If you have, great. If you haven’t, I’d suggest you should.

A common blogging goal is to reach the milestone of X number of followers. Aiming for 100 initially, then 1,000, then 5,000 and so on.

Many Twitter users, perhaps even the majority, strive towards achieving a specific ‘followers’ goal.

Yesterday (May 13th 2009) Xavier Lur had 66,988 followers on Twitter!

So who is Xavier Lur?

Xavier is the most followed 15-year-old on Twitter and a blogging phenomenon from Singapore. His TechXav blog is an absolute mine of information on new technology and social media.

A self-confessed ‘geek’ Xavier loves to write and clearly has a flare for his passion.

“I’m just a 15-year-old student who loves blogging and I am keen to share my tech knowledge with all you guys via my blog. Running this tech blog is just one of my interests and a place for me to kill time.

“I blog on TechXav about Web 2.0 apps, online tips and news. I have good experience in technology (especially the Internet), search engine optimization (SEO), web designing, the blogosphere and even the Twitterverse.”

Xavier has wisely suspended writing any posts as he’s in the middle of exams at school. A smart move. That said, there’s no doubt his posting will come thick and fast once his exams are over.

Does Xavier’s long-term career goal include blogging?

“I’ve planned to put professional blogging as part of my hobby and my main careers goals is to become a financial investor just like Warren Buffett and maybe a psychologist (not so sure yet).”

Although Xavier is without doubt the driving force behind his TechXav blog, he does have the luxury of a co-editor to help him. 14-year-old Zhou Tong, who has a ‘mere’ 1,007 Twitter followers. I suspect that’s a goal achieved… 7 followers ago!

As an example, the ‘real’ URL of this post is http://bloggingcrew.com/2009/05/short-url/ and by using tinyurl.com the shortened version is http://tinyurl.com/cjbtxo. Reducing it from 42 characters to 25.

In situations where you have a limited space or characters to use, in Twitter for example, where there are only 140 to play with (20 less than a standard text message), it becomes very useful.

A couple of months ago I came across an even better URL shortening service called bit.ly. With bit.ly you can track the stats behind the short link, like how many clicks it got, where the links came from, which country the user was in when he/she clicked and so on. If used with Twitter, the service also tells you if your message has been re-tweeted. It’s all updated in real time too!

If you’re curious, http://bit.ly/psIFY (only 19 characters) is the shortened version of this post!

By entering details such as location, keyword and search radius (measured in miles), Nearby Tweets will present the 50 most recent tweets within the area.

Although still at the Beta stage I would recommend giving the application a try.

Twitter means different things to different people, but in essence it is a “micro blogging” platform which has exploded in the UK over the last few months. To some degree this is due to several high-profile celebrities, including Jonathan Ross, Chris Moyles and Stephen Fry waxing lyrical about Twitter at every given opportunity.

With a maximum of 140 characters to play with (that’s 20 characters less than a standard SMS text message) posts have to be straight to the point. There’s literally no room to waffle!

I am a real Twitter enthusiast and have several accounts (based on the nature of the content I’d like to share). My Blogging Crew account is the newest – which may explain why I don’t have many followers!

Twitter is a brilliant tool for Bloggers. If you’re producing excellent editorial, but you have no readers to enjoy it, write a ‘teaser’ in Twitter with a link to your blog, and, providing you’ve already attracted plenty of followers (I wrote an earlier post on how to get them here), you will have a whole new audience reading your articles.

Go on, what are you waiting for… try it!