If you want to go beyond sharing text, pictures or audio on Twitter, you can not only share videos with Twitvid, but even upload from your iPhone 3GS with their new mobile application.

That’s in addition to their earlier integration into popular iPhone Twitter app Twitterfon.

Alternatively the site itself allow you to upload a video file or capture your webcam, tag people, tweet it, and also send to Youtube at the same time.

There’s also an API available.

Want to find Twitter users to follow? There are already a fair number of directories out there, but Followformation offers a slightly different approach.

Whereas Twellow, WeFollow or Just Tweet It display lists for users to explore and manually add followers, you can now select your area of interest, and automatically follow the Top 10 to Top 50 people listed on followformation.

The rankings within each area of interest, e.g. Sports, or Social Media, are all defined by follower counts, so essentially you’re just grabbing the most-followed people who have an interest in their profile.

The only people I can see getting much value from the service are new users, as it’s at least slightly more relevant than the Suggested User List.

Once upon a time, there were three prominent microblogging platforms, Twitter, Plurk and Jaiku. One became incredibly popular, one introduced a side-on view, and one was acquired and then released by the Google Fairy Godmother.

Others fell by the wayside, including Pownce, and Rejaw.

But how do they compare now, after the mainstream adoption of Twitter:

Obviously this doesn’t tell the complete story, as it tracks web visits only, but it’s safe to assume it’s proportionally correct. Twitter’s close to 25 million Unique Visitors, Plurk is holding steady between 250,000-300,000 for the past year, and Jaiku has dropped from 70,000 down to 30-40,000 for the last two months measured.

In fact, it’s not even winning the Open Source Microblogging Platform war – as Identi.ca has grown slightly while Jaiku declined.

Meanwhile, Google has listed the 46 official accounts it has on Twitter.

And in the meantime, we’ve seen the rise of Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck, internal microblogging such as Yammer,  the blend of micro and macro blogging in Tumblr and Posterous, and video and audio blogging with the likes of 12 seconds and Audioboo. Not forgetting the lifestreaming element of the likes of Friendfeed.

And although we talk about forums, blogs and Web 2.0 social networks as if they’ve reached the endpoint of their evolution, there’s still a lot more to come from them – I’d say the social elements of the web aren’t even 15% of what they’ll become in the next 10 years.

The question is how you as a person, you as a company, or you as a developer can find clarity through it all…

(There is also the question fo what Google were thinking re: Jaiku, and how it’s managing to miss out on the rise of Open Source as much as it did on the rise of microblogging – after all, the platform itself doesn’t appear to be the cause)

I’ve just logged onto Twitter to see many of the people I know are sharing messages and pictures of a fire in Dean Street, in the Soho area of London.

A quick look at the BBC and Google News doesn’t seem to show any coverage yet.

But you can see the amount of content on Twitter already by searching for #sohofire or dean street.

I’d normally be at work just around the corner in Golden Square if I wasn’t on holiday this week, so I know the area pretty well and hope everyone is OK and noone is hurt.

Dean Street, London fire by @DrPlotka via TwitPic

Technorati, the blog tracking service, has now launched Twittorati, which tracks the tweets of the Top 100 Blogs they track. Apparently the plan is to include more of the web’s ‘most influential voices’.

Oh dear.

I don’t care how influential the voices are, if they’re in subjects which are completely irrelevant to me, and if they’re all presented in a jumbled stream which I can’t filter.

Interestingly it’s based on technology provided by Muck Rack, which aggregates journalists on Twitter – which makes a little more sense, but is still far too general.

The entire point of Twitter is allowing me to filter who I read by letting me follow them. And by seeing what is influential via Trending Topics and Twitter Search.

If you’ve built a third-party application for Twitter, you’ll want to think carefully about what you call it, following the company trademarking the term ‘Tweet’.

The official response has been posted on the Twitter blog by Biz Stone, after Robin Wauters highlighted the issue over at Techcrunch. The official announcement is:

‘We have applied to trademark Tweet because it is clearly attached to Twitter from a brand perspective but we have no intention of “going after” the wonderful applications and services that use the word in their name when associated with Twitter. In fact, we encourage the use of the word Tweet. However, if we come across a confusing or damaging project, the recourse to act responsibly to protect both users and our brand is important.

Regarding the use of the word Twitter in projects, we are a bit more wary although there are some exceptions here as well. After all, Twitter is the name of our service and our company so the potential for confusion is much higher. When folks ask us about naming their application with “Twitter” we generally respond by suggesting more original branding for their project. This avoids potential confusion down the line.’

Which is interesting from a marketing point of view – Twitter has namechecked and praised some of the great apps currently using the word ‘Tweet’, including Tweetdeck for example, and suggests it may only use the trademark to go other apps which try to pass themselves of as official, for example.

Then again, ‘to tweet’ or ‘I’ve just tweeted’ suggests common usage of the word as a verb anyway. I’d be interested in hearing from any legal experts about what that would mean for any trademark cases.

And Mark Evans points out that Tweet.com is currently a site claiming to be about birds.

So if you can’t use ‘Twitter’, and might want to stay away from ‘Tweet’, what about Twit?

Well, that could cause problems as well – Robert Scoble reports that Leo LaPorte has trademarked ‘Twit’ for his longrunning TWiT TV netcast network (It stands for This Week in Tech if you didn’t know, rather than being Twitter related, and is something I recommend having a listen to…). There’s a related Friendfeed discussion going on…

So you might want to steer clear of Twitter, Tweet and Twit.

There are obviously reasons why Twitter wants to maintain some clarity between company products and 3rd party applications – particularly when they might be launching more of their own for premium users. At the same time, the constant referrals to ‘Tweet’ and ‘Twit’ have definitely helped publicity and common usage of the parent service, as has the availability of such services.

At the same time, the generic terms aren’t as well used – for instance, microblogging. Which is a bit of a shame, given 140char’s ranking for the term ‘microblogging blog‘!

Personally, I’d recommend building your own brand name – it’s a long term win but means you aren’t tied to one service or risking trademark problems. The short term benefit of going for the most common Twitter terms is likely to be waning as so many exist, and you’ll be able to carve out your own niche.

There are a number of people using Twitter to promote special offers and competitions, so it seemed a bit silly not to mention that Absolute Radio is currently offering a range of tickets throughout the summer via Twitter.

(I’m Digital Marketing Manager at Absolute Radio – which includes managing the Twitter account!)

At the moment, tickets are up for grabs for the Blur re-union gigs in Hyde Park in London on Thursday, July 2nd, so check out @absoluteradio if you fancy entering by Retweeting the specified message.

I’ve long been a fan of Mashable amongst the top tech blogs, and this comparison of the Tumblr and Posterous services goes some way to explaining why.

They combine news with good in-depth analysis of services to show what exactly you might want to use them for – and in general this article is pretty good.

It does have one major, major, major omission, though, which is so obvious as to appear almost intentional.

When Jennifer Van Grive details the autoposting options Posterous offers, she writers:

‘a single Posterous video post could auto-post to Twitter, Facebook , YouTube and Vimeo and blog sites, while photo posts could automatically add images to your Flickr, Facebook, and Picasa accounts.’

What she doesn’t make clear is that Posterous will actually autopost to Tumblr.

That’s a major advantage to Posterous, and certainly a major element for discussion in a ‘head-to-head’ comparison.

And as you can see, it’s something I’m playing around with at the moment, with my Posterous blog, and my Tumblr blog linked.

If you want to combine Twitter with a tribute to Michael Jackson, how would you do it?

In the case of the awesome Billie Tweets, you sync a video of the Jackson classic ‘Billie Jean’ with tweets that contain the individual words in the lyrics, as they play together.

BillieTweets syncs Michael Jackson's Bille Jean with individual tweets

It’s the work of coders 9Astronauts, who have also created other notable Twitter-based sites and applications, including  Blame Drew’s Cancer, lyric-identifier Lyricrat, Youtube videos mentioned on Twitter aggregator Veetweet,  and Tetris-inspired Tweetbricks.

And Billie Tweets probably sums up why Jackon’s death affected so many people. It’s not about being a huge fan – it’s about the fact that even if you liked entirely different music, the odds were that at some point you’d have heard, danced, kissed or more to one of his songs. It’s not about the songs themselves, but the fact that provided a soundtrack to the lives of so many individuals, just as Billie Tweets is providing a sountrack to so many individual Tweets. Even if I suspect it was built more because it was cool than as a statement about Jackson’s celebrity status…

It’s not just Twitter that is spawning television shows in the microblogging world, with the launch of Horsetweet, a microblogging platform for horse lovers, which accompanies U.S. reality TV show ‘Hard Reins to Hold’.

Both the site and the TV show are the work of father and daughter Matt and Loagan Fury, who run Loagan ranches, around which the TV show is based.

Horsetweet itself is on the Shout’Em platform, which allows you to ‘roll your own microblogging community’. Which means you can sign up for the site, or login with your existing Twitter or Windows Live details.

The aim is to accumulate 10,000 members on Horsetweet by the end of 2009 – could this be the start of more disaggregated microblogging for specialist areas of interest?