Matt Richtel of The New York Times added to Valleywag’s presumed embarrassment today by letting readers of the world-renowned rag in on his secret. Evidently the salacious gossip artists at the other VW weren’t privy to a Twitter novel - or a Twitter thriller, a so-called “Twiller,” to be precise - under production by Richtel. I myself learned of its evolution near the start. How about you? No matter. The reason I touch on the subject is to expand on the commentary a bit.

The Twittersphere, after all, is full not only of these kilobit- or megabit-sized novels. Comedians wax to varying degrees of hilarity via the medium at all hours. 140-character-long jokes can be punchy, woeful, and plenty of things in between, it turns out. Just like your half-hour stand-up routine. Indeed, if you follow a real talent for an extended period of time, well, you begin to get exceedingly dependent on the feed I know I do. (Merlin Mann, I bid you much thanks. Shall your run of the funnies never end.)

People celebrate the art of the haiku, as well. Too many people, arguably. So I ask, is there a limit? Nevermind the faults and the failures behind the stage, many - if not all - of which seem to have disappeared completely. Does the service’s message structure determine what is and what is not possible? Does it maintain a sort of fun and casual gimmicky quality because you’re required to stay within set bounds? If the answer these questions is a resounding no, could there then be a moment when Twitter members are honored with awards for creativity? Awards you can handle, too. With your hands!

Twitter itself, as we know, has won ample praise. It received the SXSW Blog Award for being so beautifully basic. Well, I say it’s time to weed the membership for some serious recognition. Or at least begin to consider the possibility of a trophy. Or two. Or more. What say you? (Poll after the jump.)

A quick Web search will bring an event dubbed “the twitties.” The byline is “awards for the most interesting twists on 140 characters!” Visitors to the site submit favorite URLs for particular messages published and vote to nominate that which they believe to be the best. But that premise seems limiting to me. I’d like consistency to be honored. Serials. The best delivery of on-the-ground journalism, too. How about a head-to-head comedy competition? The categories can be many.

Yes, it is far fetched to think a Twitter user somewhere will rank as some sort of Hemingway 2.0. But if the players in the field today have shown anything worthwhile, it is sheer inventiveness. Twitter, against some major odds given the technical issues it has had to contend with, is now being used just as often by people broadcasting cocktail recipes as organizations campaigning for the next so-called leader of the free world. Peculiar, absolutely. But incredibly intriguing as well. And I tell you it’s time to take it to the next level. Agreed?

How does the Best of Twitter sound to you? ( surveys)

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What can you do in 12 seconds? You can make a fairly interesting video update. With new site 12seconds, you can create a video update to share on the Web, through your own channel on the site. Similar to Twitter’s 140 character limit, the video updates on 12seconds are limited to, well, 12 seconds. It’s just enough to get the point across, and short enough for easy consumption by viewers. Creating a video update is easy enough–just record with your webcam. There’s mobile support as well.

Every user receives their very own email address for sending mobile content to their 12seconds account, making it easy enough to create content on the go. Mobile support was pretty much a necessity for 12seconds, given the target demographic and the current presence of countless updating and microblogging services, both with and without video capabilities. From Seesmic to Pownce, and a number of third-party applications that operate off the Twitter ecosystem, it’s clear that multimedia microblogging is here to stay.

Given the crowded market, I was glad to see that 12seconds also redistributes your content on Twitter, so you can post 12seconds content on other areas of the Web if you’d like. You can even import your Twitter friends to 12seconds. The good thing about 12seconds’ particular take on the microblogging video industry is that with webcam and its existing mobile support, its service becomes a niche tool for the average user. It encompasses much of the mobile user demographic as opposed to focusing on a smaller group that has a select mobile phone device that utilizes live video streaming capabilities.

As cool as live streaming is, there’s still a large portion of the population that doesn’t yet have a device to support this, so creating a niche community focused on short-form video updates that caters to both the Web and the mobile community is something easy for a lot of people to latch onto, though I wouldn’t mind seeing a few more options for the redistribution of content to other blogging and social networking communities across the Web.

There are also embed options and the expected sharing/following options you’ll see on most microblogging sites, so there’s nothing too unfamiliar here. If you’d like a chance to check out 12seconds, click here to fill out a questionnaire in order to receive your beta account.

For practically the last work week, the "replies" tab in Twitter has been out of service. People in the know began to push users over to the Summize service to see the replies. What I don’t understand is why Twitter doesn’t change the link on the replies tab to point to Summize - wouldn’t that (at least in the interim) alleviate some of the negative press?

Many people have hopped on the bus to FriendFeed’ville (initially driven by the likes of Robert Scoble and Louis Gray). If you are a regular CN reader, you already know my thoughts on FriendFeed. Corvida explains why you can’t leave Twitter. Others wonder why everyone is bitching.

So come up close because I am going to tell you a little secret… it’s about the traffic Twitter was driving. How many people really give a crap that you just went surfing, that your dog peed on the floor or that you just went to Ikea. Sure there are a few, everyone has some fans. But the majority of Twitter users are bloggers. And from that perspective everyone is trying to milk Twitter for the traffic. Let’s get real here folks.

I have about 3,000 followers on Twitter and when I posted a link early on, I would see anywhere from 10-200 visits to CN from the link. Of course if others "retweeted", that is to copy a twitter message into another content stream, the traffic was even higher. Lately though, the traffic has dropped significantly. From my studies using a variety of proprietary algorithms, I have seen a decline of 60-70% of inbound Twitter traffic.

So I have 3,000 followers, what about those people with more? A couple of power users include: Jason Calacanis with 30,000 followers, Techcrunch with 20,000, Mashable with 8,000, ReadWriteWeb with 2,000 and Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang with 9,000. What kind of traffic are they seeing when they post a link? Techcrunch uses twitterfeed so every crunchpost goes directly to the 20,000. Jason promotes Mahalo several times a day - how many of the 30,000 are visiting from the links? No matter how many, it’s good traffic I believe.

Since I don’t know the traffic from other large follower users, the only thing I can go by is when Jason demands that his fans go comment on a photo (typically of his dogs). Within minutes there are usually 30+ comments. This means the actual links are much higher than that.

I’ve asked before for Twitter analytics but I guess first we need to get the service stable.

Now here’s another secret for you at no cost because it’s happy hour. Let’s take this traffic concept a step further. I might subscribe to a blog that uses Twitter but what’s the likelyhood that I will actually visit the site? Rarely for advanced users. But with Twitter, you always visit because when you click the link, and henceforth have just driven at least one monetizable pageview to that blog (this one included). Now for CN it doesn’t matter much - but if you have 10k+ Twitter subs and are using Twitterfeed, that could start to amount to something over time. Side note, I don’t use Twitterfeed for CN - I try to only post what I think are the top CN posts into my Twitter feed.

No matter whether the blogs that push links on Twitter are generating revenue or not doesn’t matter - they are still getting eyes to their content which is great.

The issue is what happens now that a core part of the Twitter audience might be packing their bags for other locations? I believe this is part of the concern of everyone who is writing about the service. It’s like wondering what would happen to a few blogs if Digg died tomorrow.

I don’t believe Twitter is going to die, be killed or go for a suicide. Twitter is easy to understand and use. It’s perfect for the mainstream. FriendFeed isn’t. FriendFeed will do very well also for the set of users currently using it. I am not sold that there’s mainstream appeal coming for FriendFeed.

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