There is a severe shortage of four-letter Twitter names, so if you happen to own one, and you want to raise money for charity, why don’t you auction it off?

Drew Olanoff, the man behind #BlameDrewsCancer that we wrote about a while back, appears to be winning his battle with Hodgkins Lymphoma, but that doesn’t mean he is going to give up his fighting the scourge known as cancer just because he’s beaten it.  So, what do you do when you want to raise money to continue the fight?  You hold a charity auction, of course.  What do you put up for auction?  Your name … well, at least if your name happens to also be a highly desirable four-letter Twitter handle such as @drew.

Mr. Olanoff has opted to auction off his Twitter name with all the funds going to the Livestrong Foundation, Lance Armstrong’s organization that fights for cancer research and support.  By simply placing the hashtag #drewbid in a Tweet, you can place a bid for the user name (followers not included), but be mindful that the minimum bid is $10,000.

… well, it was $10,000, and then that damned Drew Carey from The Price is Right had to step in and take it straight to $25,000.

You see, Mr. Carey got stuck with the unfortunate user name of @drewfromTV, so of course he’d like to have @drew, and luckily he has the money to back it up.  However, Mr. Carey is willing to bid against himself it seems.

See, the auction for @drew ends at 12 AM PST on Nov. 9th, and while Mr. Carey is already willing to pay $25,000, he has promised to up it to $100,000 if he can get 100,000 followers to his current user name by that time.  About 15 hours before this post he was at 13,000 followers, and he is now up to over 20,000.  All you need to do to help is go to his Twitter page and click “Follow”, and you can help him get to 100,000 followers, and in turn raise $100,000 for cancer research.

So, if you have a Twitter account, what are you waiting for?  Go follow @drewfromTV and help raise money to fight cancer!

It would seem that if your company has no discernible source of income, you can still get investors to pour millions of dollars into it.

Twitter, the favorite microblogging service of just about every one under the sun, looks set to bring in a third round of funding in the neighborhood of $100 million.  This is impressive for two reasons: the rumored valuation of the company is $1 billion now, four times higher than it was just this past February, and the second aspect is that the company has still yet to earn any money.

The running joke around the tech blogosphere is that the true Twitter monetization plan is to just keep pulling in funding, and with the way things are going at the company, you have to wonder if that is true.  Even though the service is now three-and-a-half-years-old, it has not yet made money, or even made clear how it plans to do so.  Yet, in spite of this fact, people just keep throwing money at it in the way of funding.

According to The Wall street Journal, the latest round of funding includes some pretty impressive names to boot. The new investors include Insight Venture Partners, a New York venture capital firm, T. Rowe Price, the mutual fund company. Returnign to the table yet again are the current investors Spark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners.

Apparently Twitter was only looking for $50 million this time around, but the investors thought differently and gave them $100 million for future investments in infrastructure and to keep growing the company.

I wish I could sit around making no money and have people just handing me funding.

Have you ever wondered how you stack up against other Twitter users?  Well, Yahoo is going to help you find out… yes, I said “Yahoo”.

Yahoo has launched a new service called “Know Your Mojo” which allows you to enter any Twitter user name and see a resulting image and title for just what type of Twitter user you are.

Headliner – You’ve got all of the followers

Crowd Pleaser – You’re great at passing on the retweets

Name Dropper – You use lots of @names when you tweet

Novelist – You have a lot to say and tweet with a lot of characters to prove it

Scenester – If there’s a hashtag conversation happening, you’re there

Cheerleader – Retweeting is how you roll

Private Eye – Like any good investigator, you’re following a lots of people

Concierge – You seem to be great at showing people the best URLs around

Shadow – You follow lots of people like a good shadow should

B.F.F. – Your high volume of @replies makes you everybody’s best bud

Word Whiz – You have a way with words, and tweets with a lot of characters in them

Matchmaker – You pass along lots of URLs to make sure everyone’s connected

Tweethead – Your high number of retweets make you quite a fan

Party Animal – With so many followers, you’re the life of the party

Lone Wolf – Based on your low number of tweets, you must like to keep a low-profile

Wall Flower – It seems like you don’t tweet much but you’re still in on the party

What exactly the service uses to measure all of this is unclear, but to be honest, it’s pretty much useless. It looks like Yahoo found a way to cash in on the Twitter brand name and ran with it.  Is it fun?  Eh.  Will lots of people use it?  Probably, and that’s the point.  It’ll receive heavy use for a few days and then be forgotten by next weekend.

I will say this, the animations are cute.  Click the image below for a larger view.

Apparently Twitter is relevant enough to become a regular sketch on The Tonight Show.

Working the in the tech blogosphere, you kind of get isolated to what really is going on with the masses in relation to the tech you work with each day.  While only 8% of people seem to know what a browser is, it seems everyone is learning what Twitter is.  It was recently featured in a commercial for Sprint that even made fun of how many people didn’t know what it is, but yet Conan O’Brien seems to think it’s well known enough that he has done his Twitter Tracker sketch three times now.

While the sketches are very tongue-in-cheek, it still says a lot about what he thinks his audience knows about it.  The guys at Twitter must be loving this.  Even though we posted the first sketch before, here are all three in order.

From June 2nd

From June 9th

From June 18th

I would say by this frequency that he isn’t done with these, which just makes you wonder how far the reach of Twitter had made it now.

You know Twitter is reaching critical mass when even The Tonight Show is poking fun at it.

In his second night as host of The Tonight Show, Conan O’Brien featured a sketch called “Twitter Tracker” which purported to keep you up to date on all of the hottest Tweets from the celebrities using Twitter.  All of the Tweets were of course fake, but it was still amusing to watch.  You can see the video below, and some more commentary after it.  (Sorry, video appears to be USA only)

What seems a bit off about this is that The Tonight Show demographic famously skews to an older crowd.  While true that Conan O’Brien fans are sure to have followed him from his old show, it still seems a bit risky of a joke to make for an audience that wouldn’t understand it.  However, when Mr. O’Brien asks his audience who uses Twitter, it sure sounded like the majority of them responded in the positive.  Is Twitter truly becoming this mainstream?

Only time will be able to appropriately answer that question, but it sure looks like this service is going to be around for quite a while at this point.