Like a lot of people on the web, I use Twitter, and very useful it is too, both from a social and a business perspective, but one thing that seems to confuse quite a few people is how Twitter's places limits on the people you can Follow.

There are a lot of conspiracy theories about Twitter limiting the people you Follow, but the actual way it's done is quite simple.

If you have between 1 and 1800 Followers, you are limited to Following 2000 people yourself.

When you have over 1800 Followers, then you can Follow your number Followers +10%. So if you're lucky enough to have 2300 Followers, you can Follow 2530 people.

For example

Your Followers = 2300

10% of that  = 230

Number of People you can Follow = 2300 + 230 = 2530

Obviously your number of Followers increases, so does the maximum number of people you can Follow. 

Simple eh? 

Domainers put a lot of stock into tools like Google Trends, but making financial decisions based on tools like this can be a dangerous game, especially if you're dealing with search volumes for terms with special characters (ie not A to Z).

In a previous post I've talked about the fact that Google cannot see currency symbols like the "$" sign, but it's interesting to look at how this same search fares in Google Trends.

Although Google search returns zero results for "$", Google trends reports "$" as a major search term - with twice the search volume of the keywords "keyboards", and "foreclosures".  How Google reaches this conclusion is a bit of a mystery, given that it carries no results for the term, but even more interesting is the geographical data reported for the search for the dollar.

As a domainer I've not been able to find a comprehensive list of major Spanish language domain names elsewhere - so I've been compiling one for my own use - then thought it might be a useful resource to share with the domain community at large. This table has not been copied from another source, and will be updated weekly as figures are released - new domains will be added to a top section then integrated into the table.

Namedrive and Sedo are two of the biggest names in the domain parking space, and both are based on Google's Adsense system.

For both Namedrive and Sedo you can set related keywords for your domain ,which is a critical part of optimising your earnings on the domain, but adjusting these keywords for optimum earnings it is not as straighforward as it appears.

One of the strangest things I've found is that a single parked domain showing the same ads can literally earn 20 times more revenue for the same clicks when the domain is loaded with slightly different keywords... and this is especially true of Sedo - where the reporting is real time, as opposed to Namedrive, which reports figures with a 2 day lag.

Now, the way Adsense works is fairly tricky, and Google don't exactly tell you a lot about how the system ranks, pays or operates, but you can tell quite a lot just by using it over a period of time.

Currency symbols are completely invisible to Google!! Yup it's true, and in fact so are a lot of other special symbols..

See for yourself - here is a Google search for $, the Google search for £, and the Google search for ¢.

But what's this got to do with domains? IDN domains allow a lot of weird and wonderful characters... did you know that you can have a ♥ in a domain name?  There are also quite a few finance characters allowed in domain names, such as the British £ sign, European ¢, and the Japanese ¥. Unfortunately the American $ sign is not allowed - don't ask me why, but it's not.

All well and good you might think, so that means that someone has a domain with a special character in it, such as 50¢.com, then there is a catch.... in fact these symbols are so invisible to Google that it treats a search containing ¢.com as if it was searching for .com - it just omits the ¢ sign completely from the search string.

I'm not sure what it means in the long run for the owners of IDNs with special symbols or for other specialist SEO for that matter, but it'll be an interesting experiment to find out!!