Finally Twitter has done it. They have admitted that they are out to commercialize the platform and earn money from it (as though they have not been doing it as yet).

That is good news for a lot of people who have been living with that itch to advertise on Twitter and make huge money. But is it that lucrative and option? I would not be the best person to comment on it. Let’s see how it progresses with time.

So, Twitter has introduced a few features in the past couple of weeks or, so. Some are cool and some are not that cool.

Twitter’s New Features

What’s new with Twitter? There are 4-5 new features that they have launched. Let’s see what these new features are.

1). Sponsored Tweets -

Twitter is calling this “Promoted Tweets”. This means that now advertisers can place their tweets on top of the search results at Twitter for a price which I believe Twitter is yet to decide on.

The search at Twitter was gradually becoming a competitor to Google’s search engine. There are over 600 million daily search queries at Twitter and with that amount of searches, promoting a few sponsored tweets at the search results certainly makes sense so far as Twitter is concerned. I personally think that it would also make commercial sense to the advertisers as well.

2). Commercial Accounts -

Now that Twitter is getting into Sponsored Tweets, there was always a requirement for a commercial account. So Twitter is adding commercial accounts. As the name suggests it will be accounts that will have some kind of a preference in terms of advertising on the platform. Also these accounts will be paid accounts, I presume and you will have to pay an amount for getting a commercial account. What kind of preferences, these accounts get is something that is to be seen.

3). Analytics for the Promoted Tweets -

If you own a commercial account and you are advertising on Twitter and you are also paying for the promoted tweets, you will demand analytics around your campaigns. So Twitter couldn’t have lived without it. They had to provide analytics to their commercial account holders.

So that is the next feature that Twitter is coming out with. So now, you will be able to monitor the number of clicks that you get on a link and the like with this new analytics at Twitter.

4). URL Shortners -

Since Twitter had the 140 character limitation, it was always a constraint to go ahead and post a link in your tweets. You had to then, go to a third party application to shorten your links and then come back and post the tweet or, you had to use some 3rd party client like Tweetdeck etc. to shorten links and post them.

But now, you will no more have to do it, because Twitter is coming up with its own URL shortening service. I am not sure as how good it will be and if it will provide some kind of statistics around the clicks on the URL like bit.ly provides. But it is indeed a welcome feature.

5). Photo Sharing Apps -

Another welcome feature in Twitter, because till now photo sharing could only be done through 3rd party apps and the process was not too encouraging for an avid Twitter user like me. So I preferred not to share any photos at Twitter in most instances.

6) Organized and Annotated tweets -

I am not too sure about how this works, but I think this would help us in doing away with the hashtags which was the only way of organizing tweets based on topics. I am unhappy with hashtags because of the precious few words it occupied in the tweets. Now with this new feature I will save on a few words and can still organize and tag my tweets. Welcome….

What do you think about these changes that Twitter is bringing in? Don’t forget to post your comments.

Twitter is amazing. They are always up-to-date. They keep innovating. And probably that is why they are so hot.

Check out the latest feature from Twitter – The Twitter Lists.

Wondering what Twitter List is all about. Just login to your account and see the details on your homepage.

This was a feature that was there is Friendfeed. Now that it has been added to Twitter, there are quite a few similarities between the two services now.

Twitter list helps you create lists in Twitter. You can create any number of lists and add you followers to these lists. For eg: you might have a lot of friends on your Twitter followers and you would want to maintain a distinct list for them. You can do that here. Similar is the case with a list of followers who below to your customer category.

In a way, Twitter list helps you in organizing your followers into different lists and hence makes managing them much more easy. In addition to this there is another feature to it. Now you can follow all the people belonging to a particular list of another Twitter user, just by selecting that list to follow. So that means that following a group of about 50 people is a matter of a click now. This is particularly useful when you wish to follow the followers of established personalities.

Check out Twitter List and don’t forget to comment about your opinion here.

Are you tweeting? Wrong question, ain’t it?

Who is it that is not aware of Twitter today? Twitter is a global phenomenon and even Barack Obama is tweeting and has huge followers at Twitter.

So when such renowned personalities are using Twitter and are making their presence felt at Twitter, why should you and I stay away from it?

But what is the purpose of Twitter? Why would you and I want to use it? What are the benefits of using Twitter?

There are a lot of such questions which has the same number of answers most of which are unconvincing and a lot of the rest close to convincing but are yet far from the goal of convincing you and me. Just type in “Twitter” in Google and you would find millions of websites with close to a million of different information about this global phenomenon in 14o words. Then what is the purpose of another website, rather a blog called as “Tweeting Tips”?

It is just because I thought there was quite a bit that I could write about Twitter and I also felt that down the line there would a lot that you can contribute about Twitter. There is no other purpose to it.

Also, just wanted to mention that I had actually bought the “Thesis” theme and wanted to experiment with it. I had a domain name called “Tweetingtip.com” and I felt that this was where I could do all the experimentation.

Just Kidding!!!

Let’s TWEET together.

Tweet…Tweet…Tweet.