Follow Crenk on Twitter! I havent written an article about our Twitter accounts in a little while, so thought I would just let everyone know about all our accounts.
Crenk – http://twitter.com/crenk
Steven Finch – http://twitter.com/steven_finch
Dean Sherwin – http://twitter.com/deansherwin
Augusto Alvarez – http://twitter.com/augustoalvarez
John Steppens – http://twitter.com/johnofthewest
There are just so many Twitter clients in the market at the moment and Im even finding it hard to keep up. The newest Twitter client is TunesTweeter. TunesTweeter is a web app that lets you show what you are currently listening to in iTunes, and updates your Twitter status with the song and artist.
TunesTweeter seems like an interesting application that adds a nice twist, maybe now someone will also come out with a Last.fm Twitter related client.
Yes indeed Crenk readers, we have another Twitter web app to tell y’all about. It’s called Twesent. Basically, it takes the normal tweet and turns it into a virtual present for your pals!
You got to Twesent.com and follow the instructions. Then, you select what present you want to send to the people you’re following. For example, I decided to buy a few friends a pint of beer each, what with me being Irish and the hilarity of living up to a stereotype.
So after I selected the pint of beer I continue to sign in with my twitter username and password and select who to send it too. I had fifty free credits and I believe three pints of beer cost me 24 credits. You can but more credits if you wish using PayPal for a small price.
This is cool tool to know about for when a friend’s birthday rolls around or indeed as a very half-hearted apology to you significant other. Or, you know, just for the laugh!
The Internet moves at a staggering pace. In a single day it gains more news, blogs and twitters than you could read in a lifetime. Fads come and go over night and it’s becoming increasingly hard to keep track of what is relevant. This is where Twittorati comes in.
From the guys who brought us Technorati, one of the top blog search engines on the net, Twittorati aims to sift the gibberish from junk, tracking tweets from the highest authority bloggers and posting them in a way that’s meaningful and easy to follow.
It’s all about ‘authority’ and what determines a blogs authority is the number of unique blogs that link to that blog. The technology for this is the same as Technorati. In fact Twittorati incorporates blogs from the Technorati Top 100 and promises to include “many more of the web’s most influential voices.”
It’s certainly a good idea but after a brief look on the website I couldn’t actually find I was genuinely interested. Sure it’s all convenient, at any time at anytime I”m only a few clicks away from the highest authority blogs and tweets on the net but therein lies the problem.
There are no rare gems, no cult hits and no must know info-bites. Having a high authority does not mean it’s a good blog. Take a quick look at the front page, how much of that do you actually care about? Very little I bet. Well it’s not all bad and it really depends on how much you care about tweets in general.
It seems like these days you can’t go anywhere without tripping over a multitude of Twitter Apps, all of them struggling against each other vying for attention of the masses. Much like the people who use twitter. Well now it’s the turn of Filetwt.
It’s all very simple and convenient. Just put in your Twitter name and password, type in a description then upload a file. A link to that file will be posted on your twitter account.
Filetwt is a tool of convenience as it wouldn’t take too much effort to find one of the many other file uploading websites and then manually post the link to twitter yourself. That way you could have files larger than 20 megs. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the more well known uploading websites added a Tweet option.
According to the website if you sign up you can get Private Tweets, faster file uploads, updates and stuff. Personally I try not to sign up for anything if I don’t have to and the upload speed seems reasonable enough.
There are so many places on the net where you can now see the biggest and best links via Twitter. Today we came across a new site that has high hopes, TweetPortal. TweetPortal does exactly what is says in the tin and show the most popular tweets via channels (business, sport, etc).
TweetPortal is great for quickly seeing what is happening in each area via Twitter, but it still has a lot of work to do to be more efficient than the likes of Tweetmeme.
So what does TweetPortal need to improve? Well here are my thoughts:
TweetPortal really has a huge amount to do to become a Tweetmeme competitor let alone a key destination for news via Twitter. It will be interesting to see if they take our advice on board and really try to improve the quality and options within their service.
I was lucky enough to receive an invite to Yahoo’s new product Meme. Meme is a micro-blogging service from Yahoo that works in a very similar way to Twitter. You may now ask, whats the difference?
We have joined just to test out the service and even after testing im pretty sure im going to keep using the account, because it is just so simple and easy to use. If you want to follow Crenk on Yahoo Meme our url is: http://meme.yahoo.com/crenk/
So you may be wondering why doesnt everyone just move over to this service from Twitter, well basically its because of the amount of users using Twitter. Additionally its the community of developers who have helped Twitter grow at the rate they have.
What Yahoo Meme really needs to develop:
Yahoo Meme is currently in private beta, so to mark its launch we can offer a lucky 5 people into the system. All you have to do is comment on this post and let us know why you want to use the service so badly!
Many of us have blogs, websites or at least a profile or two on a few social networking sites, right? And many of us are also on twitter. So instead of just posting a link saying “hey, follow me”, you could have a cool, professional looking twitter logo or cartoon for people to click on to go to your Twitter profile.
TwitterLogos.com is a collection of free twitter logos submitted by hundreds of graphic designers for our disposal. On the homepage you can see all the latest posts. Most of them are really good. You have the well-known chubby bird but I also found some new faces…or beaks such as a kind of pelican bird, a cheerleading bird and randomly enough, a can of twitter beer.
When you have found the series that you like, simply click on it and download the file. There will be instructions on how to use the Twitter badges in the .zip file.
These are easy to insert into blogging platforms such as Wordpress or into text for a profile on Facebook, MySpace etc…
My second Twitter post today – I must have tweet fever or something! This one is however a little more on the serious side – Stocks.
Yes, I suppose we can partially blame them for the recession and be totally jealous of their riches but they need to talk too, right? StockTwits Desktop is a new piece of software that allows people all over the world to talk to one another about stocks. Within the tweets you’ll find the latest gossip, trends and advices about trading.
The programs basically consists of columns of tweets in different categories as well as StockTwit TV which gives you the latest news about the software. For example, they recently teamed up with the trading giant NASDAQ in the Big Apple.
It’s all free and extremely useful to anyone who currently trades or is interested in becoming a stock trader. I used the programs for five minutes and discovered that AIG stocks may be a safe bet for the future and that USD-JPY would not have been a good move.
You can get a feel for the software or download it at their homepage.
How much is Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google involved in your common day activities? Did you ever ask yourself that? Where would you be if those didn’t exist?
Well there thousands of those existential questions that you may or may not asked yourself, and there’s no need to get real philosophical about this, but we sure can be certain that those technologies, web apps and more have an important presence in most of our days.
About those presences, here’s a very interesting video about the facts of several of these social tools, technologies and media: “Social Media Revolution”
Here are some of the facts that caught my attention:
“Social media isn’t a fad; it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate”
You all know the shorten URL web apps, they exist for a long time now, but they sure have become a must use app if you are using Twitter. And Twitter itself made the choice of their favorite shorten URL site: http://bit.ly/ . But this last one has one interesting, new and even shorter option to use it: http://j.mp/.
J.mp gives you two extra chars to use with your tweets, and will represent from now on, that everyone that uses j.mp can have a 1.4% length increase in their tweets. Yes, I know, those stats doesn’t sound like a big deal to you, but isn’t cool to have a even shorter option for your URLs?
Bit.ly and j.mp are both products from Betaworks group, that is having an important growth from last May: Since then, Twitter replaced TinyUrl with Bit.ly as its built-in short URL service.
I’ve been always grateful with these shorten URLs apps, did you ever ask to you what would Twitter be without the shorten URLs?
It has been reported over at Techcrunch that the Feedburner CEO has decided to leave the ship and is now becoming the Twitter COO. This has really made me think about RSS and where it is heading and is Twitter the next big thing in terms of keeping track of your favourite resources?
Steve Gillmor stated:
“Rest In Peace, RSS,” he wrote, saying “It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter…All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore.”
Everyday I head over to my Google Reader and see what all the major sites have been talking about and for me there is simply no other alternative to easily read over 200 sites in one place. I know I can follow a lot of major sites on Twitter, but it is very difficult to keep track of more than 200 follows, plus you have to be online and watching when they post or you just miss the news (bad thing about real-time).
