For my blog, I am somewhat active on Twitter, although I generally use it as a means to communicate outwardly rather than having a discussion with others. I’d say that about 60% of my posts are “Tweeted” by me shortly after posting, and I get a bit of traffic as a result. With so many balls in the air, I don’t really have enough time to check in with Twitter very often.

A while back, I set up Twitter accounts for Lowell.com, Newburyport.com, and Burbank.com, and I still update them occasionally using CoTweet. I didn’t bother to set them up for other websites of mine, figuring it wasn’t necessary. Well, that assumption was pretty wrong.

Today, I decided to open a Twitter account for DogWalker.com, and within an hour or so of setting it up, I had two new registrations and one paid listing. I don’t have a lot of followers yet, but I am now following quite a few people. It seems that when you start out, you end up following a lot more people than people who follow you, but with a bunch of people automatically following their followers, you can build up quite a number of followers.

Instead of having to laboriously search through Twitter to find related businesses to follow (dog walkers and pet sitters), I noticed that one company had a list of hundreds of pet care companies, so I just followed all of them. I don’t expect to “Tweet” much, but I might give special offers on Twitter – like donating $10 to local non profits of a new advertiser’s choice.

The total time it took to set up was under an hour, and I expect this to help generate business. Sometimes the most obvious things are missed, and I certainly missed it with some of my newer websites.

Yes, this idea is pretty obvious right now, but even smart people who know this sh*t need to be reminded every once in a while.

**Update** The Jerusalem Post is reporting that the actual price was $3,000.

According to several news reports, including one in the New York Times, Israel bought the rights to use the @israel Twitter handle found at Twitter.com/israel. Although the price was not revealed in the Times article, it was reported to be in the six figure range by The First Post. Because of Twitter rules preventing the sale of Twitter accounts, the transaction was completed via a loophole.

I am not really surprised that the state of Israel would want to have this Twitter handle with Twitter’s popularity still high and its huge reach. Looking back a couple of years, however, it does seem strange that Israel would not pay seven figures for something that would seem to be even more important to the country and its tourism industry: Israel.com.

You may recall, Israel.com was up for an auction held by Moniker during TRAFFIC, and the reserve price was reportedly $5,500,000. The domain name did not sell during the live auction, but it was reportedly sold for $5,880,000, according to an article in Israeli newspaper, Haaretz.

Since the Whois information is private and since the domain name is currently parked, it does not appear that the state of Israel was the buyer of this domain name. It’s interesting that the state of Israel would pay a reported 6 figure sum for a Twitter handle, but they weren’t interested in buying Israel.com for $5.5 million when it was up for auction.

Tim Tebow haircut photo from Twitpic: (http://twitpic.com/2ckyyv)

One of the funniest photos making the rounds on Twitter and the Internet during the past few days is a photo of the new Tim Tebow haircut, which was distributed by LenDale White, running back for the Denver Broncos. As many football fans know, NFL rookies are subject to minor hazing rituals (like carrying veterans’ pads, bringing water, and other ridicule) during football training camp.

Tim Tebow, popular former Florida Gators quarterback and Broncos’ rookie, is no different than any other rookie when it comes to pranks and hazing. Known for his deep religious beliefs, Tebow was given a hilarious Friar Tuck-esque haircut last week by his veteran teammates. LenDale White then posted the photo on his Twitter page using Twitpic, and it was seen by thousands of fans who follow White and others.

After checking out White’s Twitter page and seeing the picture, I went to visit the url being prominently advertised by White on his Twitter page. Surprisingly, the LenDaleWhite.com website resolves to a default parking page with PPC links rather than a Lendale White fan page. There’s also a link on the page that says “This domain may be for sale.”

From the looks of his Twitter presence, LenDale White does a pretty good job of marketing himself. However, he needs to do a better job of looking after his website.

I am not someone who is interested in politics or discussing politics. In fact, I strongly dislike political conversations with polarizing topics – it’s just not my thing. That being said, I came across President Obama’s Twitter page this afternoon and saw something that I think is pretty ironic.

Just about all of the URLs that are linked to from the President’s page use Bitly to shorten the URL. Although Bitly owns Bitly.com, it primarily uses Bit.LY for its shortened URLs, and .LY is the ccTLD for the country of Libya. For instance, http://bit.ly/bROnKn, http://www.bit.ly/9-l, and http://bit.ly/a-r were all recently used on President Obama’s Twitter page.

As you are may be aware, the country of Libya, along with Cuba and Syria was described by John Bolton as “Beyond the Axis of Evil.”  The government of Libya isn’t exactly on the friendliest of terms with the US government, so it’s somewhat humorous in an ironic way that the President’s Twitter staff would choose to use Bitly to shorten URLs.

From what I understand, it’s fairly simple to create a URL shortener on any domain name. There are plenty of short .US domain names that would make the perfect URL shortener for our President. Just some food for thought.

A few weeks ago, a reader emailed me with a question, “I’m asking myself if businesses are abandoning their websites for a facebook page. Maybe not for an ecommerce site but for a small and medium “brochure” type website, why not just go with facebook? ” As I was about to write an article to discuss this, Mike Berkens had a post that touched on this topic.

It seems that many companies have been using and actively promoting Facebook and Twitter accounts with vanity urls that contain their brand names. I personally never liked the idea of ceding control of your url, which has been done by companies like Best Buy with their Twitter Twelpforce and TGI Friday’s with their Facebook FanWoody campaign.

Today, I read an article on TechCrunch about Facebook revoking the vanity url, http://www.facebook.com/harmon, used by one of its users, Harmon Bajwa. The company allegedly sold it to another company named Harman International, who wanted it for a campaign, supposedly in conjunction with the Grammy Awards.

Imagine that your small company shares its name with a Fortune 500 company – or even shares a name with a F500 company’s brand. It doesn’t appear that there would be anything to stop Facebook or maybe even Twitter from taking your url and selling or giving it to another company.

With a domain name, another company could still try to get it by filing a UDRP dispute (or lawsuit), but there are mechanisms in place to prevent a person or company from simply having the domain name taken from them.

This looks really bad for Facebook, and it’s a good reason why smaller companies and individuals should really think about whether they want to give up control of their address online.