On September 18th 2008, Mashable’s Twitter followers donated $3536 to Charity:Water, an initiative to build wells in Ethiopia. On the same day, our Twitter friend Paul Young raised a further $637 through his Twitter and Facebook accounts. And Twitter user Sarah Townsend hauled in $400 - that’s more than $4500, almost exclusively from Twitter, in a single day. With $4000 buying an entire well to supply water to 200 people for 20 years, we can truly call this the “well that Twitter built”.

Twitting for Charity: The Backstory

It started with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone: his September Twitter newsletter included a mention of Scott Harrison, a 33 year-old Twitter user and founder of Charity:Water, which builds wells in Ethiopia. Scott’s September birthday inspired him to launch the “September” campaign, asking those with September birthdays to accept online donations in leui of gifts this year. Many did: the site claims to have raised $393,000 since the end of August.

September 18th: The Twitter Well

At least three Twitter users celebrated their birthdays on September 18th: myself, Paul Young and Sarah Townsend. Thanks to the large following that my company, Mashable, has on both Twitter and Facebook, I was able to raise a healthy $3536 in donations. As I was turning 23, the recommended amount was $23, but visitors could give any amount they liked. As mentioned above, Paul and Sarah also raised huge amounts, taking us beyond the $4000 needed to fund a well that day.

Twitter Users More Generous than Facebook?

Now perhaps this Twitter theorem isn’t utterly scientific: after all, personal friends could have chipped in without seeing the Twitter posting, and both Paul and I promoted on Facebook too. And yet, Paul went to the trouble of carefully logging his referrers, as explained in a lengthy and fascinating blog post. Particularly interesting: Twitter users donated far more readily than Facebook members - so much that Facebook referrers are almost insignificant:

Dollars per Click Through

Twitter: $4.50

Facebook: $0.29

So while Paul attributes $325 of his haul to a close personal friend, it’s reasonable to say that between Mashable, Paul and Sarah, one complete Ethiopian well was funded by Twitter users on September 18th. And it gets better: since sponsors match donations to the campaign dollar for dollar, two entire wells can be built from our collective efforts.

September Birthday? You Are Next!

September 18th wasn’t unique: scores of Twitter users report that they’ve been raising money for this great cause during September. So if you have a September birthday, be sure to turn your special day into an extraordinary one with Charity:Water and Twitter. And if you aren’t celebrating a September birthday, you’re still welcome to donate through Mashable’s page at http://tinyurl.com/charityw

PS. We receive a note of your name and the amount given for every donation. Time permitting, I will continue to thank everyone who donates on our Twitter feed - the amount is irrelevant and your generosity is deeply appreciated.

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Source:Mashable!

Favtape, a music sharing and discovery service we first mentioned near the height of summer, was thrown into the spotlight rather quickly since that time, both as a result of its free, on-demand construction as well as the growing controversy surrounding another favorite, Muxtape, which last month was officially silenced by the RIAA. Fans of Favtape will thus delight in knowing that it has just today been updated to better conform to the desires of its users. Want to make “mixtapes?” You can. Want to quickly browse music videos when available? Absolutely. Listen to Billboard hits? Top iTunes songs, perhaps? Yes, yes, and quite a bit more, too.

Some additions to Favtape will of course garner less applause than others, but the changes made will please many listeners for sure. For one, Favtape is now said to deliver millions more songs. Bigger surely is better in that respect. Also, the ability to embed a Favtape player in a website makes for easy sharing with those who would otherwise not bother with a visit to the homepage. This goes for everything from social networks big and small to blogs of various sorts.

Furthermore, Favtape users can search for content and create a mixtape from the query. The ability to listen to your recent plays on Last.fm, as well as top hits of the moment on the music service, is also provided. Album art tops off the new setup.

Though users cannot view music videos directly within Favtape via automated YouTube embeds or anything of that kind, thumbnail images directing users to videos at an external source are showed on the leftmost side of the page. In all, the revised front end to Favtape provides a great way to familiarize yourself better with the content Favtape is able to connect with through its engine.

Last but not least, iPhone support is provided, too. You’ll need to navigate past the homepage to see a format friendlier to the smaller screen, but once you do, the experience is a decent one. Touching a song title will send you do the source. This inevitably means a temporary opening of Safari’s on-board QuickTime Player.

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Let me say from the outset that I am a thorough fan of Pandora and its browser-based and iPhone-friendly offerings. Both work exceptionally well. (Most of the time, anyway. Music recommendation isn’t a perfect science - with or without a so-called Genome Project involved in the process.) Yet the Washington Post has featured an exposé by Peter Whoriskey this weekend to the effect that Pandora, save for a swift change in royalty fees stipulated for Internet music playback by SoundExchange, the representative for a number of studios in the industry, will soon be facing a “pull-the-plug kind of decision.” So says the founder of the service, Tim Westergren.

That, I hold no reservations in saying, would be (all but) tragic. Pandora has added considerable value to the custom radio market, and its arrangements with mobile phone carriers and home theater systems by Slim Devices (Sqeezebox) and Sonos are quite elegant methods for casual listening sans a PC.

Yet, I feel I must beg the question: Is the royalty system all that gives Pandora and the people behind it the kind of finite outlook they predict as a result of drastically increased licensing costs? Might it not be at least partly due to the competition’s much more expansive implementation of social services intertwined with music streaming and recommendation that targets Pandora for expiration? Is it, when all is said and done, an algorithm, or a set of algorithms, that music fans wish for? Or is it interactive, person-to-person frameworks by which to share and learn of favorite artists and new releases they crave more? Popular names like Last.fm and imeem are readily serving to such demand quite well.

For the time being, Pandora seems quite healthy, I’ll allow. Google shows that the last 12 months for the site have generally moved upward from a low of 200,000 visitors per day in July 2008 to 400k by July 2008. It then witnessed a surge to about 450k in the days immediately after. But a service like imeem, for instance, which carries quite a few social networking components in addition to its media-rich archives, has a sort of all-in-oneness to it, and Google marks it as having had 400k visitors in July 2007 turn to 800k a year later.

Similarly, Last.fm is also a popular destination for social music entertainment. Its name is well enmeshed in the market. Mind you, it is early neck-and-neck with Pandora, user-wise, so it would be silly to think it’s anything of an outstanding financial success. But in terms of assets, I would venture to peg Last.fm as a more promising wager going into 2009 and beyond. (Just for reference, Google Trends shows Last.fm as having experienced ups and downs over the last four seasons, but it has often maintained a rough 400k daily visitors.)

Now, there is without question a noticeable segment of the Pandora listenership that has with it a critical feature for the service’s continuance: allegiance. There’s considerable affinity for the service, from the core utility to the various accessories the company has added to its repertoire, and if SoundExchange weren’t forcing its hand greedily, Pandora would not be in serious trouble. But unless it can command a greater advertising premium - Westergren told the Washington Post that it would soon add intermittent, in-stream ads, a la NPR (“The next half-hour is brought to you by…,” is the example he offers) - the company really is at the mercy of SoundExchange. More users would perhaps be helpful to bring in more ad dollars, but Pandora would then have to deliver more streaming music, and pay in kind for that increase. A rather circular situation, in short.

Perhaps brighter days will greet the gang at Pandora in the weeks to come. But it has investors to satisfy, and the burden of SoundExchange clearly isn’t making life easy. ($17 million of a projected $25 million in revenue for this year will go toward royalties.) I only question whether the Last.fm class of social music sites is really where the future lies, and that something like Pandora, while superb in its own right, is not heavy enough on community building to sustain itself indefinitely.

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