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Twinfluence is a service which lets you measure your Twitter influence and see who are the twitter users with more influence.

It basically puts together a couple of parameters from which it calculates your “reach“, “velocity” and “social capital“. Here is adescription of these attributes, taken from their website:

Reach is a measurement of potential audience and listeners, a best estimate of the number of people that a given Twitterer could quickly get a message to.

Velocity merely averages the number of first- and second-order followers attracted per day since the Twitterer first established their account. The larger the number is, the faster that Twitterer has accumulated their influence.

Social Capital: It’s essentially a measure of how influential are a twitterer’s followers. A high value indicates that most of that Twitterer’s followers have a lot of followers themselves.

The last one in particular, Social Capital, could potentially be a very interesting way to measure if someone’s followers are just, let’s say, unknown Twitterers with a couple of followers or “important” influencers and opinion leader themselves. Unfortunately, at first sight, it’s not working very well because some users on top of the list looks like anonymous and not certainly “famous” twitterers.

In the Top 5 - Reach we found some well known names:

1) Jason Calcanis

2) Ewan Williams (Twitter’s CEO)

3) Chris Brogan

4) TechCrunch

5) Guy Kawasaki

Other famous bloggers / internet opinion leaders can be easily found in the Top 50, like Loic Le Meur (7), Robert Scoble (10), Mashable (11), Kevin Rose (14), Jeff Pulver (20). There are many others, you can take a look by yourself at this link.

Ok, what about me (I don’t consider myself a heavy Twitter user) ?

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Technorati Tags: Kevin Rose, microblogging, robert scoble, Social Media, twinfluence, twitter

Posty is a little AIR-based app which lets you easily post to multiple microblogging services all at once. It’s similar to the web based HelloTXT but it is a desktop client instead.

Posty Screencast from funkyboy on Vimeo.
I’ll try it out and look forward to seeing my company’s Hictu integrated soon. You can download it here.

Technorati Tags: hictu, luca filigheddu, microblogging, posty

I’m happy to announce that Hictu, the first video micro blogging service launched on June 2007, has been released today with a new and improved version 2.0.

This new Hictu brings a ton of new features to end users plus a major restyling aimed to improve the overall user experience of the “video conversation”. A main video strip has been added on top of the main page where different videos from different Hictuans appear randomly.

In addition to that, we think that with Hictu it’s very important that any user could see it in a different way and use it according to their feelings. For this reason, there are different Hictu home pages, representing different ways to see Hictu and to use it.

For example, Hictu can become your speaker’s corner as well as a way to declare your darkest vices or brightest passions, or maybe to tell the world your view about the meaning of life… what does really matter for you? Tell us through a video on Hictu and look at people who join the conversation and leave video comments to your video. It’s gonna be fun.

Speaking about features, I would like to give you a brief overview on what’s new here. First of all, the posting interface has been optimized and you can now easily choose what kind of post you want to publish, whether it’s text only, audio, video from your webcam or a video taken from YouTube or Google Video.

In addition, the mood has been added. You can reinforce your post with a nice icon representing you mood, something related to important concepts like “rich presence”, additional information on your status, more than the post only.

Features like the Twitter cross-posting and the Jajah calling capability are always there. You can easily configure those services from the “Settings” tab. You can also import your Twitter friends and send them messages directly from within Hictu.

An interesting feature is the ability to add video comments to your blog or website. You can configure and customize your Hictu widget from the Widget tab and insert the generated code directly on your site. People will be able to write comments, post videos and so on, even if they are not registered to Hictu.

A new specific plugin for Wordpress is available too, in order to make the integration with the most popular blogging platform as easy as possible. Think of leaving realtime video comments as well as YouTube or Google videos. You will face a completely new experience and definitely expand the audience of the conversations taking place on your blog, since everything will be public on a specific channel on Hictu too. This means that also people not visiting your blog can join the conversation and their comments will appear on your blog too (for those who are familiar with that, something similar to what happens with services like disqus). Expect bugs… But we will solve them immediately

This is how the conversation looks like on my Wordpress blog posts:

and here the same on Hictu:

I was forgetting: to join Hictu 2, you need to get an invite from people who are already registered. Sign up is currently closed and will be kept closed for now. If you need an invite, just leave a comment to this post and I’ll send you one.

Do you want more and you are a developer? A comprehensive set of APIs is now available to developers to integrate Hictu in 3rd party services or applications. You can post videos from other applications or even create mobile applications to send videos directly to your Hictu account. To get more information, just send an email to api@hictu.com.

Another important thing, the last one, something that I really care, is that Hictu has been built by a bunch of engineers and developers that we are very proud of

Technorati Tags: Blogging, hictu, luca filigheddu, micro video blogging, microblogging, video comments, video conversation, wordpress, wordpress video comments

Tommaso Sorchiotti, blogger at www.microblogging.it and David Casalini (www.beemood.com) are the organizers of the first MicroBlogging BarCamp, taking place on May 24th in Milan.

This is an sign that something important is happening in this area. New micro blogging services are coming up everyday and each of them often bring something new and original that makes the user experience even better. 

The purpose of this BarCamp is to share knowledge, ideas and opinions about the future of microblogging, starting from Twitter, and its links with Web 2.0, instant messaging and mobile world in general. I believe that this is an excellent opportunity for the TWITTER ITALY members to share their knowledge and projects and extend the community itself. I want to make a special appeal to the international members of TWITTER ITALY: don’t forget to attend the event because there are tons of info and projects we are eager to exchange with you. This is the way real and virtual dimension can effectively interact with each other.

Unfortunately I cannot make it this time. My wife is close to the “release” of my Son 2.0 (beta) and I cannot go away from my home. Anyway, a representative of my company’s video micro blogging service Hictu! will be there.

If you’ll be nearby and you would like to come by the bar camp, you are welcome to take a look here on Facebook. I’m not sure if it is fully booked already, anyway you can give it a try.

Technorati Tags: bar camp, beemood, luca filigheddu, microblogging

I just came across an interesting post by Rich Ord about Twitter. He basically states that Twitter is becoming more and more a big wall where people write something in order to make it visible to their audience.

In a nutshell, as Rich says, many people talk more than listen, since it’s almost impossibile to follow such huge amount of users, as many do.

So, how are people using Twitter? In my latest presentation at eComm last month, I inserted an interesting slide taken by a Twitter presentation, where they explain how their users use their service:

• ask questions, advice
• personal branding
• offer resource information to peers
• promote your projects, products
• drive awareness to something of interest to a wider community
• update many people all at once
• on-the-go sketchpad
• breaking news, new sites, trends

Technorati Tags: luca filigheddu, microblogging, rich ord, twitter

Twitter, the micro blogging service used by more than 500.000 people (not official, but this should be a realistic number according to many trusted sources), has become more and more popular even thanks to its simplicity as well as the wide availability of third party applications that make it even easier.

Many have often stated that, at the end of the day, from the technical standpoint Twitter is nothing really special. On the other hand, a widely used service doesn’t necessarily need to be driven by a sort of patented unique technology or special algorithms and so on. Users rule.

That said, how long does it take for a potential competitor to setup a Twitter-like service from scratch?

I often referred to Guy Kawasaki’s service Truemors as an interesting example. Thanks to Open Source, he realized a pretty unique website (even if, according to TechCrunch, the ugliest one in the Universe..) with just roughly $12.000. Most of that sum is made of legal fees and logo design, but from the technical standpoint you really need much less.  

Here is how anyone can create a Twitter-like service in less than 45 minutes. I did this experiment during my spare time while I was in Palo Alto a few weeks ago, so anyone can do the same pretty easily.

1) Choose a name and register a domain: I chose www.techtwits.com, thinking of a twitter-like service for posting breaking news on technology. It takes $9.99 / year and 5 minutes to do that.

2) Subscribe for a dedicated server somewhere. There are many options (Yahoo, Dreamhost, etc.) to do that and the associated cost is around $30 to $60 / month. I shared the same servers I use for this blog, but it’s not really the best option since I don’t have a dedicated server. You need a dedicated server in order to avoid problems of scalability and, if your service is successful, keep an eye to it. How long? Let’s say 15 minutes.

3) Install Wordpress 2.5. Dreamhost and many others offer a “one-click install” option, so it usually shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes and you don’t need to be a PHP expert to do that. After the install is completed, make sure to go to Settings->General->Membership and enable the “Anyone can register” option. Set the “New User Default Role” as “Subscriber”.

4) Install the “Prologue” theme. This theme has been developed from the Automattic team for internal usage, but it’s really well done and ready to be used in services like this. It should take 5 minutes.

5) Make sure to add the “Meta” widget to the sidebar to let users sign up to your service from the home page. In addition, if users want to have an avatar associated to their account, make sure they sign up for a Gravatar account, using the same email they used to subscribe to your service. Let’s dedicate 10 minutes more to this activity.

Here is the result: http://www.techtwits.com.

If you did everything described above, you will have your ready to use twitter-like service up and running in about 45 minutes. Now you can work on customizations, graphic improvements and so on, but most part of the job is done. In addition to this, you can give your users the ability to post from third party applications, from mobile phones or even by sending an email to a specific address, thank to the huge number of wordpress blog posting tools available.

In conclusion, this want be just an example to demonstrate how good times are these if you want to become an entrepreneur. Focus on your idea, focus on how you want to differentiate your service from the competition in terms of contents and functionalities, keeping in mind that Open Source and a programmer could be all you need to solve all your technical issues and launch your new service.

Technorati Tags: luca filigheddu, microblogging, opensource, techtwits, twitter