This is a weekly series that looks at the best Twitter-related stories, news and articles within the Twittersphere over the last seven days. You can read previous entries in our archives.

Twitter Trips on Its Rapid Growth

So says the Wall Street Journal. Twitter’s user-base has jumped from around 1.6 million to an estimated 32.1 million in a year, but the company still boasts less than 50 employees. “For the entire [three-year] history of the company, most of the resources have gone to managing growth and that is still the case,” says co-founder Evan Williams.

Paper Tweets

Fun projects like this always seem to spring up around social media. They rarely last, but still: fun. Twitter on Paper is a free service that allows you to request a handwritten, one-of-a-kind paper edition of a tweet that is mailed to your home. Why? Well, there’s the question.

Topsy

Topsy is a search-engine that is powered entirely by tweets. Here’s what it has to say about me. As you can see, amongst other things, Topsy rates a given user’s influence on Twitter, using re-tweets as a kind of virtual currency.

Google Twave

Google Wave generated enormous buzz this week, and if it’s as good as it looks we could well be seeing the beginning of the end for Facebook and Twitter as well. Meantime, check out Twave, an extension for Google Wave that allows you to manage tweets in unique ways.

New York Times Appoints First Social Media Editor

This story isn’t about Twitter per se, but it’s definitely related as Jennifer Preston has been appointed the first Social Media Editor of the New York Times. You can follow her on Twitter here.

Location, Location, Location

This week, Twitter announced that they may soon be adding comments and ‘likes’ as new functionality on the network – the latter of which I detest and wrote about here – as well as attaching controversial geo-referencing metadata to each tweet.

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Twitter’s API Lead Alex Payne has been speaking at the Twitter 140 Conference and I’ve already written today about his announcement that Twitter might be adding geo-referencing data to all tweets – you can vote on my poll about this here.

Alex also mentioned that Twitter will add a new feature similar to the ‘like’ option on Friendfeed and Facebook, which lets users vote up a submission. Twitter already has a ‘favourite’ feature which allows us to save any tweets we desire (I keep all my ‘links of the day’ in mine) but it’s not heavily-used by members, possibly because it isn’t heavily profiled. There’s been a lot of talk on Friendfeed about how good their ‘like’ feature is to Twitter’s ‘favourites’, and as Robert Scoble, arguably the single-greatest Friendfeed advocate on the planet, took the interview with Alex Payne, one has to wonder who did most of the pitching.

(Alex also stated that Twitter might be adding comments to tweets, which is also a feature on Friendfeed and Facebook, as well as Plurk. I’m fine with this, although I’d very much prefer if it came in threaded messaging format, with a reply link on each comment, as on Friendfeed in particular long runs of responses can be a real pain to follow.)

Here’s my concern, though: the ‘like’ feature is dumb. Really dumb.

It’s dumb on Friendfeed, and it’s even dumber on Facebook, where users regularly ‘like’ things like plane crashes, bomb explosions, the death of Mike Tyson’s daughter and many other tragedies. Depeche Mode fans seem to like the cancellation of concerts, and I also regularly see people liking things that are about them, or that they have written and others have then submitted. Keep that ego in check, won’t you?

It’s not really their fault, as the ‘like’ is essentially the only option they have. But grammatically, and in any reasonable measure of decency when it concerns traumatic events, like is a major fail.

Twitter doesn’t need a like. What it needs is a share.

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Over at ReadWriteWeb there’s an interesting piece about the 140 Twitter Conference which reveals more of Twitter’s plans for the future, courtesy of API Lead Alex Payne. (See my article yesterday for more on this.)

As told to Robert Scoble, Payne states that Twitter may soon be adding location-based information to each and every submitted tweet. Currently, users can enter their location information in their profiles but it’s hardly scientific – you can put whatever you want – and this ‘geo-referencing’, or geotagging, will allow users to find specific information on anything that is area or location-based – for example, restaurants, museums, art galleries, pubs, and so on.

As is usual with many vague Twitter announcements, the news hasn’t been taken particularly well. The primary concern is whether we’ll be able to opt out of such a feature, or if Twitter will force geo-referencing into every tweet whether we want it or not. Yes, it’s very much a matter of privacy. The idea of location-based tracking is fine in principle, but it raises concerns for everybody, and not just celebrities. Some of us like the idea that our friends and followers can find us wherever we are, or have been; others do not.

Yes, this is a ‘might’ idea from Twitter, but it seems a fairly logical one if they’re going to pursue this dream of being the all-purpose utility. It is, after all, already a feature on the iPhone and many other websites and applications.

So here’s my question:

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I’m going to leave this poll open until more data arrives from Twitter, so check back regularly for updates.

UPDATE: Security expert Graham Cluley has a must-read post about his concerns on his blog.

There’s an interesting article today over at Techrader that outlines some of the plans Twitter is making for the future of the platform, as provided by Alex Payne, Twitter’s API lead.

(Image source: Techradar.)

Alex is definitely saying all the right things. On scalability:

“Hopefully we’ve already been through the catastrophe phase. Where we’re at now is very, very different; fundamental pieces of our technology have changed. We’ve built out a really robust system; it doesn’t just handle tweets, it handles every operation around the site. Whenever you’re sending a direct message, whenever you’re adding someone, whenever you’re blocking someone it goes through this system we’ve built.

We’ve pitted it against the other big enterprise grade message queue systems out there and we’ve pretty much smoked them all in terms of benchmarks.”

On the development of the tweet:

“In a perfect world we’d like every tweet to have its own key value store for whatever metadata [developers] want. In terms of implementation it’s still too far off to say when we’re going to deliver that; the majority of our team is still focused on handling the scale of the social graph.”

On the future of Twitter’s API:

“It doesn’t make sense to have apps ask us again and again ‘do you have anything new? Do you have anything new?’… Whether that’s data or changes to the social graph, it makes more sense that we push that information to them so they’re always up to date.”

On this, Twitter plans to introduce a ‘push API’ service and also to release the limit of API calls that external applications can make, which is currently set at 100 per hour per user.

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Sirs,

On many occasions your otherwise fine publication will submit stories and articles to the internet, notably those that contain a series of images, and break these submissions over many pages. Often this can involve as many as ten clicks from the reader to get from start to finish.

This is not acceptable.

Recent examples: Time, The Telegraph, Wired.

We fully understand why you do this – more click-throughs mean more advertisement impressions with each new page and another chance that we might not completely ignore your sponsors and actually show an interest in what they are selling. But for the reader, and especially the linker, the most-likely result is we will become quickly aware of the game you are playing, and not bother to read past the first one or two pages. Quite simply, it’s too much work. The story isn’t that good.

Moreover, those of us who enjoy sharing great content with our friends on social networks will most likely refrain from doing so in these instances, simply because we do not want to have them endure the same experience. You may be blissfully unaware, but this is the age of social media. Websites and portals like Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Stumbleupon and Twitter can deliver an enormous amount of traffic to your publication. We presume you want and encourage this, particularly in the current financial climate.

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