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Twitter has launched a new section of its website called Twitter Tales, a collection of “examples of great Twitter use [that] will also likely inspire others to use the service in innovative and interesting ways.”

On the official Twitter blog, communications staffer Carolyn Penner wrote that Twitter Tales is intended to be “a growing set of articles that highlights creative individuals and businesses from all corners of the world that help make Twitter awesome.” Users are encouraged to email tales@twitter.com to share their own stories.

Three of the accounts highlighted so far are @natashabadhwar, a New Delhi-based filmmaker; @caltrain, a community-written account for SF commuters; and @thebloggess, a well-known digital humor writer. Each tale is a thorough and fascinating essay, a sort of social media version of a coming-out story.

If this tactic sounds familiar at all, it’s because both Facebook and Google have been heavily promoting user “stories” lately too. Facebook launched a website to highlight its users’ experiences as part of its 500-million-users commemoration. And Google’s “search stories” began with a Super Bowl ad and has continued as a series of YouTube videos and Google blog posts.

As social media junkies, we ourselves use Twitter for myriad purposes, from communicating with friends and family to spreading the word about work and ideas to sharing media to pure self expression. If you’re a Twitter user, how do you use the service? Has it changed your life in any ways?

[img credit: tsevis]

More About: community, facebook stories, google search stories, twitter, twitter tales

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HootSuite has just joined the ranks of websites like Flickr, Vimeo and Pandora: It’s unveiled a freemium business model that’s tiered and tailored for all kinds of users.

As of today, all new users will have to select a plan during signup. Next week, all current users will have to migrate to one of the new packages, as well.

Starting out, all customers (except Enterprise customers) will get a free 30-day trial option for the service’s Pro Plans, which offer such premium features as an ad-free UI, enhanced stats, and multiple RSS feeds, social networks, and team members. Stats packages include additional reporting tools such as Google Analytics integration and custom URL features. And the highest tier of service gives users the ability to add custom vanity web addresses shortening services from Ow.ly Pro.

Pro Plans range in price from $5 to $100 per month and are targeted toward power users, small or medium-sized businesses, smaller agencies and others who are heavy social media users and need control and analytics for their online activity.

The company’s Enterprise Package (Star Trek reference intended) weighs in at around $1,500 per month, or $2,000 per month if you want to use a vanity URL shortener. This service is as deluxe as its pricetag and includes geo-segmented social network monitoring, a full-featured analytics package, Zendesk integration, “HootSuite University” training and a great deal more.

However, HootSuite said it will still keep a free version of its service available to all users; based on surveys it has conducted, the company predicts around 95% of its userbase will use the free option.

Disclosure: As part of the 5% who might fit the Pro Plan profile, your friendly social media junkies here at Mashable do use HootSuite professionally; as daily users, we can tell you it fits the bill for organizations that have teams of very active social media pros.

What do you think of HootSuite’s new freemium model? Do you think it will bring in enough cash to qualify as a significant revenue stream? If you’re a power user or business, would you consider paying for one of the Pro Plans or Enterprise Package? Tell us why or why not in the comments.

More About: business, freemium, hootsuite, social media

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Sony Ericsson and AT&T are working together on a new Android “superphone,” one that promises to be all things to all people — including heavy communicators, social media junkies and audio/video consumers.

Dubbed the Xperia X10, this new device will feature a 4-inch screen, a 1GHz processor, an 8.1 megapixel camera and up to 32GB of memory. All these hardware perks are wedded to an interesting software suite, and the UI itself is rumored to be something special, too.

The one element about which AT&T and Sony are deliberately vague is the specific Android version the device will run. Whether or not the Xperia will ship with Android 2.1 or the much-coveted 2.2 (a.k.a. Froyo) remains to be verified.

For example, part of the phone’s software is Mediascape, which can access images, video and music content from the web, as well as from the device, for a more integrated viewing and sharing experience. Users can “view photos taken on the device as well as [their] Facebook and Picasa web albums,” reads a statement about the device. “Or, when listening to a favorite song on their phone[s], [users can] press Sony Ericsson’s infinite button to access related content about the artist pulled from the phone’s memory as well as albums, songs and video content from YouTube and search results from Google,” it explains.

Another software feature is Timescape, which creates a chronological interface for social updates and actions. It draws data from Facebook, Twitter, photo sites, e-mail accounts, SMS messages and more. Items can be viewed in a scrolling menu, or the user can see a screen of all updates and communications from a single user or source.

The Xperia device will be available beginning August 15 and will cost $149.99 with a two-year AT&T service agreement and data plan.

The device looks pretty slick and will be Sony’s flagship device in the Android category. AT&T already offers several Android devices created in partnership with HTC, Motorola and Samsung.

What do you think of the Xperia so far? Will it be able to give the Droid suite of phones or HTC’s EVO a run for their money?

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Video

More About: android, att, Mobile 2.0, smartphone, sony, Xperia

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Smartphones are one of the most talked-about and hotly debated consumer electronics on the block these days, and manufacturers are pumping out more of these devices each month.

So, how are these devices measuring up in the arena of public opinion? A few 140-character user reviews can say a lot about a phone’s early success or failure, and we’ve got details on what social media junkies are saying about a few Android devices, including the Droid X, the HTC Evo, and the HTC Incredible.

In the past year or so, we’ve gone from “smartphones” to “superphones” — slick, sexy pieces of hardware with huge screens, HD capabilities, powerful cameras, zippy processors, impressive browsing capabilities and more apps than you can shake a stick at. Technology has accelerated quickly over these months, and Android devices are competing nicely with Apple’s iPhones. How they compete amongst themselves, however, is another story.

Many of these phones are selling faster than they can be built. And each one is making a significant media splash at its launch. In the public eye, is there one Android to rule them all?

Android Devices by Sentiment

In looking over data from sentiment analysis tool Chatterscope, which does some natural-language processing on tweets containing a given keyword, we see some interesting patterns emerging. Chatterscope even parses emoticons, and it can determine the difference between a moderately satisfied customer and a truly enthusiastic reviewer. Here’s what we learned from tracking Android-related keywords for eleven days.

Between July 8, 2010 and today, Chatterscope collected 13, 303 tweets about the Droid X, 976 about HTC’s Evo, and 427 tweets about the HTC Droid Incredible. Clearly, the Droid X — which launched just last week — saw the lion’s share of buzz in terms of volume. We can attribute most of this noise to the fact that the device is brand-new and getting a lot of press coverage at the time, leading to more tweets and retweets of blog posts, consumer reviews and news articles.

When we dice up the tweets into positive and negative sentiment, a different picture emerges. While the Droid X gets more tweets overall, the Incredible shows by far the best positive-to-negative tweet ratio:

And when it comes to “supergood” and “superbad” tweets, i.e. the overwhelmingly positive and negative opinions and reviews, the Incredible was again the clear winner, with zero tweets of the “I hate this phone and would rather die than use it” variety.

The underperforming device in terms of consumer sentiment, then, is the Evo. Why would this device — Sprint’s first 4G phone, which had completely sold out by June 8, just 4 days after its debut — be getting such a slew of negative Twitter reviews? We have seen some frustration expressed over this fact, which may account for a fair amount of negative sentiment; looks like the Evo’s manufacturers need to step up their game while demand is still hot and before the buzz around other devices sweeps that demand aside.

Android Devices by Volume Over Time

Another app we used to parse Twitter data about these three phones is The Archivist, which looks at users, links, keywords and tweet volume over a period of time.

What we learned from a pure volume analysis is that the Incredible lags in terms of overall mentions — possibly because the Incredible launched at the end of April; the Evo and Droid X, which debuted June 4 and July 15, respectively, haven’t quite cooled yet in terms of media mentions and general public interest.

The Droid X shows a predictable peak around its launch date, but mentions have sharply declined, perhaps signaling a dropping-off in consumer interest. On the other hand, the Evo’s sustained buzz signals good things for that device. Overall, during a 12-day period, the Archivist picked up 63,329 tweets about the Evo, 43,025 about the Droid X, and just 6,466 about the Incredible:

Android Devices Being Compared to the iPhone

Going into this analysis of Android versus Android, we wanted to leave any comparisons to the iPhone 4 completely out of the picture. However, the Archivist showed us that consumers themselves are making comparisons between these Androids and the iPhone in a huge number of their tweets.

We checked out the lists of words used in the same tweets as these Android brand names; only the Incredible didn’t have the term “iPhone” in the top 5 associated keywords.

For the Droid X, “iPhone” was the third-most used word in tweets about the Droid X, outnumbered only by instances of the terms “Motorola” and “Verizon.” In these Droid X tweets, the word “iPhone” shows up in a full 10% of all updates.

When looking at tweets about the Evo, “iPhone” is the fifth most-used term, topped by “HTC” and “4G.” The term “iPhone” appears in 9.8% of tweets about the Evo. And for the Incredible, “iPhone” is the tenth most-used term, showing up in 6.4% of Incredible-related tweets.

For qualitative data on why Twitter users would be putting Android phones in the same tweets as the iPhone, we turned to generic Twitter search. What we saw were frank, brief, gut reactions that compared one device to another; in a significant majority of the tweets we tallied, the Android devices were favorably compared and even considered preferable to the iPhone. Call reception, device speed, open-source software, device-specific features and even hardware aesthetics were touted as Android advantages.

Granted, these tweets all represent subjective user opinions; still, these are the kinds of intuitive, emotion-charged beliefs that move product — and having these evaluations spread over a medium such as Twitter is definitely positive for the makers and retailers of these devices.

Let’s just hope those manufacturers can keep up with demand.

As more and more Android “superphones” roll out with each passing month, we’d love to know which phones are catching your interest. Should we be tracking Samsung’s Galaxy S, too? And what about the Charm from T Mobile?

Let us know which phones are most exciting to you; we’ll add them to our list of devices to track, and we’ll update you on their progress in a couple weeks.

More About: android, droid incredible, droid x, evo, htc evo, HTC Incredible, incredible, iphone, smartphone, social media, twitter

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