The Twitter API only lets you access the last  7 days of a user’s tweets. Sadly I wasn’t able to compile any of the usage statistics this past week because of 2 things: 1) the cron job I wrote to automatically import all of the data, for some reason, hasn’t been working properly (I only discovered this a couple days ago) and 2) I’m now outside of that 7 day range to compile the data manually.

For the very few of you who find this information interesting, I apologize.

From now on, I’m only going to be doing this on a monthly basis. Based on the data I’ve been collecting, a weekly analysis is too short of a time frame to compile anything meaningful. And because I’m now missing week 3′s stats, the next state of the Royal Roads Twittersphere won’t come until July 1st.

If there’s something you’d like to see in the next RR Twittersphere update, let me know so I can include it in the data collection process.

There’s going to be a ton of great ideas generated during the short 24 hour hacking period and I cannot wait to hear about them all.

If you aren’t familiar with what Annotations are, I wrote a post going over what they are here.

One of the primary concerns around Annotation is that every developer is going to have their own way of describing an Annotation, which in turn is going to make it exceedingly difficult to standardize and take advantage of Annotations. My hope is that the Annotations Explorer will address this concern and help developers come to a consensus about how the most predominant Annotations should be described. Twitter isn’t going to enforce any of these Annotation types on developers, so someone who despises the most adopted way to describe a book can still go off and do their own thing. However, I’m not entirely sure why they’d want to.

There isn’t any indication when the Annotations Explorer will be launched, but I suspect it’s going to arrive within 1-2 months.

It’s here. Twitter officially released Twitter for iPhone today and it comes with a couple new features that are going to make life on Twitter more beautiful, simple, and elegant than ever. Grab it from the iTunes Store here.

New things to love

1. Use Twitter without an having an account. This is great. You can browse trends, users, and use Twitter Search.
2. Twitter Search is made much more elegant. It includes results for top tweets and trends too.
3. Sign up for Twitter within the application. Nice little convenience add.
4. They’ve reorganized some tabs making common functions like re tweeting or following a user more accessible.
5. It’s free!

Here are some screenshots of the new application:

Woohoo! Get it now, for free!

It’s easy to talk about the ideologies that surround Twitter and business. However, in my experience, doing so without having data to support your suggestions won’t get you very far.

How do you know you need a Twitter feed? Has your digital strategist utilized Twitter Search, the Twitter API, or any number of third-party Twitter applications that offer audience profiling tools to find out if your customers are even using Twitter? Are they bringing you concrete data to supposed their recommendation to use Twitter?

If you’re note receiving this type of advice, I’d be in a big hurry to ask whoever you’ve hired to build your social media strategy to support their suggestions with data.

Thanks to @casuist, my professor, for bringing this point up in class and reminding me of its importance.