All Annotations of Twitter Tools, Tweaks and Theories: TypePad Hacks[Preview]

saved by59 people, first byMichael Troiano on 2008-03-27, last byTodd Wheeler on 2008-06-30

• 

• 
  I have to preface this post with a confession: The first time I
  heard about blogging, my response was "That's the dumbest @$%#&%$
  thing I've ever heard of. Why the hell would I want to do that?"

  
  
  
  
  

  I said the exact same thing about Twitter when I first heard about it. The exact same words.

  
  

  Of course, both times I was totally wrong… blogging and Twitter have
  become the two most important tools I use to make a living, socialize,
  and get things done.

  
  
  
  
  

  I bring this up at the beginning because I know there's a lot of people who still respond to Twitter in the way I first did and
  I want to put it the proper context. I signed up at SXSWi 2007 during
  the first big Twitter boom… mostly as a way to track people
  (TwitterStalking). Once I got back home, my Twitter use dropped off
  pretty quickly and the account gathered dust. But as I started getting
  excited about SXSW 2008, I logged back in and began adding new people,
  writing more tweets and exploring what had become of this cute little
  service in the last year. Wow… it's rapidly become, I think, my
  favorite app on the web.

• The thing about Twitter that makes it really powerful is it's
  simplicity… although it's often explained as a way of constantly
  updating people with what you're doing right this minute (having
  breakfast, yelling at the dog, stuck in traffic — yes, that's boring)
  it can be repurposed into so
  many other contexts. I never would have guessed how many things you
  could do with 140 characters. Twitter is especially useful when
  combined with other tools that have been built using their API.

  
  

  This post covers two separate topics: some of my favorite ways I've
  seen Twitter used and then reviews of 26 powerful tools you can use to
  make Twitter do all kinds of groovy things. For those of you who just
  want to skip ahead to the reviews, use the convenient links below.

• The
  category links take you to the reviews in the post below and the links
  for tools take you straight to their website.

  
  

  Twitter Clients: Twitter, Pocket Tweets, Twitterific, Twhirl
  
  
  Twitter Search: Tweet Scan, Quotably, TwitterBuzz
  
  URL Shortening: TinyURL, urlTea, Tweetburner
  
  Twitter and RSS: Twitterfeed, LoudTwitter, TwitThis Feedflare
  
  
  Twitter Badges: Twitter, Korelab Twitter Balloon, Morgan Aldridge
  
  
  Twitter and Media Files: Jott, Tweetr, TwitPic, Twittergram, Power Twitter by 30 Boxes, Twiddeo
  
  Twitter Stats: TweetStats,
  Twitter Quotient
  
  
  Twitter Social Tools: Twitter Friend Adder, Twitter Pack:
  
  Twitter Theories: strategies for getting the most out of Twitter.

• If you find this post to be a useful resource, I'd like to ask you
  to use the social bookmarking buttons at the end of the post to submit
  it to Digg, Del.icio.us, etc. Thanks! Now, on with the post.

• Some of my favorite uses for Twitter:

  
  
  
  
  
  1. TwitterStalking: Still number one is knowing where
     people are and whether they're busy… some of my friends are hard to
     reach due to insane schedules. Twitter helps me figure out when I can
     call or email without interrupting their day.
  
  
  
  2. Microblogging: You don't see a lot of short posts at
     TypePad Hacks… I prefer to write longer think pieces or tutorials here.
     Which have been damn hard to fit into the schedule of late. Twitter to
     the rescue! The Twitter format is a different process with a different
     feel… so writing quick updates that are on-topic for the blog at @typepadhacks
     may help me send more good info your way. It's working for me in
     connection with other blogs I have. As much as I realize that short
     posts would work fine here on the blog I don't write them because I'm
     not wired to think of the blog that way.
  
  
  
  3. Note to Self: Twitter has become the quickest and easiest way to keep track of stray thoughts I want to hold on to.
  
  
  
  4. Breaking news: I'm finding it more difficult to stay on top
     of my RSS feeds these days. But a lot of the people I follow in Twitter
     drop links to the most interesting stories of the day. Also, some of
     the blogs that generate way to much content to allow into my RSS can be
     found on Twitter, allowing me to easily scan the headlines and choose
     whether to follow links (@BoingBoing for example).
• • Communication: I've never liked IM or SMS and I don't think
    I ever will. But the @reply and DM (direct message) features in Twitter
    work really well for me. Because I've got a Twitter client open all
    day, I can send quick messages to most of my contacts without feeling
    as interrupted or getting dragged into a long back and forth over IM. A direct message on Twitter is WAY
    more likely to get my immediate attention than email or phone right
    now… especially because by nature, it's required to be short and to the
    point.
  
  
  
  • Link Sharing: There are a million tools for sharing links on
    the web, and I've tried lot's of them. I set up a del.icio.us account
    specifically for this blog years ago but never found a good way to
    import the bookmarks into the blog (lots of ways that I didn't like).
    I've set up a TypePad Hacks Twitter page that I see being much more useful for sharing quick links and tips.
  
  
  
  • GTD (Getting Things Done): Twitter can be used in all kinds
    of ways to help you organize (ratherthan disrupt) work flow. From to-do
    lists, to tracking how long you work on client projects, to saving
    notes or concepts or links. This also plays into my last point in this
    list:
  
  
  
  • Advice, Support, Polling, Questions: More and more, I see
    people using Twitter as a way to fire off a quick question and get
    answers back from people in their network. This is way more useful than
    I would have expected at first. Everything from tech support, research
    questions, vetting new ideas, where to eat in a new town and so on. When I want a quick answer, sending out a twitter question is a great way to get one.

• My favorite Twitter story right now is an example of number 8 that
  happened on the way to SXSW: I was driving to Austin and saw a tweet
  from Hugh MacLeod (@gapingvoid) saying:

  
  
  
  

  Anyone driving to Austin from
  Dallas tonight? Stranded at DFW with 2 friends,. Hotel and car rental
  situation not looking good here :(

  
  
  

  
  I was still north of Memphis, but tweeted back that I'd be happy to
  give him and friends a ride if he hadn't found one by the time I got to
  Dallas. Five minutes later, I got a call from Brian Clark (@copyblogger) who called to tell me that the road conditions in Dallas were totally impassable and not
  to go to the airport under any circumstances. As it turned out, Hugh
  found a ride and I ended up getting a room for the night before I
  reached Dallas anyway.

  
  
  
  
  

  But the interesting thing to
  me about the whole exchange was that it wouldn't have happened via any
  of the other communication tools I use… with email, chat or phone I
  wouldn't have known Hugh's situation unless he specifically reached out
  to me. Likewise, Brian wouldn't have seen my reply and called to warn
  me about the several hundred cars that had gone off the road in Dallas.
  Twitter becomes almost like a sixth sense in these situations, with
  extremely targeted, relevant information finding you when you need it…
  without having to even know that you should be searching for it (I was
  aware that there was snow in Dallas, and I guess I'd have expected that
  Texans don't drive well in snow, but I had no idea that most of the
  roads were blocked that night).

• My favorite Twitter Apps:

  
  
  
  
  

  There are tons of apps, hacks, mashups and tools built on Twitter's API. The Twitter Fan Wikihas
  a good collection of links. For the most part, the apps I really
  use and love have been found either in links from other Twitter users I
  follow or by searching for a particular function I want. Without some
  of these third party additions to the service, I doubt Twitter would
  ever have become as useful or compelling for me as it has.

• Twitter Clients:

  
  
  
  
  

  Twitter: You can post from the web at Twitter.com
  or set up posting from your phone via SMS or post via IM. Although I do
  sometimes log in on the web and post directly from Twitter's website, I
  find that posting (and reading) from a desktop app or my IPhone are
  much easier to integrate into my day.

  
  
  
  
  

  Pocket Tweets: Definitely the
  best way to post to twitter from an IPhone… Not as good as Twitter's
  new mobile site for reading tweets however. I use Pocket Tweets quite a bit when I'm not at the desk.
  

  
  
  
  
  

  Twitterific.
  Twitterific is still my favorite way to read tweets even though it
  isn't nearly as robust as Twhirl. I like the way it looks, I like how
  simple it is and I like the ease with which it allow direct messaging
  and replies (because it accepts keyboard commands for those). Now that
  I'm using multiple Twitter accounts for different blogs, though, I may
  really have to consider just using Twhirl so that I don't ping the
  Twitter servers too often.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Twhirl: Twhirl does a lot of
  things really nicely… The most important in my experience being that
  you can be logged in to multiple twitter accounts at once. I have
  separate Twitter accounts for John T Unger, TypePad Hacks and Emoodicon and this
  allows me to focus on different audiences without having to log in and
  out of Twitter.Other nice features include: runs on both Windows and
  Mac OSX, shortens long URLs, integration with TwitPic and TweetScan, crossposts to Pownce and Jaiku,
  plus way, way more. The only real drawback is that it can be a little
  difficult to figure out how to change settings at first… it would be
  nice if the preferences were available from the menu rather than having
  to click the Twhirl logo in the upper left corner (yeah, *not*
  intuitive that).

• Twitter Search:

  
  
  
  
  
  

  Tweet Scan is a Twitter search engine. Search
  public Twitter posts in real-time from the page or add Tweet Scan to Firefox's
  search box for instant access. Find replies, track keywords, and sign up for daily/weekly
  email alerts.

  
  
  

  Quotably allows you to enter a
  Twitter user name to follow the comment threads of discussions that
  happen in Twitter. It can be kind of hard to follow conversations in
  Twitter itself, so pulling an entire conversation from multiple
  accounts on to one page is pretty useful.

  
  
  

  TwitterBuzz shows you what people are linking to in Twitter. It's updated constantly. The
  default view shows the most popular links over the last day.

• URL Shortening:

  
  
  

  With only 140 characters to work with, a long URL doesn't leave you
  much room to describe what you're linking to. In fact, some URLs
  wouldn't even fit in a 140 character message.

  
  
  
  

  TinyURL has been around forever.
  It's a good solid service that does one thing well: make URLs short.
  You can use it by pasting a link into their web page or by installing
  the TinyURL bookmarklet.

  
  
  
  

  urlTea  adds the ability for users
  to describe a URL however they want (following a ? at the end of the
  shortened URL), as part of the actual URL text. You can add as much
  description as you want but if the URL gets clipped by Twitter, the
  link still functions
  properly, as long as everything before the question mark was intact.

  
  
  
  

  Tweetburner shortens URLS and
  tracks what actually happens with them once they're posted. You can see
  how often a link has been clicked in
  tweets shared with you, by you, by your friends and every other
  twitterer. Kind of a cool way to see who's paying attention, but more
  importantly, it gives you a clear picture of what people are most
  interested in at this moment in time.

• Twitter and RSS

  
  
  
  

  Twitterfeed imports your blog
  entries into your Twitter account. You can specify how often it should
  check your feed, how often it should post to Twitter and how you would
  like to format the links.

  
  
  
  

  LoudTwitter imports your Twitter entries into your blog.

  
  
  
  

  TwitThis Feedflare
  If you use FeedBurner, add this feedflare to display in your blog or
  feed. It allows readers to post a link to your blog posts to their
  Twitter stream with a simple click.

• Twitter Badges

  
  
  
  

  There are lots and lots of place to get Twitter Badges for your sidebar… I like the following three.

  
  
  
  

  Twitter: Twitter makes it just a little hard to find their badge/widget creation page
  (the link is at the bottom of your Twitter home page… I'd have put it
  in the settings menu. They provide both Flash and HTML widgets and if
  you're using basic templates, you can easily add them to TypePad with
  just a few clicks. You can style the colors of your badge to match your
  site and there are some options for how many tweets to display as well
  as whether to show only your tweets or also include the people you're
  following.

  
  
  
  

  Korelab Twitter Balloon: This one has the potential for good or evil in my opinion… I love it. I used it to create the speaking mime in the sidebar at Emoodicon.com which totally cracks me up. It took almost no time to configure the widget the way I wanted it and install it in the sidebar.

  
  
  
  

  Morgan Aldridge
  has a really pretty (though awfully large) badge that you can download
  and then install on your blog. Because it's provided as JavaScript and
  CSS, you can configure it pretty heavily. The widget displays your
  twitter icon (linked to your twitter page), one or more recent tweets,
  date-stamps linked to tweet permalinks. I haven't tried this one out,
  but I do really like the way it looks. Be sure to read the whole page,
  as it makes mention of some browser errors associated with the widget.

• Twitter and Media Files

  
  
  
  

  Jott is one of my new best friends. I LOVE
  Jott. Sign up for an account and Jott converts your voice into emails,
  text messages, reminders, lists and appointments. I have it on speed
  dial so that whenever I have an idea, I can quickly send it to my
  email, contacts, or, you guessed it, Twitter! On the way to SXSW, I
  spent the first day of the drive actually typing tweets on the IPhone
  while driving… Then I decided to see if I could make Jott send my voice
  as a text tweet. No problem. It's built right into the service.

  
  
  
  

  The one thing that you might not like about Jott is that, like an
  voice > text transcription, it's not always perfect… some messages
  get a little garbled. On the one hand, that's no big deal because
  there's a link to the audio file in your tweet, so people can
  click through to hear what you said if they need to. On the other hand,
  some of my tweets came out much more fun based on what Jott thought I said. The sentence
  "C'mon people, nothing to see, no astronaut by the side of the road."
  became "Funky. Boom. Nothing to see, no astronaut by the side of the
  road." Personally, I enjoy the second sentence much more. I'm thinking
  of writing a whole cell phone novel that way to see if it comes out like Naked Lunch.

• Tweetr could have gone under
  Twitter Clients, because it does all that they do… BUT, it does more.
  Basically, Tweetr is a mashup of Twitter and file sharing. Drag any
  file onto Tweetr to automatically upload your file; it will
  provide a short url to send to your friends. Tweetr can also access a
  webcam if you have one and take pictures to send to Twitter. File size
  is limited to 10MB (which means this may well become my favored way of
  sharing files at some point).

  
  
  
  

  TwitPic allows you to upload
  images to their site and then posts a link to the photo in your Twitter
  stream. People can leave comments on the photo, which will be sent to
  their own Twitter page along with a link to the photo. This is a pretty
  cool way to share photos. You can also send pics from your phone.

  
  
  
  

  Twittergram: Phone in 30-second audio messages to Twitter. Enter your phone number and Twitter username and
  password. Click Submit. Then call BlogTalkRadio at 646-716-6000 and follow
  the prompts.

• Power Twitter by 30 Boxes is a Firefox extension that embeds the following media types into your tweets:

  
  
  
  
  • Photo sharing with embedded flickr photos
  
  
  
  • Video sharing with embedded youtube videos
  
  
  
  • Shared tinyurls are unwound so you know where they link to
  
  
  
  • All links are mapped to their web page titles
  
  
  
  • Additional user information is mapped to twitter users thanks to
    data conduits via 30 Boxes (e.g. flickr accounts, blog posts,
    del.icio.us links, and tons of other social media!)
  
  
  

  
  In order to view the media, it appears that people also have to have the extension enabled in their browser.

• Twiddeo lets you upload video
  files and send a link to Twitter. I wasn't able to get it to work last
  night, but it's pretty new and may work better in the near future.

  
  
  
  
  

  Twitter Stats:

  
  
  
  

  TweetStats: Enter a Twitter user name and TweetStats will create
  graphs showing you cool usage stats, such as how often you tweet since
  your account began, when you tweet the most, who has sent you the most
  direct messages, etc. My personal Twitter TweetStats are here.

  
  
  
  

  Twitter Quotient:
  This page presents your Twitter stats in a fun, somewhat snarky way by
  comparing the numbers to arrive at the following usage measurments:
  
  Babble index (number of updates for every follower),
  
  Popularity index (number of followers for every friend),
  
  Usefulness index (number of useful updates based on number of friends)

• Twitter Social Tools:

  
  
  

  Twitter Friend Adder: If you want to be read by people who don't know you, the best way to get their attention is to follow them. Enter your Twitter login details at Twitter Friend Adder
  and they add 20 random friends to your account. OK, so why would you
  want to do that? If you were using Twitter as more of a broadcast
  medium than as a two-way conversation. Think marketing. My advice
  though would be that it can be easy to upset people with this tool, so
  if you're going to use it to send messages out you should be prepared
  to A) respond to all replies and DMs and B) provide content that is
  actually likely to be enjoyed or useful.

  
  
  

  Twitter Pack: A wiki
  where Twitter users are grouped by topic of interest, company or
  geographical area. If you're looking for people to read/follow within a
  certain area of interest, this could be a really useful tool.

• Twitter Theories:

  
  
  
  
  
  

  The following posts present a variety of strategies for getting the
  most out of Twitter. All of them are worthwhile reads, even if you're
  pretty familiar with using Twitter.

  
  
  
  
  

  How to Handle Your Twitter Followers from Sarah Dopp at Dopp Juice

  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  More Twitter Tips also from Sarah

  
  
  
  
  

  The Beauty, Secrets and Utility of Twitter for Business from BL Ochman at whatsnextblog.com

  
  
  
  
  
  

  winning practices of top tweeters also from BL.

  
  
  
  
  

  Three Ways to Maximize Your Twitter Time for Networking, Marketing and Fun From Nathania Johnson at Copyblogger

  
  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  

  
  

  
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