In just the last month I’ve really started using Twitter’s favorite feature. I’ve used it 3,571 times so far in just the past month. What is it? Well, I read thousands of tweets every day and I pick my favorite ones and click “favorite” on them. What does that do? It shares them with everyone on Twitter. You can see a page of all my favorites here. Unfortunately you probably will only be able to see the last few hundred, but a new service called favstar.fm is tracking them all and is showing some details.

For instance, you can see who my favorite Twitter users are here.

But what I’m learning goes well beyond that. It tells me that Twitter isn’t lame anymore. Remember those days when Twitter was for telling all your friends you were having a tuna sandwich at Subway in Half Moon Bay?

I do.

Those days are mere memories anymore.

Today Twitter is used for professional networking. Well, OK, and a few of us still use it to tell you where we’re eating for lunch, but those tweets are easy to skip over.

So, what have I learned by reading hundreds of thousands of tweets in the past month and favoriting 3,571?

1. If it moves in the tech industry it moves on Twitter first. I’m very active on Facebook, Google Reader, FriendFeed, and quite a few other services, and, sorry to those services, but stuff moves on Twitter first. If TechCrunch breaks a story I always see it on Twitter first.

2. More executives and influentials are on Twitter and far more are ACCESSIBLE on Twitter. There are lots on Facebook, almost everyone in the industry is, but very few people on Facebook will give you access to what they are writing and sharing.

3. Facebook is increasingly being seen as “for ‘real friends’ and family” or a rolodex of contacts, while Twitter is for telling us what they are working on. In many cases people just import their tweets into their Facebook accounts. (A practice that really bugs me but I’m not going to be able to stop it).

4. Twitter is a better news reader than Google Reader. And a worse one too. Google Reader is awesome if you really limit the number of feeds you follow (and the number of friends). Unfortunately I don’t follow that advice. Google Reader has become useless to me and VERY SLOW. I sure wish the team would use my account and figure out how to make it rocking fast for friend management. It’s gotten so bad I hate even going in there and use Feedly, except for the fact that the world is moving to mobile and Feedly only plays well on desktops with Firefox loaded.

5. Mobile is why Twitter is winning. I have moved probably 80% of my reading over to iPhone. On Facebook, FriendFeed, and Twitter. And I can tell that my favorite Twitterers have done the same. My favorite app? SimplyTweet. I’ve tried them all. Twitterrific. TweetDeck. Tweetie. And many others and SimplyTweet is the best — by far. It never crashes and hasn’t pissed me off once. All the others have. Reading behavior shifting to mobile has DEEP implications for all sorts of startups. If you don’t have a mobile strategy you will fail in this new world. It will be a lot harder to get adoption than if you have an iPhone app (and a Palm Pre one, an Android one, a Blackberry one, etc).

6. A large percentage of great tweets have a link. It’s very hard to say anything useful in 140 characters. Believe me, I’ve tried to spend most of 2009 saying stuff in 140 character bites. It isn’t satisfying most of the time. Long blogging has its place and those who get lots of retweets use long blogs a lot.

7. You only need to follow about 2,000 people to hit about 85% of the tech conversations out there. Why is that? Because of retweeting. Let’s say I didn’t follow Jeremiah Owyang. Let’s say he got an exclusive interview with Steve Jobs. How many minutes would it be before I heard about it? I’ve found usually about 30 seconds. In fact, within 30 minutes you will be sick and tired of hearing about it. Just tonight we had an example when Seesmic released a cool new desktop client. I wanted out I heard about it so much!

8. If you don’t read tweets for eight hours, don’t worry, all the big stuff you missed will be on TechMeme. When I was the first to talk about Yelp’s augmented reality feature on Twitter and on FriendFeed it was quickly blogged by EVERYONE and was on TechMeme within a few minutes and stayed there for about a day. The same is true of ALL news. I have not found an example yet where something important is discussed on Twitter about a tech company or tech news and doesn’t show up on TechMeme within a few hours. What doesn’t show up? Small stuff like birthdays or launches of obscure technology that only a very small audience will use.

9. Pushing Favorites over to FriendFeed via RSS makes them more searchable. I can find all sorts of stuff over on FriendFeed that I can’t find on Twitter. Why? Twitter’s search sucks and only shows you the last few days of results. Looking for something twittered about months ago? I can find it on my account, but you won’t be able to on just Twitter search. It’s not perfect, though. I wish search engines were better and I wish FriendFeed were better at letting me search just Twitter Favorites.

10. There is an 80/20 rule. The best Twitterers are a LOT better at Tweeting than even those just a few notches down. This is why some people get lots of followers on FriendFeed/Facebook/Twitter while others don’t, even after discounting the power of the suggested user lists on those services.

11. There is a LOT of noise on Twitter. It’s true. But that’s why human curation is going to be more and more important and why services like TweetMeme and others (I need to do a post on those) will be more and more important over time. Also, why when I unfollowed everyone that got a lot of discussion going. People are looking for ways to reduce noise in their lives and people and companies that help do that will get attention.

Anyway, I’ve gotta get back to reading tweets. Anything else you’re learning from reading all these tweets?

Oh, and I love that the Wall Street Journal made a case today that Twitter is worth 2.6 billion. I made the case a couple weeks back after reading so many Tweets that Twitter is worth $5 billion. Yesterday it was announced that Twitter raised another round of funding where investors poured in cash at a billion dollar valuation, which means that the investors can see a case for it being worth 10x that. Now you know why Ron Conway, investor in Twitter, was nice to me the other day at TechCrunch50.

I’ve been taking lots of bashing for not backing up my blog. I deserved that. Or did I? Several people this weekend have been sending me all the posts that have been deleted. How did they do that, I asked a couple. “RSS,” was the answer. In other words, I had been backing up my blog all along without thinking about it.

“Huh?”

I hurried off to Google Reader, clicked on my folder, and sure enough, there were all my posts.

RSS was automatically backing up my blog to thousands of people’s accounts. Oh, dummy! I’m now rebuilding my posts from those.

This is why I’m excited by another trend I’m seeing happen. RSSCloud. Turns out that WordPress turned on this infrastructure today. Yes, Matt Mullenweg is working on his day off. So is Dave Winer. Geeks! Dave Winer is showing off what happened today on his blog.

Anyway, what is this doing? Well, Dave Winer showed it to me the other day. He’s backing up all my Tweets (here’s my Tweets in XML from today on his server). So, if something goes wrong it’s stored on his server. In a decentralized way. All in real time, or nearly so (at oldest each item is a minute old due to the decentralized ping architecture that RSS Cloud uses, but I’ll let Dave Winer explain more about that.

Now this doesn’t look very important today. But, it’s an interesting building block for a new world where EVERYTHING Tweets.

Don’t believe me that everything will Tweet?

We have buoys in the ocean that Tweet. London’s Tower Bridge Tweets. The US-Canada border crossing Tweets.

Imagine a world where everything Tweets. Now, why do they need to Tweet on Twitter? Aren’t we rebuilding the same world we had in 1993 when lots of us were on CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL? What came along next? The open web.

So, let’s think about CNN. Why is CNN giving Twitter millions of dollars in free advertising? I keep hearing that we should “follow CNN on Twitter.” Why not “follow CNN’s Tweets at cnn.com/twitter?” Instead of the current “follow CNN on http://twitter.com/cnn.”

Why do we need to care? Well, we’ve already seen what happens when we have a single point of failure: when Twitter is down everything is down. Have you ever seen the entire web go down? I haven’t. Even in high flow events like 9/11, where lots of “professional news sites” were unreachable for a few hours there were lots of other sites with the news that were reachable.

Imagine if emergency resources weren’t available because Twitter’s data center got hit by a huge earthquake? Now you are getting to the core of one of my fears. During the 1989 earthquake KGO Radio went down, but the net stayed up. Centralized resources aren’t the way to go. We saw this when the plane fell into the Hudson, too. We couldn’t get to Janis Krums’ picture, but because his picture was copied by a bunch of different servers we were able to see it other places.

Does CNN serve itself well by not having a backup of its Tweets? No.

Why not?

1. Because right now all the branding power of CNN is being gifted to another brand.
2. Because right now all the Google juice behind twitter.com/cnn is being gifted to another URL that might not be there when CNN needs it to be (during a high-flow event).
3. Because right now Twitter search is inconsistent at best, and doesn’t show Tweets older than a few weeks at worst. So, any useful stuff in CNN’s Twitter account isn’t searchable. If they built their own Twitter they would be able to build their own search that worked the way they wanted it to.
4. Because Twitter has proven that it is perfectly willing to kick accounts off. And sometimes things get hacked. My friend Fred Davis, who is one of the co-founders of Wired Magazine, recently had his Twitter account hacked and had his account closed down. This is why he now Tweets on a vulgar account here. Can CNN or the New York Times afford to let some other organization have that power?
5. Because anything that CNN types into Twitter now becomes subject to Twitter’s Terms of Service. It spells out the potential danger right here: “We reserve the right, in accordance with any applicable laws, to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time.” What happens if Twitter gets bought by Fox News and Rupert Murdoch wants to charge CNN for its Twitter account? This COULD happen. If CNN built its own Twitter on its own servers then that danger would go away.

But, maybe I’m being alarmist. Either way, I’ve learned a lot this weekend of the power of decentralized distribution. My words are safe. Because they were automatically backed up and distributed to thousands of people and their own accounts. Some people used Google Reader. Other people used RSS aggregators that stored my words on their local computers, like FeedDemon.

Now, what’s stopping us from distributing Tweets this way?

Yes, I know of Twistory, which backs up your Tweets. But here’s the rub, it will only back up the last 3,000 Tweets. I’ve already done many times that. Plus, your backup doesn’t help the ecosystem the way that RSS does. You can’t build search on top of the datastore that Twistory does. You can’t distribute your Tweetstore to everyone else who’s interested, at least not easily.

Anyway, now you know that RSS=Robert’s Stuff is Saved. Today, thanks to RSS Cloud, everyone on WordPress will be safe in a whole new way.

A few weeks ago some hackers broke into my blog here (this was before 2.8.4 was released). At first I thought they just left some porn sites in a couple of blog entries. So we upgraded WordPress (I was on 2.7x back then). Deleted a fake admin account. Deleted the porn sites. And thought we had solved the problem. We didn’t.

They broke back in, but this time they did a lot more damage. They deleted about two months of my blog. Yes, I didn’t have a backup. I should learn to do backups (we’re doing them now). Life has a way of beating you if you don’t have backups.

Anyway, this time they also put some malicious code on my archive pages. Google sent me an email saying they had removed my blog from its index. That got a whole team to look into how they broke in. Now thanks to TechCrunch and Mashable you know there was a vulnerability in WordPress which let them break in. Even more good details on Lorelle’s blog.

We’ve done some other things now to make it harder for them to break in (for instance, my admin account has been deleted and a new one doesn’t use the name “admin”), but the damage is done and I feel the same way when our childhood home was broken into. I don’t feel safe here, which might explain why I’ve been posting more over on a new Posterous blog I’ve setup.

Hopefully we’ve caught all the damage and hopefully other WordPress users haven’t had worse damage happen to them. Have you been hit by WordPress vulnerabilities? If so, what did you do to lock down the system?

Oh, and please upgrade your WordPress immediately to the latest version. That seems to have fixed the hole that the jerks got in through on my blog. Knock on wood.

So, once this happens, how do you feel safe again?

UPDATE: Matt Mullenweg, who is the guy who runs Automattic, the company that produces WordPress, wrote that I never had the problem on WordPress.com (hosted version of WordPress). That’s true. Interesting conversation going on over there with Matt.