Facebook may be in the middle of negotiating a deal to acquire the check-in service Hot Potato, but that didn’t stop most employees from stopping by the cafeteria at the headquarters in Palo Alto today to see hip hop artist Kanye West freestyle.

West, dressed in a suit, appears to be standing on a table as his lets loose. First, he raps a bit about getting laid. But then, cheered on by the crowd, he comes back to freestyle about a number of others things — and if you listen closely, you can even hear him diss Facebook rival Twitter (I’m not even sure those in the audience picked up on it).

You may recall that early last year, West was mad as hell at Twitter — and blogged about it. Clearly, he’s a Facebook guy.

[thanks Jason for the pic and Joe for the vid]

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An interesting post just went up on the Twitter Engineering blog. Usually, that blog contains posts that are more interesting to developers working on Twitter’s platform. And this post is that as well, but it also states two much larger things. First, Twitter won’t be using the Cassandra database system to store tweets. Second, Cassandra will be used for Twitter’s realtime analytics product. The one they haven’t officially announced yet.

It’s been believed for some time that analytics would eventually be a part of Twitter’s monetization strategy, but they’ve never said much about it beyond vague statements about it being one potential idea. ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick dug up some evidence that it would be launching soon (which we also believe to be the case) two days ago. And in this post tonight, Twitter’s Ryan King writes the following, “Our analytics, operations and infrastructure teams are working on a system that uses cassandra for large-scale real time analytics for use both internally and externally.”

Yep, large-scale realtime analytics — externally.

But the bigger news may be the shift Twitter is making in the way it had stated it would be storing tweets. Previously, Twitter was intending to use this Cassandra system for tweet storage (dumping MySQL in favor of it), but that’s not going to be the case anymore — at least for now. “This is a change in strategy,” King notes. He goes on, “Instead we’re going to continue to maintain our existing Mysql-based storage. We believe that this isn’t the time to make large scale migration to a new technology.“

I’m assuming the time isn’t right for the migration because Twitter has been dealing with uptime issues as they face levels of traffic that they’ve never seen before (thanks in part to the World Cup — which ends on Sunday). We have a query into Twitter about that.

Cassandra is an open source Apache project to create a “highly scalable second generation distributed database.” It was originally open-sourced by Facebook back in 2008. King notes that the system will continued to be a key part of many of Twitter’s newer large scale projects, such as their geolocation places database, data mining for data used in top tweets and trends, and the aforementioned analytics. “We’re investing in Cassandra every day. It’ll be with us for a long time and our usage of it will only grow,” he concludes.

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It’s already fairly impossible to escape hearing about basketball star LeBron James these days. It seems that no matter what TV channel you put on, what website you read, or what social media site you’re on, talk of him is rampant as the world awaits his decision on which team he’ll sign with. That’s why it’s a little odd that the NBA decided they needed to pay Twitter to promote James a bit more. Yes, he’s the latest Promoted Trending Topic on the service.

If you look at the right hand column on twitter.com, you’ll see LeBron James’ name at the bottom of the Trending Topics section highlighted by a big yellow “Promoted” icon. At first, I thought James himself may be paying for the promotion (which would be kind of funny in the ultimate vanity kind of way), or that perhaps his main sponsor Nike was doing it. But no, it’s actually the NBA itself which is paying Twitter to promote James’ name — as you can see when you hover over his name.

So why on Earth is the NBA paying to promote just one player? Well, if you click on the topic, you’ll see the tweet they’re also paying for along the top. “For all your LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh and other NBA Free Agency updates check out Decision 2010 on NBA.com” which is then followed by a link to nba.com.

It’s actually a pretty savvy move by the NBA. Had they just promoted something like “NBA Free Agency,” I doubt as many people would click on the trending topic (and subsequent link). But LeBron James draws crowds both in real life and virtually. So the NBA is piggybacking off of the name of their biggest star. Smart.

Promoted Trending Topics are the latest Twitter money-making idea being tested out. They began appearing last month, when Disney/Pixar promoted Toy Story 3.

Humorously, the NBA has also managed to get upstaged in the promoted tweet arena by popular Twitter user Conan O’Brien. He currently has a top tweet (meaning it has been retweeted a ton of times) under the “LeBron James” topic that reads, “I don’t care where LeBron James ends up… As long as it’s not at 11pm on TBS.”

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As brands and businesses flock to Twitter and Facebook, they are looking for ways to engage with consumers. Businesses are using coupons, personalized messages and more on social networks as tools to connect with prospective and current customers. Offerpop is entering the arena, offering a social marketing platform to help businesses create, run and measure campaigns on Twitter and Facebook.

The application is designed to be easy-to-use, with no coding or training required. Offerpop offers marketers a number of different apps to engage with consumers. The New follower app makes it easy for businesses to automatically send a welcome message or a special offer
to new followers. For example, you could send a special offer as a “thank you” to people who
respond to a “follow us on Twitter” program.

Another app, Offers, allows marketers to create branded landing pages with flash Groupon-like sales to potential customers. And Offerpop allows users to run “for-followers-only” promotions (such as a “private sale”) on Twitter, or follower engagement campaigns where promotions are only valid if at least 50 people retweet the offer.

There’s no doubt that these types of campaigns are becoming a necessary strategy for businesses to adopt on their crusade to use Facebook and Twitter. But Offerpop will face a number of worthy competitors that are already helping brands do this, including Wildfire.

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www.marketingprofessor.com This weeks, weekly wrapup covers posts Business Blogging Inspiration Around the Web www.marketingprofessor.com Various posts discovered while catching up on some recent blogging posts by Darren Rowse of www.ProBlogger.net and others. Google PageRank Impacts Your Twitter Profile www.marketingprofessor.com How recent changes to Google’s PageRank have impacted Twitter profiles, and how to move forward so your Twitter profile is valuable to followers and the search engines. If you liked this video, could you: 1.) Rate 2.) Favorite 3.) Comment 4.) Subscribe (to the channel) if you haven’t already Recorded: 05-28-2009 for viewers like you

There’s no question that Twitter’s web experience has been improving pretty rapidly over the past several months. However, one area that’s still lacking is a good way to view conversations. Clicking on the “in reply to” links is tedious for long conversations. Several third-party apps (including Twitter’s own native iPhone app — which they bought) are much better at doing this. One of those is an app called Twitoaster. And its creator just got hired by Twitter.

Twitoaster is the work of French developer Arnaud Meunier. As he tweeted and blogged today, he’s going to work for Twitter after getting to know some of the team following the Chirp conference in April. Of note, Twitoaster’s speciality was the threaded conversation view it gave to tweets.

So does that mean this is coming to Twitter? Not necessarily — Twitoaster eventually added a number of other features — such as analytics — that could point to how Twitter could use Meunier’s skills as well. But given the direction Twitter has been going with its web product, I would be surprised if some sort of better conversation view wasn’t added to the site relatively soon.

Another key focus of Twitoaster is tweet archiving. That’s another feature Twitter could definitely improve upon. Currently, thanks to Twitter’s search limitations, once a tweet is a couple of months old, it’s basically lost in the Twitter.com ether. If Twitter had a better archiving mechanism for old tweets, it could extend the life of them, and make them much more useful.

All of this, of course, is some fun late Friday afternoon speculation. But Twitter was clearly impressed with what Meunier built, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they use his skills in a similar fashion on their core product.

Meanwhile, Twitoaster will live on, but Meunier says not to expect any new features as he’ll be focused on his new job.

[thanks Richard]

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Twitter COO Dick Cosotolo offered some updated stats at the Conversational Media Summit today in New York City. Twitter is now attracting 190 million visitors per month and generating 65 million Tweets a day. “We’re laying down track as fast as we can in front of the train,” says Costolo. These numbers are up slightly from 180 million self-reported unique visitors per month back in April, and 50 million Tweets per day in February.

The number of visitors to Twitter.com is not the same as the number of registered users. (ComScore, in contrast, estimated 83.6 million worldwide unique visitors to Twitter.com in April and 23.8 million U.S. visitors in May, see chart below). Most users, says Costolo, don’t Tweet at all, but rather use Twitter as a consumption media. How many of those 65 million Tweets are automated spam is not clear.

Once again, Costolo reiterated Twitter’s stance that “we will not allow third parties to inject ads into the stream.” When Twitter rolls out its Promoted Tweets, it will control them 100 percent. Some brands doing early beta testing with Promoted Tweets are seeing, on average, 2.5 percent “engagement rates,” as measured by replies, retweets, clicks and so on. He also mentioned that Twitter soon will be rolling out an analytics dashboard for commercial customers and brands. Advertisers will be able to target messages by interest and topics, but not by individual users. And on Twitter’s privacy policy, he says, “Our privacy policy is very simple: You can have a protected account, or not. If not, everything is public.” Nobody seems to be having fits over the fact that everything on Twitter is public, but then they knew that going in.

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One of the founders of Reddit, a Digg-clone, openly criticized Digg founder Kevin Rose yesterday for his plans to implement “me-too” features into the new version of the service. We consider this to be absurd and rather impolite.

Yesterday we discovered a video showing some of the features of the upcoming relaunch of Digg. In a nutshell, Digg has been trying to find a way to leverage social sharing to make the site more relevant, and users will soon see links to interesting things based on the what people and entities they choose to follow are voting on.

That goal isn’t anything new, founder Kevin Rose has been talking openly about it for more than a year now.

Will it help save Digg, which has been stuck in a no-growth cycle for years now as services like Twitter and Facebook have surged? I have no idea. I do know that Digg will now become much more personally relevant to me, and TechCrunch will certainly be auto-publishing to Digg and adding a Digg button to posts.

I love nothing more than shouting my opinion on things, and I’ve been particularly harsh on Rose and Digg over the last several months. But opinions are one thing. Rewriting history is another.

Hypocrisy Alert

Reddit, a site for discovering and sharing new things, was launched in mid-2005, more than six months after Digg. There were very few differences between Reddit and Digg then, and they haven’t diverged all that much since then, either. Both sites allow users to vote on submitted stories/links, and the most popular stories are on the home page. Reddit ripped off the core Digg idea when it launched. Which is totally fine in my opinion, since the Internet has evolved in this way from the beginning. You take someone else’s ideas and you try to improve on them.

But Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian says Digg needs new ideas. From his post:

…this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It’s cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to “give the power back to the people.”

Those are your words from that aforementioned 2004 video segment.

Now what matters is how many followers & influence a user has and how many followers & influence they’ve got.

Where have we heard this before: Twitter? Facebook? GoogleBuzz?

Kevin, you absolutely deserve all the credit for starting the movement — fascinating things happen when online communities can efficiently share content. Whales get silly names and we can expose the tragedies our fellow man endures faster than ever before.

It’s a damned shame to see digg just re-implementing features from other websites.

Is it reasonable criticism? Absolutely (although I disagree with it). And when it’s being said by someone who cloned the site that he is now complaining is copying features from others, it becomes absurd.

But hold on just one minute – Ohanian says he never even knew about Digg when he decided to build Reddit half a year after Digg launched:

Funded by Y Combinator, Steve Huffman and I started work on reddit in June 2005, which we launched a month later. A month after that, we learned about digg and realized this was going to be an interesting new space — we had some catching up to do.

Is that possible? Did they really invent the Digg idea completely independently from Digg six months after Digg launched? And no one at Y Combinator pointed out that there were similarities?

Paul Carr put this best when we were discussing this post internally on Yammer: “So at best they did zero research before they launched Reddit into a space that kinda relies on the founders knowing where to find cool new stuff online.”

At worst of course he’s simply lying.

Everyone knows that Digg needs to do something to find relevance again. This new version looks as good to me as anything else I’ve heard suggested, and it certainly doesn’t smell like something the venture capitalists forced down their throat. Kevin returned to a full time role at Digg earlier this year and clearly wants to prove that he can bring this company back to life. He’s excited about Digg, clearly. He may succeed. He may fail. But at least he’s in the arena and fighting valiantly.

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As you’re probably well aware, there’s a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico right now. When BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded and then sank last month, it began dumping thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf each day. By the time the oil stops leaking, it’s expected to be the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Yeah, it’s bad. It’s so bad, that BP and several other organizations working on the spill are apparently running out of ideas. And they’re turning to Twitter, according to gCaptain.

A group of a dozen or so organizations including BP, the EPA, the U.S. Department of Interior, the Department of Defense, and OSHA have set up Deepwater Horizon Response, a “Unified Command” established to “manage response operations.” Naturally, there’s a website for this effort, but there’s also a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a Flickr account, and a YouTube account. They’re covering all the social media bases (though no Foursquare account just yet).

On one hand, this is absolutely great. This site and all of these social accounts are giving users access to a ton of information about the spill, and what’s being done to try and solve it. On the other hand, it’s a little scary to see tweets like this: “Submit alternative tech ideas to stop leaking...” Yes, they apparently must now resort to crowd-sourcing ideas over Twitter for how to stop the spill. Ugh.

Let’s hope they’re just tweeting stuff like that to let people know they’re doing all they can, and are willing to explore all ideas. Let’s hope it’s not that they’re completely out of ideas and need Twitter to solve the problem for them. (But tweets like this and this aren’t looking too promising.) Especially since that account only has around 4,000 followers, and that tweet was only retweeted 3 times. Maybe they should enlist Ashton Kutcher, and his nearly 5 million followers to help out if they really want to crowd-source this thing.

If you do have an idea for how to solve the spill, submit it using this form. If somehow this crowd-sourcing over Twitter does actually produce a solution, I’ll be all in favor of them winning some sort of Nobel prize at that point.

[photo: flickr/NASA Goddard Photo and Video]

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We’ve been tracking down some of Facebook’s little quirks and flaws lately. But let’s get back to an old favorite. Twitter, which appears to have sprung a leak as well.

Is there a bug in Twitter which literally forces any account to follow you?

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