While attending PayPal X Innovate 09 in San Francisco this week, there was a very interesting theme that PayPal presented to attendees: cash is dead.

Not really, but PayPal seems to think that cash is overrated and inefficient. At the end of the day, digital dollars should rule the world. It could not only be safer, but more convenient and very much easier to manage. “No cash? No problem, we accept PayPal too!” Now all you have to do is take out your phone and send the money to any of the many companies that will plug into PayPal’s new open API. This could be done via a text, mobile formatted site, or from inside a mobile app. On a global scale, you could make payments on the fly while you’re in another country.  No currency conversions necessary. All of that will be done for you.

Sounds neat right? But could you really see your company doing business in such a way? Share your thoughts on what you think about PayPal’s vision for the future of money.

Earlier this month I reported on Twitter’s launch of a new feature, Twitter lists. Initially this was being rolled out in testing phases, but recently more tweeters are reporting their lists have been activate on their account. Twitter lists is a new way to group your Twitter followers. You can even add people that you don’t want to follow to a Twitter list. I listed 5 effective ways to use Twitter lists to your advantage. Using Twitter lists, you can keep track of a host of people you follow on Twitter including:

• Clients
• Brands (and their Twitter accounts)
• Bloggers
• Industry Experts
• Hashtagged Events

Note: Not everyone may have Twitter Lists enabled. If you don’t, you’ll have to wait for Twitter to roll it out to your account. If so, bookmark this post for later.

Creating Public Lists for Visitors

So how do you create a list. If you want to list the people you’re following, simply head to their Twitter profile and you should see the following (see image below):

• Hit the new list icon and add anyone to an existing list or a new list on the fly.
• When creating a new list you can also do a search for Twitter users that you’d like to add.
• Once your done, your lists will appear between your saved searches and twitter trend sidebar options.

To share a list:

• Open the list you’d like to share. Double check the URL for your list. It should be in this format:

‘http://twitter.com/yourusername/list-name’

• Use a URL shortener or bookmarklet to share your lists with others.
• Or you could just do a good old copy-and-paste.

6 Resourceful Twitter Lists (Add Yours!)

Not only can you track your followers, but you can also follow the lists of your friends and others in the Twitter community. My list suggestions were only the beginning of the opportunities for you to better organize your Twitter world with lists. I’d love to hear what lists you’ve created and even the ones you’ve started following.

While, I do have private lists for work, I’ve created a few public lists and you’re more than welcome to recommend people that I should add to these list or follow them:

• Tech, Gadgets, & Mobile Twitter List
• Social Media Twitter List

I’m still updating these lists, so if you have a recommendation for me to add leave a comment on this post. In the meantime, I’ve also started following a few list creations from my followers. Lists that I’m following made by you include:

• From @Scobleizer: Tech News People Twitter List (200 People)
• From @JeffisaGeek: The Social Geeks  Twitter List (5 People)
• From @EricaJoy: Blacks In Tech Twitter List (21 People)
• From @_Antonella_: Fierce and Smart Women Twitter List (17 People)

Share Your Twitter Lists

So what’s your latest creation? Who do you find value in on Twitter? Show off your Twitter lists in the comments below!

Did you know that Twitter is beginning to filter out tweets from Twitter Search? Did you know that you can’t twitter the same tweet twice? Neither did I until read  “Recurring Tweets On Twitter Accounts Have Been Discontinued”. Joel Postman, author of Social Corp, performed a quick test that successfully verified that Twitter is filtering out recurring tweets. However, those aren’t the only type of tweets being filtered.

Tweet sent from accounts marked as spam and people who are blocked by others too often will have their tweets filtered out of Twitter Search too. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, having your tweets filtered from Twitter Search is not a good look for your social presence and people will have a hard time hearing you on the very channel they wish to connect. It’s like being on a call and you can barely hear the person on the other line. You get all this other feedback, but you never actually hear the person you want to talk to. Here are 5 ways to avoid that on Twitter:

5 Ways To Avoid Being Filtered From Twitter Search

1. Don’t broadcast your content every 10 seconds. They saw your first tweet, ok? Instead, try spacing tweets for your content over a few hours (2-3). Focus on catching a different group in a different time zone instead of attempting to brainwash people with mass tweeting. It’s a sure way to get you marked as spam.

2. Don’t get marked as spam. Self explanatory (see suggestion 1 if lost).

3. Mix up your headlines.  You can’t tweet the same tweet, but you can mix up your headlines when you’ve updated a post. Use these opportunities as a way to do a little SEO target practice . You could also crowdsource your community for the good headlines.

4. Monitor your tweets via Twitter Search. It’s up to you to make sure things are running smoothly on the front-end. Twitter’s development team can address problems more quickly, when they actually know what’s you’re getting on your end of the computer. They’re not psychics and they can’t do everything. Check your username on Twitter Search at least once a week to see if your tweets are showing up properly. Keep reading to find out how to do this.

5. Check Your Followings. They say “one bad apple, spoils the bunch”. Well, the same applies on Twitter. That’s right, you can be guilty through association. Retweeting others that are marked as spam or spam-like content are sure ways to get your account flagged. You might want to start looking at the little box in the top right corner of every Twitter profile. Yes, it’s called a Bio. Read it! Click through to websites listed in profiles with suspicious content. You might be surprised by what comes up.

Find Out If Your Profile Is Showing Up In Twitter Search

Head to Twitter search. Enter the following in the search box:  from:username, without the @ symbol. For example:

from:corvida

When you hit search, make sure that the last tweets you sent out are showing up in Twitter Search. I’d suggest opening a separate tab in your browser to compare and contrast your profile with Twitter Search results.

From Google Wave to Mozilla (the makers of Firefox) recently announcing Mozilla Raindrop, developers are looking to take all of your communication platforms and turn them into one centralized inbox stream. The future is heading towards a new inbox, full of emails, tweets, direct messages, Facebook updates and whatever else they can throw in the mix, passed through a personalized filtering system. In theory, it sounds great. However in practice, it may be the most chaotic scene of communication we ever experience.

Our inbox is already full of Facebook notifications, Twitter alerts and direct messages, follower updates, and emails from marketing, PR, friends, and family. The mixture of all of these messages already looks like a nightmare in Gmail. In turn, it’s a nightmare just to get out of your inbox and feel productive after leaving it.

• Would filtering these messages make a difference for your workload?

Relevance: What, When, and Why

Wave and Raindrop promise to highlight the messages that it thinks would be most important to you. Yet, how would these tools know what’s important to you? Importance changes on a daily, sometimes hourly basis. What was important yesterday, may be completely irrelevant today. Within mere seconds we could change our minds about the importance of personal messages over a mailing list that might generate tons of income.

Start By Filtering Your Own Actions

So is the solution filtering the messages? Or is the problem more “we’re signing up for too much”? Have you stopped to think about the myriad of ways you want to communicate with people? Why not simply stop following the noise. Turn off the alerts. Unsubscribe from mailing lists that you’re starting to delete without even reading the headlines for. Filtering isn’t enough anymore. You have to cut the noise out or prepare to forever filter the random knots of communication lines that will pipe into one huge mess…I mean tool.

What Do You Think?

We brought these overloads on ourselves and there’s no denying that. I’m happy to see developers helping as best as they can, but I can’t help thinking that tools like Wave and Raindrop won’t help us cut the noise out. Filtering is great and definitely necessary next step for social media and most communication platforms we’ll be experience in the near future. We also need to do more to keep the noise from entering into our inbox in the first place, but filtering our own actions, instead of depending on these tools to solve all of our problems.

This should keep folks talking about Microsoft a lot more after Mac Tuesday’s drooling annoucements!
        

Will Bing Replace Twitter Search?

Today, Bing will integrate Twitter and Facebook status updates into their search services. Essentially, all of your updates will be available for public consumption like never before. This has the opportunity to propel your voice into the stratosphere of new outlets. Yet, pose some privacy and security concerns all in the same breath.

If you head to http://bing.com/twitter you’ll notice a tag cloud of trending twitter topics along with shared links of the trending topics. Type in a search query get the most recent Twitter results, or sort them by Best Match by viewing more tweets for your query.

Twitter Trends On Bing
   

How Important Are Social Media Search Results?

Is social media important to search? For me, it’s become necessary for the majority of my search queries as of lately. I start off in Google with some things, and move over to Twitter. Often times, I find my questions getting answered more quickly through Twitter. How many times do you find yourself heading to search.twitter.com in a day? Now think about how many times you’ve skipped out on going to your default search engine, by using Twitter’s search?

On the other hand, there are just as many cases where Twitter is useless as opinions and rumors flood out facts. This is especially prevalent within breaking news stories. In the end, I think there’s something nice about searching for the facts on bigger news outlets, and also receiving the enlightening truth of what communities have to say about what news outlets are covering. Sometimes, they know a lot more.
    

Bing’s Twitter Search Results
      
         

8 Questions To Ask Yourself

• Would incorporating them make an overall difference in the search results you’re seeking today?
• Would it make searching easier for you? Will you get the answers you need faster via real-time updates?
• Will it truly feel personalized or will it tweets and status updates begin to look more and more like…well…search results and not people’s genuine opinions?
• Is this enough to make you start using Bing as your default search engine?
• Will this push Bing into a more real-time search engine or another aggregator?
• How important and successful will this move prove to be for Microsoft?
• Are social media properties like Twitter and Facebook big enough to move Bing above or closer to Google’s number #1 search engine ranking?

Unless you enjoyed Twitter via txt, mobile Twitter clients have only just begun their breakthrough into the masses. In early 2008, ReadWriteWeb released an article on 20 of the most popular Twitter clients surveyed from a pool of 37,000 tweets. Only one mobile Twitter client made the list: PocketTweets.

Mobile Twitter Clients Break Out

Fast forward over a year later and popular mobile Twitter clients such as UberTwitter, Tweetie for iPhone, TweetDeck for the iPhone, and Echofon are ranking higher and higher in the race to be the best Twitter client. Not too far down the list are clients such as Twitterberry and the Symbian king of Twitter, Gravity (mobile twitter client review). Other mobile clients and services are also making the cut though they aren’t solely Twitter clients like Viigo, Foursquare, and PixelPipe. This is definitely only the beginning of mobile breakthroughs, especially with Twitter clients.

Getting Value Out of Mobile Twitter Clients

They offer a ton of advantages over desktop clients:

• You’re not tied to your desktop.
• You don’t need to be at home.
• Mobile Twitter clients immediately take care of your most basic twitter needs.
• Bells and whistles (more apps and service integrations) are supported. Yes even link shortening.
• Save tweets and links to read them later.
• Less distracting. You can only stare down at your phone screen for so long before your neck cramps
• Support for numerous mobile gadgets and platforms including Blackberry, Android, Windows Mobile, and of course the iPhone.

There’s plenty of mobile twitter clients to go around. In the end, the focus is always on the best and quickest way for you to get your Twitter updates on the go.

What’s Next?

They’re part of a growing trend where desktop developers are finding the addition of a mobile service to be extremely valuable for adding new users. More clients are coming out of the wild specifically for tweeting other forms of media such as video and images. Twitpic, a popular photo-sharing service for Twitter, has their own iPhone app. Twitter users are finding mobile clients to be fun for keeping their friends updated on the weekends, and also getting their news on the go during the week.

We’re clearly going to be increasing our usage of Twitter on the go, especially at conferences where twitter hashtags are a popular way of keeping others up to date on what’s what.

• Have you started using a mobile Twitter client?
• What’s your favorite so far? What platform is it for (iPhone, Android, Blackberry)?
• How much has your mobile usage on Twitter increased since you started using a mobile client to twitter?
• Has using a mobile Twitter client become vital to your work on Twitter?

Some people find that the biggest drawbacks of social media is making a connection with millions of people with bigger problems than you.

You’re failing at social media if you don’t have faith that you can help 1 million others that have problems that you know the solution to.

I’m a huge fan of Converse sneakers, better known as Chucks or Chuck Taylors. They make  life as a conference speaker so simple. I’m always concerned about what to wear to conferences. Everyone seems to have their own sense of fashion at most events I attend. I’ve seen people wear hilarious shirts and I’ve seen others in sharp business suits in the same room.

The more I’ve traveled and spoke, the more I’ve been able to find a style I’m personally comfortable displaying at any conference. A major part of my style is Converse shoes, my official conference kicks. Here are my top 50 reasons why Converse is the best conference shoe of the year.

Comfort
  

Converse are comfortable! I’ve always wondered how they can make a shoe that looks so bare on the outside, soft and comfortable on the inside. I can walk all over SxSW with a pair of Converse and never stop for a much needed foot break. Those who’ve been to SxSW know exactly what I’m talking about.

Diverse Roots
   

If Ellen DeGeneres can rock Chucks on her show, I can definitely rock them to a conference. Converse shoes are for everyone. They look great on my grandma, they look even better on me, and they look hotter on my little sister. Their styles transcends the age-limits that are readily identifiable in most shoes, like Nike or Adidas. Created before I was born, and passed down through many generations. Talk about bridging the gap!

Customization
 

I love art and design. So, I tend to treat my fashion as an art canvas. Everything matches perfectly. My shoes match my shirt. The color of my jeans blends in with the tones of my shoes and shirt. My shades and shoes are the art pieces that cause people to stare at me 3-5 seconds longer than usual or do a double-take at my outfit. They stand out and bring a unique flare to my style. Because of this, I have a ton of colors in my closet that are really difficult to match with a great pair of shoes…except Converse. They have so many colors to choose from, you’re bound to find one that you like from the classic all-blacks to more flashy colors. Converse also offers more personalized options on-line, like customizing your own pair with your choice of colors, and even adding some text on your shoes!

Affordable
  

I currently own 10 pairs of Converse, and bring at least 3-4 pairs to any conference I attend. I have a personal goal of owning 50 of these babies. While I don’t need 50 pairs, they’re so inexpensive that I always buy 2-3 at a time. Essentially, I can get 2 pairs of Converse for less than the price of 1 pair of Air Jordans. Sounds like good math to me.

Personality
  

I love that fact that I can also design my own Converse sneaker. I can choose the colors and mix-match them as much as I like. I don’t have to go to the mall and shop for hours for something that fits the outfit I have in mind. I can simply go online and create it on the official Converse website. I’m not the only one who digs this type of flexibility either:

Simplicity Overlooked

These are just a few reasons why I love Converse shoes and how they’re a no brainer when it comes to traveling to conferences. They offer so much that it’s easy to overlook their simple solutions. They’re easy to fit in your suitcase, have a passionate fan base, and just look good! You could start your next conversation at a conference on these shoes and no one would think twice.

Do you know how pointless it to attempt to control a conversation? How do you react to people that that constantly dominate the conversation without sharing the opportunity to be heard? My sentiments exactly. With online communities, that’s not going to help you or your brand. Pushover’s aren’t appreciated.

Companies need to understand that the push for social media isn’t about just using tools to find the conversation. The platforms and tools available today allow you to actively listen to a conversation about your brand. You need to organize the thoughts, ideas, and direction your community is headed in based on the conversations you find. You don’t want to control the conversation, because you need them to help you control your brand!
  

Maybe This Will Help You Understand
  

• Actively Listening + A Product (Conversations) = A Potentially Better Product
• A Potentially Better Product (Conversations) = A Potentially Better Brand

Whether you’d like to admit or not, people are turning to the web for information more and more. I can’t remember the last time I looked at the Yellow Pages. I don’t watch TV all that often. I tell people, “Google is your friend” all the time. I’m debating switching from Google to Twitter Search. People are going to expose the companies that are lagging behind, and praise those who at the very least have their feet in the game. You can’t stop people from talking about you just by not listening. In fact, you don’t want them to stop talking. That’s almost like the death of your brand. You want the conversation!

Better Your Conversations, Better Your Brand
 

The key to maintaining a positive brand image is to actively monitor these conversations, let your customers know that you hear them, then show it!

I know when a company is actively listening to me because I can see the difference in future products or services. I might see a steady stream of updates continuously being pushed out from developers. However, these updates actually address previous problems and complaints, instead of giving me more to complain about. They’re active on Twitter or Facebook, sharing quick tips about their services and great content of interest. They know what they’re doing.
   

• Are you actively listening?
• What companies are doing a good job of actively listening?

“I left Blogalicious feeling really inspired and empowered…especially after seeing Brandi Carlile in concert with The Indigo Girls!”

In recent weeks, I made some awesomesauce new friends from the Blogalicious09 conference here in Atlanta. Woman of all races, sizes, backgrounds, and age came out seeking help and support from other women with the same goal in mind: taking your blog, as a business, to the next level.

Changing The Landscape

These women started blogging as a hobby, a way expressing themselves, and to voice their powerful thoughts and feelings. Now they’re treating their blogs less as a hobby and more as a business. They are stumbling upon doors that blogging can open. They are connecting with communities that share their common goals and interests. They’re making companies feel not only their power, but the power of their networks. Once a minority, NOW they’re very influential within their network of online and offline friends.

There are a ton of ways to connect with all of us. When we meet, we share compliments, praises, and advice. They let me know what I’m doing right, and where I can improve. They asked for my advice and insights on what they should do. Some of these women I could never connect with on Twitter in the same manner. There’s just too much noise and not enough time.

Hashtags Help

That’s not to disregard Twitter in any way. Tracking the twitter hashtag #blogalicious09, I was able to get recommendations on people I should meet, products I should look into, panels I might enjoy. I watched camaraderie between the ladies play out in person and in their digital worlds. I could see other sides of them even when we weren’t speaking.

These connections helped make my panel with Angela Benton and Leticia Barr, a powerful success for these women. We were able to inspire them, but only through keeping the lines of communication open and sharing our knowledge. By taking advantage of the multitude of connections available, were we able to not only make a connection in the physical, but continue to strengthen it without physical contact. It was an incredibly humbling experience.

Don’t disregard the multitude of connections you can have to your audience. Pay attention!