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Twitterhood Info |
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Whether you're a Twitter newbie yourself or you have friends who are reluctant to join you on Twitter because they are afraid they won't be able to work out how it all goes, @twittaroid's 'Mastering Twitter in 10 Minutes or Less' is a very handy guide in .pdf format, is absolutely FREE to download and I am very happy for you to share it with anyone and everyone and, likewise, you are very welcome to share a link to this page if you feel it might be helpful to anyone, whether your friends intend to follow me or not although, obviously, I'd love to meet them :-) | |||||||||||||
MANAGING TWEETS |
Whilst some of the people you follow may only tweet once or twice a day, or even less, others, like me for example, will be tweeting a great deal more. On the Twitter interface this can mean that you have to wade through great swathes of tweets that are of no interest to you in order to reach the tweets you want to read. There are various other ways to see ones tweets. As a PC user, I find TweetDeck the best way to manage my tweets. Having downloaded the free software, you will find an interface which divides your tweets into columns. From the start you will be able to view tweets aimed directly at you (by having your @name at the beginning) or that include your @name in them, all in one column, the general stream of tweets, including those you have sent in another column, DMs (Direct Messages - private tweets to and from individuals) in another, Favourites and so on. |
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TWEET DECK TUTORIALS |
An excellent and
ongoing blog with an FAQ format was recommended by
@Paulina1 at
http://www.richardbarley.com/2009/02/22/all-your-tweetdeck-questions-answered/
Another beloved neighbor of the Twitterhood, @mayhemstudios, tweeted a link to this excellent article: http://www.yourbloghelper.com/2009/01/26/how-to-use-tweetdeck/ Here's a very nice video tutorial for TweetDeck by@johnhaydon and recommended by @pamjoy: http://www.corporatedollar.org/2008/11/video-post-how-to-use-tweetdeck/ | |||||||||||||
| ARTICLES | As I find them I will include links to related articles on this page too. So far, this is the best I have come across on the subject of organizing tweets, although I have to say that I don't filter my tweets except by 'All Friends', '@replies', a group I created with myself as the only person in it, called 'My Tweets' (to help me discover what people might be referring to in their delayed replies) and 'Direct Messages' so I don't have personal experience of following this advice, although I can see the advantages that might exist in grouping people according to shared interests. http://mashable.com/2008/12/08/how-to-quiet-the-twitter-noise/ | |||||||||||||
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This webpage allows one to tweet and read tweets on a simple web interface but not quite as simplistic as Twitter's own. With built-in auto-refresh, search, Twitter trends & hashtags it allows you to view a user bio, location & URL inline with tweets, includes threaded conversations with "in reply to" links, a bit.ly URL shortener and a TwitPic uploader. | |||||||||||||
MAC USERS |
A great many people in the Twitter community are Mac users and need different applications to those which I use. This one comes highly recommended. To quote the developer: "Twitterrific is a fun application that lets you both read and publish posts or "tweets" to the Twitter community website. The application's user interface is clean, concise and designed to take up a minimum of real estate on your Mac's desktop. " You can also get Twitterific for iPhone and iPod touch through the same website which you will find at: | |||||||||||||
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twhirl is a social software desktop client, based on the Adobe AIR platform, which runs on both Windows (2000/XP/Vista) and Mac OSX There are a lot of things twhirl can do to improve your twitter experience, according to various tweeters in the Twitterhood and it "offers various configuration options to adapt to your personal needs" according to the website. @chrysalisceo was kind enough to tell me that it is possible to use Twhirl with more than one Twitter account at the same time which could be very useful for anyone running separate business and personal Twitter accounts, for example. | |||||||||||||
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Since I don't have an iPhone I must rely on a great number of recommendations from users of this very popular tweet management app who say it is user-friendly, useful and loaded with great features. If anyone cares to elaborate I will be glad to add the information here. | |||||||||||||
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To quote the
website: "If you are a Microsoft ® Outlook ® user, you probably have it open all
the time. Now you can update your Twitter status and follow your friends without
having to open any other applications. OutTwit seamlessly integrates Twitter
into Outlook." http://www.techhit.com/OutTwit/ | |||||||||||||
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When you give
them your Twitter credentials they supply you with a TwitterMail email address.
(e.g. abcdef1234 @ twittermail. com). If you send an email to that address it
will be posted to Twitter.com and, if you make a donation you can also get some
premium features, http://twittermail.com/ | |||||||||||||
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To quote the
website: "Get ready to take control of your twitterstream. twalala is a client
for Twitter that allows you to control what you see, and more importantly, what
you don't see in your twitterstream. Using twalala, you can filter tweets out of
your stream by keywords and phrases or mute individuals who get a bit too
chatty. Finally, Twitter with a mute button." This
is not an app I have tried since I wouldn't want to be unaware of what people I
follow are saying and doing but I can imagine some of my followers finding it
very handy as a way to shut me up for a while! LOL | |||||||||||||
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Written by @andrewparker
TwitterSnooze allows you to "Hit the snooze button on your 'verbose Twitter
friends" for between 1 and 30 days. To quote the website: "It's a good tool to
avoid a blast of tweets from a conference you are not attending... just snooze
the conference goers for a few days. It's a nice way to get back at someone for
saying something stupid... give them the silent treatment ;) It's a good way to
ignore someone that just flooded your timeline for no good reason... but it was
just a one-time offence and doesn't merit permanent unfollowing.
As Dave Winer points out, TwitterSnooze is not ideal
because when a person is unsnoozed, Twitter will send them an email alerting
that person that you are now following them again. This is an unfortunate
side-effect of the only way I know to implement a "Snooze" feature (by
unfollowing and then re-following a user) given the current API. If you don't
like your snoozers getting alert emails, then TwitterSnooze is not for you. | |||||||||||||
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To quote the website: "Are you being overwhelmed by twitter friends who can't stop talking, but they're like... still your friends? Install TwitBlocker (a greasmonkey script) and then double clicking chattering peeps will temporarily remove their tweets from your timeline. Restart your browser to get them back. Simple eh? It works a bit like Twittersnooze or Twalala, but you don't have to give someone you don't know your password, which is an entirely bad idea, generally speaking." | |||||||||||||
MANAGING FOLLOWS |
What nobody told me at the start was that Twitter limits the number of people you can initially follow,
usually to 2000, until the number of people who follow you catches up i.e. the ideal ratio is 1:1 so it is probably not a good idea to follow too many more people than are following you.
I ended up having to un-follow people in order to be able to follow people back
as they became neighbors and neighbors of the Twitterhood (sorry, I have an
aversion to the concept of 'followers'!). Something tells me that, otherwise,
most people would not want to wait until the numbers finally caught up to have a
conversation with one and would un-follow eventually, so that the ratio never
would make it to 1:1! At this point I am going to nail my colours to the mast. There are as many ways to think about and use Twitter as there are people with imaginations and nobody is 'right' or 'wrong' about what is best. I have read perfectly logical-sounding blog posts about how one should follow only a chosen few and let the rest of one's followers be hangers-on, about how one should manipulate the system by 'gaming' Twitter to create a large following rapidly and so on. I don't actually give a hoot what anybody else says or does about this topic and I don't have to. That's the joy of Twitter! My own philosophy is that I follow very few people who don't follow me back, for news or because they are so amusing I can't bear to abandon them. Everyone else I expect to have two-way traffic with, barring a tiny handful whom I really don't want to follow but I don't mind their following me if they want to. I don't agree that large numbers become impossible to communicate with since, at any given moment one is not communicating with everyone anyway. | |||||||||||||
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MyTweeple is a reasonably useful website that synchronises with Twitter and then lets you know which of your follows are mutual, who you are following that is not following you and who is following you that you are not following back. The first time you use MyTweeple, depending on how many people you are connected with, it may take quite a while to load. You will find MyTweeple at: | |||||||||||||
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Who are you following that's not following you back? Who's following you that you're not following back? Find out with this amusing and simple-to-use interface! I didn't initially find it as helpful as MyTweeple but we all like to do things in different ways and lots of tweeple in the Twitterhood recommended it. In time I found it easier to use this application than MyTweeple although one sometimes has to get it to process information a second time before the results are correct. I now use it daily: | |||||||||||||
RETWEETS |
When you want to share a tweet with everyone who follows you, all you have to do is type RT at the beginning of the message and tweet it. In the same way, you will receive tweets that have been forwarded to everyone by people you are following. When you see RT at the beginning of a tweet and want to respond to it, make sure you respond to the original tweeter e.g.: "@linnetwoods RT @name: Get a free SEO e-book" means that I have forwarded @name's tweet and, if you want the free e-book, you will need to tweet @name, not me! If you want something re-tweeted, remember to keep it short because, in addition to your message, the tweet will have to contain RT and your @name so people know who to respond to (or at least who put the original tweet out). If you want something re-tweeted, say so by adding Pls RT or something similar at the end. Try to reserve requests for re-tweets for things that really matter. I tend to automatically re-tweet, unasked, if I think a tweet is particularly important, or of interest, to enough people in the Twitterhood. Just because I don't re-tweet something of yours, it doesn't mean I thought less of it. I may have already re-tweeted a number of times and not want to bombard everyone or it may have slipped past me at a busy time. If it is really important, feel free to send your tweet directly to me, by putting @linnetwoods at the beginning of it, or even as a DM (Direct Message), to make sure I see it. | |||||||||||||
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"Finding trends in the mountains of information 'retweet'ed on Twitter", as it says at the top of this page, describes succinctly the point of this application which shows who and what is currently being retweeted the most. Why one would want to now that is not explained but I have no doubt that plenty of people will be interested to know for one reason or another :-) The creator, @retweetradar , can be followed for hourly trends on hot terms, people and retweeted URLs on Twitter and the page is at: | |||||||||||||
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To paraphrase
the creator of this site Saurabh Sahni @saurabhsahni : "Retweetrank lets you
find the rank of any Twitter user. Along with the rank, the latest retweets of
the user are shown and an RSS feed can also be grabbed for the same. Monitoring
retweets can provide better audience understanding to the originator whilst
others can see a user's most interesting tweets. The top ranked Twitter users,
those who have been most retweeted recently, are listed in the leaderboard. They
are the ones producing most interesting content across the twittersphere." Tragically, #6 on that leaderboard when I went to the page was Gary McCaffrey whose artificial follower-gathering scheme is hugely popular with those who believe that gaming Twitter is clever and/or will get them somewhere they want to go. I have toyed with the idea of blocking every follower who has one of those retweets anywhere on their profile but most are unaware of the fact that this is a cynical ploy disguised as a fun thing to do. Gary McCaffrey himself had 20,904 followers and was following 151 people. Do the math yourself and you will get the picture. More fool anyone who gets sucked into this scheme. | |||||||||||||
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To quote the website " * If you find yourself copying other people's Twitter messages and reposting them with such codes as "retweet" or "RT", you may be a Retweetist. Don't worry, you are not alone. In fact so many people are RT'ing that we can use this to see what are some of the most valued topics out there. " | |||||||||||||
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At 21:30 UTC/GMT (16:30 EST, 15:30 CST, 13:30 PST) every day, I run a quiz with prizes provided by sponsors from around the Twitterhood. It's fun and you get points for participating whether you answer correctly or not! For details, take a look at http://www.linnetwoods.com/twitterhood_quiz.html If you are not able to participate but would still like to play alone, you will find links to the questions and answer pages of previous quizzes just above the scoreboard on the quiz page. | |||||||||||||
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Quiz mad? Join the @twizmaster on Fridays at 17:00 GMT / 09:00 PST /, 12:00 EST (6 hours before the Twitterhood Quiz so you'll have time to recover! LOL) - 20 great questions, mad prizes! The person to answer the most questions correctly first wins the zany item of the week! You'll find more information about this fun quiz at http://www.twizmaster.com | |||||||||||||
INTRODUCTIONS |
Anyone who would like to meet some new people can ask me to introduce them, at any time, just tweet or DM me that you would like a shout-out. Typically my tweet will go something like "Hey everybody! Have you met @name yet?! A follow is the warmest welcome! :-)" but you can also ask me to tweet specifics, for example 'Looking for others who enjoy quilting' or 'wanting to network with other real estate agents' or 'searching for other rock music fans' and so on. I have an aversion to tweets with lists of new followers in them so I never tweet them or take any notice of other people's. Some people un-follow others who list all their new followers in a series of tweets. I've never gone that far but I have been tempted! At the beginning of February 2009 I instituted an Intro Lottery to try and make sure that everyone had a fair chance of being given a 'shout-out' to the Twitterhood by creating a simple database of the @name of everyone in the Twitterhood and allowing the automatic numbering of entries. Every day I randomly asked people with whom I was in conversation to pick me a number and I then created a shout-out for the person whose name was attached to that number in the database. I might do this up to ten times per day. I also randomly, as and when I had a spare moment, looked to see who the latest 'neighbour' or 'neighbor' is and give them a welcoming shout-out. Although I still do the occasional shout-out for a new neighbor or neighbour and am always happy to introduce anyone who asks I had to abandon the original introLottery idea for lack of time! Instead, I have lately been joining in with the #followfriday convention based on a brilliant idea that occurred to Micah Baldwin, as documented at: | |||||||||||||
| #followfriday | Like all Twitter hashtags, the
addition of this to a tweet to the beginning or end of a tweet in which you
@name specific people, ensures that anyone looking for people worth following in
the eyes of others can be found conveniently gathered together at
http://www.search.twitter.com by
putting 'followfriday' in the search slot (without the apostrophes of course!).
When someone you are already following tweets a #followfriday recommendation you
can, of course, simply click on the @names contained in the tweet to check out
the profile pages of those recommended. The #followfriday convention means that everyone is recommending people to one another at the same time and the volume of tweets can peak extraordinarily but it's only a short-term phenomenon each week and, although some grumpy individuals may un-follow one because of it, they will quickly be replaced by more sociable people :-) Like most Twitter conventions #followfriday now has it's own website: Having said all that, it is not my intention to disturb anyone so I will be creating less #followfriday tweets some weeks than others and may even create a page of recommendations on my site and link to it if time permits. | |||||||||||||
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Tweeple Pages is a directory of Twitter users organized by their interests. Although this is a fairly new service it is a great idea and using it is simply a matter of logging in using your Twitter username and password and you can start discovering other users with similar interests as you. Check out the popular ones on the home page or enter your interest in the search bar at the top of the page. Be sure to enter your own interests as well so other users can find and connect with you! | |||||||||||||
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To quote the
website: "Twellow is a service to help Twitter users find people to follow. From
Accountants to Yoga, Twellow categorizes and organizes Twitter into hundreds of
niches to make your searching easier. So go ahead, Connect with people who matter." One is allowed to choose ten categories/subcategories in which to be listed as a part of the free service and it seems like a good idea to do so, so I did :-) One can follow @twellowup for news and updates if one so wishes. | |||||||||||||
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JustTweetIt is a
directory of tweeters to help you find other users with whom you may have
something in common or who might be informative on a topic in which you are
interested. Although I added my details I have to say that the directory seemed
unlikely to get anyone other than those on the first page of any category far -
it isn't organised in a way that would make me want to visit again. Maybe they
will improve it over time. There are plenty of people in it! http://justtweetit.com/ | |||||||||||||
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WeFollow is a user-powered directory. When you enter the WeFollow site you will be given the opportunity to choose three tags or categories under which to be listed. You can type in whatever you want or look at the existing categories and choose from amongst them. Being in a hurry, I chose #social from the listings and then simply typed in #quiz and #fun. To complete the transaction I agreed to allow the app to tweet my new listing and that was that - in and out in a matter of a minute or two! I like the way this directory is put together. | |||||||||||||
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Twibs was
created to give Twitter users a place to find businesses on Twitter. They are
big believers in the power of twitter to connect customers with businesses,
working on making it easy for consumers to find businesses, both local and
national. Keep in mind, they're just getting started, so there may be small
glitches and features missing, but don't worry, they're working hard at helping
consumers find businesses on twitter! http://twibs.com/ | |||||||||||||
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There is no way
to put it more succinctly that the author of the website has done: "Enter your
Twitter username. Get suggestions on interesting people to follow." Unfortunately, when I put my name in there were an awful lot of Internet marketers on the first couple of pages of suggestions and I am at pains to imagine why anyone might think that those would be my first choice... | |||||||||||||
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Looking for more
people to follow? Twubble can help expand your Twitter bubble—it searches your friend graph and picks out people who you may like to follow. | |||||||||||||
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To quote the website: "Tweepler Is an easy, more enjoyable way of processing your New Twitter Followers. View a list of New Followers and classify them in one of two "Buckets" Follow (meaning you wish to follow them back) and Ignore (meaning you don't wish to follow them and want to archive them out of the way, reducing clutter)." http://www.tweepler.com/ | |||||||||||||
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To quote the website: "TwitSeeker is basically an alternate search engine for finding twitter.com users - "twits" - and browsing the results all in one combined control panel. It works by using the twitter.com API, and finds twits not by what's posted in their bios but rather based on what they've been tweeting about lately. It uses a custom tag cloud generator written by the author, and was created as an experimental tool to help users quickly build up a twitter community around specific topics." | |||||||||||||
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To quote the
'About' page on the site itself: "Launched as an early–stage beta January 20th,
2009, the Nearby Tweets project was developed by Brian Cray to extend Twitter’s
capabilities into its true potential: a geography–centric social tool for
networking and a business tool for building customer relationships and
monitoring real–time buzz. With Nearby Tweets’ sophisticated geographic layer on
top of Twitter people and businesses will find Twitter more relevant,
manageable, and fun! Even at its early beta stages, Nearby Tweets was recognized by Internet blogging giant Mashable. Today, twitterers all over the world are buzzing about Nearby Tweets": | |||||||||||||
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This app, which I discovered when I was kindly recommended through it by @alexpuig is very interesting as it allows one to choose ten people to recommend as the most interesting people one knows to recommend. Unfortunately, I know too many interesting people now to be able to make use of it but I would definitely have used Twibes while the group was still of a small to moderate size and saved a lot of time doing so! | |||||||||||||
MY FOLLOW |
Because I can't
see the point of one-way traffic, I always follow back anyone who follows me
manually. I used to use a service to follow back automatically but found it let
just anyone in and I like to be more discerning than that! I find automated DMs off-putting to receive so I don't send them. I particularly dislike an automated DM that thanks me for my follow and immediately tries to sell me something or plug a website before I have even had a chance to get to know my new neighbour (or neighbor!) and decided whether I am interested in what he, or she, does.
It comes across particularly badly when one follows back out of courtesy and
receives a patronising automated DM thanking one for following and implying that
one is now being mentored! It has been remarked that an automated 'thank you' DM is better than no thank you at all. In my view, the fact that I follow someone back is an expression of my thanks for their follow and I wouldn't want to automatically thank spammers, pornographers or other low-life for following me, since I wouldn't be grateful for their attentions! As I mentioned earlier, I follow very few people who are not following me, those whom I do follow without reciprocation are mainly for news or other factual content and I regularly un-follow people who have followed me just to get my follow back and then un-followed me again and those who simply want to advertise rather than converse. I am not interested in the quantity of followers in the Twitterhood but I am very interested in the quality of them. Those who follow me with the intention of getting my follow back and then immediately un-following, those misguided people who think it makes them appear important to be followed by many but only be following a few, will soon discover that I take satisfaction in manually un-following such people within anything from minutes to a maximum of 48 hours, so they have wasted their time as well as mine! | |||||||||||||
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This is an incredible website created by Benedikt Koehler of Munich, Germany, aka @furukama and there was so much to see that I will have to return to get through trying all of it out but it represents various statistics about a user's interactions with others in very interesting ways! | |||||||||||||
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TweetCube allows
you to share files on Twitter. Simple as that. Blast out your images, videos,
music and more with just a couple of clicks, and your files are automatically
posted on Twitter. TweetCube is 100% free to use, but the maximum file size you can upload is currently 10mb. You can upload as many files as you want. They delete old files after 30 days. | |||||||||||||
GLOSSARY OF TWITTER TERMS |
A very useful glossary of terms used by tweeters and about tweeting and associated activities is contained at the searchable http://twittonary.com/ and there is also http://twictionary.pbwiki.com/ | |||||||||||||
| INTERNET SLANG |
If you haven't been on the Internet for long the array of terms and abbreviations can seem a little daunting but this Internet page will provide you with the answers so it may be a good idea to bookmark it: | |||||||||||||
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Here's a fun item you can use to show visitors to your website or blog how many people are currently following you. In my experience it's not a particularly accurate system in that, so far, it has consistently lagged behind Twitter somewhat. Still, you can visit the website and manually update it and there is also lots of additional information at | |||||||||||||
TWITTERHOLIC.COM |
This website, created by
@alexrudloff and @gavin has
several interfaces that allow one to review the 'top' Twitter activity. At this
point I have to say that, ever since people started 'gaming' and manipulating
Twitter to create large groups of followers by preying on those who use
autofollowing, I place no importance in numbers of followers as a way of
determining a person or company's popularity. Having watched a few people build
up accounts with thousands of followers and never having tweeted even once, I
can see that numbers are entirely irrelevant.
Nonetheless, if you are interested in identifying those who have huge herds of followers, whether genuinely acquired or fraudulently (none of the applications can tell the difference), you'll find the top 100 of them very easily on the first page. A second page shows you the top 100 of those who have the most reciprocal followers and the people on that page I do have respect for as being willing to have communication in both directions. A third page shows the top 100 in terms of quantity of updates and I thought I tweeted a lot until I inspected that page! LOL The 4th page simply shows you the 100 people who have been on Twitter the longest. You can also insert your own Twitter user name and see where you fit into the scheme of things. | |||||||||||||
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Update your
status on Twitter to pay somebody. If you fill in the text boxes on the web page
and click on Tweet they'll show you how it's done. When you're ready to settle
up, they make that easy, too, with one person, or everyone you owe. Twitpay
payments are handled by Amazon Payments, so your money only goes where you want
it to. If you have more questions about Twitpay, then be sure to check out their
FAQ. http://twitpay.me/ | |||||||||||||
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It took me a
second visit to grasp this concept after
@eisokant told me about it, but
it's rather a good idea and I am now enthused! To quote the
FAQ page "Think of Twollars as a new type
of money that rewards your social value to others and your good reputation with
your community. A Twollar is a way to convert your 'good deed', your knowledge,
your energy, your generosity into a symbol, a standard unit that can be
exchanged with others.
Its really simple! Just write a Give Twollar Tweet like this: Give 2 Twollars @macwind because he gave me great advice. Or Reward someone with a special Twollar Retweet like this: RT 3 Twollars @esiokant because of his great Tweet. And then you can donate Twollars to a charity like this: Donate 20 Twollars @redcross because of their great work in Africa. | |||||||||||||
TWITTER
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This is another fun item you can use on your website or blog to show people your Twitter 'grade' When I first discovered Twitter Grader it showed 97 and updated itself regularly as whatever parameters are being used to grade one dictated. At one point the number went down by 1 and I would love to have known why but guessed it may have been because someone from the more influential echelons had un-followed me or something like that. Anyway, it was fun to visit my homepage one day and see that the counter showed 100, since when it seems to have become stuck (I hope permanently since the only way from there is down! :-)
The Elite list of users appears to be variable according to who consults it. For example, one day I appeared at #9 on the list when @DarenBBC looked at it whilst, at the very same time, I was nowhere on the list when I looked at it and was, variously, at 82, 96 and 99 in other people's browsers. Therefore, I set no great store by it but that doesn't stop me being pleased to hear that I have appeared on it for one friend or another from time to time! | |||||||||||||
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Twooting is a daily podcast all about Twitter hosted by Bo Bennett and Ryan Levesque (not part of the Twitter team) who present what they believe will be the most comprehensive and entertaining way to learn and master Twitter. Their podcasts offer, they say, a daily dose of Twitter new, tips, tricks, updates, advice, interviews and more! It is to be hoped that they will not be promoting any of the schemes that are so potentially harmful to Twitter and I would appreciate feedback from listeners to let me know as I simply do not have the time to listen in and check. You can also follow Ryan Levesque on @thepodcast | |||||||||||||
| @timer | Follow
@timer and then, whenever you need to
be reminded of something you must do, a minimum of 5 minutes after you've
thought of it, DM @timer and request an alert tweet. To quote @timer : "Need to remember something? Send me a direct message, and I'll tweet you back. For example, 'd timer 45 call mom' reminds you in 45 minutes." | |||||||||||||
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This is a
multiple reminder service for tweeters and, rather than go into lengthy
explanations I will simply suggest that you visit the page and read their clear
and straightforward instructions. http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/twitter/ | |||||||||||||
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An easy to use,
web-based to-do list. Get organized, stay motivated, and be more productive. You need to be following and followed by @Toodledo to use this Direct Message-based service. | |||||||||||||
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To see the first 16 tweets someone tweeted or at least the earliest 16 available (Twitter only makes the last 3200 tweets on any account available) go to: | |||||||||||||
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twInfluence is a
simple tool using the Twitter API to to measure the combined influence of
twitterers and their followers, with a few social network statistics thrown in
as bonus. As of right now, 22,307 twitterers have profiles analyzed on
twinfluence.com.
If you want one, you can have a link directly to your twinfluence results like this one: http://twinfluence.com/?u=linnetwoods | |||||||||||||
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To quote the website: "Measure Your Impact and Success in Social Media. Twitalyzer is a unique tool to evaluate the activity of any Twitter user and report on relative influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout, and other useful measures of success in social media." As with most, if not all, of these applications, the usefulness depends upon your interest in knowing these things and some people, like me, will not be spending a great deal of time using them whilst others will want a daily update, no doubt! | |||||||||||||
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This is a fun and informative way to view your Twitter statistics if you like that kind of thing! It is fun anyway, watching the way things change from one week to another - I took a screenshot (Alt and Prt Scr together and then pasted into Accessories>Paint) a couple of times in the course of the past month and things certainly did look different the second time around! All good fun! You can access the site at: | |||||||||||||
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To quote the
website: "Tweetag gives you a unique way to browse through all the public tweets
published on Twitter.com. The Tweetag homepage displays the 40 most frequent
topics being discussed on Twitter (based on our automatic tagging system). The
size of each tag represents its relative importance. It means you can tell what most people are talking about at a glance (e.g. "Are they talking more about Obama or McCain?"). By selecting certain tags, you can also define the scope of your search and discover new topics related to them. You can add tags to the selection by clicking on them. A click on a tag in the "selected tags" bar removes it from the selection." | |||||||||||||
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If you like to include videos and photos in your twitter life, you may want to check out TweetTree which is a fascinating way of viewing your tweet stream with such items displayed in it to save you having to cick on links and have them come up elsewhere. | |||||||||||||
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TwitPic lets you share photos on
Twitter. You can post pictures to TwitPic from your phone, our API, or through
the site itself. There are also popular twitter clients that have built-in
support for TwitPic. http://twitpic.com/ | |||||||||||||
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This site enables you to shorten, share and track links that you want to tweet. Presumably it will be of much greater interest to commercial users of Twitter than to most of us but even the personal user may find it interesting to see how far a link has gone into the Twitterverse! | |||||||||||||
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On this very basic and simple website you can share files, up to a maximum of 15MB per file, with your Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook friends. | |||||||||||||
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Share your
favorite videos quickly with short URLs. TweeTube let you track the visits and
comments from the people that follow you on Twitter. http://www.tweetube.com/ | |||||||||||||
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A blip is a
combination of a song and a short message to accompany it created by searching
for a song that you want to share with your friends on Twitter, adding a short
message and submitting, or 'blipping' it. The 'blip' appears automatically as a
tweet in the tweetstream and friends can click on the link contained in the
tweet to hear the song. If you start the message with an @name it appears as an
@reply to the named individual, like any other tweet.
'Props' are tokens of respect that can be given from one DJ to another - say for blipping a good song or being a good DJ in general. You can give props by licking the thumbs-up icon that shows up at the bottom right of each Blip in the blipstream or visit the user's profile page and click the number of props to the right of the DJ’s profile picture. There’s a little star at the bottom right of each blip. Clicking it so that it glows yellow adds the blip to your playlist. There's a good FAQ from which to learn everything you might need to know. This is something about which I am quite enthusiastic and I have created a sizeable playlist at Blip.fm http://blip.fm/linnetwoods | |||||||||||||
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To quote the website: "Twisten.fm (pronounced TWISS-en-dot-eff-em) is a mashup that crawls Twitter for tweets about music. It then takes those tweets and throws in a play button so that you can listen to the song being talked about. Way cool huh?" Having never tried this I cannot say whether I would like it or not - it is on my To Do list - but am told it is a useful service. | |||||||||||||
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To quote the
simple web page that houses this service: twiggit is an automated service that
lets your friends on twitter know what articles you digg. http://twiggit.org/ | |||||||||||||
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Before I say anything else about BubbleTweet I must confess that I am a total novice where online video is concerned, to the extent that I watch videos on YouTube and elsewhere and embed videos from some of the merchants in my US shopping mall but have never uploaded a video or made one with the Internet in mind, so I haven't been able to try this service myself. However, Kevin Sherman aka @bubbleguru the creator of BubbleTweet has kindly included an example on the page so that one can see how the idea works. It is impressive but I will freely admit it is not something I can imagine wanting to use. If, however, you are a speaker, coach, trainer, salesperson, musician or anyone for whom a video introduction would be an asset then I think you might find this a very exciting idea: | |||||||||||||
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The instructions on this web page couldn't be simpler: Put two Twitter screen names into the boxes below to see their conversation via @ replies! If you have spotted half of a conversation, for example, someone asking for information you would also like to have, and have then seen the enquirer tweet their thanks to someone, you can use this to see what the answer was that they were given by the person they have thanked. It's a handy eavesdropping tool, basically, but only on conversations that are on the public timeline anyway! | |||||||||||||
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GroupTweet allows a particular group of people to send a DM (Direct Message) to all other members of the group in one go. You can set up a separate Twitter account, and register it with GroupTweet. Get all the members you want to include in the group to follow the new account and make sure the new account follows all of them back as well. When a member of the group sends a DM to that Twitter account, GroupTweet re-sends the message to everyone in the group. | |||||||||||||
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TweetScan allows you to search the Twitter public timeline for real-time information - find out whether anyone is experiencing the same thing you are, i.e. an outage, or get the latest news from a tweeter at the scene of events. | |||||||||||||
| ONLY 2 CLICKS | This is an amazing resource site which groups outstanding tweeters according to what their Twitter 'function' is, shows web pages being tweeted about and much, much more: | |||||||||||||
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This is a bit of 3D fun and also very useful I have no doubt! See the world and who is tweeting from where right now - you can move around the map to see what is going on in a particular sector too at: | |||||||||||||
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Looking for the most authoritative tweeters on a particular topic? Within reason, this works quite well, in that it gathers the tweeters on a given subject and displays them in order of apparent authority - you may have to exercise some discernment but you should be able to find what you seek (if it's anywhere on Twitter) fairly easily: | |||||||||||||
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To quote the website: "DestroyTwitter is a robust but compact Twitter application built to run on Mac, Windows, and Linux using Adobe AIR. It consists of a series of canvases that constantly update to keep tweets current and up-to-date using notifications that appear immediately after a new tweet arrives. DestroyTwitter also features complete direct messaging functionality. Messages and tweets can be replied to with the original visible for quick and easy reference. A search function is also available to track anything that's being talked about. | |||||||||||||
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Twiddict love Twitter. They hate when it's down. If you're addicted to Twitter as well, tweet your heart out through Twiddict and avoid life-changing withdrawal symptoms during Twitter downtime. They'll make sure your tweets end up where they belong! This is not something I have tried myself but it comes highly recommended! | |||||||||||||
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Twittercal is a free service that connects your Twitter account to your Google Calendar. Add events in a snap from your favorite Twitter client. Follow a simple 5-step procedure to get started. | |||||||||||||
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TweetChat creates 'rooms'
within Twitter where you can discuss a particular topic and the appropriate hashtag for the 'room' is automatically added to your tweets
- you can see all tweets containing the hashtag and this is useful when several people want to discuss something and not lose
track of each other's responses or socialise with people who share a particular
interest:
One particularly good use of this facility is @Time4CoffeeTime 's CoffeeTime. To participate, enter the room of which the name is coffeetime and, to send tweets from elsewhere add #coffeetime to your tweets. You can actually tweet from within the room and the hashtag will be added automatically to your tweets. CoffeeTime is an opportunity to meet other sociable and gregarious people - introduce yourself to anyone and everyone there, don't be shy - the whole point of going there is to meet others. If you follow @Time4CoffeeTime you will see when she is calling the usual crowd together and that's when you can be sure of finding others in the room but anyone can suggest a CoffeeTime and use the room at any time and invite whoever they wish to join them in there! Do remember that it is an entirely social room, though, it is not a place to plug your latest thing or look for clients... | |||||||||||||
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Tweetake exists to allow you to
back-up your followers, people you are following and Tweets with just one click. Why bother to do this? Many reasons: Twitter may lose followers again like it did in June / July 2008. You may change your Twitter name and want to re-follow the people you were following, and contact the people who were following you You may want to refer to an older Tweet - currently Twitter does not keep all of your older Tweets... You may just like backing things up, ‘just in case’ This is a very basic backup: http://tweetake.com/ | |||||||||||||
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This rather more sophisticated backup facility is also free and allows a choice of formats in which to download the backup. You are required to give your e-mail address so that you can be sent a password and the good thing about this is that it is not necessary for you to reveal your Twitter password, which means it can be used by people who have decided to avoid all apps where revealing it is necessary. The only requirement for use of TweetBack is that you should follow the creator of it: @tweetbackup | |||||||||||||
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Here's a bit of fun: TwtCards you can send individually or to everyone. The message consists of a tweet and you have a choice of cartoon symbols by way of adornment: | |||||||||||||
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To quote the
website:
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It was not my
intention to include TweetLater on this page because the main thrust of what is
on offer is automation of tweets, follows and unfollows, all things which I am
totally against. However, it was recommended by
@rocknrod and does include some
elements that are useful in the free version.
Some of the useful features are keyword tracking, which could help you find people with whom you have interests in common, tracking of replies missed on Twitter to help you ensure you don't appear to have ignored anyone's direct communication with you and a personal status feed "your own tweet engine" as they put it. If you are tempted to automate any other aspect of your Twitter activity, negating the whole idea of 'social' networking, then do not be surprised if your Twitter world turns to worms and do not expect me to sympathize over it! | |||||||||||||
| TWITTERFALL | Here's another very interesting website to visit and rather than try and explain it to you I will suggest that you take a look for yourself and decide whether you find it useful or not. I found it useful and quite fascinating within a couple of minutes of getting there: | |||||||||||||
| TWEET SEARCHES | For a very basic
and, apparently, current tweets only search try:
For a slightly more sophisticated search try | |||||||||||||
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To quote the website: "It's a twitter monitor, it lets you "monitter" the twitter world for a set of keywords and watch what people are saying. Cool huh? Just type three words into the three search boxes and within seconds you'll start seeing relevant tweets streaming live.. " my experiene with it was somewhat mind-boggling in that the tweets were moving rather faster than my brain was able to assimilate but then it is rather an old brain so that's no real indication! It was certainly fascinating to see what came up, I must say: | |||||||||||||
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Twitscoop was
built to help you stay on top of twitter's hot topics or discussions. Through an
automated algorithm, twitscoop crawls hundreds of tweets every minute and
extracts the words which are mentionned more often than usual. The result is
displayed in a Tag Cloud, using the following rule: the hotter, the bigger (no
joke here). Thanks to twitscoop and the continuously growing twitter user base, you will soon realise that "What are you doing ?" can have very different answers, from "I'm standing in a queue of 500 to buy Gta4", to "Was that just an Earthquake ?", through to "Hey, Microsoft just acquired Yahoo" (no this didn't actually happen yet). As a result, twitscoop enables you to stay on top of things in a matter of seconds, often way before the news actually hits the mainstream information channels! | |||||||||||||
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To quote the website: "The TwitterLocal AIR Client allows you to watch as many location-based Twitter feeds as you want. Requires Adobe AIR version 1.5." | |||||||||||||
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Once the owner of the website has ironed out a few teething troubles one will, apparently, be able to track your un-followers in graphical format and more besides: | |||||||||||||
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See your tweeting habits represented in graphical form. This page will show you the days of the week and times of day when you tweet most and least. To save you having to scroll a long way down the blog, here is a link to my graph where you can replace my Twitter name with your own: | |||||||||||||
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Ping.fm is "a simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap.
They post your text messages and images (and soon video) wherever you want, support over 30 social networking sites and are adding more regularly. Between their straight forward posting methods and advanced custom triggers, they make it easy for you to post your messages exactly where you want them to go. | |||||||||||||
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To quote the website: "TwitterBuzz shows you what people using Twitter, a microblogging service, are linking to. It's updated constantly. The default view shows the most popular links over the last day. Normal service has now been restored. More features coming soon." | |||||||||||||
| TOP TWEETERS | This website uses
serious analytics to produce a list of the top 100 twitter users in a pretty
scientific manner by comparison with many of the others. Now that so many people
are pushing Ponzi-type schemes for the artificial growth of Twitter groups this
may end up being one of the only ones that isn't wildly swayed by
irrelevant follower numbers. http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/twitter/twitter_top_100.asp | |||||||||||||
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This is a service that
generates a mosaic with the images of users who have the greater numbers of
followers on Twitter. Each poster has 5 x 72x72 pixel photos showing the 5 users
with the most followers. In addition there are 10 x 48x48 pixel photos showing
the 6th to the15th most followed tweeters and 523 x 24x24 pixel images of those
who occupy positions 16 to 538.
Now that so many people are gaming the numbers on Twitter it is fairly meaningless - there are people with thousands of followers who have never, ever, tweeted and who have simply gone through swathes of @names following 100 at a time and then unfollowing all those who didn't follow them back, which would be everyone who isn't using 'autofollow'. For this reason, I am not impressed by numbers and I am very much against the use of autofollowing and encouraging this gaming of the system. Who knows what those gamers intend to do with their accounts later?! Anyway, it's still an interesting page: | |||||||||||||
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To quote the website: When its too long to tweet, just TwitWall it! TwitWall is the easy-to-use, quick-to-blast-out, instant blog companion for Twitter. With TwitWall, you can embed your favorite videos and widgets, upload your photos, mp3 music or podcasts, - you name it. Just the kind of stuff to keep your followers following (fans cheering, or clients calling). All that, while still enjoying the many social-goodness and customization features you enjoy on Twitter. | |||||||||||||
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Actually, I really don't understand why the fuss about clearing out inactive accounts - if someone isn't tweeting, they are not adding any clutter to your tweet stream and may return to Twitter after an absence only to be offended by finding you have unfollowed them! I suppose such accounts in quantity might create an imbalance in one's followings if you are following them and they are not following you back but, otherwise I cannot see what harm they are doing! http://www.mycleenr.com/ | |||||||||||||
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Here's an interesting way of finding out which of the people in your group are inactive so you can investigate what has become of them, give them a nudge or do whatever occurs to you about them! Some people use it to determine which of their followers no longer tweet so that they can weed them out although, frankly, as I mentioned in the previous paragraph, someone who isn't tweeting isn't doing any harm and may be quite offended at being unfollowed simply for not having been around for a while! | |||||||||||||
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Want to poll everyone and find out what they think about something? This might help! You can offer single or multiple choices but there is no editing possible once the poll is saved so it's worth thinking carefully before you save, to avoid having to delete the poll and start again! Once you've created the poll you can tweet the link to it or embed it wherever else you want to.: | |||||||||||||
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Here's another way of polling people: To quote the website: "StrawPoll is the coolest way to follow the opinions of people on Twitter, but until now you haven't been able to ask your own questions. With the new StrawPoll Platform, you can use your own Twitter account to ask the questions you find interesting. Post a question, watch your friends reply—it's as easy as that." | |||||||||||||
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To quote the
website: Free Twitter Alerts by Email! If you love Twitter, you'll love
TweetBeep! Keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your
company, anything, with hourly updates! You can even keep track of who's
tweeting your website or blog, even if they use a shortened URL (like
tinyurl.com). Now, how cool is that?! Great for online reputation management, catching all your @replies, finding job/networking opportunities, keeping up on your favorite hobby, and more! | |||||||||||||
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Quite simply, by entering some words or phrases and clicking on the OK GO button you can see how often they appear on Twitter. The loader tells you that it is "getting stuff" and is followed by a bar chart. I tried it with sail & boat & yacht & schooner & sailor and got, respectively: 11500 & 77,100 & 6650 & 570 & 16,300. This could be handy for helping you determine which of your interests are least represented on Twitter and which the most, for example, telling you which keyword search is likely to find you the most tweeters with whom you have something in common. | |||||||||||||
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Twist shows you
topic trends on Twitter and you can compare various topics by separating them
with commas in the search. The website also offers the opportunity to embed the
chart on your website. http://twist.flaptor.com | |||||||||||||
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TweetRush is a service based on Rush Hour's engine that aims to provide real time estimated stats on Twitter usage over a period of time. Clicking on the top graph gives more detailed information about Twitter usage for a given date. | |||||||||||||
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To quote the
site: "Just how much time DO you spend on Twitter? This site is completely
useless and was created by @itcn, designed by @reese and based on a concept by @sugarrae
she thought of during a lecture aimed @streko." It is pointless but a good bit of fun - I was told I should move out of my mother's basement, for example! | |||||||||||||
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To quote the
website: "TwittFame is a tool for Twitter users to track certain stats over time
and against other Twitter users. You will be able to compare your stats against
others on the site overall or even by location. Not only will this help you find
out where you stand but it can also increase your number of followers! The more
people that come to this site and compare themselves means the more possibility
that your own Twitter account will be compared, viewed and ultimately followed!" http://www.twittfame.com/ | |||||||||||||
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To quote the Posti.ca website: "Create a sticky note, choose your color, and drag it. Postica remembers the location of your sticky on every computer. Tired of emailing yourself one file? Quickly upload a photo or document to your sticky note. Have something to share with others? Send your sticky note to friends and family even if they don't have an account. Tweet tweet...now you can send sticky notes using twitter! You can now create and view your sticky notes with a Google Gadget on iGoogle." | |||||||||||||
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Track your
packages via Twitter This very handy service, called TrackThis, will send you
near instant updates through Twitter, amongst other channels. Send TrackThis
your tracking number, and you’ll get tweeted each time the location of your
package changes. They track UPS, Fedex, USPS, DHL and several other carriers. http://www.usetrackthis.com/ | |||||||||||||
| TWITTER HELP | Last, but by no means least, there is a lot of very useful information in Twitter's own support array which you can access via Help on your Twitter page. | |||||||||||||
| If you have, or know of, a Twitter-related application that you think I should include here, feel free to tweet me about it! @linnetwoods | ||||||||||||||
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