For a while now the world has been talking about ways to make money on Twitter. When reading the news today for a second I thought the solution has been found by a third party provider. Although the money is virtual, I think the idea is worth presenting here in ‘monetinzing Twitter’ section. Pretwitting.com combines cleverly couple of things in one: making money, gambling, foreseeing the future, analyzing trends, predicting. It must be a fun game!

Indeed, Pretwitting.com is simple but entertaining. And addictive. This might be a killer. For a Twitter, that is. I have found myself checking up notoriously my fresh portfolio, consisting only of two words: ‘money’ and ‘era’. Any thoughts why these in particular?

OK, what is the new service all about? Each new participant gets ten thousand dollars ($10.000) for buying words. Their prices differ depending on popularity: the more popular the word, the more expensive it is. At this moment the most expensive one is “the” at $264. The 60th position is “by” at 24,29. The service monitors the usage of words on Twitter and the prices are based on statistics. The update takes place every 10 minutes or so.

There is another limitation on what (or rather how many) words you can buy. You get 1000 slots. Most of the words are occupying 1 slot only, but better ones more (up to 5 slots per word). In my case I managed to buy only 600 ‘eras’ and 100 ‘moneys’. And I am done – no more slots available. I must sell some of them before I can buy anything else. Fortunately, I can sell a part of the portfolio by declaring different quantities, (e.g. 150/300/600 or 25/50/100) which equals 25%/50%/100% of particular word portfolio.

So far I have been up and I have been down with my investment – this changes frequently.

By selling 25% of my portfolio just now I came up in ranking from 300 range to #189. Is it good or bad? You tell me!

To sum up: I think Twitter should be grateful to Pretwitting.com for coming up with such a great idea. If I was on board of Twitter directors I would focus my efforts on promoting the new game. It is so addictive and because of that got a huge potential: in getting new users, spreading the word about Twitter around (priceless PR we call it) or just creating excitement.

If only the money was not virtual!

http://www.money-era.com/2009/09/make-money-on-twitter-there-is-only-one-%E2%80%98but%E2%80%99/

There’s no doubt about it: TV is getting way more social. A recent patent filed by IBM reveals that Big Blue wants to help it get even more social, by developing a remote control that will automatically blog and/or microblog what you’re watching.

The patent talks about a networkable remote controller that can “send a blog posting to a blog,” which can be set up to send posts automatically. It includes the ability to comment on the shows you’re watching, either by selecting from a pre-populated list or authoring your own. It also mentions posting automatically to microblogging services, which to most of us means Twitter (Twitter).

The patent was filed April 14 of this year, and the approval process can take some time so it may be a while before this thing comes to market. Nevertheless, it’s another stepping stone on the road to socially-enabled television.

Check out the original patent diagram below. Let us know if you’re excited about the idea of social TV. Do you use applications like Boxee (Boxee) already? Do you watch Hulu with your Facebook friends? Do you have a TV that already supports social widgets? Let us know in the comments.