They’re so popular on Twitter that it would take a football stadium, or several, to accommodate everyone who follows their posts.

No, they’re not Hollywood A-listers like Oprah or Ashton Kutcher, who have collected more than a million fans on the micro-blogging service.

Rather, they’re three relative unknowns from Northern California who, through tireless hobnobbing, nonstop posting and, in one case, luck, have joined a rare club: Twitter’s citizen celebrities.

All three – a business coach, a cellist and an entrepreneur – have tens of thousands of people following their musings. Depending on the perspective, the sheer numbers are a testament to Twitter’s power to connect people or simply a pointless popularity contest.

The San Francisco service’s simple allure is allowing users to post brief messages about everything from politics to the tuna sandwich they ate for lunch.

Followers are those who subscribe to, and automatically receive, another’s posts. Amassing a huge number of followers is a badge of honor for many.

Those who have gained a measure of fame say it’s a way to meet people and share ideas, although they confess that interacting with their audience can eat up hours a day.

Inspiration, gratitude and soulfulness emanate from Shannon Seek’s posts on Twitter. The business coach, professional organizer and owner of a conferencing business is a supernova of positive energy, all day, every day, in cheery messages in which she shares blessings, online hugs and cosmic harmony.

“Twitter is a place I go to raise my vibration,” said Seek, a Marin resident who has attracted more than 53,000 followers.

Seek’s journey into Twitter’s upper echelon started as an outlet while she recovered from breast cancer surgery last year. She started following others, and many would follow her in turn.

Like elsewhere, there is a big appetite on Twitter for emotional pick-me-ups. When not broadcasting optimism, Seek, 40, replies to others who send her their good karma.

“The beauty of rebirth from the phoenix inside,” Seek recently wrote in one of her occasional Twitter poems, which, like all posts on the service, is limited to 140 characters. “My faith washes over me like the tide.”

On average, Seek posts 70 times daily. Her record is about 185 times, or one every 8 minutes.

Keeping so many followers happy isn’t as easy as it may sound, Seek said. People can “unfollow” someone as quickly as they follow them, meaning the pressure is always on to be interesting.

Still, Seek said having so many followers is an honor.

“It’s a big part of saving my life and in helping me know that I have made a difference in their lives,” she said.

Put in the spotlight

If the number of followers on Twitter is any gauge, Zoe Keating is more famous than Paris Hilton, Newt Gingrich and Justin Timberlake.

The professional cellist, whose avant-garde music draws modest-size audiences, got a big break when Twitter’s staff placed her on a list of suggested people to follow. By being thrust into the spotlight, her following – numbering around 8,000 at the time – catapulted by around 5,000 daily, for more than four months, to more than 777,000.

“I wonder if it was all a grand social joke by the Twitter founders to create someone who is famous who really isn’t,” Keating said.

Although glad to have such a huge audience, she also downplayed its importance. Some new followers, she said, send ego-deflating messages asking, “who the hell are you?”

Keating, 37, posts from a shack among the redwoods near Occidental, in Sonoma County, where she composes her music. When on the road, she tweets from the tour bus (they generally have Wi-Fi connections) or from backstage.

Because of her following, Keating feels compelled to post more frequently on Twitter than she did before, usually about recording sessions and other music-related topics.

“It’s hard on a musician when 1/2 your audience isn’t allowed to attend your concert because they are under 21,” Keating recently wrote.

Whether her prominence on Twitter has translated into anything concrete is unclear. Her music sales have increased, but she’s unsure if it’s because of her online fame.

Keating said that when and if her Twitter celebrity ends, she’ll cope just fine.

“I’ll just go back to what I was before,” Keating said. “I’m not sure that I want to be too well known.”

85,000 and counting

Having more than 85,000 people follow you on Twitter helps when your dog is sprayed by a skunk, as Dave Malby can attest. He tweeted about his smelly pet, and got nearly 20 suggestions for eliminating the stench.

Malby, a serial entrepreneur from Newcastle, in the Sierra foothills east of Sacramento, is a Twitter fanatic who has drawn a huge following since signing up last year. It’s his social outlet, business-networking vehicle and personal escape (his wife suffers from Alzheimer’s).

“It can really consume you,” Malby said.

He started on Twitter to send a message to Joe the Plumber, who he thought was mistreated by the media during the presidential campaign. It grew from there, in part because of his aggressive campaign to follow others, many of whom followed him back.

“The people I’ve met on Twitter are phenomenal,” Malby said.

During the Internet boom, Malby, 54, said he made millions of dollars selling ZIP code data. More recently he started a business selling camera stands that are popular on eBay. He walks a fine line in promoting his commercial interests on Twitter, where overtly doing so is frowned upon.

In his posts, he regularly mentions an online seminar for would-be entrepreneurs (run by someone else). He also touts a separate Twitter account he uses as an online radio show for playing rock oldies.

But even with his ample following, Malby’s not satisfied.

“My goal is to reach 100,000, after that, I’ll probably back off,” he said.

About Twitter

21 million Number of users

126 Average number of followers

Should you be Twittering?

Loseitback.com was an idea I had around 7 years ago. Working as a 20 year old telecommunications engineer for Vodafone I was always dreaming up ideas for the next big thing within mobile communication. With a friend we had a side business called Evolve Creations that started out when we were 16 respectively and started doing local web design.

As we grew older and as web design got boring and competitive we moved into niche areas of the web. When the trials of WAP technology were being done in Japan (i-mode and other technologies) we decided this was the way forward, the future and almost overnight re-branded our web-design business as a WAP specialist. While my techie partner got up to speed with WAP technologies and coding, I got out on the road and began to drum up business from the corporates such as Cadbury, Rover and BT all fairly local to where we were based.

Although new technology, we managed to generate some revenue from this venture but it failed due to the poor WAP service on mobiles. We then licked our wounds and went back to web design but this time in shopping carts. While working full-time, running a small time web design house we also started work on my next vision which was ‘traffic updates’ on your mobile at that time wasn’t available. Through contacts at Vodafone we were given a few meetings to pitch our idea but we didn’t have the expertise to even write the code!

I then started working with a company that actually offered mobile phone services, so anything from accessories to insurance. This is where I got to see the amount of mobile phones that get lost each year in the UK and the cost to insurance companies. This idea sat in my head until one day I designed a small tag, almost like a strap that most people have on their digital cameras that they put their wrist through.

I then developed a basic numbering system and phone number that people would call if their mobile was found. I then wrote to a number of local insurance companies that I knew did mobile phone insurance and pretended I was a student doing some research for a project and was able to get some great facts and statistics. From this, I could clearly see how much I could save their company in payment claims by reducing the risk of loss with my labels.

I attended two meetings with two medium sized insurance companies and they really liked the idea but didn’t like the fact the finder had to call a number. After further meetings, discussions broke down to a point where I couldn’t get any further with these companies. Things got busier at work and with the web design business and this project sat in my drawer for about 18 months.

I was then on holiday in the east when I began to think about this venture again after we had just won a contract to produce an online asset register for a company. So I thought I would take my venture online so people can either call or report a found item through the website. So I then got my friend to commission me a template site and within a week I was running tests by losing various items around Birmingham. After further research of things getting lost such as keys, wallets, laptops and iPods I designed a multi-function label that could be applied to almost anything personal, valuable and small.

I then got a large run of labels printed to cut costs and then ran out of cash! I was then cut out of my web-design business because I wasn’t focusing anytime on it and again the project stalled. I attempted to get finance for the site but got nowhere, this was the times before Angels Den etc.

So in the end, nearly broke I had to cut my losses and sell the entire project. I lacked marketing experience and basic financing experience. I also think now upon reflection that it wouldn’t have been a big attraction for an investor as it can be reproduced so easily. Now there are a number of ventures out there that cater for this very niche.

I then read a very interesting article in The Independant(UK) last year about an Irish startup called YouGetItBack.com

They seem to have had better luck as the article points out:

‘After trying to fund the business themselves, Hannigan and his co-founders Paul Prendergast and William Fitzgerald (now marketing director and operations director respectively) sought funding from a business expansion programme and were invited to pitch at the Investment Club Network in January 2006. This resulted in Yougetitback.com receiving £510,000 – twice the amount they asked for on Dragon’s Den.

“These were financial directors of multi-nationals right through to farmers who heard our story and, unlike the Dragons, thought our business idea made tonnes of sense and were prepared to put a few bob behind us,” says Hannigan, who reports that the company still has 39 separate investors.

“At that time, the company was valued at £4m and it’s now worth £6.8m, so they are very happy,” he says. “The forecast is even more optimistic, with the company estimated to grow in value 20 times by 2012.”

I think now though, that this sector needs to move on and get a bit more innovative. It should look at ways you can utilise the software on the phone so missing/lost phones can be remotely disabled etc. I actually wrote to Frank Hannigan with my thoughts and ideas on this.

I thought that his stickers with a cute little doggy on were not attractive or suitable for men, or businessmen! I wouldn’t have this on my mobile. So maybe a number of different designs as well as ‘white label’ labels, so say a huge corporate can apply their logo to it like and asset tag.

I then went ahead with another idea such as LostNokia.com where Franks company could apply their existing infrastructure to a certain brand. LostNokia.com would obviously be for the Nokia brand and you could partner up with Nokia to offer these labels say in every box of the phone. I think its a move in the right direction …. what do you think?

Ian Wallis has been appointed editorial director and head of Entrepreneur TV for cmypitch.com.

His role on the soon-to-be-launched website for entrepreneurs will see Wallis conducting video interviews, as well as being responsible for the community aspects of the site.

Commenting on his new role, Wallis said: “There’s nothing like cmypitch.com out there at the moment, which brings together this particular range of business services and combines it with the latest in video and social media technology, so we’re entering uncharted territory and as a start-up will need to establish our brand.”

Wallis joins from Crimson Business where he was previously editor of Growing Business magazine and GrowingBusiness.co.uk, as well as working on Startups.co.uk and MyBusiness.co.uk as managing editor.

1. A Serial Killer’s Fingernails

   

   One of the weirdest things ever sold was a serial killer’s cut fingernails. In 1979, two men named Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris rode through southern California on a killing spree that resulted in at least five victims.

   Years later Roy Norris, the man in the mug shot above had his fingernail shavings that had been taped to the back of a Christmas card sold on the net. His fingernails only sold for $9.99 but still stand as one of the scariest and weirdest things ever sold on the internet.

2. A Person’s Soul

   

   In late 2007, an American man tried to sell his soul for $1 million dollars on the net. He said that the reason for selling his soul was to raise money for the Christmas season. He also said that the proud owner would be allowed to take the soul home in a glass jar along with a contract relinquishing ownership. The image above is a picture of the man who actually looks a little bit scary.

   The following is a quote that the man had said about his soul,” I’m not really using it lately – and selling it on the internet is better than letting the Devil have it.” The soul never sold although it doesn’t appear to be still up for grabs. FYI: In the past somebody’s soul was successfully sold for $400.

3. A Liver

   Another crazy item that was put up for sale on the net was someone’s liver, which is the body part in the picture above. A guy from Florida tried to sell part of his liver for a possible organ transplant. The price for his liver reached $5.7 million dollars before being eventually pulled from the website it was being sold on. It was removed because it is illegal to sell body parts over the internet.

4. Haunted Rubber Ducky

   

   Another very odd item sold on the internet was a haunted rubber ducky. In 2004, a man sold a so-called haunted rubber ducky, resembling the one above. He said his one and a half year old son had been telling weird and scary stories about fights that he and the duck had had. Also he said that his child had been bitten by the duck, making the child mean and vicious, and causing him to throw the duck across the room. After only 7 days on the site the rubber duck sold for the price of $107.50.

5. Jesus Toast

   

   The seller of the product in the picture above had accidentally burnt his toast in a toaster. Before throwing the piece of toast away, he suddenly noticed the face of Jesus on his toast as if by some type of miracle. He put the odd piece of toast up for auction with the starting bid of $.99, although this piece of toast never ended up selling.

6. Justin Timberlake’s French Toast

   

   In March 2000, a leftover piece of French toast, half-eaten Justin Timberlake of N*SYNC was sold on a website. The entire group of N*SYNC was on the Z-Morning Zoo, some sort of TV show, on March 9th. On the show, Justin only ate one bite of his French toast! The seller said that the buyer would get Justin’s half-eaten French toast, the fork he used, and the plate…complete with extra syrup! After a total of 40 bids and not even two days on the internet, the French toast was sold for a total of $3,154 dollars.

7. Rights to Name a Woman’s Baby

   

   In April 2005, a 33 year old woman named Melissa Heuschkel auctioned the rights to name her baby on the internet. After not being able to decide what to name her fourth child, Melissa decided to turn to an online bidding site. The rights for naming her child sold for a whopping $15,100 dollars. The online casino site named GoldenPalace.com bought the right of naming her baby. The casino website decided to name the child GoldenPalace.com. The image above is a picture of newly born GoldenPalace.com. Melissa said that the money received would go towards caring needs and toys for the new born baby.

8. Imaginary Friend

   

   Another odd thing sold on the net was a guy’s imaginary friend named Jon Malipieman. The image above is a picture of this imaginary friend Jon Malipieman, and as you can see he is imaginary. The man that sold Jon lived in the UK and said that he was selling Jon because he felt like he had grown out of him.

   In the listings for the product the seller stated the following: “My imaginary friend Jon Malipieman is getting too old for me now. I am now 27 and I feel I am growing out of him. He is very friendly. Along with him, I will send you what he likes and dislikes along with his favorite things to do and his personal self portrait.” His self portrait is the picture you see above. Amazingly Jon Malipieman got 31 bids and ended up selling for over $3,000 dollars. Now that is Wacky.

9. Ghost Cane

   

   In 2004 a so called Ghost Cane was sold on a bidding site. A woman in Indiana her dead husband’s metal walking cane up for sale in hopes that her scared grandson would think that his grandfather’s spirit would leave their house when the cane was sold.

   The image seen above is actually a picture of the dead grandfather who is to the left, along with the scared grandson who is in the ladies arms. Her six year old grandson son thought that the grandfathers’ spirit was haunting their home, causing him to be scared of everything. The cane received over 132 bids and sold for the price of $65,000 dollars. The buyers of the cane actually ended up being GoldenPalace.com.

10. Giant Cheetoh

    

    In 2003 the worlds largest Cheetoh was put up for sale. The Cheetoh weighed more then a half an ounce and was as big as a kiwi. The image above is a picture of the giant Cheetoh and as you can see it is huge. The man who discovered the Cheetoh was Mike Evans. Before the Cheetoh could be sold it was taken off line and donated to a small town as a tourist attraction. Before being taken offline, the Cheetoh had received bids of up to $180 dollars and still had days left in the auction.

George Berkowski and Steve Stokols had a brainwave last year. What if they created an online version of speed dating, but took away the sad, lonely heart, dating bit? Now, Woome.com is the latest social craze to sweep the internet.

“The site isn’t pink. There are no love hearts scattered on the homepage. This is not a dating site,” says Berkowski. “It’s just a place where people can meet, become friends and socialise.”
 
Berkowski was inspired to launch Woo Me after the runaway success of speed-dating in the UK. “It’s so efficient,” he says. “You get 30 girls and 30 guys in one room. Some will fancy each other. It’s just so easy.” But he shied away from doing a straight online version because of the heavy, “I’m looking for a life partner” perception of online dating.
 
“Online dating’s still stigmatised,” he says. “All those people going, ‘I’m single and I really want to find someone.’ I wanted to use the speed-dating model to help people meet each other. Without the rest of it.”
 
The site has been live for three months. And already Woome.com has garnered a following of some 200,000 users. The service is free, for now, but the management team is working out how best to commercialise the site.
 
“We’ve already introduced a credit system,” says Berkowski. “It’s just that at the moment credits are free. Soon we’ll introduce premium services that you will have to pay for.”
 
Despite the lack of revenue model, Woome has attracted some big-name support. Its first round of funding amounted to some £1.5m from the likes of Skype founder Niklas Zennström, Mangrove Capital, and angel investor Klaus Hommels.
 
So here’s how it works. Users sign up to the site, craft a profile, create “sessions” – group activites where other members can opt in and chat about anything from the Arctic Monkeys to their weekend’s shenanigans – and use video and audio to simulate a real-life speed-dating, with each member of a chat group given two minutes of one-on-one time with the other people in the “room”.
 
“Our unique visitors are doubling every month,” says Berkowski. “It’s taken on a life of its own. We’ve seen people dancing in sessions, playing Guitar Hero… We’re introducing a Youtube-style option to record sessions and make them public.”
 
The site’s target demographic is the highly sophisticated, tech-savvy 18-24 year-olds. People who are comfortable online and want to meet new people and share friends. Woome.com has become so addictive to some of these users that they volunteer as “interns” on the site, moderating sessions 24 hours a day.
 
Ultimately, the site is all about fun.
 
“It’s just a great way to waste time,” says Berkowski

I came across this article about a web 2.0 from back in 2007and thought what a great idea it was, but can’t seem to find out what has happened?

The story:

When Oxford student Thomas Whitfield put forward his idea in the university’s own version of the BBC’s Dragon’s Den, he hoped for nothing more than encouraging words and a slice of the £5,000 prize money.

But the judges, which included two former Internet millionaires, were so “blown away” by it they threw the weight of their £50 million investment fund behind him.

Now Mr Whitfield, 25, a PhD biochemistry student at Christ Church college, and two friends plan to turn the website, conceived during a night out drinking, into the next YouTube.

If all goes to plan it should make them multi-millionaires by the time they are 30.

The final year student and his friend Karl Heinz Toni, 25, a computer science graduate, came up with designthetime.com while drinking in the lobby of a hotel they were staying in during a residential course.

They quickly recruited a third friend Richard Schreiber, 25.

It involves creating a website featuring a virtual timeline stretching back into history and far into the future. The “online timeline” will be split into minutes, each of which can be bought by users to post memorable moments in their lives.

Users can then buy their place in history or the future.

The more you pay the more prominent your entry will be for a particular minute.

The idea is similar to the Million Dollar Homepage in which a student sold off one million pixels of a computer picture at $1 a time.

When the pixel was clicked on the person or company’s work was displayed.

Mr Whitfield, 25, who is originally from Germany, said: “We were very confident about our idea but we never thought anything like this would happen.

The prototype of the website can be viewed on www.designthetime.com but its dead! Any ideas?

As most people dabble in propertty as well as working full time, and with the current property price slump and credit crisis here is an excellent way to seek out those properties that have not only been on the market for ages but have also dropped in price:

UK startup Propertysnake, which helps buyers find properties whose priced have dropped. While the real estate downturn in the UK hasn’t been as severe as in the US, deeply discounted homes can still be found even in London’s most desirable neighbourhoods. Propertysnake makes the task of finding those homes easier. Users can search by region and by price. But Propertysnake also emphasizes the kind of information savvy realtors and property managers typically hone in on: the number of days a home’s been on the market, for example, the percentage that sellers have reduced their offering, and the number of other homes in the vicinity that have reduced their selling price.

Unlike websites maintained by real estate agencies, Propertysnake posts comments from those who’ve visited the properties. Site visitors may advise that a property’s poor state of repair or other circumstances warrant its price reduction or that the property’s discounted price needs to drop further.

It’s important to realize that sites such as Propertysnake actually benefit home sellers who need to unload their properties quickly. Before this type of information became available online, ‘fire-sale’ home prices were often known only to real estate insiders. Posting the information on the web actually adds to the number of potential buyers, which can speed sales and even lead to higher prices for sellers. The entrepreneurial lesson here is that opportunities avail themselves no matter which direction markets move. The key to success is figuring out a new and more efficient way to match buyers and sellers.

We have gone from domain names that say exactly what they do, e.g. cheaplaptops.com or asbestossurveys.com to quirky four letter names!

Andrew Frame had several criteria for the name of his Voice over Internet Protocol startup. It had to be universally pronounceable, memorable, and short—ideally, no more than four letters and two syllables. Of course, the dot-com domain name also had to be available.

There are now more than 71.1 million registered .com domains—about three times the number of domains registered using .net, .org, .info, .biz, or .us combined. Every possible two- and three-character dot-com domain name was claimed years ago, as was virtually every word in the English dictionary.

So Frame, much like an increasing number of entrepreneurs, has been playing with sounds in hopes of hitting upon a unique combination of vowels and consonants that he could turn into a brand—and a top-ranked result on Google. It’s a strategy that’s given rise to a generation of startups with monikers more Teletubbies than high-tech—Lala, Lulu, Zlio, Zoho, Ning, and Zing.

Some of these quirkily named young startups—Bebo, the social-networking site, and Etsy, the online crafts marketplace, for example—have caught on. Yet the naming trend has also drawn considerable eye-rolling among Web denizens, inspiring tongue-in-cheek pages like Web 2.0 Name Generator and the quiz “Web 2.0 or Star Wars Character?”

Now, all but about 20,000 of the available four-letter dot-com domains have been snatched up as well—many of them by speculators buoyed by the high-profile sales of generic dot-coms for prices unseen since the first bubble burst. Business.com, which for years served as a cautionary tale of investors’ irrational exuberance after selling for a reported $7.5 million in 1999, sold for $350 million in July.

Among these domain-name buyers is Steve Luo, a hardware engineer from California. Luo started buying up four-letter domains early last year after he noticed that the relative scarcity of four-letter domains meant that even random combinations like rmnd.com were selling for many times the $9 or so they cost to register. Luo now owns several thousand four-letter domains, which as of recently included peeb.com ($4,000), qurr.com ($400), and wwuw.com ($900).

Mums rely heavily on search engines for both online and offline purchases, and when coordinating travel and planning a host of other activities, according to a study unveiled by DoubleClick Performics last week, reports MarketingCharts.

“Of the nearly 1,000 moms surveyed, 89 percent use the internet at least twice per day, and 90 percent have been using it for more than seven years,” said Stuart Larkins, VP of search for DoubleClick Performics. “A whopping 86 percent of respondents said search engines are the most efficient way to find information.”

Regarding moms’ media consumption habits, the study found that…

• Respondents spend the most time with the internet and television.
• Three-quarters spend one hour or more per day using both the internet and watching television.
• 76 percent spend one hour or more per day using the internet, and 36 percent spend three or more hours per day.

Video Email is a revolutionary new way in how we communicate with one another. In our personal lives, we send out an average of 15 emails per week. In our business lives, the company as a collective group sends out hundreds if not thousands of emails.

The pre-existing emails encompass two methods to communicating: text and pictures. Studies show that the average human being only retains 10% of what we read, only 20 percent of what we see with pictures. However, the average human being retains 50% of what they see AND hear. Hence the concept of video email could be the wave of the future.

It is a new and unique way of contacting perspective clients, retaining existing clients, and rekindling relationships with past clients. The facts make sense but i don’t feel it would be appropriate for business mail??? I know certain people wouldn’t feel comfortable videoing themselves in the office!

But i think this would be excellent for personal use!