Twitter Now Third Largest Social Network, Announces Promoted Accounts

On Tuesday Twitter COO Dick Costola, speaking at the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Mixx Conference in New York City, announced that Twitter has surpassed MySpace in terms of unique users, while also announceing Twitter's new "promoted accounts" feature. Using Promoted Accounts companies can suggest that users automatically follow brands with similar interests to their own. The program works by given advertisers the ability to added their paid accounts to users "Who To Follow" suggestion list. Just like the companies "Promoted Tweets" feature, the suggestions would be based on a users Twitter activity and their preference settings. The "Promoted Accounts" option also marks the end of Twitter Earlybird offers, which never really took off as planned. In terms of user size, Twitter has announced more than 160 million users, with 370,000 more individuals signing up each day. Twitter says 96 million unique visitors accessed their portal in August, that number is compared to 95 million uniques for MySpace and is an increase of 76 percent over Twitter numbers in 2009. What do you think about the "Promoted Accounts" feature, I already ignore Promoted Tweets, I assume I'll do the same for Promoted Accounts.

What WordPress Envy? Blogger Live Stats Go Public After beta testing Blogger Live Stats upon Blogger in Draft (Google's eternal testing ground), the search engine giant has given the feature its seal of approval by launching it towards the public. Last month we released two new stats gadgets to the Blogger in Draft testing ground; after hearing your feedback and making a few tweaks, we're happy to announce that they are both now ready for the main stage. The new-and-improved Popular Posts and Blog's Statsgadgets can be added to your blog right now from the Gadget Directory by clicking Add a gadget from the Design | Page Elements tab. Both of these gadgets take advantage of the traffic data that is being collected by Blogger Stats and provide an easy way for you to pass that info on to the readers of your blog. (Blogger Buzz) What I love most about the Blogger Live stats (aside from the interface behind the scenes) is the fact that you can select how many page views your blog has received over the past week, month or since inception. Google even provided an animated counter for BlogSpot fans with "flashier" sites, which should appeal to those who enjoy lots of eye candy on their blog. Google has been steadily improving their BlogSpot platform over the past few months by incorporating changes ranging from real anti-spam defenses to revamping their theme designer. Only time will tell if these latest additions will help maintain Blogger's edge over WordPress.com (the latter who recently assimilated Windows Live Spaces), although thus far the BlogSpot team is showing no signs of slowing down.

Tumblr Unveiling Revolutionary New Queue System? Tumblr's dramatic rise has apparently taken a toll on the company's queue system (aka scheduled posting), and in an attempt to avoid a "fail whale" scenario they're not only scaling the feature, but promising to wow the world when it relaunches. Later this week we're pushing a complete overhaul of the Queue feature with some killer new functionality. In the meantime though, the existing queue service is handling a volume of posts it was never designed for. To prevent it from becoming unstable and mis-publishing posts, we've decided the best course is to take the queues offline and expedite the relaunch. (Tumblr Staff Blog) Thus far the company hasn't given any hints as to what the new system will look like, although if I had to guess it might have something to do with solving the international group blog problem (i.e. queuing posts based on a timed countdown rather than a specific time). Tumblr has thus far not given an estimate of when queued posts will return to the tumblr-verse, although hopefully soon (as manually posting queued posts is not exactly fun).

Iran To Pro-Iranian Blogger: How Does 19 Years In Jail Sound? Known mostly for sentencing critics of the government to jail, Iran for the most part has displayed a very hostile attitude towards bloggers (not to mention the twittersphere as well). But what about bloggers who not only condone the Iranian government, but praise it as well? Unfortunately it seems that lip service alone will not save you. An Iranian court sentenced the founder of one of the first Farsi-language blogs, credited with sparking the boom in Iranian reform bloggers, to more than 19 years in prison for his writings, a news web site reported Tuesday. Iranian-Canadian Hossein Derakhshan, 35, was a controversial figure among Iran's blogging community. Writing his blog from Canada, he was initially a critic of Iran's clerical leadership, and in 2006 he visited Israel — Iran's archenemy — saying he wanted to act as a bridge between the two countries' peoples. But he later became a vocal supporter of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, praising him for standing up to the West and criticizing regime opponents. (Fox News) Yael (from Israel) was able to meet Derakhshan in person and from her encounters was "convinced that he was an Iranian agent." Other bloggers (even ones from Iran) seemed to have a similar attitude, which is why many are surprised by Derakshan's sentence. While it may seem strange for Iran to jail a proponent of their regime, it should not come as a surprise as the government has been known to jail apolitical bloggers without cause (aside from the fact that they own a blog). Derakhshan imprisonment probably goes to show that the Iranian government sees bloggers as a threat (and not as an asset), which probably means that Iranian bloggers need to exercise more caution when blogging in hostile countries.