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Taweet (beta) is a unique Twitter application that adds a whole new dimension to your Twitter experience: the future. The casual format of Taweet allows users to answer one simple question: “What are you doing in the future?” …and search the future to see what others are doing.

You create posts on Taweet in the same way you would add items to a calendar or timeline. You describe a future event and add the date and time it will occur. Your post is then added to your “Future Tweets” and is visible on your Taweet profile. You can view the profile of any Twitter user on Taweet.

When a future tweet is created it also posts to Twitter, with the date included, to let your followers know you have a new event coming up. At the date and time each of your posts is scheduled they also appear on your Twitter profile. The short-URL at the end of each Twitter post links to your topic page on Taweet where others can add comments. When a comment is made it posts to the Twitter account of the commenter, again linking back to the original topic.

You can use the “Post Now” feature to override scheduling. Tweets sent with the “Post Now” feature also include a short-URL to allow all of your Twitter posts to have threaded comments.

All future tweets are visible on the Taweet search page. Taweet’s future search is novel solution for promoting future events or searching the future to see what others are doing.

Rumors earlier this week of Twitter negotiating a new round of funding at a valuation of $1 billion are confirmed today by co-founder Evan Williams on the Twitter Blog. TechCrunch reports this latest round of funding has closed with Twitter receiving $100 million.

Twitter’s previous round of funding raised $35 million in February of 2009 at a valuation of $250 million. The new figure of $1 billion quadruples Twitter’s valuation in just 7 months.

Keeping in the spirit that you have to spend money to make money, Twitter has yet to produce a viable revenue stream. We anticipate that this $100 million injection is contingent on Twitter rolling out a paid advertising platform in the very near future. It’s worth noting that Facebook received $716 million in funding before finally announcing, less than two weeks ago, the company is now cash flow positive.

Evan William thanks Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Morgan Stanley as contributing investment firms. Twitter to date has received $155 million in venture funding.

Sources: Twitter Blog, TechCrunch

If you are having trouble accessing Twitter today the service is apparently under heavy denial-of-service (DoS) attacks since around 9am EST. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone states, “We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to … investigate.”

A denial-of-service attack is characterized by an explicit attempt by attackers to prevent legitimate users of a service from accessing that service, commonly carried out by groups within the hacking community. The basic idea is to cripple servers by flooding them with more requests then they can handle.

New research shows that Twitter is gaining recognition as a useful business resource among younger demographics. A survey conducted by AIIM shows that 27% of 18-30 year olds see the value in Twitter as a crowdsourcing and feedback tool, compared to just 7% of participants over the age of 45. Twitter has become popular for young professionals as a way to find answers from experts, poll their followers, share opinions, and communicate during conferences and while traveling.

Business users tend to be more engaged on Twitter than personal users. Of those surveyed, half of business users actively post and contribute to conversations rather than just following.

“We’ve been tracking the rapid growth of Enterprise 2.0 – the business use of social media – for a couple of years,” says Atle Skjekkeland, VP of AIIM, “but Twitter has grown much faster than anything we’ve seen before. It seems to me that Twitter brings back such quick answers from any expert community that it cannot fail to have a lasting place within the general business toolbox.”

Of the 788 respondents to the AIIM survey, 34% had a Twitter account.

Source: AIIM

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is considering blocking all access to social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace from military computers. The concern is that these platforms “make it way too easy for people with bad intentions to push malicious code to unsuspecting users,” says a U.S. Strategic Command (Stratcom) source.

Price Floyd, the new Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs social media czar for the Pentagon, states that embracing these technologies is the reason Secretary of Defense Robert Gates hired him. The goal is to “enable [Gates] to engage and hear from people in a way and manner that wasn’t possible before,” says Floyd.

Despite concerns, Floyd is moving forward with several Web 2.0 projects. You can find the Pentagon Channel on Twitter @pentagonchannel and you can also become a fan of the Pentagon Channel on Facebook. Other initiatives include involving blogs in the military’s “Early Bird” clipping service and a new Department of Defense website launching this month that will include links to Facebook and Twitter accounts along with a section that will allow visitors to propose questions for the Secretary of Defense.

Source: Wired

Twitter rolls out a stylish new homepage this week and is finally promoting real-time search front and center. Up until now, when talking with friends about the true power of Twitter lying in it’s real-time search capabilities, some seemed to not fully grasp the concept. Hopefully the new design will help more users understand how it works.

“See what people are saying about…” are the instructions above the new search box, and appropriately so. Twitter allows you to search what users are tweeting about up to the second.

A search for “social media” displays the latest post from @CrystalGibson, “Social media may well be the pain reliever we have all needed-the medicine that makes advertising relevant and welcome in our lives.”

The new Twitter tagline reads, “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.”

Below the search bar we find popular topics displayed by the minute, day and week.

Viewing search.twitter.com still displays the old design but you can anticipate they will be updating that soon too.

This weekend I was glancing at the television and took in a Best Buy commercial that I know I’ve seen heard before. Obviously I wasn’t really paying attention prior because this time I noticed the Twitter URL plain as day on the screen. I’m the type of person who does more listening to the TV than watching due to the fact that my face is usually buried between two computer screens.

[Taking a minute to watch commercials one and two again on YouTube]

Now that I’ve had a chance to scrutinize the commercials I see they are acting out the Twitter reference. I “get it” because I actually use Twitter, but I can guarantee very few who have never tweeted will make the connection, even with the URL on the screen. The name Twelpforce will definitely have several people confused. If they made at least one vocal reference to Twitter during the commercial they would most likely see stronger results.

For the first time we see a major brand promoting a Twitter based service on network television commercials. Corporate websites taking a backseat to social media is a trending topic this year. Not too long ago we talked about Volkswagen promoting their Facebook fan page on their commercials.

Here is how Twelpforce works: consumers tweet a question @twelpforce or include the #twelpforce hash tag in their post and a pool of Best Buy employees can answer via any Twitter enabled device. What’s interesting is how Best Buy is generating a strong buzz around their efforts to use Twitter as a customer service platform. What’s flat out amazing is they have what are probably mostly hourly wage employees participating in customer service off the clock. @dustinbby tweets, “Having a blast helping customers with @twelpforce! Answered many questions in the last 2 days. Time flew by at my second job today.” Well at least off Best Buy’s clock.

Twitter users frequently share their thoughts in 140 characters or less, and sometimes do not think twice before posting. No worries though, the handy delete button is always available to remove remorseful tweets. Up until now most users were under the impression that deleted posts were swallowed by the black hole of cyberspace, never to be seen again. Tweleted has arrived to let us know this is simply not the case. Tweleted is an application that allows you to search by Twitter username to see what posts have been recently deleted.
 
The concept behind Tweleted is actually pretty simple due to what can be considered a loophole in the software design of Twitter. When you click delete that post is removed from your profile but still remains available via Twitter search. Tweleted simply compares Twitter search results for your username to the information displayed on your profile and returns only the tweets that do not match up.
 
Depending on your mood Tweleted offers Good and Evil modes. The default Good mode allows you to easily recover accidentally deleted posts. Evil mode promotes itself as an “instant drama generator” where you can search for embarrassing deleted tweets for fun and profit. John Mayer recently posted that “Wearing corduroy pants means having a nail file on you all the time,” however he apparently changed his mind shortly after.
 
The loophole has raised privacy concerns and sources say Twitter is working to correct this issue. For now setting your profile to private is a temporary fix if you have recently tweeted and deleted some dirty laundry.

Want a great deal? Check what your favorite brands are posting on Facebook and Twitter. Interacting with consumers through social media is becoming increasing more vital to corporate marketing strategies. The ability to globally broadcast praises and complaints about companies and brands has businesses very active on social networks.
 
“All the departments have gotten some sort of feedback from customers online. We benefit and our customers benefit,” says Amber Talbot, online public relations specialist for Scottrade. Talbot builds relationships with customers by monitoring what is being said about Scottrade online. The ability to search in real-time through Twitter allows companies to track keywords related to their brands and trademarks.
 
Starbucks spokeswoman Bridget Baker says, “It’s a great way to connect with customers. It’s where the people are.” Starbucks has almost 250,000 followers on Twitter and over 3 million fans through Facebook. This week Starbucks is giving away 800 coupons per hour for pints of ice cream to Facebook fans.
 
Scottrade and Starbucks also leverage the power of YouTube to offer customers educational and promotional videos.
 
MasterCard posts company news through Twitter, Victoria’s Secret and Gap provide original content for their Facebook fans, Zappos frequently tweets and posts specials from it’s 6pm.com discount site, and Southwest Airlines is active on the above mentioned along with Flickr and LinkedIn.
 
These are just a few examples of how social media networks are becoming important tools for businesses and consumers to communicate and interact.

Source: US News

Happy Follow Friday! Welcome to another edition of Twitter Ten on 10. If you understand what real-time is all about then you are probably already on Twitter, if not we need to have a chat. Top executives, marketers, entrepreneurs and technologists are tweeting out knowledge, ideas and news every second. If you blink you might miss it! Well, not really, you can actually search Twitter to see what is being said on pretty much any topic. So if you weren’t on Twitter at the beginning of this paragraph you better be now! Here are some influential tweeters to start following…

@kevinrose
Kevin Rose, entrepreneur, rock climber and founder of Digg

@briansolis
Brian Solis, principal of FutureWorks

@chrisbrogan
Chris Brogan, president of New Marketing Labs

@dmscott
David Meerman Scott, marketing speaker and author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR

@ginatrapani
Gina Trapani, book author, programmer, and founding editor of Lifehacker

@ijustine
Justine Ezarik, blogger, geek, internet video producer

@leeodden
Lee Odden, CEO at TopRank Online Marketing

@prsarahevans
Sarah Evans, social media freak and director of communications at Elgin Community College

@unmarketing
Scott Stratten, president of Un-Marketing.com and Jedi of viral marketing

@missrogue
Tara Hunt, author of The Whuffie Factor and owner of Citizen Space

@collabocom
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