Since the beginning of twitter, it has been unable to properly monetize itself and earn the revenue it could be earning. There are already sponsored tweets and such but should twitter add actual sponsored ads similar to facebook?

The traffic is there for twitter, but it seems like the ads would interfere with the sleek design twitter has. However, server costs and other high tech costs make it a necessity for twitter to start earning more. Perhaps twitter could launch a deals service similar to facebook and groupon by offering advertising directly to companies via their twitter accounts.

Regardless, something needs to be done now because twitter is wasting time and opportunity by not capitalizing on the millions of page views on twitter each month. I for one would not mind ads so long as they are not too intrusive. I understand businesses need to make money, just make sure that ads do not ruin my overall experience. What do you think about sponsored ads similar to facebook?

There are many rumors going on right now that Twitter has been blocked to all users that reside in Thailand. There is some speculation that some users will using twitter to protest the government, but no official word from the government has been released.

Some users from Thailand seem to have access as normal, but thousands of Thai twitter users have reported they can no longer access any part of twitter. The two questions are now whether the Thai government has censored twitter in the first place and if so, why did?

Censorship never ends well, so it’s no surprise there has been much outrage by the Thai people over this. It could be something much more simply then that, perhaps even something on twitter’s side. However, if it turns out the government has indeed censored Thai residents from twitter, there could be some major consequences.

The month of July brought exceptionally good results for twitter in that it posted a record amount of traffic during the entire month. There were approximately 32.8 million unique visitors from the United States, up from only 30.6 million visitors in June and only 27 million in May.

While twitter’s traffic is on the rise, other social networks on on the decline. Linkedin saw a decent spike after their IPO but then traffic sharply dropped. Myspace is continuing its slow demise and lost another decrease in traffic throughout the month.

With the launch of Google’s social network Google+, it will be interesting to see if Google can take some of twitter’s traffic. It doesn’t seem like they will be able to do much harm, but it’s still to early in the game to tell how successful Google+ will be. Regardless, things are looking up for twitter as everything just continues to rise.

A Russian firm Yandex recently reported that there are now over one million Russian speaking twitter users. The firm also found that there are approximately 370,000 tweets sent per day in Russian compared to only 150,000 at the same time last year. The average tweet in the Russian language was about 84 characters, much less then the 109 character average of tweets in the English language.

So while there are more tweets in Russian now, there are not as many active Russian users. The firm reported that only about 6.4% of twitter users registered in Russia are active. At this time last year this number was almost up to 60%.

It’s only been a few months since twitter released the Russian language support to make twitter more accessible to Russians. Therefore it is too early to establish whether the language support was a bust or not. However, one thing is clear: Twitter needs to find a way to make Russian members more active. How do you think they can do that?

Have you ever wanted to find twitter users that share your same interests? It can be fairly tough to do so but thankfully a new service called listoruius can provide you with a large list of users that share interests. Essentially, listorious is a directory of twitter lists and users that can be sorted by a variety of things including celebrities, athletes, social media gurus and more.

To start, simply go to listorious.com and type in something in the search box and click search. You will then be shown a large variety of twitter users whose profiles you can browse and determine if you want to follow them. It’s that simple.

This is a cool new service for people wanted to expand their social network and connect with different people even more. This service is already taking off and looks to be a promising source of new friends and contacts.

Yesterday, twitter officially released it’s url shortner “t.co”. Now, any url that is above 20 characters will automatically be replaced by a t.co link. It is automatic in that you have no choice, it will do it for you regardless if you want it to or not.

Here is twitter’s offical statement: ““Beginning August 15th, when a user tweets or sends a direct message containing a URL 20 characters long or greater (the length of URLs wrapped with t.co), the URL will automatically be converted to a t.co-wrapped link. We will eventually wrap all links, regardless of length, but until then there’s nothing you need to do to support this change. When we’re ready to wrap all links, we’ll give you plenty of time and make another announcement.”

Twitter’s goal in this seems to be so that then cause run their own analytics on links on twitter and see exactly how users respond to the links that are posted. Do you like the new url shortening system on twitter?

A serious issue needs to be addressed that affects many people every day on the internet: slander and libel. You should know that anything you say can be found and regardless if something is true, you may still be guilty of libel or slander.

A professor of law at North Carolina explained why twitter can be so dangerous, “Statements on Twitter can form the basis of a defamation lawsuit just as much as any form of publication. It’s just sometimes with new technology, it takes a little longer for people to start to take what they read seriously enough — and more importantly for lawyers — to pay enough attention to start to bring lawsuits based on it.

Just remember to think before you tweet and do your due diligence. It may save you thousands of dollars and you’ll be much better off in the long run.

In wake of the recent riots in London, the prime minister of England has proposed that the government censor social media posts on twitter and facebook. The main purpose of the censorship was to break up looters from organizing and posting details about what is going on.

Today, a spokesperson for twitter released a statement about the issue, “Our only comment is that if the government would like to talk about this we’d be happy to listen.

This is a little surprising consider twitter is very pro-speech and allows just about anything to be posted. However, at the same time it seems that twitter should absolutely work with the U.K. government to stop the rioting before more people get hurt. Censorship is never good but it sometimes is necessary and this may be one of those cases.