The reason I decided to use Posterous is because it bridges the gap between Twitter and my WordPress blog. There’s a lot going in the space between Twitter and a full length blog so I felt it was necessary to have space where I can post content that exceeds the 140 character limit and falls short of my formal WordPress content.

Let’s say I want to share content with my friends on Twitter, but I can’t squeeze my thoughts into 140 characters or less. No problem, Posterous will be there to pick up the slack. The service offers a feature called “autopost” which allows you to send content to Posterous once and then will distribute the content to all the social media sites that you have linked to your account. If you would like to send content to a specific social media site, e.g. Twitter, you can do that too. Simply type your message in an e-mail, send it to Posterous using the e-mail address twitter@posterous.com, and let Posterous take care of the rest.

So, after sending an e-mail to twitter@posterous.com, the content is posted to my blog and a tweet, accompanied by a link pointing to my blog, is sent to Twitter so friends can read the entire message. Now, let’s say I want to send content to Flickr and Twitter, but exclude the other social media sites I have linked to my Posterous account. Sending an e-mail to flickr+twitter@posterous.com would do the tick. Nice, right?

Posterous will also serve as that space where I post dribs and drabs of content that doesn’t quite fit in with my WordPress blog content. Some examples of informal content that will be posted to my Posterous blog include random ramblings, a paragraph or two of content, random photos or videos taken with my mobile phone, or perhaps a voice note. Although I use TwitPic for my Twitter photos and Qik for my mobile videos, Posterous can be used as a “catchall” space if necessary. So when I’m on the move, traveling, relaxing at the pool, or whatever it is I’m doing, Posterous will be available to capture anything and house all my content in one single space.

Overall, Posterous is a great blogging platform for people who are looking for a free, simple, and quick way to blog with some nice features. Posterous can handle just about anything you throw at it and allows you to post updates to all your social media sites with very little effort. Posterous also gives you the option to add Google Analytics and FeedBurner to your blog so you can gather information about who is visiting and who is subscribing. If you are interested in changing the look and feel of Posterous, you can choose from the different built-in themes or customize your own theme using CSS and HTML. Lastly, Posterous even allows you to use a custom domain instead of the default http://yourname.posterous.com.

Unfortunately, even with all the nice features outlined above, Posterous does not compare to a self-hosted WordPress blog, in my opinion. You see, the ability to control content is one of the most important things for me as a blogger and because Posterous doesn’t allow me to perform simple things such as creating pages and subpages, editing permalinks, adding plug-ins, widgets, or choose a comment system, it could never work as my primary blogging platform. WordPress, on the other hand, meets all my formal publishing needs and the fact that I own, host, and manage all the content makes blogging that much more enjoyable.

Here’s How It Works
1. Copy the tweet’s URL you wish to embed by clicking the tweet’s timestamp. (i.e. about 21 hours ago)
2. Visit Blackbird Pie, paste the tweet’s URL in the field provided, and then click “Bake it.”
3. If you’re satisfied with the preview, select and copy the code at the bottom.
4. Visit your Web page or blog post and paste the code into the desired location.
Done!

Above is a tweet from my Twitter timeline that I embedded into this blog post so you can get an idea how it will look on your site. As you can see, the embedded tweet that is created by Blackbird Pie is more attractive than the traditional screen grabs of tweets most of us have used over the years.

There are some really nice things that make an embedded tweet attractive. For starters, the embedded tweet picks up some of the styling on your own site, e.g. font family, font color, link color, etc…. Another thing is that an embedded tweet provides a much better user experience than traditional screen grabs in that they allow @mentions, hashtags, links, and the individual ‘s account to be linked and clickable. Lastly, an embedded tweet will display the Twitter background used by the person tweeting.

Personally, I think the embedded tweet feature is a great idea with a lot of potential. However, I do have some concerns about the feature so let’s take a look at some of the potential problems that surround embedded tweets

Content aggregation: One potential problem is that embedded tweets will not be visible on a site in the event that Twitter.com encounters a “fail whale” problem, hence the service goes down. It’s no secret that Twitter.com is over capacity every now and then, therefore, since embedded tweets rely on content aggregation it could be an issue at some point.

Static timestamp: Unfortunately the timestamp on an embedded tweet is static and reads “less than a minute ago” instead of the actual timestamp you would see if you visited the tweet at Twitter.com. This may not be an issue for some people, however, readers may want to see the date and time a tweet was posted to Twitter without having to click the timestamp and visit Twitter.com.

Embed this Tweet: Although this is not a problem, it’s something I believe could improve the embedded tweet feature. Instead of a user going through multiple steps to embed a tweet into their site, there should be a “Embed this tweet” link on every tweet. When a user clicks “Embed this tweet” on a tweet they will be taken to the Blackbird Pie website where the code is already generated. The only thing the user needs to do is copy the code and paste it into their site. It’s that simple. Currently each tweet has a “Reply” and “Retweet” link so adding a new “Embed this tweet” link would be a perfect addition to the list of links.

Embedded tweets will not delete: Since this has not been addressed by Twitter, I decided to do my own test to see what will happen to an embedded tweet should a person delete the tweet from their timeline. Let’s take a look at the tweet below. After using Blackbird Pie to generate the code, I embedded the tweet into this post and then deleted the tweet from my timeline. Well, as you can see the embedded tweet is still visible in this post even though I deleted it from my timeline. If you click the link “less than a minute ago” to go to the tweet you will get a message that reads “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!” In my opinion, this is both good news and bad news. The good news is that bloggers like myself don’t need to worry about someone deleting a tweet from their Twitter timeline and the site being left with a large empty space where an embedded tweet once resided. At the time of this writing, once a tweet in baked using Blackbird Pie and then embedded into a site, it will never be deleted unless it’s deleted by the site’s author. The bad news is that users who delete tweets are out of luck if their tweet was embedded on a Web page or blog post. This reminds me when Twitter had a serious flaw and deleted tweets were not removed from the search index even though they were deleted by the user. Nonetheless, I’m not sure how I feel about this, but from a privacy perspective I can understand if people get disappointed if they delete a tweet, yet it is still visible on another medium.

Although Blackbird Pie needs some work, I really like what Twitter has done here. I’m going to start using the new feature soon and see how it goes. The embed code is a bit of a mess, but I’m sure they will clean it up in the future.

Shortly after our chat Dennis was nice enough to hook me up by shipping out some stuff so I could pass it around inside my circle of friends as well as share it with potential “Foursquare-ers.” I’ll be keeping a few items for myself of course.

So, here’s what I got. A ton of Foursquare buttons with images of the different Foursquare badges, some stickers, and a yellow t-shirt. Although I can pull off wearing the color yellow, I may need to speak to Foursquare about the t-shirt color choices for the men. I was thinking more along the lines of a navy blue color t-shirt with baby blue letters that read “Foursquare.”

Actually, take a look at the polo shirt in the photo below. In my opinion, that’s a nice looking polo shirt. Unfortunately this is not an official Foursquare polo shirt. Since the trim color on the Foursquare sticker matched the color of one of my polo shirts I decided to place the sticker over the embroidered logo design just to see how it would look. Looks good, eh?

Anyway, thanks to @Dens, @Mari, and the @Foursquare team for the hook up as always. For those of you who don’t know, Mari works at Foursquare and designs the badges we all unlock, among other things. She was nice enough to ship everything to me on behalf of Dennis so I wanted to send her a “thanks” too.

After doing some digging, I have noticed that more than 90% of the blogs, and even a few websites, I have read are feeding wrong information to its readers about how mayorships are awarded on Foursquare. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, mayorship information isn’t explained very well on the Foursquare website. According to Foursquare’s “Help” and “Learn More” Web pages, mayorships are awarded “If you’ve been to a place more than anyone else.” Although this information is posted on the Foursquare website, it’s not how the algorithm works. Since there has been a lot of questions surrounding this topic, I decided to send a tweet to Foursquare about this issue so they could clarify how mayorships are awarded on their website.

Nonetheless, let me explain how mayorships work. Foursquare mayorships are awarded to any user who has checked into a venue the most number of days within the past 60 days. In other words, you will only be awarded a mayorship based on the total number of days you check-in to a venue, not the total number of check-ins at a venue. For example, let’s say you check-in to the New York Sports Club 2x on Monday, 2x on Wednesday, and 2x Friday every week for 60 days. Now let’s say the current mayor of the club checks in 1x on Monday, 1x on Tuesday, 1x on Wednesday, and 1x Thursday every week for 60 days. According to your check-in history, you checked into the club 48x on 24 different days in the past 60 days. The current mayor checked in 32x on 32 different days in the past 60 days. Although you checked in at the club 16x more than the current mayor, he/she checked in 8 days more than you, hence the current mayor retains the crown.

If you are interested in seeing how close you are to ousting a mayor, take note of the number displayed when you mouseover a mayor’s picture on the venue page. This is the total number of check-ins for the mayor in the past 60 days.

This is when a “Superuser” comes into play. Foursquare Superusers are users who are very active with the service and are handpicked by the Foursquare staff. These users are usually people who have checked into a lot of venues and spent time creating new venues. Superusers play an important role in the Foursquare service because they improve the service by editing venues, merging duplicate venues, closing fake venues, adding aliases, adding useful tags, removing incorrect tags, and ultimately keeping the database nice and clean.

Currently, there are three Superuser levels and each level comes with its own special privileges. The three levels are as follows:

Superuser Level 1: User can edit venue information (name, address, cross street, phone number, and Twitter name), mark venues as “closed,” request duplicate venues to be merged, and add venue categories.

Superuser Level 2: User can edit venue information (name, address, cross street, phone number, and Twitter name), mark venues as “closed,” merge duplicate venues themselves, and add venue categories.

Superuser Level 3: User can edit venue information (name, address, cross street, phone number, and Twitter name), mark venues as “closed,” merge duplicate venues themselves, add venue categories, and create aliases for venues.

If you are interested in getting upgraded to Superuser status, I recommend checking into venues and creating venues as often as possible since this is what could land you Superuser status. The Foursquare staff will occasionally upgrade a select group of users to Superuser status as they are needed so it is not necessary for users to request an upgrade.

As a side note, Foursquare is very protective of aliases since they could cause a lot of problems in the data set if users don’t add them properly. Therefore, since Superuser Level 3 status allows users to add aliases, it’s rare that this level is given as an upgrade.

However, since I’ve been contributing to the Foursquare community for a while, I was fortunate to snag Superuser Level 3 status. Although this level allows a user to perform most of the necessary tasks to keep the service up-to-date and running smoothly, there are a few privileges that I believe could be even more beneficial to the Foursquare service if given to Superuser Level 3 users. These privileges include:

• Ability to edit and delete venue tips that are off topic or inappropriate.
• Ability to semi-lock a venue. This will prevent Superuser Levels 1 & 2 from editing or closing a venue.
• Ability to rollback changes that were made to the venue. Although Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley told me this will be implemented, I’m not sure if all Superusers will have this ability.
  [Credit: My UK buddy, @Joel_Hughes]

If you have any other Superuser privileges in mind that you think would benefit the Foursquare service feel free to share your thoughts below.

Please note: Superuser status should not be confused with the Foursquare badge, “Super User.”

After Dennis was kind enough to share that information with me I decided to do a quick calculation. According to my math, the user ID count should be at approximately 1019000 in order for Foursquare to hit one million registered users. Foursquare sees thousands of new user signups each day so Friday looks like it will be the day Foursquare crosses the milestone and joins the One Million Member Social Media Club. Well, there is no such club, but it’s not a bad idea.

When Foursquare hits one million registered users tomorrow they will have reached this milestone in just over 13 months. There is no question that Foursquare’s growth has been impressive over the last year and it definitely explains why venture capital firms and companies such as Yahoo! are trying to get in on the action.

Since Foursquare will reach one million users in almost half the time that it took Twitter to reach that same number when they were a startup, there has been a lot of talk in social media circles about the comparison between the two companies. In my opinion, it’s not a fair comparison.

You see, back in the day when there was no such thing as Twitter and Facebook there was this location-based service called Dodgeball. Dodgeball was founded by Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert in 2000 and the service was similar to Foursquare, yet not nearly as good. The service was only available in 24 American cities and it didn’t really catch on with its users like Foursquare has over the last year. In 2005, the service was acquired by Google and in 2007 Dennis and Alex decided to quit Google since they both felt Google was not supporting the service like they expected. In 2009, Google finally made a decision to shut down the Dogeball service and it was succeeded by Google Latitude.

As you can see Dodgeball had a decent run over the years, but ultimately didn’t do very well. The service wasn’t available worldwide and it lacked a lot of the nice features and the gaming aspect Foursquare has built-in to it today, but even if Dodgeball had all the bells and whistles, I’m not entirely convinced that would have made a difference without the help of Twitter and Facebook users bringing attention to its service.

The point I’m trying to make is that no one really knows how popular Dodgeball could have become if social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook were in existence. I mean, sure, location-based services are on fire right now and Foursquare is leading the way in this space, but the way I see it, both Twitter and Facebook played an important role in Foursquare’s success by allowing Foursquare users to use their service to broadcast their whereabouts, unlocked badges, and mayorships. I’m not going to speculate how many Foursquare users signed up with the service only after hearing about it on Twitter and/or Facebook, but I have a strong feeling it’s more than just a few. While Foursquare’s growth has been very impressive, I don’t believe it would have been possible for the company to hit one million users as fast as they did without Twitter.

With that said, Foursquare is a great service and I use it on a daily basis not only for the gaming aspect and the information the service provides, but for all the discounts I receive at venues and of course the bragging rights for holding down mayorships. Are you using Foursquare? If not, you may want to give it a try.

Update: It appears that TechCrunch made the same assumption I had made earlier today in that we both thought Foursquare had hit one million users. TechCrunch author, MG Siegler, wrote an article a few hours ago congratulating Foursquare’s one millionth user. However, Siegler covered his bases by saying “Or, at least, you’re the user with the one millionth ID.” Feel free to head over to TechCrunch to read the article.

Yesterday marked the first global social media holiday in history, Foursquare Day. If you missed it, Foursquare, the location-based social media service, announced last month that every April 16th will be Foursquare Day, a social media holiday. This particular day was chosen because April is the 4th month of the year and 4^2 = 16. Simple enough, yeah?

Foursquare Day was a huge success across the globe so let’s take a look inside the numbers.

[Photo Credit: Nick McGlynn]

The style change doesn’t come as a surprise given how many people have “Asked the Editor” to change the style from “Web site” to “website.” I have always preferred “website” instead of “Web site” simply because the latter was an antiquated way of writing it. However, since the AP Stylebook used “Web site,” I thought it would be best if I followed the correct spelling and capitalization style rules.

While this change settled a lot of arguments in newsrooms across the globe as well as in the blogosphere, there are still critics out there who would like to see a change in other technological terms such as e-mail, Internet, and Web pages. At the time of this writing, the correct spelling and capitalization style rules in the AP Stylebook for a few technological terms are as follows: World Wide Web, website, Web page, webmaster, webcam, webcast, Internet, the Net, and e-mail.

When AP Stylebook editors make style changes such as “Web site” to “website,” these are not arbitrary changes. The editors are constantly fielding questions and suggestions from readers via their website, e-mail, and even Twitter which play a role in the decision making process when editors meet to finalize content for the print edition. This should help explain why AP Stylebook editors made the style change from two words to one word.

While I applaud the AP Stylebook editors for listening to reader’s input and making changes based on this input, I have to wonder why “Web page” remains two words with a capital “W.” The term “Web” is really a short form of the term “World Wide Web” so the “W” should really be capitalized. However, since the AP Stylebook changed “Web site” to “website,” they might want to consider changing the term “Web page” to “webpage” or perhaps “web page” in the AP Stylebook? They’re both derivative terms, no?

Keep in mind that these guidelines apply to those people who are using the AP Stylebook for style rules. This usually includes newspapers, magazines, tech blogs, and other areas of journalism. If you’re writing a college paper, for example, you are most likely following The Chicago Manual of Style rules. Therefore, “Web site” would be acceptable.

Nonetheless, now that the change is official, I will be using “website” from this point forward. The only other change I would like to see in the AP Stylebook is “e-mail” changed to “email.” The latter just looks much nicer, doesn’t it?

Co-founder Biz Stone kicked off the event with some key statistics about the company. Biz revealed that Twitter now has 105 million registered users, or to be exact, 105,779,710 registered users since its launch in 2006. He went on to say that Twitter is also adding 300,000 new users each day and about 60% of these users are coming from outside the U.S. According to my math, that’s 180,000 new signups coming from outside the U.S. and 120,000 coming within the U.S each day. While these are very impressive numbers, I have to wonder how many people sign up for multiple Twitter accounts, how many users are currently active, and how many signups are spam users or bots. Nonetheless, to learn more about all the statistics revealed at Chirp visit Chirp Conference – 2010: Twitter Statistics Revealed.

Although the entire conference was interesting and provided a lot of valuable information, perhaps the most interesting part of the event came at the end when five key Twitter executives (CEO Evan Williams, and Co-Founder Biz Stone, VP Product Jason Goldman, COO Dick Costolo, and Director of Platform Ryan Sarver) took the stage to answer questions from the audience. The majority of questions came from people who attended the conference, but Twitter users who tweeted questions accompanied with the hashtag #chirpqa had a chance to get their questions answered as well. For more on the Q&A session feel free to visit Mashable.

So let’s take a look at some of the things that were discussed on stage at Chirp.

Twitter for Android – Yes, an Android app is in the works, but it’s unclear if Twitter will acquire an existing company who already developed an app, partner with a mobile device maker, or develop the app themselves.

URL shortener – Twitter confirmed that it has plans to launch their own URL shortner. This news comes two days after Twitter purchased the twee.tt domain name. However, it’s unclear if this will be the official short URL.

Twitter hosted rich media – According to CEO Evan Williams, there hasn’t been a decision yet about hosting rich media content like photos, videos, etc…. However, he went on to say “We won’t discount the possibility of hosting.”

Geolocation – Twitter announced that it will be possible to add locations to tweets, but CEO Evan Williams said Twitter has no plans to challenge location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla.

Promoted Tweets – Twitter CEO Evan Williams and Twitter COO Dick Costolo made it clear that promoted tweets are not ads. You can read more about Twitter’s monetization model and the launch of promoted tweets by visiting the official Twitter blog here.

Annotations – This will allow developers to attach metadata to a tweet.

Twitter expanding into China – Twitter has no plans to grow their business in China now. However, according to co-founder Biz Stone, Twitter wants “to translate the service into as many languages as possible without putting any servers into these countries.”

App developers get their own site – Director of Platform, Ryan Sarver, announced that Twitter will be giving developers their own sandbox for developing apps. In addition, developers will get a lot more information about the Twitter API.

Library of Congress – Twitter and the Library of Congress announced that every public tweet that has been posted since Twitter’s launch in 2006 will be digitally archived by the federal library.

Although a lot of good information was shared at Chirp today, I highlighted only a few of the topics that were covered. If you missed Chirp and would like to learn more you can watch a few of the videos here.

[Photo Credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid]

Infographic

[Image Credit: G_Obieta]