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Keep your Twitter stream ticking over with new tweets even when you're not in front of your computer. Or, use it as your personal reminder system.

Tools that give an indication of the “influence” of a particular user are of use not only for users seeking authoritative users to follow, but for professional users seeking key “influencers” to work with.

The two systems agree on the first factor being measured. Twinfluence’s measure of Reach is the same as Grader’s first two factors - the number of followers you have and the influence of those followers

At this point I can’t say which method I prefer most. Grader has the advantage of presenting a single grade, which makes it easy to see and take in, but I think some of their measures are great (profile completeness?). Twinfluence has some great metrics. I like Social Capital as a measure, but I find the site seems to have a lag that Grader doesn’t.

The primary idea behind it was that simply counting followers was an insufficient way to measure influence via Twitter.

Ideally, we would methodically map out the entire network of Twitter and calculate some rigorous social network analysis metrics like clustering, betweenness, equivalence, etc. to really understand the structure of the Twitterverse and the role any particular Twitterer plays in it.

I also wanted to make certain that the metrics were all transparent and well-defined, and some global trend statistics were collected so everyone could get a better idea of what should be the “baseline” expectation as one’s twitter network grows.

From the perspective of graph theory, a Twitterer's followers would be considered their first-order network, and their "followers count" the same as their "degree".

Reach is the number of followers a Twitterer has (first-order followers), plus all of their followers (second-order followers). In the diagram above, the reach would be 27 (there are 28 nodes, including the Twitterer)

Velocity merely averages the number of first- and second-order followers attracted per day since the Twitterer first established their account.

Let’s define social networking for those not familiar with it. “Social networking” is a technology-based means of communication utilizing the power and variety of the Internet to provide an infinite variety of tools and offerings

People can leverage these sites to create a sense of presence that even traditional marketing experts can appreciate: brand awareness, lead generation, information sharing and so on. And the real keys to success are the same as in traditional marketing: frequency, relevancy and cross-marketing, to name a few.

Critics claim that social networking is merely a gimmick. In reality, while it is true that social networking alone will not likely produce substantial leads in the absence of other critical methodologies, it IS true that combined with other methods, and when used regularly, social networking can, and has, produced excellent results.

The first issue many of you have brought up that we’d like to address right off the bat is the concern of those of you who have aliases on Yahoo! Groups, Games, Finance, and Chat. The new profile provides users with a single identity while they’re on the Yahoo! network. Some of you may have heard about Yahoo!’s new strategy for a more open and social network, which allows for you to have one identity while you’re using Yahoo!, essentially making you, you.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t still have an “alias” while you’re on the Yahoo! network-you can still use multiple identities on Groups, Chat, or Finance. However, these aliases CANNOT have their own profile page, nor can they have any unique profile data associated with them. This means that by default when another user clicks a link pointing to your alias, they’ll be greeted by a message telling them that “there is nothing to see here,” unless you bind your alias to your primary profile. This also means that if a user tries to search for you by your alias, they won’t be able to find you.

create a completely new account

bind your alias to your profile

With all the twittering of 140 characters - sometimes the shout outs need to be longer - even sometimes it's more about how you say your shout out makes it more important than just texting. The real advantage of Twitter is that you have followers that you can connect with all at the same time

During the last debate I took part in the use of a service related to twitter: Plodt.com What it does is captures on a free web site yours and others reactions from their tweets. In the graphic to the right it shows how the those that tweeted during the debate rated Obama and McCain.

new mobile operating system, Android. The phone, which will go on sale in late October, is manufactured by the Taiwanese company HTC and is being offered exclusively through T-Mobile, but Google's software will soon make its way to other phones and other carriers across the globe. Google says that Android embodies principles of "radical openness

Watching Google and Apple carve out space in the mobile business, one can hardly avoid thinking that history is repeating itself. In the 1970s and '80s, Apple created the first great personal computers. But because Apple closed its platform, it was IBM, Dell, HP, and especially Microsoft that reaped the benefits of Apple's innovations

Well, maybe he has—and maybe he's betting that these days, "openness" is overrated. For one thing, an open platform is much more technically complex than a closed one.

Notice how short the dispatches are. Twitter is a free Web-based service that allows anyone to type short comments (maximum 140 characters per "Tweet"). You broadcast these to anyone who chooses to follow you, and you follow anyone who you think is interesting.

However, the real power of Twitter is the interaction it allows. Readers asked questions and got answers. Readers told us of areas of destruction through Twitter, and our reporters checked out those areas. And when we saw a good dispatch from a non-journalist Twitter user, we retweeted their posts to give the most comprehensive news possible.

Twitter, which is popular in Austin partly because it was introduced during the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive Festival, is growing quickly. Nielsen Online says Twitter had 2.3 million unique users in August, a 422 percent growth rate over the previous August.

Google makes deep reading impossible. Media changes. Our brains’ wiring changes too. Computers think for us, flattening our intelligence.

And the major players have all recognized that they and their users are better off with secure contacts APIs (rather than having third-party services ask for users' credentials in order to scrape their data). As a result, we're seeing major Internet companies making contacts APIs available, such as Google's GData Contacts API, Yahoo's Address Book API, and Microsoft's Live Contacts API (with more to come).

Focus on what achieves results, not what some faux guru says you should do.

Is there another strategy that could be completed in less time? Is there something else that your business depends on that you’re putting off because it’s not as fun as playing with your Facebook profile or posting on Twitter?

Don’t get caught up in the flavor of the week. There are new social networking sites popping up all the time. Before setting up an account and investing your valuable time with one, see who’s using it and what kind of results they’re getting.