One of our favorite geeks has just released an e-book on best practices for Twitter use.
Chris Pirillo's 140 Twitter Tips, a 14-page PDF, is a concise compendium of useful guidelines and helpful hints for every kind of Twitter user, from doing-it-wrong noobs to social media addicts. From the best time of day to get retweets to how to process public criticism, the e-book also covers a broad range of common issues users experience.
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Some of the tips might seem like common sense - until you realize you might not be adhering very well to them, yourself. Most of us are occasionally guilty of using too much jargon and oversharing (or undersharing, in the case of some more professionally oriented accounts).
The e-book costs only $1.40, or you can hold out for the $14 deluxe version, which will contain more than 140 adorable illustrations from Kristin Marshall.
Mark Fletcher builds software, that's just what he does. He may have sold the system that became Yahoo Groups for $400 million, and then made millions selling Bloglines to Ask.com as well, but that doesn't mean he's going to stop making software. And it's not just any software he makes, either. Those two projects changed millions of peoples' lives.
Tomorrow morning Fletcher will unveil his newest creation, a lightweight group communication tool called SnapGroups. We first wrote about it two weeks ago but hadn't been able to take a look until tonight. We're happy to report that you're probably going to like it a lot: it's easy, it's clear, it's got good social design and it's real time. Check out the screenshots below.
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Update:Just after we posted this, Fletcher says he's lifted the password from the site and it's live!
SnapGroups makes it really easy to create a group discussion around a particular topic, invite people, set variable privacy controls and then participate in that conversation as part of a whole "newsfeed" style stream of updates from all your various groups in one place. Fresh comments, likes and dislikes get pushed to your browser live using a home-made bit of AJAX and the whole thing couldn't be much simpler. It's a lot of fun to use, in fact.
Fletcher says this is only the beginning, that all kinds of features are still to come, but he's focused on the basics for now. He started working on the site in October and says his favorite part of the project was "learning about the new technologies that have sprung up in the past couple years." "The various databases that have come out recently are great," he told us. "I'm using Mongo, but there are many interesting projects now." The core of the site is written in C++.
Fletcher says SnapGroups will go live tomorrow morning. You should try it out when it does. Invites to groups will no doubt be flying around Twitter and Facebook. It may very well become something you want to use regularly. Hopefully there will be a way to export your conversations easily. Fletcher is a pretty straightforward guy and will probably implement just about anything that enough people ask for and that isn't too hard to do.
Mark Fletcher has a habit of building relatively simple things, like the first major email list system and the first popular RSS reader, that end up being a defining player in the rise of a new era online. Simple, real-time group communication? Not at all hard to imagine that being a big new thing as well.
Twitter launched lists in October 2009 and this feature has quickly become an essential part of the Twitter ecosystem. The power of lists isn't just in their ability to organize your followers, they also provide an an insight into how other users use Twitter. The number of followers an account has might show its popularity, but the number of lists called, for instance, "most influential" or "essential", that it appears on reveals just how important that account is.
Today, we're using lists to unscientifically analyze what we think are some of the some of the most influential Twitter accounts. We used a variety of lists to identify 334 accounts and then ran those names through Tableau's data visualization tools.
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Editors Note: This post is the second of a four-part content series ReadWriteWeb is producing in partnership with Tableau Software, where we examine interesting data sets relevant to technology trends today. You can use Tableau Public to create interactive visualizations like this and publish them to your own blog, Web sites, or anywhere online. You also can embed this (or any other Tableau Public) visualization on your own site.
Our List
We generated our list of Twitter influencers based on the lists that the RWW team follows and lists that some of the most influential people on those lists have created. We only used lists that were aggregating accounts that the list creator had called, for instance, "most important", or "most influential". After removing duplicates, we ended up 334 Twitter accounts. This list includes people, companies and breaking news feeds. By using lists instead of just follower counts we added an important filter, as many of these lists were created by Twitter users outside of the RWW team.
Many of the conclusions are unsurprising: Influential accounts have between 100 to more than 1 million followers. While there are some relatively new accounts in our list, the vast majority has been on Twitter for over a year. When it comes to influence on Twitter, being an early adopter clearly has some advantages.
Most of the users who appear on a lot of lists and have a lot of followers also tweet a lot. Given that some of these accounts are from news organizations, this number makes sense, but there is also a group of users like Anil Dash, the Gates Foundation and Outside.in's Steven Johnson who don't tweet a lot, but still have a large number of followers based on their reputation.
It is interesting to note is that there seems to be a group of users that has a very large number of followers, but doesn't appear on an extraordinary large number of lists. This group includes a surprisingly large number of Twitter employees, including Cheryl Palarca (Twitter HR), Alex McCauley (Twitter business operations) and Kevin Thau (mobile products and partnerships at Twitter).
Lastly, it's obvious that a large number of power users - those with a high number of followers and who appear on a large number of lists - were early adopters; SXSW 2007 and the months leading up to it is when a significant number of influencers signed up. However, while the sign-up rate of those influencers has significantly dropped over time, new influencers continued to appear right through the end of 2009. Twitter early adopters may have moved on the next big thing, but users with prestige haven't stopped signing up.
Making breakfast, lunch or dinner plans for any group that involves more than two people can quickly become a chore. Lunchwalla, which launched earlier today, wants to make this task a bit easier by providing you with a web service that allows you to avoid long email chains and back-and-forth phone calls. You simply pick a time, choose a few restaurant options and a list of friends you want to invite. Lunchwalla will email your contacts and they can then RSVP and vote for the restaurant they prefer.
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What makes Lunchwalla unique is that it brings together Yelp reviews, OpenTable reservations, menus and local coupons. This makes it different from similar scheduling services like Evite, Tungle.me, Presdo or Doodle.
Not Just for Lunch
While the name implies that Lunchwalla is only focused on getting people together for lunch, the site won't stop you from organizing breakfast, brunch, dinner or happy hour get-togethers.
After you have sent out your invitations, you contacts can vote for different restaurants right in their email clients. Once everybody has voted (or decided not to attend), you can make the final decision and your contacts will get one more email with the finalized details. After the event is over, you can also upload photos from the meal and share them with your friends.
One nice aspect of the site is that it allows you to pick a set of favorite restaurants, so if you decide to use the service regularly, you won't have to pick and choose the same restaurants again. You can also group your contacts into lists.
Privacy
One aspect of the site that not everybody will appreciate, however, is that - by default - all your invitations, comments and events are public and will appear on your profile page. If you want to keep your lunch plans private, make sure that you change the privacy settings for your profile. Even then, though, the event page remains visible to anybody who has access to the URL.
http://bit.ly/dzVKGX
Mark Fletcher builds software, that's just what he does. He may have sold the system that became Yahoo Groups for $400 million, and then made millions selling 
Twitter 
Making breakfast, lunch or dinner plans for any group that involves more than two people can quickly become a chore. 
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