The all-India strike called by opposition parties against rising fuel prices made quite an impact on the virtual world too, with ‘Bharat bandh’ being the top trend topic on Twitter, beating the American Independence Day.

On the home page of twitter, the phrase, ‘Bharat Bandh’ (India strike), was at the head of the top 10 ‘trends’, which calculates the frequency of certain phrases used on the social networking tool.

It proved more popular than even ‘God Bless America’, which marked the US Independence day July 4, and “Last Airbender”, the latest film of Indian origin Hollywood director M. Night Shyamalan.

According to trendsmap, a software that maps trends geographically, the majority of the tweets on the shutdown were coming from Mumbai, followed by Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata and Chennai.

Indian twitters were giving reports on the status of the strike in their area, as well as sharing jokes and giving their views on this method of protest.

“Indians are really enjoying their holiday… 12 tweets per minute on Bharat Bandh… Opposition will be happy,” tweeted Meera Chandra.

Kripa Sharma, who tweets under the name, kripss, explained in sms-speak, “Itz bharat bandh… Nt twitter bandh… Hehe”.

Another ‘twitizen’ noted that trend topics seemed to be inversely proportionate to productivity.

Hira Dewangan, a public relations personnel from Chhattisgarh, suggested on twitter that opposition leaders should join the social networking site.

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Microblogging service Twitter introduced a new advertising program on Tuesday, in a first step to prove that its popularity among web users can translate into a self-sustaining business.

Known as “Promoted Tweets,” the ad program represents a much-anticipated move to address concerns about the revenue generating potential at Twitter and marks a key milestone on the road to an initial public offering, analysts said.

“Over the years, we’ve resisted introducing a traditional Web advertising model because we wanted to optimize for value before profit,” wrote Twitter co-founder Biz Stone in a post on the company’s blog on Tuesday.

Twitter, which lets users send short, 140-character text messages, or Tweets, to groups of “followers,” is among the new breed of popular Internet social networking services, along with Facebook and LinkedIn.

The company struck deals to provide its stream of Tweets to Google Inc and Microsoft Corp for inclusion in their Web search results last year, but Tuesday’s ad service represents the first fruits of an effort to build a business model around a recurring revenue stream.

Twitter said that it was currently testing Promoted Tweets with a handful of advertisers including Starbucks Corp, Best Buy Co, Sony Corp’s Sony Pictures and Virgin America. Under the program, a Twitter message, such as a promotional offer by Starbucks, will appear at the top of search results on Twitter for keywords that companies specifically purchase from Twitter.

As Twitter broadens the program to include more advertisers, spokesman Sean Garret said, keywords on Twitter’s search engine will be opened to competitive bidding by advertisers, similar to the way that Google’s lucrative paid search advertising program operates.

Twitter also said on its blog Tuesday that the company planned to eventually serve Promoted Tweets ads beyond its search feature, offering the ads directly within users’ message streams.

Josh Bernoff, a Forrester Research analyst, said Twitter needs to roll out the ad program more aggressively to advertisers if it hopes to turn its service into a money-making tool that can generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

“A handful of advertisers is not going to get them where they want to go,” said Bernoff. “Scale is where the success is.”

Twitter does not release information about its number of users, but comScore said the site had 22.3 million unique visitors in March in the United States, up roughly 140 percent year-over-year.

The ad program represents Twitter’s latest move to evolve from a hot start-up into a financially focused enterprise. The company has filled out its management team with executives with experience at Google and Walt Disney Co’s Pixar Animation Studios over the past year.

Twitter’s Garrett said that Twitter has no plans for an initial public offering, though as one of the Internet’s most popular Web companies, analysts believe Twitter could eventually make for an attractive IPO candidate.

Cowen and Company analyst Jim Friedland said Twitter needed to first show investors that the new ad model can deliver sustainable revenue.

“Even if this ad opportunity is incredibly successful, it’s still going to be a while before they have the track record to go public,” said Friedland. He pointed to Google, which unveiled its AdWords program several years before floating shares to the public in 2004.

Twitter is backed by investors including Benchmark Capital, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. In September, the company raised USD 100 million in a funding round that valued the company at USD 1 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter.

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Because of the need to propagate updates to two different sets of people, your secure profile of “Core” friends and business contacts, and also your “Public” Fan Page, you’ll need a Twitter account. Obviously, anything entered in Twitter is going to be a public update, so you should never use Twitter for anything that is of a private nature or something you don’t want forwarded on.

My attitude towards this is if it isn’t game for Twitter, I probably also don’t want it posted in my private FaceBook profile or my Fan Page. If something is really important and of a sensitive nature, I expect people to have common sense and to call people individually on the phone, or use traditional forms of electronic communication, such as an e-Mail or a private FaceBook message.

If you think that you’ve got something to say that doesn’t belong on Twitter but can stay within your “Inner Circle” on FaceBook on your profile status, you can enter it into FaceBook directly. Got it? Great.

If you have a Twitter account already, good. If not, go to Twitter.com, sign up, and get one.  Once you’ve signed up, you’ll need the RSS feed for your update stream.

Because of the need to propagate updates to two different sets of people, your secure profile of “Core” friends and business contacts, and also your “Public” Fan Page, you’ll need a Twitter account. Obviously, anything entered in Twitter is going to be a public update, so you should never use Twitter for anything that is of a private nature or something you don’t want forwarded on.

My attitude towards this is if it isn’t game for Twitter, I probably also don’t want it posted in my private FaceBook profile or my Fan Page. If something is really important and of a sensitive nature, I expect people to have common sense and to call people individually on the phone, or use traditional forms of electronic communication, such as an e-Mail or a private FaceBook message.

If you think that you’ve got something to say that doesn’t belong on Twitter but can stay within your “Inner Circle” on FaceBook on your profile status, you can enter it into FaceBook directly. Got it? Great.

If you have a Twitter account already, good. If not, go to Twitter.com, sign up, and get one.  Once you’ve signed up, you’ll need the RSS feed for your update stream.

In my case, mine is located on http://twitter.com/mitulbhavsar, and if I click on the “RSS feed of mitulbhavsar’s tweets” link on the middle-right hand side of the page, I get this URL:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/6882462.rss

Your unique RSS feed will have a different number at the end, but copy this into a text file and save this for later, you’ll need it.

If you’re new to Twitter, you can enter status updates directly from the Twitter website, or you can use any number of Twitter clients for your smartphone, mobile Internet device or or your PC.

On the PC for Windows/Mac/Linux, I recommend TweetDeck or Seesmic. On the iPhone and iPad, I like to use Twittelator. On Android, my preference is for Twidroid. On RIM devices I used to use Twitter for BlackBerry.

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Twitter is hoping to lure in more newbies by making its home page more dynamic and user friendly.

Following some tweaks last year, the popular social network has revamped its home page once again. The new home page design, which rolled out Tuesday, now features a slowly scrolling list of randomly selected top tweets that change every few seconds. A rolling marquee near the top of the page displays a feed of hot trending topics. Hovering over any one topic reveals the latest tweet on that subject.

A “See who’s here” window also displays thumbnail photos that link you to the tweets from favorite celebrities, top businesses, and other popular tweeters. And to persuade the uninitiated to sign up, the home page now displays a “New to Twitter” promo on the right touting the benefits of the service and inviting people to “join the conversation.”

Twitter’s official blog on Tuesday said the new design is a test to show up front more of the information that comes from the many tweets on the site. The new home page can be useful for current tweeters but seems especially geared toward those who haven’t yet signed up for the service.

The home page revamp is part of Twitter’s efforts to show people that the site isn’t just for quick status updates, according to the blog, but is now a way of grabbing and sharing information at a fast pace. The company believes the new home page may better convey the value of Twitter to people who haven’t yet sampled the service.

Twitter said it will monitor feedback on the new home page design and test the waters with other ideas to help people learn what the site is all about. Those of you who already have a Twitter account should be able to check out the new home page by logging out and refreshing your browser.

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Twitter hit a major milestone late Thursday – when someone hit the “update” button on the networking site’s 10 billionth tweet.

The question Friday morning? Who was it and what did they say?

Unfortunately for the curious masses, it appears that the landmark tweet was posted by someone who has set their feed to be private by default.

A search for tweet No. 10 billion – individual posts on the site are identified by a number – yields a message saying that page is unavailable.

It was unclear whether Twitter was pursuing the user to see if they’d like to go public. The site’s spokespeople were notably quiet – with no mention of the milestone on their official Twitter feed and no new posts on their blog.

The two nearest misses, however, were public and show the range of ways the micro-blogging site is used.

Tweet number 9,999,999,999 was by a user with the handle @lelamarques, who posted a link to a gallery of “urban decay” photographs – a genre that celebrates the hidden beauty of abandoned buildings.

The user lists her address as Sao Luis, Brazil, and most of her posts are in Portugese – a nod to Twitter’s increasing international popularity.

Twitter has been lauded as a game-changing tool during such internationally notable events as the Iranian election protests and post-earthquake fundraising in Haiti.

But tweet Number 10,000,000,001 likely won’t impress those who consider it a hotbed of meaningless chatter.

In a feed from a woman who says she lives in Bronx, New York, the tweet read simply, “$Pretty N Paid$.”

Her feed is filled with profanity and misspelled words, often written in all caps – considered poor form by many Internet users. [NOTE: Since Friday morning, that user has switched her feed to private].

Interest in the milestone was high on the micro-blogging site, which has seen astronomical growth since it started in 2007. Thursday evening, the site for GigaTweet, an app that tracks the number of Twitter posts in real time, was down – presumably from overuse.

While the total number of Twitter users appeared to flatline several months ago, the sites activity levels has continued to spiral upward.

Twitter saw its 1 billionth tweet about a year ago and hit 5 billion tweets about four months ago.

According to a Wednesday night e-mail from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, the number of Twitter accounts has grown 1,500 percent in the past year.

The company’s low-key response to the much-anticipated tweet, at least in the first several hours that followed, is in stark contrast to how Apple greeted a similar milestone recently.

When the company’s online store sold its 10 billionth download, the lucky customer got a $10,000 Apple gift card and a personal phone call from Steve Jobs.

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