Staring at the Digg frontpage right now.  2 pretty mundane stories from Arstechnica and two stories from HuffingtonPost about Hillary’s campaign death spiral.

Real diverse, guys.  Digg domain trust FTW!

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…Uhh, start with a big one?

So, it’s been a week or so and I’ve genuinely tried to immerse myself into the Twitter ecosystem (note to self: stop talking like Zuckerberg) and I guess I’ll have to moderate my position from, “What a totally useless timesuck” to something like “Ok, this is kind of fun, but I have to get back to making money now.”

While I mostly agree with SEOBlackhat, Twitter is not completely useless.  There are plenty of business models that should engage the service and it definitely plugs into the broader Internet audience strategies of most businesses (yes, I said most businesses).  But it’s like Instant Messaging and nobody “got into the IM game” to make money directly.

Actually, that’s not true.  I had one friend mass-link-drop his Amazon storefront to his Buddy List back in ‘00.  $7 later, he felt like Mark Cuban (MC was actually cool back then) and I had to acknowlege that he indeed could make a buck…or seven…off of IM spamming.

Here’s what I have learned so far:

1. There are no direct monetization models that merit spending the time to build a Twitter “power account”.  There are, however, some very valid indirect audience and monetization benefits to acknowledging the Twitter userbase.
2. I think it was Mike Arrington who mentioned this previously, but things now break on Twitter before they break on the blogs.  If you have a brand, you need to be monitoring and/or engaging Twitter.  You may be able to put out a public relations fire or better retain your most vocal customers.
3. In terms of pushing your content or product, Twitter is basically an inbox or RSS aggregator for a lot of people now.  You should treat it as an audience medium/channel as the “open rates” are pretty high and there are downstream links.
4. A lot of Twitter users have blogs.  Bloggers link.  So, get to know more linkers.
5. Jason Calacanis is taking his personal branding whorishness to a whole new level.  Dude dropped a link on Twitter that was a live cell phone video feed of his dogs running around the pool.  That is both amazing and hopefully illegal after Congress passes the Nobody Should Have to Read, Hear, or View Everything You Do on the Internets Act of 2012.
6. I have met a dozen or so people who knew me from this blog.  So, about half my readers use Twitter.
7. I don’t know if this has been done yet, but I’m pretty sure if someone bulit the “Followback Girl” Twitter app, roughly 26 million college kids would use it between the hours of 12am and 3am.  This thing was built for booty calls.
8. I now know what sports teams the other SEO’s follow and who the degenerate gamblers are.
9. As soon as they figure out some sort of revenue model…and it doesn’t even have to generate more than $.50 RPM’s…Twitter is going to sell for a big number.   Twitter is big enough that they have enough audience momentum to have marginalized any of the other players who tried to take advantage of the very simple concept.  Twitter for the microblogging win.

With that said, I’m going to take my Tweets private.  As much as I’ll appreciate another way to interact with some friends and maybe make some new ones, I…unlike Calacanis…am not trying to put on a peep show.  Or is that a tweet show?

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After getting housed by the biggest hater on the planet in the dork-off (I mean, “blogging bet”) and then reclaiming my pride by winning a Reddit Xbox Challenge, I am now letting my pride, gambling addiction, and inability to turn away from any competition get the best of me yet again…a Twitter challenge.

We haven’t figured out what the total Followers # will be to win, but it’s going to be a lot, so please feed my downward spiral into overcompetitive burnout status just one more time:  http://twitter.com/brianprovost

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…these guys could really use their contact info right about now!

The Internet decentralized your audience.  Online publishing platforms created a million competitive sources virtually overnight, completely commoditizing content.  Craigslist and Ebay killed your cash cows.  Your remaining primary monetization model is the same dumb model and ad product that sucked in the late 90’s.  And some blogger leaking Jose Cansceco’s new book might just have been the death blow (I’m kidding, for those not familiar with arcane American sports references).

Man, you guys are sooooo f*cked unless you start hiring actual Internet people.  This bell isn’t going to be unrung.

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I’m tempting fate here by messing with the “I don’t ever publish anything but my subscriber count keeps going up” mojo, but I did want to mention some events I will be at in April. 

This update isn’t offered in the,  “Hey, I’m sooooo cool because I have a blog with a couple readers, come worship me and stroke my ego” vain.  It’s more of a, “I owe a lot of you some drinks or we’ve never been able to synch our schedules for a meeting, so maybe we can kill a few birds with one stone here” kind of announcement.

I will be in my San Francisco office the entire week of AdTech.  After that, I’ll be buzzing down to Long Beach to live the VIP Lifestyle at The Long Beach Grand Prix (cheering on a few friends that still get to kill tires while I’m working 100hr weeks).

If you’ll be at either event, give me a holler or email “brian [at] scoreboard-media.com”.

Note:  There’s a bunch of stuff I’ve banged out on the plane over the last month regarding the second death of the impression-based audience models, domain parking, domain development, Digg = teh suck, why Obama’s economic plan caused me to fall off his bandwagon, Demand Media, raising money, UCLA’s favorable foul calls, recessioniary hedges, and the guest post series on how not to get screwed by VC’s.  Many of these were cranked out on red-eye’s home from the West Coast, so I need to go back and see how incoherent they may be. 

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