So, how do you make money on Twitter? Mostly it involves making a sponsored tweet – yes, you get paid for a tweet. How do you get paid? Well, you sign up with services which allow you to do that. There are tons of these services. Some are of course fraudulent, and others are not so well paying. I tried my hand at this, and shortlisted this to three services which seem promising (one of which has already paid me twice). Below are short and sweet reviews of these three services, as I see them.

The first one (and the one I doubt the most) is called Magpie. My observations for this service are:

• It auto-tweets to your account – set it, forget it. Although, you can set it for pre-approval so that you go and approve each tweet, but you can also set it for auto-approval.
• It allows pay-per-tweet model. So, you actually get paid per tweet.
• The drawback is that you can only cash out once you reach $50.

With Magpie, in less than a month, I have already accumulated $5.09 (as of this post), and it has tweeted out about 22 tweets for this amount. That is a good amount of earning. However, the moment of truth only comes in if you get paid. There are reports of people who have gotten paid, and there are reports of people who said that Magpie declared their Twitter accounts as violating terms, and so cancelled their payments. So, I don’t know what would happen with my account. I don’t think I am violating their terms of service, so let’s see.

The second one (and the one I don’t doubt as much, since its by a company which is well known). It’s called SponsoredTweets, by a company called Izea.Here are my observations on this service:

• It works just as some of the other Izea services work – you get invited to opportunities (I got about 4 invites in the last month). If you don’t respond to the opportunity, then it can expire. So it does not auto-approve for you. Once you accept an opportunity (you can negotiate the tweet price), you write your tweet, and then wait for advertiser approval. Once the advertiser approves, SponsoredTweets tweets out the tweet you wrote on your behalf automatically.
• It is a pay-per-tweet model.
• You can only cash out once you reach $50.
• The good thing is that you can set your own price. So, if you have a lot of followers, you can charge a higher price per tweet.

In 4 tweets, I have accumulated $1.95 in my account. The good thing is that I am certain, that i will get a payout whenever I make it to $50. Izea has a very good track record of payment (and I have been paid by them before while using PayPerPost and SocialSpark).

The final one and the one that is the best so far is called MyLikes. This is a very new company on the scene, but they are great. They have an overall StumbleUpon like model (not entirely) where you can basically create a ‘like’ for anything in the world. And that is what you do on the site. I love to spend time on it. However, part of the model is that you can create “Sponsored Likes” which you can then tweet out to Twitter, and then get paid for it. Here are my observations:

• It is a pay-per-click model, primarily. So every sponsored like has a link, and you get paid for the number of clicks that link generates. They do have a pay-per-tweet, but you hardly every see campaigns which are pay-per-tweet.
• It only allows you to send one sponsored tweet every day.
• It pays you weekly – yes weekly, every Friday.
• The minimum payout is $2. Yes that is two dollars.

In the last month, I have been paid twice, with the third payment expected this weekend. Below is a screenshot from my PayPal account showing one of the payments from MyLikes. In total, I have made a little over $12 from MyLikes so far.

So, as you can see, it is not a bad service to be used.

There are many other our there, but I have decided to stay with these three. Between them, I get a maximum of 2-4 paid tweets in a day, and that helps me keep the paid content to a relatively low percentage, since I send out about 20-30 tweets a day on average. If you are going to check any of the services out, I request you to use the above links since they contain referral information which helps me out, and it doesn’t harm you any.

Also, if you would like to follow me on Twitter, then click here.

Update (Jun 21, 2010): Well, I have been into these services a bit longer now. I thought I would update this article a little. Of the three services I have reviewed above:

• MyLikes continues to excel. I have gotten a payment from them every week. Once again, you can sign up with them by clicking here.
• SponsoredTweets continues to accrue money for me. After a certain while, I got access to Pay-Per-Click as well. There are always some opportunities available. I tend to use the PayPerTweet opportunities more, though those are not available as often. To sign up, you can click here.
• Magpie has been a disappointment. I have not received a tweet from them in over 12 days. I have a little under $15 just sitting there which I can’t withdraw till I reach $50. I will update this post if this situation changes, but I am not keeping my hopes too high.

Aside from the two above, I finally decided to try out another service called RevTwt. I have only tweeted from it twice so far (again trying to keep sponsored content to a minimum in my stream). But, they always have a fairly large inventory of ads to tweet from. I have heard a lot about them, so I am going to keep my hopes up for this system.

But, Twitter is not only about getting followers. Its also about following interesting people. Which is why there are many services which adopt a community building approach to Twitter. One such service is Twiends. As you can see, the name is a take on Twitter + Friends. What this service allows you to do is to list yourself on its page, and through the listing others can check you out. Every time someone follows you, it cost you credits. You choose how many credits you are willing to spend per follow (a higher number places you higher in the listing).

To earn credits you can either buy them. Or earn them. Earning requires that you also follow people who are listed and check them out. They may have something interesting to say which would cause you to follow them infinitely. And this is the community building part. They monitor whether you are abusing the system by following indiscriminately to earn credits, and simply unfollowing later. If you do this, then you get banned. So, play nice.

Head over, and check the service out. It really is something interesting. (And by the way, if you post an article like this one about their service, you get a nice little bonus of 100 credits. I am off to claim mine).

As you can see in the image, you can set a location for where you are, and see what the people there are talking about. I am guessing that Twitter will use the geolocation information for finding out which tweets are coming from where.

You have to set your location for this to work. However, you are going to be disappointed if you do not live in either Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Mexico, UK, or the USA. Because these are the only countries for which local trends are supported right now. You can also further fine tune the local trends if you live in any of the 15 cities that are supported right now. A long way to go, but I am guessing now that the basic functionality is up, its just a matter of adding support for newer locations. Anyway, even now, you can see what people in Chicago are talking about, and whether its the same as what people in Atlanta are tweeting.

Nice going, Twitter.

Twitter is the hottest thing on the Internet right now, and rightly so. I blog less and tweet more. Its just so much easier to do it. TechCrunch found a picture describing Twitter’s history. Here’s what it looks like:

Not too many words are needed for this post (a picture is worth… ). Also click on the image to go to the TechCrunch article.

Here’s a screen-shot of the phishing site (for the record, my Chrome browser warned me (as did Firefox) when I went to this site that its a phising site). Notice the URL. That is the reason why you should simply type the URL in the browser yourself, because then you are sure that you are going to the right place.

The twitter blog warns you of this phishing attempt at this link. Make sure that you visit the link as it talks also in general about phishing and what it is all about. If you are not aware of what phishing is then you are already in trouble on the Internet.

Plurk is a new service which at its basic level does the same thing that Twitter does: it allows you to chronicle your life 140 characters at a time. This is where the similarities end, however.

Here’s what is different about Plurk:

• The Logo – what’s up with this logo? I have no idea, but it’s certainly different.
• The UI – big difference. Plurk allows you to get a graphical timeline view of the plurks that you make and those of people you are following. Take a look:

• Karma – there is concept of Karma which you gain on the basis of the Plurk activity that you and your friends do. This Karma is used to unlock features on the website (such as use of some emoticons for your Plurks).

Overall, the UI feels fresh(er). It’s new. Let’s see if it even catches a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of popularity that Twitter has.

First Place:

“Time travel works!” the note read. “However you can only travel to the past and one-way.” I recognized my own handwriting and felt a chill.

Second Place:

Tony was a snitch, so I wasn’t surprised when his torso turned up in the river. What did surprise me, though, was where they found his head.

Third Place:

When Gibson hit that homerun in the fall of eighty-eight, my old man had never been so happy. He hugged me for the first time. I was eleven.

Visit the results page to see details on who the winners were as well as the prizes they got.

And if you have the appetite for this sort of a thing, visit Smithereens to see a compilation of all submissions (331 of them – you will need to scroll to the bottom of this post to get a look at them).

Asp.net MVC framework rocks.  I wanted to play with it more and decided why not build an open source twitter.

So he did, and came up with Yonkly: built entirely on Asp.Net and is going to be entirely open source. It has all the features that Yonkly has and then some more. It has built-in a lot of features that Twitter didn’t have to begin with and depended on third party software to create.

Here’s a quick peek at some of the features:

• Built-in Url Shortening
• Integration with Gravatar
• Conversation Threads
• Message Deletes

Emad put together this and other features in less than a week’s worth of effort (is that because of the developer or the development platform, I wonder). He has plenty of other features planned, which he will add based on what sort of involvement he gets from the open source community.

Head over the Emad’s blog to read more about Yonkly.

Although I am certain that the idea is not to be a contender for Twitter at this stage, but then good things have a way of becoming big all on their own on the Internet.

Kunal has written this simple plugin for Windows Live Messenger which does one thing and does it well. It lets you update your status from anywhere, because this plugin simply displays your latest tweet. And since you can tweet from almost anywhere, by extension you can update your status from anywhere.

I don’t use Live Messenger too much, so I can’t comment on how useful this has been for me, but if it has lit up anyone’s lives, please leave comments.