Obviously the list of available cities is pretty small right now (Twitter’s made Local Trending available for 13 US cities and 2 international cities, Sao Paulo and London), but it’s safe to say Local Trending will be coming live to a city near you very soon.

This should be especially interesting tonight after Obama’s State of the Union Address when you’re looking to see how different parts of the country (or world, you can access Local Trending for 7 countries including the US) are reacting to the speech.

Using keywords and key phrases in your twitter lists can help to enhance their SEO power. Using geo-targeted keywords or phrases for your twitter lists is a excellent strategy. Check out this Google search for Austin marketing twitter; the first organic result is for a twitter list by @ElleLaMode a marketing grad out of Madison, WI.  @EllelaMode’s twitter list appeared at the top of my Google search because she geo-targeted her list name to Austin.

It’s a good idea to think of twitter lists not just as internal features of twitter, but as useful links that can enhance blogs, facebook fan pages, myspace pages, and tweets. Twitter lists linked in blogs offer the user vast amounts of extra information on whatever subject you choose to blog about. This strategy can greatly increase your blog’s user experience and, hopefully, encourage return visitors and loyal readers.

List your own twitter account on your lists of appropriate subject matter so when people follow your list they can also follow your tweets.

Remember that Twitter is a community, so be friendly with your neighbors. List people who’ve listed you and ask others if they would like to be on your list.

Twitter lists are very useful SEO tools, but they can be used to create Reputation Management Problems, so be sure to pay attention to the lists that you appear on and remember that it’s important to list people appropriately.

This season two Twitter memes, Sh*t My Dad Says and Texts from Last Night, have been picked up by broadcasting networks to be aired as half-hour mainstream television series. While the creators of these memes are likely overjoyed with the amount of money they have the potential to make, how excited is the rest of the Internet?

Many people who post material on the Internet may want it to stay on the Internet. Justin Halpern, the creator of Sh*t My Dad Says, however, is probably completely comfortable with his content being presented to a mainstream audience. It brings more attention, as there are demographics who don’t use the Internet often but watch network television.

In the case of these two memes, the journey to television will necessitate some changes to the content. Sh*t My Dad Says will elaborate on the character of the obnoxious but hilarious father seen in many sitcoms by making him the focal point. Many of his quotes are quite vulgar, however, and can’t possibly be taken to TV verbatim. Texts from Last Night, too, is often vulgar, as well as revealing the many unscrupulous activities of its anonymous contributors. It won’t be easy to represent a lot of them accurately and still be TV friendly.

The Internet allows for a far greater degree of freedom than television. It will be interesting to see how far this trend continues, as some viewers may find the TV versions of such material unsatisfactory after some of the edge has been taken off.

Twitter can’t seem to get their act straightened out with an integrated retweet function.  Granted, retweeting was not an official feature and came from the community.  Still, after countless 3rd party applications found a way to integrate retweeting into their apps, Twitter gave it a try last week.

And then they removed it.

I’m not so sure that people really liked Twitter’s native retweet function to begin with.  It simply wasn’t flexible enough, as it would not allow you to modify the message prior to retweeting.

Skipping ahead to yesterday, Posterous announced seamless retweeting into its already to use lifestreaming software.

Posterous has been on a tear, and fills the middle ground between microblogging and blogging.  Popular bloggers such as Steve Rubel have sworn off blogging in favor of this nimble utility.

Does that mean that Posterous will overtake Twitter? Not likely anytime soon, they aren’t in the same league:

Still, it makes you wonder if Twitter will remain top dog forever, as more of the social web aims for a piece of the digital pie.

Twitter releases Twitter Lists Widgets

Setting up a list is easy, but it’s not something every user of Twitter can do quite yet. Twitter invited a selected group for the beta program, and while we’re not sure what the rhyme or reason was in figuring out who’s on and who got left out, we’re glad that we made the cut. Those who don’t have the feature won’t see any differences in their home page. If you were invited for the beta test, you’ll know. Check for the giant box at the top of your home page reading “New! Lists…”.

If you do qualify, and you’d like to make a new list, find the section on your right-hand sidebar called “Lists.” It should be new to you. Just underneath will be two options: ‘New List” and “View All.” Click on “New List” and give it a name. Then, decide if you want to make your list public or private. Once you’ve done that, just go to your list of followers and start adding anybody you’d like to see on that specific list.

The feature definitely has a few kinks that still need working out, but we’ve mostly been happy with our experience thus far. We just wish they would make populating lists a little easier.

Who’s On Your List?

So who do we follow? And who do we think you should be following too? Beta users, check out our initial Movers and Shakers list. Anybody who can’t access Twitter Lists right now can see whose on our list by clicking here.

If you’re keeping score at home, this means that Twitter’s stock has quadrupled in just less than 7 months. It’s an astonishing feat when you think about the fact that Twitter has made no recent announcement of plans to monetize their product; which makes us wonder why all these investors are rushing to hand their wallets over to Jack, Evan and Biz.

In the past year there have been countless theories concerning how Twitter can start to turn a profit with their product, but it’s hard to tell if the Twitter brass is thinking the same way – or maybe they’ve already thought about these options and ruled them out. What’s more, a lot of the ideas people have had for monetizing Twitter call for a whole lot less capital than $1 billion. Running ads will cost them little more than what they’re already spending on developers, but it probably won’t lead to a serious payoff. Generating demographic reports and organizing groups and legions with which companies could better market themselves wouldn’t cost much, either. And neither would putting together Twitter Search Analytics systems, which Tweetizen.com’s Adarsh Pallian has suggested Twitter start doing.

But then there’s this:

Over 20 million people are using Twitter these days, a figure that pales in comparison to Facebook, which celebrated its 300 millionth member just the other day. That means that Twitter has roughly 8% the user population of Facebook, but their considered worth is 15% that of Facebook’s (Facebook is currently valued by most investors at $6.5 billion). If you look at the steady incline of Facebook’s user population, and then consider the fact that Twitter is actually easier to use and more accessible than Facebook, odds are that Twitter will experience a similar jump in population in the not-so-distant future. A jump to 300 million? It’s certainly not out of the question.

So while we probably won’t be sure of Twitter’s monetization strategy until they actually come out and announce their plans, we can take what investor Joi Ito has to say to heart:

“All the companies I’ve invested in that have gone bust, or that I’ve seen go bust, have business models and great product and pretty good teams, but they have no users. Getting users, getting distribution, getting attention, becoming viral – that’s the single most difficult thing on the internet to do. And just about every product fails because they don’t have enough users.”

Does this mean Twitter is getting a billion dollars on a leap of faith? Or do you think the brass shelling out all this dough are privy to a bit of information we in the general public have yet to discover?

Feeding the monster of Twitter’s temporary ineptitude was the fact that no one could talk about it on the platform such conversations were made perfect for: Twitter.

Yes, folks, the truth herein is that there may be no greater avenue for talking about Twitter being down than Twitter.com itself, which probably meant that the entire tweetin’ community was sitting around their computers, hitting “refresh” and waiting until they could go back to tweeting about how nice it is to have Twitter back.

If you’re like us, and you’re a tech-savvy company that’s got people tweeting this way and that throughout the day about any idle musings we may get into, you’re probably wondering the same thing we’ve been thinking about for the past 27 hours.

Who would do such a thing?

Well, our team of experts (and quasi-experts) has compiled a list of potential evil-doers who are likely to blame for hacking into the system and shutting down this Twitter tool we’ve all grown so fond of. Without further ado:

Perez Hilton

Of course! Twitter’s been this guy’s Achilles heel for the past few weeks since he got himself into a load of trouble with the guy managing the Black Eyed Peas. Sure, Hilton tried to remedy the situation, but he’s been taking all kinds of heat of late for his antics that fateful night when he tweeted for someone else to call 911 for him. In crisis mode over his inability to wash the slate clean, the only plausible solution was to feed Twitter’s servers some of his toxic hair-dye.

Britney Spears

Uh, hello?! Whether she’s willing to admit it or not, Britney’s been consumed with fame since she was the age of ten, and there is no way she’s gonna let some white-trash Iowa hick like Ashton Kutcher go out and get more followers on Twitter than her. That’s just ridiculous.

Twitter

Yes, the beast itself. Now, obviously, the question you must ask is, why would Twitter knock itself out of the game? Wouldn’t that be kind of counter-intuitive? Uhh, yeah, until you check the stats and see that Twitter itself has fewer followers than Ellen Degeneres. Total travesty for the Tweet-hub; the only solution is to knock the whole system off its handle.

Swine Flu

It’s already knocked out all the high school sporting events in Texas and half of the mass gatherings in Mexico. People in Asia are walking around scared for their lives of this thing, and my buddy Shelby was just put on his back for a week because of the H1N1. It’s highly contagious. Who says it can’t mess around with the immune system of the world’s most revolutionary micro-blogging tool?

Your Mom

Yes, your very own mother. Because while you’ve been up in your room tweeting about god knows what, the meatloaf downstairs has turned cold and grown hard as a three-day-old loaf of bread. That’s why she shut down Twitter; because you’ve been late to every meal for the past three weeks.