTF Man?
• Maybe we should start a Twitter Quitter Tracker

Valleywag

• Friend View is Nokia’s experimental mobile location and micro-blogging service that also works via standard web.
• The application uses the built-in GPS, network triangulation, or manual updates to decide where you are.
• Once logged-in, it pinpoints you as well as all your friends who are on the service.
• Instead of Twitter’s ‘What Are You Doing’ question, Nokia asks ‘What’s Up’.
• I’m guessing this will roll out in Japan first as a test.
• With Nokia as the smart phone leader, and also having the power to move this app onto every deck they manufacture, will this become an immediate threat to mobile social networks like Loopt and ever-growing Twitter?

TC

• Twitter CEO Evan Williams said today that they want to “charge the people who want to use the communication channel commercially” as a way to produce revenue finally.
• As more companies begin to use it as a method for promoting products, sales, events, internal communication, etc., Williams thinks they can monetize off of that.
• This idea has been thrown around for a while along with inserting ads relative to what users are talking about.
• Is this going to work though? How will they establish the rate? Can companies get around this by using different Twitter names? All questions I have for them.
• MySpace was able to charge companies much easier than Twitter, charging as much as $50K to get companies on board, supplied with additional html room and promotional products. Twitter being a text based service whose ‘updates’ from companies and blogs are often times just a syndication such as an RSS feed, isn’t on the same level to think they can charge for that.

Cnet, AppleInsider, Reuters and Neowin.net

• Follow him at http://twitter.com/al_gore.
• As off 10:28 pm PST he has 5,203 followers and 3 posts, the latest of which touting his upcoming Digg Dialogg interview with Kevin Rose to be broadcast on http://current.com/digg on Friday @ 10pm.
• All of his posts so far are “From the web,” blatantly exposing himself as a complete Twitter n00b for not using a desktop or iPhone client.
• I spent about 10 minutes trying to come up with a clever title for this post, including such gems as “An Inconvenient Tweet,” “How to Win a Nobel in 140 Characters or Less,” and “Not Now Tipper, I’m Twittering.”

• Despite Barack Obama joining Twitter for the final weeks of the election, Twitter achieved some other astounding achievements:
  • Updates increased 46% from previous Tuesday
  • 7p-9p PST updates up 200% compared to same time last week
  • Signups on Tuesday were up 40.3%
  • Between 7p-9p PST signups were up 96.5% compared to same time last week
  • Messages per second peaked almost 3x compared to first debate
  • The site didn’t go down once.
• Will we see Barack sending out Twitter messages to keep us posted with what he is up to? It’s about time we had a blogging President.