Harvard Business Review has found, "The top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production." And a separate study shows that Twitter's about the only social network where men are more likely to be "followed" by both other men and by women. That's in contrast to other social networks, where "most of the activity is focused around women."

Even Wikipedia, notorious for being run by a tiny, self-obsessed cabal, is not so bad: There, 90 percent of the content comes from the most active 15 percent of users.

Such asymmetry, of course, is baked right into Twitter's architecture. The microblogging service grew quickly because it allows one-way "follows." On Facebook, in contrast, accounts can only be linked with the permission of both parties.

If it's any consolation, relentless self-promotion is a necessary but not sufficient condition of popularity on Twitter. Have a look at Twitter's most prolific authors — have you heard of a single one? But good luck becoming one of the most influential tweeters if you don't constantly churn out copy.

[via Business Insider]

Twitter, a service which lets users post brief, 140-character messages for friends and perfect strangers alike, has already evolved its own telegraphic grammar of @ signs ("tweets," or messages, directed "at" a specific user, yet posted publicly) and # signs (denoting a topic for the message). Add to that services like TinyURL and Bit.ly which condense Web addresses into short, unreadable masses of characters. It's also spawned a cottage industry of applications which people use to post messages, with oddball names like Twhirl and TweetDeck and Ping.fm. The result are messages like these:

It's the very definition of too insidery. How are tech newcomers supposed to decode all these inscrutable traditions.

So when a tipster asked me if Kawasaki's Twitter account had been hacked, after it started displaying some incomprehensible messages about fried chicken, I stared at it for a while. Eventually I gave up and just called Kawasaki to ask.

Yes, he told me, when I reached him at an airport, his account had been hacked, but it was probably his fault. "I was using a new service called Adjix, and I did something too fast," he told me. "I can't explain it." Sort of like Twitter.

Kawasaki then suggested I speculate that he faked the hacking to get more attention. He added that he loved the hacker's tweets about fried chicken, and would gladly add it as a topic to his website Alltop.com. See? Everything on Twitter ends up being about self-promotion.

Update: Adjix president Joe Moreno, in an email, said that Kawasaki mistakenly broadcast his login credentials over the service, allowing a hacker to take control of his account.

Kawasaki's hacked Twitter page:

In past interviews, whenever Zuckerberg was greeted by a personal question, he usually returned it with a blank stare. Why are you wasting my time? was the unspoken thought. But Brad Stone reports on Bits that Zuckerberg's parents will be in the audience for tomorrow's broadcast — so it seems like family questions will be on the agenda. This could be the best Oprah trainwreck since Tom Cruise jumped the couch.

Of course, Oprah being Oprah, Oprah will also be on the agenda. She's almost certainly going to plug her new Facebook page, one of the first to adopt an advertising-friendly redesign. So after some awkward banter, we expect the pair will get down to the real business at hand: mutual self-promotion.

(Photoillustration by Richard Blakeley)

No, really. Schneller says he was able to buy cut-rate advertising time for FoxwoodFiends.com through Google's experimental TV-advertising auction. He spent $500 to reach 330,000 Dish Network subscribers tuned in to the Oxygen, ESPN2, or WPT channels.

I'll do the math: That's $1.50 per thousand viewers, which is a quarter what a cable-television ad should cost. Thanks, Google! Your doomed foray into television-advertising will simultaneously destroy the economics of an entire industry and expose us to a whole new generation of opportunistic douchebags. I weep for the future.

Rule No. 1: Convince the video's participants that the end product will be less embarrassing if they don't worry about being embarrassed while they make it. Get your people to either commit themselves fully to the project, or stay out of the way. Vimeo's companywide lip synch of Harvey Danger's "Flagpole Sitta" wouldn't work nearly so well if the girl listening to her iPod at the beginning didn't keep such a straight face. Know what else doesn't hurt? Actually memorizing the lyrics.

Rule No. 2: Get the heavies involved. Digg's "Groove Is In The Heart" from Mark Trammell wouldn't be nearly so worth watching if CEO Jay Adelson didn't start rapping two minutes in. Tocquigny's video featured only interns, making it seem like the real executives didn't take the PR project seriously. What kind of example does that set for the monkey-see-monkey-do younguns?

Rule No. 3: Plan meticulously and practice. Here's "L'amour a la française" from AOL France. Note how precisely the performers hit their marks. Note how cleverly new singers appear on the screen. That's dedication, people! (It probably didn't hurt that the most of these people knew they were about to be laid off and probably spent most of their remaining time working on this video.)

Rule No. 4: Learn to edit. Facebook code monkeys — here dressed as White Ninjas for the company's annual games day festivities — aren't actually supersneaky ninjas; that they appear as such comes from careful editing. A hint: Editing usually takes longer than filming.

Rule No. 5: Feature the most attractive coworkers prominently. Sure, a companywide video will probably include everyone from the company. But give the longest shots to the most attractive office-workers, like the girl listening to the iPod at the beginning of the Vimeo video or the swirling blonde in the middle of the video below made by Leonardo Dalessandri's production company, "Tambureddu." Also, be a little cynical and use a frame from one of those shots for the clips' still frame, which will appear in searches and embedded placements in blogs.

"They could use someone with a serious understanding of social media *and* some political / campaign experience," wrote a former government technology adviser in my inbox. "To my knowledge, they don't have that person."

The role would be pretty simple: Keep President Obama's message out front and ahead of his detractors on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Boing Boing and every other breaking-news feed used by Internet addicts who don't trust CNN. Because as this week's fumbled VP announcement demonstrated, if you aren't on message 24/7, you'll be claim-jumped by opponents jamming the channel with misinformation. Obama will need someone to lead the troops. Someone to be available as go-to person for the mainstream media reporters who'll write trend articles based on three status updates.

The position doesn't need a pontificating "thought leader." It needs someone who knows how to own the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee? Marc Andreessen? Caterina Fake from Flickr? Are you serious? There's only one person on Earth with a proven ability to stay on top of Web 2.0 regardless of her message — or lack thereof.

That's our always-on mascot Julia Allison. Unlike any of the proposed nominees, she's dated a congressman. Oh, and she worked on Capitol Hill as a "legislative correspondent." Not much, but that's more exposure to Beltway mores than most of the old goats currently being Twittered for the job. And more than any other member of the Web 2.0 mafia, Julia Allison has a proven track record of getting people to show up for parties — er, meetings. (Photo by Brian Solis)

Here’s a few names to get you thinking:

Mark [sic] Andreessen?
Dave Winer?
Joel Spolsky?
Tantek Celik?
Molly Holzschalg?
Meg Whitman?
Bill Gates?
Steve Wozniak?
Caterina Fake?

Overall, though, I still like the idea of Lessig in the White House.

Oh, and wait until you hear what he says about how he’d retard corruption in the Capitol. The interview will be up in a couple of weeks on FastCompanyTV.

In case it's not obvious, Scoble is pitching himself for the job. Robert, you need to start playing it safe. Never say "retard," even as a verb.

(Photo of Obama by AP/Alex Brandon; photoillustration by Jackson West)

Couldn't Yahoo have found someone besides Garlinghouse frère and soeur to write about? Perhaps not. With all the defections, the company has fewer and fewer stars to draw on. CEO Jerry Yang is press-shy, and President Sue Decker is downright mediaphobic. Flaunt what you've got.

You people are sick.

• 1. Go to Facebook and click on "Businesses" at the bottom of the page.
• 2. Click on "Facebook Pages."
• 3. Click on "Create a Facebook Page."
• 4. Select "Brand or Product". I picked "Communications," for lack of a better category. Fill in the name of your business, site, product, or the brand called you.
• 5. You've created a page! You can upload a picture, add basic info like your business's founding date, and detailed info like a tagline or product description.
• 6. Make sure to publish the page when you're done editing.
• 7. Important: Click "View Page," and then add yourself as a fan. Your friends will see that you're a fan, and hopefully sign up as fans, too.
• 8. Avoid the paid advertising options. Instead, post links to your Facebook page's Wall for free. Your fans will see them in their news feeds.

Pontin writes, in a posting on Facebook:

What have I done?

Last week, when I asked my Facebook friends which startups I should write about, marketing and public relations professionals I donot know began befriending me and inundating me with pitches. I value Facebook as a private network, one where I can talk to my real friends, colleagues, and peers. Therefore, if you work in PR or marketing, and I don't have a prior relationship with you, I shan't be accepting your friendings and I shan't be reading your messages. I don't mean to be rude—but there it is.

The trick to using Facebook as a tool for self-promotion is to treat it as strictly one-way. Accept all friend invitations, and then relentlessly spam your fans with examples of your latest work, to drum up traffic. Ignore any messages you receive; you can always plead "Facebook bankruptcy," as Calacanis did.

Even Pontin is beginning to understand that Facebook is not, in the end, about real relationships. Immediately after posting his diatribe against opportunistic faux frienders on Facebook, he turned around and added a Facebook spokesperson as a "friend." Why? Not because Pontin and the PR rep are actual friends in real life. His rationale? She "might conceivably be useful to me and [Technology Review]," he explains. The other PR reps who tried to friend Pontin? Not useful, apparently.

Useful versus not useful, of course, has the benefit of being a clearer distinction than the squishy category of "friend." Facebook, through the tireless efforts of Scoble and Calacanis, is transforming from a social network to a utilitarian broadcast network. Its users, increasingly, are divided into those looking for an audience, and those willing to provide same — as well as the usual Silicon Valley scrum of favor-trading and wheeling and dealing. Just ask yourself: What have your "friends" done for you lately?