Hello advertisers! Twitter virals are the "new" Lonely Girl.

The April Fools days of Lonely Girl are over. YouTube is known for “quick-win” spikes of viewership… BUT what goes up, must come down! Nothing viral lasts forever. If you want to create something with a new virality – then play on Twitter. Unlike YouTube, Twitter is fresh and a world-sweeping “twit-viral” has not yet taken place in the Twittersphere.

Within the last year we have seen a spike in sites that use the Twitter API proving that Twitter Mashups are the new big thing! Twitter has its own sub-culture of independent initiatives that utilize key-word or key-phrase searches and display the results in either a list-view or data-visualization format.

These initiatives feed curiosity and encourages twitter users to  play where the Twitter “in-crowd” plays. Below is just a small sampling of initiatives that use the Twitter API.

Twitter Virals

• Curse Bird – a real-time feed of people cursing on Twitter.
  
• Pants Status – a twitter feed that shows people to declare the status of their pants.
  
• Twitter Grader -  gives you a grade based on the power of your Twitter profile. Just enter your name and see how you rank.
  
• Tweet Scan – a real-time search engine for Twitter  that indexes all public messages so you can find the conversations, people, and messages you want. You can search by keyword or author.
  
  
• Twitter Vision – uses Google maps to show real time tweets from all over the world.
  
• Twitter Friends Network Browser – Enter a username and browse through your friends list in a visually unique way. Find out what your friends are doing, and what their friends are doing, and what their friends are doing.
  
• Twubble – Twubble can help expand your Twitter bubble—it searches your friend graph and picks out people who you may like to follow.
  
• Twitter Color Wars – Color Wars 2008 is an internet-wide game in which players from a number of self created teams compete for prizes and medals.
  
• Tweet Stats – Graph your Twitter Stats including: Tweets per hour, Tweets per month, Tweet timeline and Reply statistics.
  
• Twitter Troll - is an app that lets you search within the actual Tweets to find people who share common interests.
  
• Group Tweet – Allows you to post private message to a group of Twitter friends.
  
• FAVRD – lists interesting things that show up on Twitter, based on the number of times an item has been declared a ‘favorite’.
  
• Twist Trends – see word trends in Twitter. You can compare various concepts and separate them with commas.
  

Hello Brands. Meet Twitter.

I predict Twitter virals are on the verge of becoming uber-commercial. Celebs like Britney Spears, MC Hammer and even Santa Claus are on twitter. I predict that brands are starting to jump on the Twitter bandwagon (Twagon?) and want to seek organic methods of interacting with consumers, especially as the economy weakens.

As of now, most Twitter users with the most followers are tech-geeks. They control the “tweet-power”. Call them the “cool twits” or the in-crowd, if you will. All a brand has to do is create a Twitter initiative that speaks to the in-crowd and it will become a twitter-viral…  only if it feels organic and not overly “commercial”. Oh! And I should mention that it needs to be useful, unique or entertaining.

The Twitter Crystal Ball

As more people in mass culture begin to understand and utilize Twitter we will see brands follow and play in the same sandbox. The brands who will succeed will do play in the Twitter-Sphere in a way that is organic and focused.