In advance of a panel discussion I’m taking part in today, I decided to survey my twitter and Facebook peeps to see what they had to say about twitter; here are some of the best answers.

If you could change/add one feature on twitter, what would it be?

Jim Woods: Threading conversations rather than having to use hashtags. That would make it easier to archive and feed specific discussions.

Raanan Avidor: better Following and Followers management

Pirocho Piro: Hashtag whatever you like without sacrificing your 140 char limit

Eyal Rofe: RT Button

Virginie De Bel-air: being able to click on a hashtag the same way you can click on a @name

@alphonseha: Have Twitter filter your tweets the way you want it a la FB. Rather than having to use the limited Tweetdeck functions

@YaelBeeri: see conversation threads (including multiple participants)

@cc_chapman: Threaded conversations. Pownce use to do this really well. Followed closely by Groups functionality.

@yuvals: The ability to search only in my friends’ tweets.

What would u say is the biggest misconception about twitter?

Kim Bayne: Myth: You should follow everyone who follows you. Not true. You can’t possible engage in meaningful conversations and relationships that way

Nikos Anagnostou: That one should reply to the question “What are you doing?”

@baratunde:  biggest twitter misconception: that it’s a bunch of people talking about what they had for lunch.

@saritamar: that it’s stupid, but that’s what people told me about Facebook 18 months ago.

@almondjoi: that celebs make best twits. Not true. Best tweets come from regular ppl who engage followers.

@gathrme: biggest misconception is that all Twitter users are narcissists talking about mundane personal stuff. BTW: Taking a shower now.

@eyalrofe: That it is a “conversation” platform. Twitter, in my opinion, is more like a “share the situation” platform.

@HilzFuld: Misconception? That you can use it like Facebook and be passive about it, that is why 80% try it and give up.

If a million people r following u & u are only following 3. Cool or fool?

Oren Magnezy:  Well, Let me quote Paris Hilton: “Look bored but never boring”.

Thomas J Hoehn: The ratio shouldn’t be too skewed one way or the other. Neither one to one, nor one to zero.

Itay Hazan: fool. fame hype. it attracts attention to figures that were made in the old media, and does not empower the people.

@deeped: Fool. Twitter is more to listen than to talk. Even in the digital world you still have to have two ears but only one mouth.

@didic: Cool if you’re engaged with your followers. Tool if you’re only broadcasting

@JoelyRighteous: I’d go with ‘Tool’

What’s the best revenue model for twitter?

Ahuvah: they should have a “pro” account like flickr - where you can tweet a specific amount per day or month but if you want to exceed that # you need to pay for a pro account. i’d pay.

Laurant Weill: Contextual advertising (from the one that doesnt like ad biz model!). They have the critical mass, hyperlinks, tracking and keywords history

Shay Rachmani: Free account is now limited to 70 chars, while 140 chars become paid service

Benjamin Chelli: the search tool could be a paying service => professional will have to pay to browse info

@h3lge: having no model is ’nuff. Bunch other companies build busmodels relying on twitters api. They’ll all pay twitter sooner or later.

@dotmad: Getting purchased by Google/FB.

@tzumi_monster: it should find me a girlfriend and charge a commission when I get married.

What’s the #1 thing you like most about Twitter?

@shiribiri: it’s easy and simple and quick (that can be counted as one thing, can’t it?)

@FireAphis: I like the most about Tweeter that I can write whatever I feel without any obligations on being relevant of comprehensible.

@WorldMate: @blonde20 You mean except you?

@Rafim: the fact that you never know what to expect when you send a twit. who is going to respond. what will he say. that’s great!

@HilzFuld: the surrounding industry and the endless possible ways to tweet

[Note: this is #3 in a series of posts about Web 2.0 apps that actually get used at Blonde 2.0, see the first post here and the second post here] 

As more and more social networkers populate the Web scene, more and more photo editing tools are popping up. Who doesn’t like to play around with their own precious image? What better way to do it than to use free tools available online. No downloading, no paying… all the tools are literally at your fingertips. Sure, we already have the basic means to crop, rotate and resize, but there’s something satisfying about taking it further and creating a work of art, so if you’re not a professional graphic designer, you basically don’t need to spend the absurd amount of money (or risk the illegal download) on Photoshop.   

While shuffling through the photo editing weeds I came up with a small list of gems. Most of these editing sites will offer such features as special effects, creative looking fonts, some kind of integration or application for your social profiles and my favorite: no registration.

Here are my five favorite photo editing sites:

Picnik

Picnik launched a couple of years ago and seems to be doing quite well. They offer a huge variety of enhancing tools such as special effects, creative looking fonts, shapes and frames. They’re known for their quick and user friendly interface. Their business model is a Premium upgrade account.   

Be Funky

Be Funky is for the those wannabe artists who like to draw but perhaps aren’t too successful at it. They claim that they provide the tools for anyone to achieve “photographically rich and artistic results from their digital images without the need for any technical knowledge.”  

Preloader

Preloader is fun because it’s specifically made for flickr users (that’s me). They integrated their application with flickr so all you need to do is log on to your flickr account through the Preloadr site. They offer tools to enhance your photos’ color, sharpness and contrast.

MagMyPic’s

I’ve seen some MagMyPic’s around and they’re pretty hilarious. If you fancy your photo on the cover of a magazine, this is by far the easiest way to do it. They’ve made the platform fool proof. All you need to do is upload your image, choose from a range of 33 magazine covers to plaster your face on and grab the code. Their business model seems to include the chance for the user to actually buy the printed cover. 

Splashup

What was once called Fauxto is now “Splashup.” This site is great for people who are already familiar with Photoshop. The most complex out of the bunch, they offer quick, flash-based, multi-layer tools. You can utilize Splashup from a variety of social platforms such as flickr, facebook and Picasso.

When Connie Talbot (age six) got up to sing in Briton’s Got Talent back in 2007 the judges were no less wowed, the audience no less thrilled and production no less stage-managed  than Susan Boyle’s performance a few weeks back. Connie Talbot’s audition video was uploaded to YouTube the day after her audition was broadcast and as of today has a very respectable 40+ million views. Yet somehow all of Connie’s videos put together have far less views after 2 years than Susan Boyle’s main audition video has after three weeks. Clearly something in the last two years has changed the dynamic of how we share media.

Once upon a time to attain the level of (positive) fame and recognition that Susan Boyle now enjoys you would have had to be a president or a movie star. Now an anonymous, middle aged, Scottish spinster who possesses a stunning voice is arguably one of the most famous people on the planet.

The first and easiest argument to be made is that Simon Cowell, Piers Morgan and the rest of the Briton’s Got Talent crew have brought reality TV to a new level of audience manipulation. However, this argument doesn’t hold up when you look back at previous videos such as Connie the wonder kid and Paul Potts the unlikely opera tenor. The production value in those videos is nearly identical to those in the Susan Boyle video and the contestants just as unlikely (I would argue that Paul Potts was an even bigger surprise) winners as Boyle.

So what has changed in the last two years?  The sharing tools available to all of us. In 2007 I wrote a post about “The New Tribalism”, influenced by Stowe Boyd’s explanation of how Web 2.0 tools help online communities form “tribes” of people around the same vertical. Now with increasingly powerful sites for link sharing such as Digg, Facebook and especially Twitter (with is its ability to find and display trending topics), these tools have given the Web the power to accelerate the exposure received by a single event far faster than ever before. These tools will only get more and more powerful as time passes, crossing tribes, communities, networks and entire countries with increasing speed. In the future it will only take 15 minutes to get your 15 minutes of fame.

It can be argued that AOL is the granddaddy of the social Web. They were the first to have a buddies list, the first to really get instant messaging, groups, email as a social graph and they were the first to integrate all of these in one service.

Lately they seem to be making a push back to their social roots with an entire division called People Networks built around their social properties (Bebo, AIM, Yedda, Socialthing and ICQ). AOL has previously launched social-networking features called Social Inbox, which is a one-stop destination with aggregated social feeds from across the Web, multiple email accounts and media recommendations. However, as Ziv Navoth, SVP marketing at people networks told me in our interview two weeks ago, AOL is planning much more to come. AOL plans to allow consumers to aggregate their disparate piles of online information through connective offerings that allow them to pool all kinds of Web content and communications in one place. In other words: Life Streaming. I will have more on this when it goes live.

AOL also recently announced a new country manager for Israel; Avichay Nissenbaum, CEO of Yedda. Avichay has an extensive background in the start-up industry; his first company  SmarTeam which focused on product lifecycle management was acquired by Dassault Systems in 1999, and Q&A site Yedda was bought by AOL in 2007.

In his role as Country Manager Avichay will focus on establishing better connections with the Israeli Web scene by promoting AOL’s developer network and the services that power known brands such as AIM, ICQ, Bebo, Winamp and Mapquest. His attention will also be focused on identifying local companies of value for potential acquisition. AOL currently has over 200 employees in Israel across several companies it has acquired over the years, namely: ICQ, Relegance, Quigo and Yedda. Avichay is one of the most knowledgeable and experienced leaders in the Israeli hi-tech industry and also a dear friend. I wish him much luck in his new role.

Deep down I guess we all wish the start-ups whose services we like to use would stay as they are forever. Take for example Vimeo, a really great service with an awesome community that never quite made it into the mainstream.

It is basically clear now that Twitter will not be one of those services. If the recent Ashton Kutcher  (@aplusk)/CNN (@cnnbrk) race to 1 million followers taught us anything it’s that Twitter is only going to get bigger.

It was probably inevitable as the actor and comedian Kevin Pollack (@kevinpollak) said; “I love Twitter because it’s not like Facebook where you have to maintain a profile, it’s just there if you have a thought, a question or an idea.” When you couple that simplicity with a service basically built around vanity counting the result is a service perfect for celebrities keeping in touch with their fan base. And celebrities represent nothing if not the mainstream.

Let’s now take a look now at Twitterholic’s 100 most followed Twitter accounts list; most of the accounts on this list are either celebrities or large news organizations (who seem to be increasingly using Twitter as an RSS killer) with few “internet famous” people left in a club they used to dominate. Slowly but surely the ubiquitous tool of the digerati is crossing the chasm.

Then came Oprah. This isn’t the first time Oprah has given a huge burst of exposure to a Web 2.0 start-up she made her first YouTube video in March 2007 nearly two years after YouTube launched. Now after two-and-a-half years of Twitter we now have @oprah.

Two things were really obvious after seeing Twitter on the Oprah show:

• Celebrities who are not comedians or geeks tweeting doesn’t really work. You either get it or you don’t. Seems like Oprah should hire someone to do her tweeting (Oprah, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship)
• My mother will probably start using Twitter soon.

This almost certainly means that Twitter is now officially “mainstream,” and perhaps the old school Twitter geeks will remember the time B.O. (Before Oprah), in the way many remember the more wild Facebook (where they could freely list their hookups) before their parents discovered it. I once saw a shirt that read “I Had an iPod Before You Knew What One Was,” now Twitterers can go to herebeforeoprah a site that tells the world you were “here before Oprah” to get that kind of affirmation. How will Twitter change now that it has gone mainstream? Only time will tell.

[Image credit: Oprah Live]

[Note: this is #2 in a series of posts about Web 2.0 apps that actually get used at Blonde 2.0, see the first post here]

To say that you really ‘get’ Twitter they say you need to do three things; 1) you need to get an @reply from someone you admire 2) you need to post a question and get loads of answers 3) you need to follow someone famous that you’re a fan of. I’m adding a number 4 -you need to access twitter from an external application. 

You won’t be alone, according to Twitter 70% of all tweets come from text messages or applications built on the Twitter API and good lordy there are a lot of applications out there. These apps go beyond just publishing tweets; many applications leverage the main database of Twitter for information about breaking news, stocks, emerging trends and even bacon recipes. 

According to Wikipedia there are over 100 Twitter clones out there and it seems that the Twitter team made a conscious decision to make it ludicrously easy to build a Twitter app. This has been a crucial part of Twitter wining the micro blogging wars (It was nice while it lasted Pownce and Jaiku).

Here are my 5 favorite Twitter apps:

Tweetdeck
17% of all tweets come from TweetDeck -way ahead of the rest so it’s pretty much the dominant Twitter desktop app. At the heart of TweetDeck is its ability to create groups of people together grouping friends or work colleagues separately means you have a window on all aspects of your twitter life. These additional columns automatically update, providing the user with a very effective dashboard of real-time information. Seesmic Desktop will offer similar functionality.

StockTwits
StockTwits.com is a Twitter powered financial bulletin board. The site skims Twitter for messages people tag with stock symbols – $GOOG for Google, for instance – and aggregates them on a Tumblr site with stock charts, tags, and comments. Great for real-time analysis.

Twitterfon
The problem with most of the Twitter iPhone apps is that they fail to capture the spirit of Twitter. Twitter is a service that allows you to send 140 character messages to other people and that simplicity is what the apps should capture, most of them have far too many bells and whistles. Twitterfon is simple and free. The others have a long way to compete.

Twistori
Twistori, according to the site, is the “first step in an ongoing social experiment.” The brainchild of Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs, Twistori pulls tweets from Twitter (via twitter search) containing specific keywords: i love, i hate, i think, i believe, i feel, and i wish. It then publishes the tweets it finds anonymously in a non-stop, auto-updating river of news. The effect is hypnotic. Put on some indie music and relax for a few minutes, totally worth it.

Twitpic
TwitPic is by far the easiest, best way to share pics on twitter

What is your favorite Twitter app?

AOL sure is in an interesting place these days. They have a brand new CEO (ex Google VP - Tim Armstrong), a legacy dial-up access business (that more than twenty years after it was launched) still makes billions of dollars a year and the rest of AOL split up into three different groups; 1) Platform A which is one of largest advertising networks 2) Media Glow which includes AOL.com and mega blogs like TMZ and Engadget plus 3) The group which most interests me; People Networks which includes AIM, ICQ, Bebo, Yedda, Goowy and the newly acquired SocialThing.

People Networks are now planning an extensive synergy of all these properties (and also 3^rd party outside content) under the banner of “life streaming” where users will be able to syndicate all their online activity into one stream.

Yesterday I was lucky enough to have a conversation with Ziv Navoth SVP for Marketing and Partnerships at AOL.  Ziv is an extremely interesting guy. While running marketing at Bebo, he grew the user base from 22 million to 45 million users and pioneered numerous innovations including a new business model for media companies to distribute and monetize their content and a new form of online entertainment, combining original productions with brand sponsorship. Since the Bebo acquisition his task at AOL has been to expand a network already 90+ million strong. See my full conversation with him below.

Let’s face it the barrier of entry to build a Web app these days is ridiculously low; developer tools are free, there are tons of good script libraries (especially the YUI) and companies like Amazon provide hosting and computing in a pay-per-use model. It seems that any group of kids hacking around is able to simply and cheaply build a website or app and as a result of that there is a huge glut of Web 2.0 apps out there.

So I’ve decided to make a series of lists of Web 2.0 apps that stand out from the rest by the fact that I actually use them. Daily. The first list is of productivity apps, the ones that help me get my work done every day, in alphabetical order:

Box.net
Box.net really does one thing very well, it lets me store and organize my files online. I can access everything no matter where I am and share specific files and folders with other people. Then has a really cool application platform that allows me to use services like Zoho and PicniK to edit my files. This is the future of file storage. 

Social Text
SocialText is a collaboration that provides Wiki’s, enterprise level social networking, a dashboard that provides a personalized interface for people and teams to manage attention and SocialText signals which acts as a Twitter for businesses, letting employees send messages back and forth to subscribers. It’s way more effective than email at group communications, and we absolutely rely on it to keep in touch at AdHocnium.

Prezi
Prezi is not just another online slideshow (there are many of those)  Prezi is a new way of thinking; Prezi allows anyone who can sketch an idea on a napkin to create and perform stunning non-linear presentations with relations, zooming into details, and adjusting to the time left without the need to skip slides. I love Prezi. (Uptime could be better though)

Wordpress
Wordpress powers the blog you’re reading now and millions of other blogs, it is hands down the best blogging platform out there and it also has the best extensions; their Akismet spam comment blocking service alone saves me every day - without it I would quite simply be overrun with spam. It catches at least 100 spam comments per day and auto-deletes them.

Zoho

Zoho, as well as its competitor Google Docs, aims to replace Microsoft Office, I will admit to still using office but when I’m on the go, or just checking something in Box.net, Zoho is awesome. The feature list is still lacking when compared to the heavy Microsoft version, but it’s free and I can also collaborate with others on documents.

What is your favorite Web 2.0 productivity app?

If you want to buy collectible’s and second hand items you go to EBay, if you’d like to buy a book you visit Amazon and that seems to be the limit of mainstream of physical retailing by pure Web companies. Many traditional retailers have a strong Web presence but that is arguably there to supplement their physical network, not to replace it. But what about a sector that has no strong, central physical world counterpart, what about the world of art? How do you replicate online the ‘feel’ of art shopping. A one-year-old Parisian start-up called Art-and –You is making an online art market a reality.

Art-And-You is not purely an art marketplace, it is a hybrid of commerce, original content, and social networking. It features a Web magazine updated daily, video content on their Web TV channel, social networking for artists, art buyers and event organizing as well as a market system where artists can list creations and buyers can view items for sale.

At Seedcamp Paris I sat down with Mary-Noelle Dana from Art-And-You, who describes it as all about art and artistic creation, focusing on very accessible art as opposed to the official art market, we talked about Art-And-You, its launch, features and when they are going to roll-out a an English language version of the site. Full interview below.

AP: Tel Aviv, Israel - Today Blonde 2.0 Israel’s premier online public relations and social marketing consultancy firm has announced a full rebranding effort and will now be known as Brunette 3.0. Ayelet Noff, Founder and CEO of Blonde 2.0 released this statement; “Did you really think I was going to keep my hair one color forever? You have to move with the times and changing fashions, blonde is so 2008”.

It has been announced that the full rebranding is also making changes at the office; gone are the foosball tables, the ball pit and the slip n’ slide and the dress code has changed from über casual to serious business attire, employees of Blonde 2.0 were spotted outside a Tel Aviv hair salon waiting one-by-one to have their hair “rebranded”.

It seems this is just another change in a long line of moves as the Internet world moves from its 2.0 to 3.0 stages, the Web 2.0 era which has lasted from 2004 till the current economic meltdown was embodied by the socialization of the Web with early social sites like Friendster showing the promise of social relationships online and later sites like Facebook really harnessing the power of the social graph and turning into Internet giants. When asked, Miss Noff said: “Brunette 3.0 will be a central part of the Web 3.0 movement, as soon as somebody figures out what that actually means”.