The twittermania continues. “Every time a bell rings, a new twitter service gets it’s wings” – You may use this quote freely.

It’s almost impossible to keep track of all the new twitter services that are constantly launched. I’ve created a list of the most recent services.

The list goes from Tweetmarks and spamplets to Hiimok and HappyTwitDay.

The list is completely random and I’ll let you be the judge which of these services are the most useful.

1. Tweetmarks is a bookmarks tool for Twitter. Tweetmarks is a combination of bookmarking and twitter. It stores and tracks all the bookmarks you share on twitter. It can even synchronize with your del.icio.us account.
2. Share your funny or strange email spam on Spamlets. Simply start any tweet with #spamlet
   and it’ll show up on Spamlet.com.
3. Good-looking plain text-backchannels with TwitterFountain. TwitterFountain mash-up tweets and Flickr images based on tags into one animation. An example could be “Obama”. You will see all the tweets about Obama with matching images from Flickr in the background.
4. Send gifts to your twitter friends with hiimok. A tweet with a link to the gift will be sent to your friend. The gift could be an icon of a cooler filled with beer.
5. Queue up your tweets with Twitabit. If/when twitter is down, you can still tweet using Twitabit. Once twitter is back up, your tweets are delivered.
6. Twizon is mash-up between twitter and Amazon. This service is probably for shopaholics. Twizon lists all the tweets referencing Amazon deals.
7. Keep track your friends’ birthdays using HappyTwitDay. Using Summize.com HappyTwitday searches the twitterati for Happy Birthday-wishes. Follow HappyTwitDay on twitter to keep track.
8. Chirrup adds twitter chat to your blog’s comments. Using Javascript and PHP Chirrup pulls your twitter replies into your blog’s comment feed.

I bet a bunch of new twitter services has been launched while I was writing this post, but the above mentioned as some of the newest ones.

I didn’t say they where all useful, but let me know if I missed anyone.

What’s your favourite twitter service?

I’ve had this post in my head for quite some time. I’m not sure if it will work, but I have to get it out of my head. I tried stabbing my brain with Q-tips, but it doesn’t help anymore.

Statement: Blogging is just like a massively multi player online game, it could be World of Warcraft, Everquest 2, Eve Online or one of the many other MMOs out there.

That’s quite a bold statement some might say. Oh yeah? Allow me to explain.

I’ve played MMORPGs since Ultima Online back in 1997, I gave Everquest one a go after that, but Everquest 2 is where I’ve spent a lot of my time.

I co-founded one of the oldest guilds on the Highkeep server, it was called The Arcane Order. I was a guild leader for several years until I retired over a year ago.

With my MMO experience backing me up, I can safely make this comparison. Blogging is like playing a MMO.

I’ll start out with the Multiplayer Online part:

1. On every MMO server there are celebrities ie. the coolest guild, players with the best gear, the guilds that beat the toughest raids, the best crafter and so forth.
2. When one of these celebrity players say something in the global chat channel, everybody chimes in. Answer their questions, laugh at their jokes or join their groups.
3. The biggest player celebrities also have most followers. What you say in the chat is often true and people tend to follow what they say and talk about it.
4. The celebs are often also among the wealthiest people on the server.
5. They are often among the first to reach the highest level, complete difficult quests and try out new things.
6. They work really hard and spent most of their time in the game improving their skills.
7. They keep their friend’s list updated all the time, they network and form guilds. However most guilds doesn’t accept anyone. If you play a fighter and they need a wizard, you have to be damn good fighter to be invited.
8. Both husband and wife plays the game.
9. From time to time a player may get a little too cocky and get a warning from a gamemaster.

Now I think you can see what I’m getting at, but to make sure let me explain with a corresponding number of points.

1. In the blogosphere there are celebrities each in their own domain. The blogging experts, the coding experts, the monetizing experts and so forth.
2. When one of these experts or celebrities say something on their blog it creates a wave through a lot other blogs. The global chat channel can be their blog or twitter. They can ask any question on twitter and get at least 50 different answers.
3. If Robert Scoble decides that he prefers Kyte instead of Qik, then Qik might as well just sell their servers to Kyte. If Michael Arrington (TechCrunch) doesn’t like a new start-up, thats not a good start.
4. Shoemoney’s Adsense cheque picture made him famous, Darren Rowse makes a living out of blogging too and with the referral money he earns every day I’m sure he lives ok. Same goes for John Chow.
5. You’ll often see A-list blogger first movers on new services and applications. FriendFeed couldn’t have made it without the attention from Louis Gray.
6. You don’t become a pro-blogger over night. It takes a lot of work, research and not just the right gear.
7. What would the blogsphere be without networks? Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim, Mashable, b5-media, Gawker and many more. Aren’t they really a guild? You just can’t join them, you have to be invited and only if your blog meets the requirements.
8. Both husband and wife blogs, sometimes on the same blog.
9. The blogosphere doesn’t have any gamemaster or moderator (thank you for that), but it has some great people, who reminds it not to get too serious all the time. Loren Feldman is one of them. His satiric movies can really make your day.

Now there is one significant thing that sets the blogsphere apart from World of Warcraft or Everquest 2. On World of Warcraft the celebrity player can be a 13-year old kid, who has too much time on his hands and a big ego.

I haven’t seen many 13-year old kids making a living out of blogging…

So is my comparison too far fetched? Did I forget anything?

Thank you very much to Mostly Lisa for letting me borrow the photo.

It’s no surprise that twitter can be a bit unstable from time to time. Twitter is probably the only service I know that’s almost more down than it’s up, and still have a loyal fan base and increase it’s number of users.

But what are the alternatives?

There are a lot of similar micro-blogging services out there, but can they replace twitter?

If you take a look at the various alternatives to twitter are they really an alternative?

Pownce:

About a year ago I wrote a post about Pownce and twitter. I compare the two services, but what really hit me was, that a year ago I wrote that twitter is unstable.

Twitter is still unstable and Pownce hasn’t replaced twitter. Why is that?

Pownce doesn’t have the simplicity of twitter. No one (except a few) has really bothered making any services for Pownce either and perhaps Pownce is just too feature-heavy?!

As always you are welcome to friend me on Pownce.

Plurk:

The brand new microblogging tool is called Plurk and everybody are talking/blogging about it. It’s probably the closest thing at the moment to twitter.

The timeline is very different and takes a little getting-used-to. However when some of your friends plurk, you can respond directly to their plurks by just clicking on it.

Plurk has a clever little extra thing that might be addicting to some users. It’s called Karma. It’s a score and the more you plurk, respong to plurks and add friends, the more Karma you get.

All the big blogger people are plurking. If they like it might breakthrough. Perhaps they should have waited and launched Plurk at some big blogger conference. That’s what twitter and Friendfeed did.

Add me as a friend on Plurk.

Some might also see Friendfeed as an alternative to twitter, but honestly I haven’t really jumped on the Friendfeed bandwagon yet.

I’m still not sure what to do with Friendfeed, but I would love to know, so if you have any advice or ideas, please don’t hesitate to share.

Which tool do you see as an alternative to twitter? Will you stick with twitter or move to another microblogging service?

This is only my second video, so please be gentle.

Using summize.com I’ve gathered some of the tweets from desperate, disappointed or even angry twitterers after twitter.com’s nasty downtime last Wednesday.

Which program and on which hardware I made the video is not important, at least not now, but it’s a part of my quest for the Apple.

Of course, this could also be Robert Scoble and other twitter super users (Fake Steve Jobs calls them twittertards) fault. I doubt it though. They just need a solid backbone and some better infrastructure.

I say that without knowing what their problem is, but my guess is just as good as blaming someone else.

Anyhoo I just wanted to show you this little video I made the other day. I’ve uploaded it to Viddler and YouTube.
The song is Alana Taylor’s Twitter Song. Thank you very much for letting me use it.

It’s time for another batch of very useful links:

• Twitter.com is down a lot and the latest statistics from Pingdom confirms this. From January to April twitter has been down 37 hours and 16 minutes. That’s 18.5 minutes a day.
• Mahalo VLOG Idol continues and The Beta News favourite, Lisa Brewster is still going strong. All I (and Tyra Banks) can say is: Congratulations Lisa, you are still in the running of becoming America’s Next To….ehrrmmm…Mahalo Top Host.
• Duncan Riley, who I interviewed a few months ago, has left TechCrunch and started his own site, The Inquisitr, which features a mix of pop, tech and odd news.

I was pleasantly surprised to see The Beta News mentioned on MoMB, Museum of Modern Betas a few days ago. I’ve always been a big fan of MoMB and the work Saurier Duval puts into it.

If you are into twitter, you should check out MoMB’s top 100 popular twitter sites. Remember you can follow me on twitter.

My luck doesn’t end here though. I was even more surprised to see The Beta News mentioned on KillerStartups.com. I’m very proud of the small “review” they gave me.

This Danish born blog has some interesting tidbits. The stories aren’t framed in boring techspeak—they are accessible and conversational. The blog has an easy to navigate design, it’s neither too text or photo heavy. It also has good stories—worth a read if you’re into tech.

Thank you, thank you /bow.

They do have a couple of questions

There are a lot of tech related blogs out there. How is this one going to draw in more users?
Will it offer more user interactive features such as commenting or even ratings?

Commenting – check. You can comment on The Beta News. Did the reviewer click on one of the posts?

Ratings – Interesting idea. Will it add value to The Beta News?

Again I’m very flattered that MoMB and KillerStartups added The Beta News to their pages. I’m a huge fan of both sites and, of course, they are in my feed reader.

As some of you know (you will if you follow me on twitter), I’ve got a new job. This is my first week as team manager at Norriq.. I’m managing a team of consultants with expertise in Windows 2003, Symantec and Citrix products, Microsoft Exchange, firewall and various other infrastructure solutions.

Unfortunately I had to return my laptop to my former employer, so now I have to use my stationary PC, which is located in my office – away from the living room, wife, son, tv and so forth.

Hopefully I’ll get my hands on a MacBook Pro (somehow). I really want to try out one of those and see if they really are better than PCs.

The new job also means that I’ll be really tired when I get home, so I could really need a hand keeping me readers happy with quality posts.

So if you have something on your heart or would like to reach a larger audience, please send your guest post suggestion to me dbp (at) thebetanews.com.

Everybody is welcome as long as it’s within this blog’s topics.

Last week’s interview with the sword swinging and keyboard wearing Lisa Bettany was a huge success. Especially because of Lisa’s use of twitter, flickr and Pownce.

This week it’s Editor-in-Chief of Mashable, MindSay co-founder and ReadBurner owner Adam Ostrow’s turn to show us his desktop. Many of you probably know Adam from Mashable and MindSay (one of the oldest blogging communities), but from today we’ll also know Adam as the one of the guys, who acquired ReadBurner.

In January 2008 Alexander Marktl launched Readburner as a hobby project, but within a month is became a very popular service. So popular that it took more time than Alexander Marktl had. Luckily for ReadBurner and for us Adam Ostrow, Drew Olanoff and Eric Kerr recently bought it and is making sure the service lives on. So what is ReadBurner?

ReadBurner collects the shared items from each feed. It’s similar to Techmeme and heavily inspired RSSmeme. It has a lot of potential. If they can get the attention and coverage, it’ll beat the current FriendFeed hype. Adam, if you need my help promoting ReadBurner, you can count on me.

The interview is a little taste of what season 3 of Show Me Your Desktop will offer.

What is your background picture?

Hilary Duff. Not like Lizzie McGuire Hilary Duff, that’d be kind of sketchy. But she’s all grown up and looks amazing.

Why did you choose that picture?

In addition to being really hot, Hilary seems like a breath of fresh air compared to a lot of the celebrities out there. She’s involved in a lot of charities and actually does stuff with them like handing out meals in New Orleans after Katrina. I shouldn’t know all this, but I spend almost as much time on WeSmirch as I do TechMeme, so, I do.

If you have a personal and a work computer, which program do you use the most on your personal computer?

They are one and the same. Sadly, I’d say when I’m not working, the program I use the most is still Firefox. I spend too much time on the Web.

Which program do you use the most on your work computer?

Firefox and Trillian are tied, since they are both open all day. Within Firefox, the programs I use the most are Gmail and Google Reader. Those two are also always on.

Which web browser is your preferred browser?

Firefox 2.0. I still do use IE on occasion though for quality assurance on my various side projects. It’s amazing how different the same site can look on different browsers. Usually, it’s not pretty.

Why is it your favourite browser?

Initially, it was the tabbed browsing, but IE has that now too. It also used to run a lot faster than IE, but that advantage also seems to be fading with all of the memory leaks. I guess Firefox won me over originally with their innovations, and much like Google versus Yahoo or Ask, it would take a lot more than a few shiny new features to get me to switch. I’d need to see something truly radical and innovative.

What is your favourite program and why?

My favorite has to be Google Reader. Pulling together all of the sites you read in one location is such an amazing time saver, and of the RSS readers I’ve tried, Google Reader does the best job of it. As someone that consumes and creates news for a living, it’s absolutely the most important tool that I’ve got.

Which program is the worst?

Adobe Reader. Loading up PDFs grinds my computer to an absolute halt. Note to PR people: don’t send us PDFs!!!

Do you have any tips and tricks on how to get the most out of your computer or blog?

To get the most out of your computer, you need to constantly delete the crap you don’t use. Similar to how a messy house can create a lethargic environment, a desktop cluttered with worthless apps can be rather de-motivating.

As for getting the most of your blog, I think one of the most important things you can do is respond to as many of your commenters as possible. Not only are these people your most important readers, but if you write for a more newsy and commercial blog like Mashable, I’ve found it’s the best way for people to get to know who you are. Similar to newspapers, with the exception of a few bloggers, almost no one remembers the bylines, so even if you write for one of the big sites, it’s up to you to build your personal brand.

From a content perspective, one tip I can offer is to constantly vary the format and length of your posts. I know I can’t stand reading big blocks of text, and know most other people don’t enjoy it either. So experiment with different image placements, shorter paragraphs, and block quotes.

Thank you very much Adam and the best of luck with ReadBurner. It’s a great service and I’m certain you will succeed. Oh and if you ever need my services on Mashable…Not that I’m waiting or anything. (Updating Gmail every two minutes and redirecting Skype, IM and twitter to my cell)

In the next two weeks I’ll host the biggest contest ever on The Beta News. Actually it’s the first contest ever here, but who’s counting?!

Now the rules to participate are developed by my twisted brain, so hopefully this will be a contest unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.

The rules are fairly simple.

Option 1: Follow me on Twitter. At a random time I will announce a keyword on Twitter and the followers will have three hours to mail it to me. A random follower will then be drawn.

Option 2: Keyword in RSS-feed. Subscribe to my RSS-feed and mail the keyword to me. Send the “secret” word to contest (at) thebetanews.com.

Option 3: Blog about the contest or The Beta News content. Write a blog post about the contest, or one of the sponsors, or one of The Beta News posts (for instance one of the Show Me Your Desktop interviews) using relevant anchor text like “celebrity blogger interview, problogger interview or blogging advice”. Another example could be my post about why virtual worlds are the next Web 2.0 money maker. Anchor text examples here could be “Web 2.0 and virtual worlds”, ” webkinz and clubpenguin.com is a money maker” or something similar. Basically anchor texts are links that features keywords about the post being linked to. Remember to Stumble your post and if you think it’s really good, submit it to digg, sphinn or other sites.

Remember to post a link in a comment in the contest post. I will Stumble your post as well. I can only encourage you to Stumble other contestants posts too.
Option 4: Take a picture of your blog “HQ” or desktop. Take a picture or a small video of what your blogger HQ, desk or computer desktop looks like. Post it in a blog post and link to this post.

Each part gives you an extra chance to win the big drawing on day 14.

Complete one or more options. Each option gives you an extra chance in the final drawing. All drawings are made by random.org.

And now for the prizes:

• Lorelle VanFossen’s book “Blogging Tips – What bloggers won’t tell you about blogging” sponsored and signed by Lorelle VanFossen. You won’t find better tips and tricks about WordPress and blogging in general anywhere else. Lorelle is the blogging expert. Visit Lorelle on WordPress.
• David Airey from DavidAirey.com and Logo Design Love has kindly taken some time out of his busy schedule and is sponsoring his design expertise. David will give the winner a critique of his/hers blog with suggestions and improvements. David has been my “go-to-guy” on several blog design occasions and he was the first to refer me to Brian Gardner. His latest blog , Logo Design Love, is all about his passion for logos.
• Entrecard.com has kindly sponsored three Entrecard Featured Status – This means you get a golden border around your Entrecard for a week. Great way of getting more attention. On top of that, Entrecard also sponsor three Fast Passes. With a Fast Pass you can jump to the top of an advert request.
• One Amazon.com $100 gift card
• One Amazon.com $30 gift card
• One Amazon.de €20 gift card (to make the Euros happy)
• Two $25 in cash through PayPal
• Three The Beta News t-shirts with logo and everything

If you feel like sponsoring a prize, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

The contest starts now and ends Friday, 22 February 2008.

Good luck everybody!

PS: If you like The Beta News, please go ahead and Favorite it on Technorati.