So the big news over the past two days is the release of Googles real time results. This is where the latest tweets for hot topics gets blended into results. An example would be if you search for “tiger woods”, example below:

Now it’s not known how Google decides what tweets it picks up. It definitely doesn’t pick up tweets from everybodies accounts but I have found a very simple way of identifying what twitter accounts it will pull tweets from. All you have to do is perform a google search on somebodies twitter username as shown below with the example of @lyndoman:

If their latest tweets are listed above the serps as shown above it means their tweets will appear in the real time results. So if you want to appear on the front page in google for real time results, make sure people with these types of accounts are tweeting about or retweeting your content.

Update: This seems to have now changed and now all twitter accounts can be part of Google’s real time results, so it seems that this was probably due to them rolling it out entrprise wide.

Popularity: 31% [?]

I went to the BTW (Blogger Twitter Whatever) meetup in the Clarion on Thursday night organised by Jason Roe. It was great to chat and exchange stories with other twitters that I talk to regularly. Below is a picture of me and Emilio Navarro chatting over a pint.

I also got a chance to chat to Merrill Goussot. Merrill has a lot of things going on at the moment. He has his Social Network For SEO, PPC, SMO www.conversionr.com. His “Overheard in Paris” site has just got a book deal and he is also maintaing his geek travel blog Voyageek . It was great to chat to him and Claire Boyles at the event:

I’d definitely recommend to anyone to try and attend the next meetup.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Well today Facebook announced that during the night it had aquired FriendFeed for $50 million dollars. This seems like a good fit considering that Facebook have been replicated some of the functions in Friendfeed such as the “like” feature. The main benefit to facebook is not so much friendfeed but the people behind it such as Paul Buchheit, who is responsible for creating Gmail, pioneering some of Google’s early (and incredibly lucrative) advertising products, and coining Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto. Other ex-Googler co-founders include Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh. The acquisition composed of $15 million in cash and the rest in stock options.

Friendfeed founder Bret Taylor says:

Now we have the opportunity to bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world and to work alongside Facebook’s passionate engineers to create even more ways for you to easily share with your friends online.

FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. We’re still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team. As usual, we will communicate openly about our plans as they develop — keep an eye on the FriendFeed News group for updates.

Facebook’s statement notes that:

“As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.”

Some people had suggested that FriendFeed’s user growth was dead but according to Hitwise UK, uk traffic to the site had increased 180% in the past 12 months as show by the graph below:

Popularity: 5% [?]

Its the statement we all want to be able to say! Whether your pushing affiliate programs, selling your own products or subscription services, everybody is trying to monetize twitter. Finally there is a service which will pay you to tweet. It’s called SponsoredTweets.com and its authorised by Twitter and brought to you by the IZEA network.

Basically SponsoredTweets pays you per Tweet that is authorised by their advertiser. They calculate how much your tweet is worth based on your influence/follower count. So the lower your twitter following, the lower you get paid.

It has a real simple interface and is very easy to get setup on:

Check it out and start getting paid to tweet!

Popularity: 4% [?]

No matter who you are there is always somebody out there who is better or who gets information before you. Trying to keep up can sometimes be difficult without the proper tools. The best way to keep up is by tracking what websites they are visiting and interacting on. Let me introduce a service that allows you to do just that, Backtype.com.

What does Backtype do?

Backtype is a comments search engine with a bit more functionality. Basically you can enter any url and it will list all websites where it has commented on, so you can build up a profile of what websites of where they are interacting and commenting on. Not only that but you can follow certain websites and be alerted when they have created a new comment on any site. To give you an example below is a screenshot for Richard Hearnes excellent SEO site RedCardinal.ie:

Along the right hand side you can see all the websites they have commented on. As you’d expect foran seo consultant there are a lot of seo related websites.

What else can you do with Backtype.com?

They have a feature called “Connect” and this feature is great if your a blogger. Have you ever wanted to know what articles or topics get the most reactions? Sure you can use the search function of technorati but what about the reactions on all the new social media sites like twitter etc? To show you an example I’ve put in Shoemoney’s site to see what articles of his have generated the most comments.

As you can see his article about making money from Twitter generate huge reactions which gives me suggestions for my next post.

Popularity: 31% [?]