Among the Twitter users I follow regularly, there are a couple that are real innovators in the activity of building a community and interact / engage with it. Those people are definitely a strong and important core which Twitter is built on.

That said here is, in no particular order, the top five innovators and community builders who give value to my Twitter stream.

1) Jeff Pulver (@jeffpulver)

Jeff has been building communities for the past 15 years. With VON first (VoIP and IP communications), with 140 Character Conference now (everything around Twitter and people who make it worthwhile). What I love about Jeff is that he is a very powerful connector by keeping himself focused on his goals. Jeff’s Twitter stream is all about what I call “life coaching”, Twitter, 140 Character Conference and engaging with his followers. I have never seen Jeff retweeting something. Jeff is always original and never misses a reply or direct message.

2) Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan)

Chris and Jeff are very close. Chris helped Jeff with VON for a couple years as community manager and, after that, he started what quickly became a very popular blog. He also wrote “Trust Agents“, a book that quickly made Amazon’s Top 10 for 2009.

You know what? Try to find a retweet in Chris’ Twitter stream. Rare. Does this mean something? Do innovative community builders retweet less? Mmm, don’t think so, see below…

3) Robert Scoble (@scobleizer)

No introduction needed, right? Robert is a well known Silicon Valley geek, someone who speaks loud when it comes to expressing his opinion about a service, product, company, person and so on. And his voice counts a lot. I can say his voice can help a company/service grow or hit the dead pool. And a huge community follow him.

He’s much different from Jeff or Chris (I would say he is “less” entrepreneur and “more” opinion leader, despite he changes his mind very often…) and his tweeting habits are much different too. He shares a lot of stuff by retweeting and favoriting and his tweets cover thousands different topics.

4) Pete Cashmore (@mashable)

Pete is the man behind Mashable, the most famous tech blog out there. Why in this list? When a news hits Mashable, the number of retweets of that news is impressive. Pete and his crew have been geniuses in leveraging Twitter at its best and building a strong community around Mashable. His tweetings habits are all around Mashable and news sharing. Didn’t expect this, right?

5) Kim Sherrell (@kim)

Kim is definitely the jolly of this list. I came across Kim through Twitter and I immediately started enjoying her activity on Twitter. Unlike the four guys above, I never met her personally, but I look forward to catching during my next visit to US. She built a very solid community on Twitter and I learnt a lot from her. Definitely worth following!

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Currently my company is focused on the growing business around our main service Sitofono, despite we keep investing in other new innovative services around Twitter. Tweefind, Tweepfind, Tweefight, Tweerank and Tweedeogame are five services we invested in and launched during the past few months.

For the reasons above, we decided to look for a solid entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley who would like to go ahead with all the activities around our twitter search engine Tweefind. This is a serious opportunity for any entrepreneur looking for the next venture who resides in Silicon Valley and wants to leverage all the experience made with other services he/she successfully led to success.

Details follow. Please drop me a line if interested or if you know someone potentially interested in this opportunity.

TITLE:                                     Entrepreneur

COMPANY:                           Tweefind Inc. (to be incorporated)

REPORTS TO:                      Abbeynet CEO

Abbeynet, a ten years old company based in Italy, deeply involved in the field of VoIP, IP Communications and Social Media, is looking for an aggressive and motivated entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley to take one of its Twitter-based service, the rank-based twitter search engine Tweefind.com, and bring it to the next level.

Introduction: Tweefind is a Twitter search engine, launched on April ’09, that lets users search Twitter and display realtime results based on a rank assigned to any Twitter user. This rank is updated daily and takes into account up to 28 parameters.

You can find more info about the Tweerank at the following link:

http://www.tweerank.com.

The higher is the rank assigned to a Twitter user, the more his/her tweet is likely to be shown on the results page for a given search term. Results are updated in realtime, so if a new result from a higher ranked user is discovered, it will show up in the page, replacing a lower ranked one.

Tweefind also offers aggregated results coming from other relevant sources, like the most popular blogs like TechCrunch, Mashable and others, search engines like Google/Bing, video services like YouTube and it also shows the highest ranked users whose Twitter bio includes that search keyword.

Tweefind also searches for the shortened urls appearing in the tweets shown in the results page and shows, through the popular service Tweetmeme, the ones that got retweeted the most. A Wordpress plugin and various types of widgets are included, too.

For more information about Tweefind, take a look at the following presentation on Slideshare: Tweefind.

Mashable on Tweefind: http://mashable.com/2009/04/06/tweefind-applies-google-magic-to-twitter-search/

Overall Responsibility: The main responsibility is to start and successfully finalize a funding process for Tweefind, grow its user base through viral marketing and strategic agreements and lead it towards a successful exit. The candidate should take the role of CEO as soon as the funding process is completed.

Primary Interactions: A continuous interaction with Abbeynet’s CEO is required, through periodic briefings.

What Abbeynet Offers: This is an entrepreneurial role. If you are looking for a “normal” job, this is NOT for you. We are looking for someone who can consider Tweefind as a service created by him/her, in order to lead it towards a successful growth.

Abbeynet will offer a very compelling package of Tweefind’s stocks upon the appointment of the role and another significant percentage as soon as the US-based company is created after successful funding.

Abbeynet will also sustain all the costs involved in the continuous development of the service, by adding new features, bug fixing, third party apps integration and anything needed to the successful growth of the service. The development team will be at complete disposal of the person who will take this position.

Qualifications & Requirements: proven experience within a “web 2.0” Silicon Valley startup, with a proven successful track record in funding and leading an innovative internet startup. Deep knowledge of social media and Twitter in particular are a must.

If you believe this would be a great opportunity for you, please e-mail your resume to: luca@abbeynet.com or ping Luca Filigheddu on Twitter (http://twitter.com/filos). People coming to me through my network of contacts and friends in Silicon Valley are preferred.

Image via Wikipedia

I know this post will upset many of my French readers and maybe some of my French friends, but I wanted to share this point of view in order to better understand if I’m doing something wrong.

The “issue” is this one: anytime, I repeat, ANYTIME my company deals with a French prospect, we always get into problems. The main problem is that, unlike any other client/prospect, French ones usually tend NOT to believe that my company can deliver what it promises.

You can understand that the premises are not good. The first task is long and painful and it is to make them comfortable that everything will be fine and will work great, as other THOUSANDS customers can confirm and guarantee. The point is that the only case histories they trust in MUST be French!

You can keep showing them this or that successful case, but if those are not French, the value given is close to zero.

Ok, now you know the problem. I’m ending up choosing not to accept French customers/prospects anymore. Or, at least, we will charge them 30% more because of the additional, painful, stressful activity involved in the sale process.

Any help? Is the world champion soccer final Italy vs France one of the issues?

Despite I’m far from being a web developer neither a designer, I love adding new stuff that can make my blog look cool. That being said, I will show you 5 things I added to my blog very easily thanks to the power of the Thesis wordpress theme.

Always-on Social Links

Bloggers use to place the icons linked to their social profiles in the sidebar or in the header. What I don’t like in this approach is that as soon as someone scrolls down to read other articles of your blog, those links will not be accessible anymore.

A very straightforward solution is to make them, let’s say, “always-on“, by inserting them on the left or right side of your blog, making their position fixed.

With Thesis, you can easily do that by using the hook thesis_hook_before_header, adding the following code (for Facebook and Twitter) to your custom_functions.php (replace USERNAME with your usernames on FB and twitter).

The styling is provided in your custom.css file:

.custom #feedback { background: transparent; width: 6.4em; position: fixed; top: 8%; left: 0.25%; }
.custom #feedback a { display: block; text-indent: 24px; height: 3.2em; }
.custom #feedback #twitter { background: url('images/twittericon.png') no-repeat 0 -3.2em; }
.custom #feedback #twitter:hover { background-position: 0 0; }
.custom #feedback #facebook { background: url('images/facebookicon.png') no-repeat 0 -3.2em; }
.custom #feedback #facebook:hover {background-position: 0 0; }

It is clear that you need the PNG icons to be used as the background, that contains both the normal and ‘on hover’ state. You can easily download them by right-clicking on this page.

Feeburner Count

I hate the Feedburner chicklet. I used it on my blog for a while, but I now wanted to make it much better. That said, I decided to display it just over the RSS icon on the right.

It is very easy. The icon is similar to those used above for Facebook and Twitter, and also includes the red “area” to host the number of readers.

To get the number of readers, a call to the Feedburner API is necessary. My blog is using the new Google servers, so this function may not work in case your feed is still on the old feedburner servers.

function feedcount(){

	// We get the data with Curl
	$url	= "https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=lucafilighedducom";
        $ch 	= curl_init();
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
        $data = curl_exec($ch);
        curl_close($ch);
        if ($data) {
	  preg_match('/circulation=\"([0-9]+)\"/',$data, $matches);
	  if ($matches[1] != 0)
	   $fb['count'] = $matches[1];
	   $fb['lastcheck'] = mktime();
	   update_option("feedburnersubscribecount",$fb);}

	return $fb['count'];
 }

At this point, you just need to display it properly. Here is the CSS:

.custom #feedback #rss_icon { background: url('images/rssicon.png') no-repeat 0 -3.2em; color:#FFFFFF; font-weight: bold; font-family: tahoma; line-height: 2.0em;

And here is the html code (that you can put inside the function SocialIcons above):

<a href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/YOURFEEDBURNERID" id="rss_icon"><?php echo feedcount(); ?></a>

Here is the final result (I also added LinkedIn and the email subscription option):

Big Header

Graphical header or not? Well, I always preferred using a text header, without any specific graphic customization. But I also used to have a nice header a few months ago with a nice cup of coffee

Anyway, this time I wanted to make it more attractive and colorful and that above is the result. Do you like it?

Adding a graphic header is very easy, and you just need to add the following code to your custom.css file.

.custom #header { height: 129px; position: relative; border-bottom: 1px dotted #cecece; border-top: 0px dotted #cecece; background: url('images/YOURHEADER.png');}

To get the best results, make sure that the “height” specified reflects the actual height of your image.

Colorful Sidebar

Bored by the standard Thesis sidebars? I finally decided to switch to one sidebar only, less crowded in my opinion. Then I liked the idea to have the “highlight” color for the various options and the sidebar widget title color alike. How do you achieve this?

It’s pretty easy. Put the widgets in your sidebar (if not there already) then open your site and right click inside the site to get the source code. Then search for “widget”. At this point you should be able to identify the widgets you have in your sidebar. Each of them is identified by an “id”. Take note of the ids of those you want to tweak.

That said, to obtain the same effect in my sidebar, just open your custom.css and add this code (this is for my widget with id “popular-posts”, yours will be different):

.custom li#text-4 h3 {background-color: #FFD0FF; border-bottom: 2px solid #943c8b;}
.custom li#text-4 a {padding: 0 0 0 0;}
.custom li#text-4 a:hover {background-color: #FFD0FF; border-bottom: 1px solid #943c8b; border-top: 1px solid #943c8b;

.custom li.widget_popular_posts h3 {background-color: #c2f5d2; border-bottom: 2px solid #589665;}

.custom li.widget_popular_posts a:hover {color: #589665; background-color: #c2f5d2; border-top: 1px solid #589665; border-bottom: 1px solid #589665;}

.custom li.widget_popular_posts a {color: #589665; border-bottom: 1px dotted #589665;}

Here is the result, where the color hex code #589665 is a green one (#c2f5d2 is a darker green used for the bottom of the widget’s title):

Retweet Button

If you want to get more chances to make people share your posts on Twitter, a re-tweet button is a must-have. The most famous solution easily available is Tweetmeme. While I love it and used it for a while, I came accross another solution that, unlike Tweetmeme, shows the actual views of your posts through Twitter rather than the number of re-tweets only.

Installing it is very easy. I recommend to put it besides the post title instead of the bottom.

You can follow the instructions provided at this page, but I would rather use this very useful plugin that does all the job.

Not-Invasive Navigation Menu

The default Thesis navigation tabs are on top. Honestly, if you perform some tests with a big graphical header like mine, those tabs don’t look that great. I found a solution by moving them to top of the main sidebar. I love the result, less invasive, but clear.

How to do this? Just add the following lines to your custom_functions.php:

remove_action('thesis_hook_before_header', 'thesis_nav_menu');
add_action('thesis_hook_before_sidebars', 'thesis_nav_menu');

BONUS

If you have a Mac and you want to make all the changes described above (and more) as easy as possible, I recommend to get Espresso.

Espresso is the best tool to handle CSS, PHP and HTML files, and it also provides the “upload on save” feature that lets you upload a new version of the files you are modifying just after you save them through a powerful integrated FTP client. No better similar app for Mac, trust me.

Conclusion

I really hope this brief tutorial will help you to get the most out of your Thesis-based Wordpress blog. Thesis is a wonderful and powerful theme/CMS for Wordpress, despite it is supplied with a very basic (but nice) layout. If you want to make your blog stand out of the crowd, you can apply these or other tweaks and it will look, no doubt, awesome and professional.

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Well, this new watch that you can pre-order for $149 is the new geeky tool that any BlackBerry user should have. InPulse, this is the name, basically offers a great OLED display where you can see the preview of your email messages, bb IM, call logs and much more that get pushed to your watch via bluetooth. And if you are receiving a call, the watch vibrates and shows you the caller ID!

You can find a complete list of features here.

The idea is pretty amazing despite you should use it carefully. BlackBerry users are, most of the time, addicted BlackBerry users, so this watch can’t but make this “status” even worse. You are advised.

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More or less it is the same problem you have with GMail, with the difference that there are lots of Gmail notifiers for Mac, including the one coming from Google itself.

All that said, if you search Google for a Twitter notifier, you will quickly find out that nothing is available. All you can do is using a desktop app like Tweetie, that includes Growl notifications.

Well, here is an easy solution that could make you happy.

1) Download RSS Menu

2) Get the RSS feed of the twitter search for “@yourusername” (try that search on Twitter’s web page then look at the bottom right side)

3) Add it to RSS Menu

4) Configure RSS menu to show Growl notifications for new items for that search

That’s all, you just created a simple Growl notifier for your Twitter replies. Alternatively, you can also use Tweetie for Mac or other alternative clients and make them run in background

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Now, let’s say I retweet an interesting message from a twitter user just because I find it interesting and want to share it with my followers. Many people tend to send a “thank you” tweet because of this. While it is fair and I can’t but appreciate that, those “thank you” add noise to the already noisy twitter stream and can be source of distraction. Those “thank you” get my attention since I see there are new “@” to check but don’t really add much value to me.

In certain cases, if the retweet involves more users, the risk is to see your stream filled with lots of reciprocal “thank you”. Not good, right?

All that said, I just wanted to suggest three alternative ways to thank someone without adding more noise but, on the contrary, adding value for the person you are saying “thank you” to.

Retweet

The best way to say thank you for a retweet you get from someone, is to check that user’s timeline and retweet one of his tweets you think could be interesting for your followers. Easy right?

Post a link to his/her blog

If you see the user you got the retweet from is a blogger, what about posting a link to one of his/her post on Twitter? As a blogger, I can assure you this would be much appreciated and 100x more valuable than a “thank you”.

Recommendation

Another great way to say “thank you” is to recommend that user to your followers. The best way to to that is through MrTweet. MrTweet is a service that lets you find the best Twitter users who could be interesting for you and a recommendation given through it is definitely a great gift for any Twitter user. Don’t forget to let MrTweet send a tweet about it, so your new friend will be aware of your recommendation.

In conclusion, the three easy methods described above will definitely please your Twitter followers who retweet your content a lot and will make them so happy that they would love to say “thank you” to you. Make sure they read this post then, so retweet it now!

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Now, after the acquisition by Facebook a few months ago, many are reporting that FriendFeed is dead. I can’t agree more. The point, IMHO, is that it never really took off and it ended up becoming the next Jaiku, acquired by a big name to be taken out of the game.

Can someone tell me three main values brought by FriendFeed? From the technological point of view, there is nothing that Facebook couldn’t really implement. Moreover, most social networks can now easily link to Twitter, so I’m able to easily re-create my FriendFeed stream both on Twitter or Facebook… so what?

If you look at the September data (not shown above) you will see there is a huge drop, also due to the fact some power users like Robert Scoble or Louis Grey started using it less and less.

That said, what’s next for FriendFeed? I don’t think it will keep being a standalone service like it is now, but I guess it will be somewhat integrated to give more power to the Facebook realtime feed. The only thing that it is clear for everyone is that it has been a very big deal for the founders and investors, since $50M is a lot of money for a service that was basically going nowhere.

The receipt that led to such result? Silicon Valley + Opnion Leaders that use it and spread the word about it + founders coming from Google or other big companies. Do you agree?

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What many of you maybe don’t know is that there is a very powerful web analytics suite that is just waiting for you, ShinyStat.

ShinyStat is the pioneer of web analytics, having been founded back in 1995. Yes, I’m not wrong, I wrote 1995. This means that the product they currently offer is made thanks to the huge experience they gained in the past 14 years, starting when Google didn’t exist yet.

ShinyStat offer a comprehensive range of web analytics suites to over 255.000 websites, mostly in Italy (they are italian, like me), despite their product is international and fully available in multiple languages.

Their offering is made of four main packages:

- ShinyStat Free
- ShinyStat Pro
- ShinyStat Business
- ShinyStat ISP

The first one is free and limited to up to 1000 pageviews/day, but I know for sure they are removing this limit very soon.

The other two, Pro and Business, offer an impressive set of features, including a realtime monitoring of what’s happening on your website, with detailed information on referrers, campaigns performances, and much more. You can take a look at the online demo of the business suite at this link.

The last one is aimed to Internet Service Providers, letting them track a huge number of websites at the same time, with the ability to re-sell the service to them. Not bad, right?

Whether you own a personal blog or a popular online magazine, if you are looking for a professional Web Analytics suite, ShinyStat is a one-stop-shopping choice. After having installed it on my blog, I can’t remember the last time I had a look at Google Analytics…

What do you think? Please leave your comments, happy to share your opinion with the founders.

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Yesterday I just got my invitation to test the Chrome version and I can say it works like a charm. You just need to install the extension and open http://www.feedly.com/home. In case you are not logged into your Google account, you just have to login in order to start using feedly.

I can’t share the link to the Chrome extension, since the guys at Feedly asked us who are testing it not to do that (and you can understand why), but you can try to get one by leaving a comment to their blog post announcing it.

With Feedly for Chrome, now I can finally switch to Google Chrome on my Mac without looking back.