1. You now think in sentences of 140 characters or less.
2. Whenever a big news item breaks, you can’t wait to log on and see what others are saying about it on Twitter.
3. If something funny/annoying/ unusual happens to you, your first thought is how you’re going to tweet it.




4. You’re considering getting an iPhone - purely “because it’s so much easier to tweet on the move.”
5. You rely on Twitter’s trending topics to tell you what people are talking about.
6. You discover a new comedian/singer /product and immediately log on to see if they have a Twitter page.
7. You scorn any friends/colleagues who aren’t on Twitter….if they’re not on Facebook either, then they’re not worth talking to.
8. The first thing you do when you wake up is to announce your presence to Twitter.
9. You Tweet people who are in the same house as you.My sister and I do this frequently…
10. Your friends no longer call you to find out how life is going since they now follow your every move on Twitter.
11. You use hash tags in IM conversations with friends. Extra points if you do it outloud in RL.
12. You have more than one Twitter Ap (eg. Twitteriffic, Tweetie, TweetDeck, zooped,Twirl or Digsby) installed on your computer and your choosen one runs automatically when you start the computer.
13. When you cant twitter you start to get withdrawl symptoms such as talking to yourself (but only in 140 characters or less).
14. You follow important news via “Trending Topics” i.e You heard about Michael Jacksons death via Twitter.
15. You need to log off Twitter or you dont get any work done… But you are still logged in.
16. You are constantly harassing friends and family to join Twitter. My Mother, Sister, Best Friend, Boyfriend and Assorted other people in my life are all on Twitter.
17. You walk into and trip over stationary objects because your Tweeting on the go… then you Tweet that you just fell over.

Ian Paul, PCWorld

Yahoo on Wednesday announced it would be providing integrated Twitter results into its search engine, and that Yahoo users will start seeing this functionality immediately. The company also laid out a brief roadmap for further Twitter integration across the company’s network of Web sites.

The recent addition of Twitter is part of Yahoo’s open strategy, which the company announced in 2008. Yahoo hopes it will help make the new Yahoo homepage and Yahoo Mail an integral part of users’ daily Internet activity.

Here’s a quick breakdown of Yahoo’s plans for Twitter integration:

Tweets in search

The most obvious result of this deal will be the integration of tweets into your Yahoo search results. You will start to see this new functionality today as a tab at the top of your search results.


Yahoo has taken a slightly different approach with Twitter results than Google and Bing. Yahoo only displays two tweets at a time, but also displays two YouTube video links that have been extracted from relevant tweets.

When I did a search for Barack Obama, for example, I saw two Twitter updates and two video links. Clicking on the video links took me to full screen YouTube videos. If I wanted to see more tweets, there was also a ‘more Barack Obama from Twitter’ link that took me directly to Twitter’s own search results page.

Yahoo’s use of Twitter is not yet comprehensive, so there are many topical issues, such as the Winter Olympics, that at the time of this writing did not trigger Twitter results in Yahoo.

Yahoo’s search sidebar, an existing feature that lets you drill down to results by source, already offers a way to search for Twitter results. To do so, you just include the word ‘Twitter’ into your search query. Yahoo will then show you a mix of Twitter accounts and older status updates related to your search terms. You won’t see the same real-time updates that the new approach offers.

By comparison, Google constantly updates relevant tweets within your search results. Bing, meanwhile, places very few links to Twitter within its search results, but offers a dedicated Twitter page at Bing.com/twitter.

Personal Twitter Feeds

Yahoo will also be incorporating a mini-Twitter client into its sites, including the Yahoo Homepage, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Sports, and so on. The company wasn’t exactly clear on how this will work, but from the sound of it, your Twitter feed will stay with you as you visit select Yahoo sites whenever you are logged in to your Yahoo account.

You will also be able to send out tweets from these Yahoo pages, and there will be mechanisms to help you share Yahoo content with your Twitter followers. Yahoo-themed tweets will include ways to comment on particular Web pages, such as rating a movie or tweeting about your Fantasy Sports teams.

Real-time Public Updates

Another part of Twitter integration will be the inclusion of real-time public Twitter updates as part of other Yahoo sites, such as News, Finance, and Sports. It’s not entirely clear, however, if that means you’ll automatically see, for example, New York Yankees-themed tweets on Yahoo Sports pages or whether relevant tweets will only appear when you search within Yahoo’s various domains.

Now that all three search engines have integrated Twitter results, what do you think? Do you find Twitter results helpful or do they just add more noise to your searches?

Connect with Ian on Twitter (@ianpaul) or on Google Buzz.

By Tony Bradley

After months of lagging, or at least stagnant traffic, Twitter is on the rise again–setting a record in January for most unique visitors in a single month according to statistics from comScore. It seems like more than just coincidence that the resurgence of Twitter follows the launch of real-time search by Google, which includes Twitter traffic in the results.Both Microsoft and Google spent much of last year courting Facebook and Twitter. The monolithic rivals were each aggressively trying to understand and adapt to the explosion of social networking and the shift in Internet culture to instant and immediate feedback. Both Bing and Google provide extensive, searchable catalogs of virtually everything on the Web, but indexing takes time and users want to know what is going on right now.


Twitter emerged into the spotlight during the political unrest in Iran following its national election. In the absence of any outside journalists, Twitter proved to be an important tool for reporting and sharing breaking news. Those events established the credibility of Twitter as more than just some silly way to let your friends and co-workers know where you are eating lunch.

Ultimately, neither Facebook or Twitter was purchased, but partnerships and alliances were formed with Microsoft and Google. In December, Google announced that real-time search results from Twitter would be included alongside traditional Web search in its Google Search Appliance.

The result has been a spike in traffic for a resurgent Twitter–validating the power of 140-character microblogging as an important marketing and public relations tool. Granted, Twitter is still flooded with multi-level marketing pitches, and tweets about which silly nonsense, but somewhere in there is an opportunity to communicate a message and have it spread virally to a large audience in a short period of time.

Many organizations are still struggling to define the role of social media for their business. There are productivity and security issues, and little business value, related to simply letting all users access sites like Twitter and Facebook from their desktops, but there is also valuable information to be gathered in terms of current trends, and a potent voice for sending a message to the general public if leveraged properly.

That “little Twittering thing”, as former Alaska governor and 2012 presidential hopeful Sarah Palin calls it, can actually be a very powerful communications tool, and a tremendous marketing and public relations asset. My advice to Palin? Marketing and public relations are important for political campaigns, so start learning more about that “little Twittering thing” quickly, or at least make sure your campaign employs someone who understands it.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t some kinks to work out and noise to filter through still, though. In a recent press release from Greenlight, Adam Bunn, head of SEO, said “99% of the time it’s just not useful, nor is it clear that people actually want the ability to search Twitter from Google. Where it is useful is as a barometer of what is current. Expect to see more subtle integration of Twitter data into indexing processes and algorithms.”

The increase in traffic to Twitter–much of it flowing from the addition of Twitter real-time results in Google searches, hasn’t been lost on Google, either. Part of the value of Buzz for Google is the ability to include Twitter feeds while keeping users on Google’s site where it can generate ad revenue.

Real-time search has been the “Holy Grail” of search providers like Microsoft and Google, and the resulting growth of Twitter traffic demonstrates that there is a lucrative opportunity there for those who learn to effectively harness social networking.

Tony Bradley is co-author of Unified Communications for Dummies . He tweets as @Tony_BradleyPCW , and can be contacted at his Facebook page .

Craig Ferguson joined Twitter, he announced last night. You can follow him @CraigyFerg.


Being the exceedingly amusing man filled with existential dread that he is, one of his first tweets was, “The fact that i am on twitter probably means its on the way out.”

“Twitter has better lighting than my show,” was another observation. And there was this bold declaration: “I follow no one. Except Dave I suppose. Or the local news. Or the smell of ham.

During the wee hours of Monday morning, singer Chris Brown took to Twitter and posted a YouTube link to a photo montage of himself and Rihanna during happier times.

“I’m sorry y’all. Just had to post it,” was the accompanying text on the tweet, and the post immediately following said, “For the fellas: showing emotion doesn’t make u weak … being honest makes you strong.”

Sending tweets about Rihanna and what happened between them on Feb. 8 doesn’t break any laws (Brown’s stay-away order is still in place; his attorney Mark Geragos didn’t respond to requests for comment on Brown’s Twitter feed). But there’s something not right about using her for his own promotion.