And then things became a little fancier and you could host a form on your site to allow people to send others links to your site. By email.

Plug-ins soon came along, and you could embed content from other sites in your site. And let visitors provide their own content (comments, etc) on your site.

All on your site. Or sent by email.

The great thing these days is that you can easily provide tools to allow visitors to share your content on other sites for you, and to follow your site on other sites. Its about moving the conversation.

Two tools which really illustrate this are Twitter and Add This. I’ve written before about Twitter and how I’ve integrated it into London for Free. I’ve already attracted quite a few followers – people who now don’t need to come back to my site to see info I’ve added about events. Instead, they will see my twitter post on either twitter itself or a twitter content aggregation site.

Add This is an excellent plug-in to allow visitors to London for Free to share it on other sites such as Facebook, delicious and more. And every time they do, it doesn’t just benefit them. It benefits my site. The more times my site can be linked to the likes of Facebook and other popular sites, the better. Though these links aren’t treated as proper inbound links by search engines, they help to advertise my site.

Two simple ways to promote your site on other sites and support conversations by visitors about it anywhere.

I’ve been thinking for a while about getting a new phone so I can check out all the mobile apps available. But after posting about it on Facebook, I realise the choice is staggering.

Now I really don’t need an iPhone as all I would use it for are the mobile apps. And I’m a big google fan. So I’ve decided to wait until a cool new phone using the Android platform becomes available and more apps get launched for it.

In the meantime, I’ve opted for a dongle with 3 network – bargain at £90 for 12 months “unlimited” access. Not exactly mobile apps but mobile web using my laptop . Haven’t tried it out yet – might take it to starbucks one day soon and give it a whirl.

This week has been amazing for London for Free. The number of visitors in the past month has now exceeded 21,000 and adsense revenue for Feb has jumped 30% on January.  And we do absolutely zero paid advertising.

The site is now ranking top of results for a number of google searches around “London”, so that would help. It even beats commercial sites about London. e.g. for “London walks” I rank number 1, above “walks.com” and others.

So I’ve been thinking of ways of boosting the site’s numbers even more and I’ve now set up a twitter account for London for Free, where I will try to post daily info and links to free stuff. Its also another way of learning more about how twitter can be used for business purposes.

This week I also discovered an excellent plug-in for Outlook called xobni. Can’t rave enough about it – it brings all your LinkedIn and Facebook contacts and statuses into the outlook client so you can see info about people as you read emails from them. It also enables you to integrate hotmail and gmail accounts so you can check them all from outlook. An excellent plug-in.

Lastly, I’ve bought two books recently which look very interesting.

Click and Grown up Digital.

I’ll post reviews of them once I’ve read them.

I read somewhere recently that its the fastest growing website at the moment so I wanted to figure out how it works and why it is so popular – and also how it really differs from social networks like Facebook.

And how organisations could make use of it.

Then yesterday I saw that Stephen Fry tweets obsessively. So I decided to follow him. That’s what you do with Twitter. Rather than invite your friends (as in Facebook), you “tweet” (read “post a status update”) and if people choose to, they can simply follow you and see all your posts.

And its true, he does tweet a lot (Stephen, I mean – he feels like a friend now, or am I a stalker??).

Now I’m a huge fan of Facebook, I absolutely love it, but that’s probably because I just love talking to people, making friends with folks from all walks of life, keeping in contact with mates from previous jobs – and I’ve had quite a few of those lately – exchanging laughs, info, links, ideas, generally chatting, learning and sharing both the good times and the bad.

Facebook is a great tool for doing all this stuff – but it requires a bit of effort to upload photos, add links, and do anything beyond status updating to keep your profile pages fresh and interesting. Not that many people bother doing this, of course.

Some people just do status updates, if anything at all.

Ah yes, the famous Status Update. One of the most interesting aspects of it, I think. But the problem with updating your status is that if you do it too often it can feel as if you are dominating the conversation. It does to me, anyway.

Not with Twitter. The more tweets you post the more fun it is. Hourly tweets, even minute by minute (see Stephen Fry’s).

And that’s pretty much it with Twitter. Some call it microblogging, but you can’t – as far as I can tell – do anything around or beyond the “blogging” part. No sharing photos, adding sidebars for links, widgets and so on.

Short and simple – but constant. One to many – but pull rather than push when it comes to reader consumption.

I can see loads of use cases for enterprises when it comes to Twitter. Informing customers of “flash” sales and events (food tasting anyone?), “use within the hour” promotion codes, urgent product recalls, store temporary closures, news flashes, the list is endless.

And if you look at the public timeline you can see loads of examples.

I have now come to love Twitter. I still love Facebook too. So I’ve brought them together but its a one way relationship. My Facebook updates appear in Twitter – but only updates on Facebook appear on Facebook. I don’t want to spam people or crowd the conversation.

Right, I guess its time for my next tweet. See you there!