Recently, there was a flurry of activity on Twitter to support a project being organized by @Jeff Power.  The project was to raise $10,000 to assist an Ethiopian man build a store. A site had been set up at Boy Without Arms with information and a Chip In counter to show the monies raised on a progressive tally basis.

What a great way to use Twitter as a medium to reach people. Tweets were sent and retweeted about the project and resulted in the required amount being raised to help in this most worthy cause.

@JeffPower is now travelling to Ethiopia to assist in completing this project. It's great to be able to see the follow through as Jeff makes his Boy Without Arms Blog entries to report on progress. The people who donated can now see in real time how the project unfolds.  This is unlike many projects where the money is donated and that's the last you hear of it.

Part of raising these funds was the mobilization of the team of people at Cagora, a community networking site. The tweeting and retweeting by these people no doubt assisted greatly in raising the required cash. The whole thing was a great demonstration of the power of Twitter to assist charities. Well done Tweeple!

According to a post on Read Write Web, Twitter has gained another 35 Million in funding.

The post makes interesting reading as it says that most of Twitter's traffic comes from sources using it's API as opposed to visiting the Twitter website. In turn this will make it very interesting as to how Twitter intends to monetize in the future. Obviously there must be some plans. No-one is going to invest $35m into a business that is just a bottomless pit and sooner or later Twitter will have to announce the manner in which it is going to fund itself.

The post at Read Write Web states that Twitter grew by 900% in the last year and I have also heard figures of around 10,000 new people a day joining Twitter.  This is phenomenal growth by any standard and there is plenty of evidence that Twitter is very much becoming a mainstream application.  The recent bushfires in Victoria give testimony to this fact where there were Twitter posts from radio station @774Melbourne, @CFAUpdates and even @CFAVolunteer providing updates on the fires. Several people, including myself, were tweeting or retweeting the current news to a hungry audience on Twitter.

With a monetization process somewhere in the background, one hopes that Twitter will not grow to a point where it is effectively the number one application online and then kill users off through a business strategy that will see people leave Twitter in droves.  Twitter has become far too an integral part of many people's lives, so it will be very interesting to see how they proceed in turning the company into a profit making concern.

I've been following MrTweet for quite some time but I haven't received any Tweets from him recommending people to follow. Today however, a Tweet came through my stream where someone had recommended someone on MrTweet so I went to have a look.

What I found on exploring the site was nothing short of amazing. I had no idea I could recommend people using MrTweet. So, I immediately set about recommending my top friends on Twitter as people worthy of being followed and provided a reason why I recommended them. When you do this, you are taken to your Twitter page and a Tweet appears that says:-

First of all, let me explain that I have titled this post with @barackobama, @KevinRuddPM, @DowningStreet and @TurnbullMalcolm because these blog posts are fed to Twitter by RSS.  Consequently, the title of the post will land in the inboxes of these people who will hopefully take notice. Now when I say, take notice, I mean not only of this post, but also of the replies you people who read this add in the comments section.

So, let's get on with solving the world's financial and economic crisis and how Twitter can help.