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:
Design – the overall site design isnt great, plus it is actually quite hard to get a good overall look at what is happening in the world via the home page. More tweets need to shown on the home page in a different format, cause the basic boxes dont really work.
Advertising – Im really not a huge fan of dirty Google adsense ads that ad nothing at all to the design and at the same time seem to cheapen the site quality.
Channels – there is a great list of channels, however when checking out the channels it still only breaks down into a very limited number of smaller channels.
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?
Yahoo Meme is very fast and stable
Yahoo Meme makes it very easy to post Video, Music and Photos straight into your stream
Yahoo Meme has really focused on making it easy to re-post items you like, with just 1 click (Viral focused)
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 needs its own URL and identity away from the Yahoo.com domain. It would be good to see this as a standalone service
Ability to resize pictures and videos down so that a lot more streams can be seen in the same window (problem with media in the stream)
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 has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the web
1 of 8 couples married in the US met via social media
If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 4th largest
TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users, Facebook took less than 9 months to reach 100 millions
Ashton Kutcher has more Twitter followers than the entire population of Ireland, Norway and Panama
80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices
Wikipedia has over 13 million articles
80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees
Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
35% of books sales on Amazon are for Kindle
“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).
I came across a great little service this morning from one of our readers who commented on one of our other articles. They recommended that we check out the Twitter service called Geochirp. GeoChirp is a great web app that allows you to see who is talking about what in what location, all via Twitter.
With GeoChirp you input your location and then set the radius and the number of tweets you want to be able to see. Once that is all done GeoChirp finds people from that location and shows you their tweets. GeoChirp also hooks in to Google Maps which allows you to exactly see where that person is based.
GeoChirp is a very interesting idea however apart from providing basic entertainment purposes im not too sure why a lot of people who use this in their daily lives.
The mobile market in all of its forms has, indeed, made a big impact around the world within the last few years. The ideas of stay always “connected” whenever and wherever, simplifying your life using a single device were just a few around. Big companies are focusing in these interconnections and technologies because, let’s face it: pays off. And Microsoft it’s no exception, this time presenting an interesting app: OneApp.
What’s the idea? This mobile app will let you access other apps like Facebook, Twitter (TweetLite), Live Messenger, games and more without actually installing them on your phone. Even though the application architecture and functionality are not revealed, seems that the small footprint from OneApp (150kb) will dynamically launch parts of the application and avoid installation or storage requirements; something like application virtualization for web apps, not a bad idea.
OneApp also includes cloud services that help offload processing and storage from the phone to the Internet, improving overall performance. But, as you may think, this mobile app it is only compatible with a few phones (at least in this first stage); here’s the list:
I have been after some great social media icons for a long time and I have finally come across a great set. All icons are circular and of the highest quality. Icons include AIM, Bebo, eBay, Hi5, Last.fm, LinkedIn, Windows Live, Ning, Orkut, Twitter and more.
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 
My second 
