Archive for: twitter
Since Twitter got really popular thanks to all the celebs who made it famous, the only way to tweet has been either directly on the website or using an app such as Tweetie. Now however, Comufy, a London based tech company brings us TweetSwitch.
Basically, it enables you to set up your account to send certain tweets to your IM. You can then in turn respond to these tweets from the IM service. Selecting what kind of tweets you want to receive is threefold. You can receive all tweets, tweets where you’re mentioned or replied to (such as @Crenk) or the most important ones, direct messages.
At the moment, some main IM clients such as AOL, Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger are supported and it’s said to be coming to the ever growing Skype. This is a really cool new feature, effectively creating a switchboard for your Twitter account!
Personal search for your Twitter network.
Search is has been a big topic of discussion in 2009, and in 2010 is almost assuredly going to be a bigger deal as users look for ways to distill the internet’s wealth of information to more personal discoveries. Recently, with the surge of social networking, search has become an even more contested topic because the content created by the millions of users worldwide is not just prolific, but is being done daily. Real time search through your networks and contacts postings can be useful to discover what the pulse of your network really is. Unfortunately small steps have been made in this area, and as much as Search.Twitter.com is used, it’s still not giving you a personal search, but rather having you search the entire Twitter network.
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Social media for the promotion of blog posts and other online material has really taken off in the past two years. Perhaps the most famous (and notorious for crashing websites) is Digg.com – launched a few years back with funding of just $40 million and is now the world’s leading social media promotion website. That is of course, if you only look at sites aiming to promote content alone.
Twitter on the other hand has become a social media promotion tool and a social network – a devilish combination. Because of this, Twitter passed Digg’s traffic rating back in March and is continuing to climb despite periods of stagnation in terms of traffic. Digg however, is falling. Since September, a 15% drop in traffic is indicated by the ComScore graph above and we haven’t even seen the results for December yet.
As the war between Facebook and Twitter calms down could we be now seeing Digg trying to take on Twitter in a no-holds-barred?
wi.nr is a link shortening service, much like bit.ly, tinyurl.com and dwarfurl.com, except that after you’ve signed up, every time you create a link and post it in an email, tweet or webpage, people click on it, you’re entered into a sweepstake to win a prize. You also get an entry when you click on a wi.nr link, more clicks, more entries – each entry is given a time stamp, and the first one clicked on after the randomly generated winningtime gets that day’s prize. At the moment they’re giving away 8 gig iPod Nanos, but if you’ve already got one, fear not, the prize will change on the 11th of Dec.
The cost of these prizes is funded by the ads served when you click on a wi.nr link, so if you feel like your online day is already overstuffed with ads then you should probably steer away; not ideal for sending links to business acquaintances! On the other hand, if you’re forwarding that video of the sneezing panda to your circle of friends, then you might as well give it a go, if you win, it’s one less Christmas present to buy, and no-one else offers you a free lottery entry to do something you would do anyway.
For those of us that have a knack for words, Scrabble has long been a favorite. Many of us enjoy the challenge of sparring one another with our wits and knowledge. In today’s mobile world there was little chance of us playing Scrabble until now.
Recently I’ve found the pleasure of a mobile Scrabble app called Words with Friends. This app replicates everything I remembered from playing Scrabble with my family that I instantly became hooked. Words with Friends has an amazing number of additions that truly define this powerhouse of entertainment.
For starters you are able to connect two of the most popular social profiles, Facebook and Twitter. This will not only announce your scores but also invite your friends to join you in a game. Furthermore the app has the built in ability to run more than one game at a time. When I started playing, it was not unusual for me to be playing four to five games at once. Definitely something you could not do with a Scrabble board.
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There’s a lot of apps out there, both mobile and desktop, that use the Twitter API to make it more “functional” for power users. What’s a power user? Well if you’ve got more than one account on Twitter, have over 1000 friends, and like to have your posts link to other social networks where you have a community, then you are probably a power user.
In the race to be the most dominant desktop application for Twitter, TweetDeck is definitely one of the leading contenders. Having been around for about a year, TweetDeck has taken the Twitter experience to a whole new level. It’s integrating the use of multiple columns, and attaching itself to URL shorteners, photo posting apps like Twitpic, and the ability link to other network like Facebook, all under one app. But just recently TweetDeck has evolved again, and this time, making it even more useful for power users to extend their reach further into the social web.
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It’s a well-known fact that employers tend to Google prospective job candidates’ names before they hire them. This is in an effort to weed out people who they may no want affiliated with their company. For instance, say you tweet all the time about how you’re out getting wasted and you’re hung-over every Monday. Do you think you’ll get the job then? No. So many professionally (especially web workers) are pimping out their online presence to make themselves look better. One of the most basic ways to do this is to spice up you blog and combine it with other areas of your social media.
Here are three widgets every professional should have on their blog:
1. A Twitter Feed. A real-time widget featuring your personal twitter account is definitely a good idea; it shows employers that you lead a good, lawful life (if you only tweet the good things, that is!). You can download one here.
2. A Summary Widget. These can be created using the text input features. While they’re not the most flashy – employers always read them. Details listed in a casual manner such as your previous employment, interests and personality are all great topics to summarize here.
3. LinkedInABox. LinkedIn is the professional social networking site which many use to house the best-of-the-best of their portfolios. So why not spread some of that love to your blog? Here is a link to the widget.
So do you think it’s time you gave your online presence a makeover?
A few months ago, everyone was saying “Oh! Blogging is dying on its feet” or “This time next year blogs will be dead and gone”. For a second or two, I started to believe them. After all, micro-blogging was flying up like a firework and blogs were the first victim – no matter how hard bloggers tried to integrate them into their blogs. And for someone like me who just started up their own blog – this was bad news.
But it appears as though Twitter is slowing down and blogging is on the rise once again. The chart above illustrates the recent trend. The orange line represents Twitter and as you can see it grew alongside WordPress (blue line) between February and June. Then it took off by itself leaving WordPress in the gutter. But from September onwards, Twitter simple flattened out and WordPress went back on the rise.
I don’t think Blogs and Twitter are really in the same league. After all, people like information and entertainment – and squeezing that into 140 characters is too much of a task. Looks like blogging will be around for quite a few years to come.
Twitter have just announced the official release of a French version of the popular micro-blogging service. Over the past couple of months they have been aiming to release the service in Spanish, French, German and Italian. So far, they got Spanish completed and now they got the French version ready just in time for le Web – a massive tech conference in France held annually.
They released a blog post on their official blog but fittingly, it was all in French, so here is a rough translation for you:
The French twitteurs golds can already track people and companies they are familiar. Whether you attended @lepicerie or @lopera for your gastronomic outings, you read @lemondefr way to work or you listen @theteenagers on the way home or you’re a fan of @CanadiensMTL, there is a wealth of information useful to discover at any time.
To see Twitter in French, just check your settings and select “French” from the menu.
One last thing: some of the Twitter team will be in Paris on 9 and 10 November for LeWeb conference, presented by @loic. The specialists of our platform, Ryan Sarver (@rsarver) and Marcel Molina (@noradio) will present, among other things, a session developers. If you are in the region these days, please join us!
So now Twitter is available in English, Japanese, Spanish and French. Next? Those zany Germans!
ReTweeting is the pretty much the equivalent of digging something multiple time – only with Tweets. When most uses see a retweet it must be from somebody that they are connected with. Now however, Twitter are testing a new Beta program which changes how retweeting works.
Basically,when a person who you are indirectly connected to, I.e. a friends of a friend, tweets something and a person you’re following retweets that tweet, it will be displayed in your timeline. As a member of this Beta I think this is a great idea. I’m finding that my community has grown (almost doubled) and the retweets are always valuable and worthwhile. This is definitely of increasing the quality and social worthiness of Twitter which I approve of.
Since Twitter got really popular thanks to all the celebs who made it famous, the only way to tweet has been either directly on the website or using an app such as Tweetie. Now however, Comufy, a London based tech company brings us TweetSwitch.
