Category Archives: Twitter

Twitter adds default ULR shortening to web app

http://5.mshcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/twitter-link-shortening.jpgTwitter has announced that links shared on Twitter.com will be automatically shortened using the service’s t.co URL shortener.

Links of any length will be cut down to a tidy number of characters — 19, to be precise — and an ellipsis when the sender clicks the Tweet button.

Although each link is assigned a unique t.co link ID, the links will appear on Twitter as abbreviated versions of their originals so users always have some idea of where their next click will take them — a smart move on Twitter’s part given the number of URL-shortened spam or scam links that have made the rounds on the microblogging platform over the past year or so.

Twitter buys Tweetdeck

http://cdn.sitetrail.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/tweetdeck-logo-300x300.pngIt’s official. Twitter last night finalized a deal to buy TweetDeck, ending weeks of speculation.

The two companies announced the acquisition Wednesday in separate blog posts. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

CNN.com reported Tuesday that Twitter was buying the maker of applications for the microblogging site for $40 million in cash and stock.

“This acquisition is an important step forward for us,” wrote Twitter CEO Dick Costolo in a blog post. “TweetDeck provides brands, publishers, marketers and others with a powerful platform to track all the real-time conversations they care about. In order to support this important constituency, we will continue to invest in the TweetDeck that users know and love.”

Iain Dodsworth, TweetDeck Founder and CEO, insinuated in his blog post that TweetDeck staff won’t be let go because of the acquisition.

“We’ve grown from one team member and a single user, to a team of 15 and a user-base of millions,” he wrote. “Change may well be inevitable, but we remain the same team, staying in London, with the same focus and products, and now with the support and resources to allow us to grow and take on even bigger challenges.”

Today’s news comes after weeks of speculation about potential future owners of TweetDeck.

Lost Origin of Twitter

Before Twitter was public, it was just an AIM hack on Jack Dorsey’s pager.

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey had a background in messenger culture. He had even launched a dispatch software startup called D-Net, back in 1999. He was also captivated by his friends status messages on AOL Instant Messenger. He wanted to combine the two. And in an era when AIM was king, he did just that.

“I loved seeing at a glance my friends status updates. But I also really appreciated at the same time the dispatch aspect, where you’re out in the world doing something away from the keyboard and IM did not allow that,” said Dorsey. “I had a RIM pager, the 850, the first email device. I programed a system where I could fire off an email from that and set my status from anywhere. And it worked! And I was able to also at a regular interval pull my buddy list and get those updates sent to my email address. It was awesome! But the number of people who had those mobile devices was so minimal that the timing was just not right. This was 2001.”

In 2006, when he was working for Evan Williams at Odeo, Dorsey resurrected the idea. He combined the timeline aspects of LiveJournal with the status updates of instant messenger and the concept of dispatch software that delivers them all remotely. Boom. That’s Twitter.

via Wired

Power of Retweets

What is a “retweet”or “retweeting”?

Have you ever received an interesting email and forwarded it to your friends?  You know, like a funny joke or a breaking news item that you thought would be of interest to your friends so you hit the “forward” button on your email client to pass that message on. That’s kind of what “retweeting” is except in this case it applies to Twitter messages rather than an email.

RT 

rt2 < | ^ Examples

Why bother to RT [Retweet]?

Passing on of interesting message across circles.

The originator @username more exposure.

You establish yourself as community/social person.

By RTing, you demonstrate that you know how to retweet and that you are a more advanced Twitter user to your followers. This will help you retain your followers who may think of you more highly than someone that merely posts meandering Tweets about mundane things. (Like when you brush your teeth for example!)

If you retweet good content, you spread goodwill to your followers. this increases the retention of your followers.

Every time you retweet, the originator is notified of your message. Meaning, the person being retweeted will get the message in their “@ replies” inbox. This will increase the chances of the originator following you (if they are not already following you) or they may very well return the favor and retweet some of your more interesting tweets!

The majority of Twitter users are accustomed to “retweeting” important news items to a point where news is spread very quickly from the original source to the entire Twitter community. For example the Tsunami news and the Mumbai bomb blast or the Mumbai Train blast news. It was all over Twitter before it actually made it to the news channels.

Apart from this if you can tell of any other advantages of RTs please leave a comment.

14 Amazing Twitter Applications

Tweeting is an ART. And it needs dedication and commitment. I came across some wonderful Twitter Applications which I used myself and loved them. I am sharing the same to my readers.

1) Tweepular

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If you want to know who is following you and who is not, this solution will give you the chance to do that in a very simple way.  In addition to this, you will have the opportunity to manage and administer your Tweeps. If you want to track others’ popularity on Twitter as well as to have the chance to get access to a highly effective way to manage all your Twitter followers, take a look at this site.

2)Twittersphere

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It deals with the most hyped stories from social messaging utility. A screen into the greenhouse of world-shaking linkage and chatter.

3) Mr.Tweet

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If you want to know how much influence you have on others. Who are your top twitter buddies. Find new friends with same interest who are active. Amazing site with great insights.


4) Tweeps

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This deals with out Usage of ”words”. What Do we like to use more often. How many tweets we have per day, the social ratio’s, hasttag ratio etc.


5) Twitalyzer

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This is also one good site which deals with Impact percentage, influence, Generosity, Clout and our Engagement.  A good input site. Helpful for us to be better Twitter Users.


6) Twilert

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If you want to keep track of a particular word or hashtag. Just name it here and Schedule it. And you would love to track the results.


7) Twetangle

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This is one hell of an amazing site. There are soo many things that could be managed here,Groups, networks, friends. “TwitTangle is a free service that helps you untangle the mess of having to many friends on twitter. They allow you to rate and tag your friends and then filter your timeline to help you easily find the tweets that are most important to you!  This tool lets you rate and tag your friends and filter them on a timeline! You can also create custom groups of your followers and filter you timeline by that group.


8 ) Untweeps

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Find out who does not tweet often and you can remove them on your choice.

9) Myceaner

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This is yet another tool that will help us automatically unfollow all the inactive accounts based on when their last tweet was, and help you save your follow number.


10) TwtrFrnd

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Helps you to find out if those people whom you are  following are following you back or not

So just register and it will display people whom you follow and the friends of those people and fans of them. It is handy as you can sort of people according to the numbers of followers they have.


11) friendorfollow

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If you’re unsure whether to follow someone or not, just use this tool to find out if you have common interests and whether there are guys you are following in common

12) ReTweet Rank

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It finds out all the re-tweeted stories and grades on the number of re-tweets. It is a good site to know your rank!.

13) Tweet Rank

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Find out which Tweet made you popular and which one un-popular. Find out what people like in you and what they dislike. Make sure  once you check the site you are on English Version.

14) Who follows whom

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Finding out common users between two accounts. Try 2 powerful users and then you can figureout whts the inside story. Try more than 2 accounts and you know whts in real going inside Twitter mentioned People.  Do give it a short. It’s a good application.

T. T. T. Track Twitter Trends

Twitter is HUGE and yes it really is. With more than 600 tweets per second it becomes very difficult to find the information of your taste. To overcome this limitation the Twitter community came up with a novel idea of #hashtags. If you are unaware of #hashtags we have it explained over here.

These #hashtags also gave birth to the trends on Twitter. The number of times the hashtag is repeated in tweets represents its trend. #Hashtags.org shows the latest trends on twitter and also allows you to search for a word and see its trend graph on Twitter.

To know what a #hashtag is about or two define your own for the public you can visit WTHashtag.com. This site is built upon wiki technology, making it easy for visitors to create their own definition entries for certain hashtags.

Here’s one I created: #Mtaram – we use this hashtag when we are sharing news about something cool, new or innovative happening on our Blog.

There are various websites and tools that you can use to track trends on Twitter.

Twist: See Trends In Twitter3593627192_25d6c8b028

Track trends on particular topics or people. The display is in graph form and can be useful in mining data for particular projects. If someone is talking about a topic you have great knowledge of the subject then it might just provide you an in to make an introduction.

Twidentify Twitter Search

This is a search engine that allows you to conduct searches on Twitter influence, related conversations, and Twitter trends. You can search for more than one term at once by separating them with commas. You’re then presented with a graph for the week showing you how each search term compares to the other. You can also hide search terms from your graph if you change your mind.

Tweetag

Here you can “browse the Twittosphere”. The most popular discussed topics within the past 24 hours are displayed underneath the search bar. Results are displayed in a Twitter-like fashion. You can see your search term in status updates only, retweets only, links only or questions. If you want to see them all at once, you can do that on the “all” tab. For each tweet displayed, you can reply to it or retweet it. The timeline is also updated in real-time so no need to refresh the page.

Twitterfall


This is another Twitter trend timeline updated in real-time. If the timeline moves too fast for you or you don’t like the color, you can change the settings to suite your preferences.

And Last but not the least is What the Trend?

This site doesn’t just show you what is trending on Twitter, it gives you an explanation as to why it’s trending — interesting concept. When you click on a hashtag it shows you the latest tweets, news and photos relating to that tag. You can go down the list or use the search bar to find a specific trend.

Try all these cool tools and let us know of your response. And if you happen to know any cool tool that we have missed please mention it in the comments.

How to make most of the Twitter #tags

Tags on Twitter or more popularly known as hashtags or simply #tags are a way of cataloging tweets on Twitter. Just like the wild wild [www] web Twitter too is a micro www in its own where the rate of flow of information is so immense that one can easily freak out. The intelligent users created hashtags and then Twitter incorporated them in its interface making it more useful for users to find the tweets of their interest at the click of a button [or tap of a finger if you use a notebook computer  ]

Now that we have billions of tweets and millions of hashtags how do we make the most of it. [ as if it’s a matter of life and death. BTW Who cares? ]

http://cdn.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/hashtagorg.jpg

First things First!

What does this hashtag stand for? It can be as difficult for Twitter veterans as it is for a newbie to make out what the hashtag stands for from the tag itself. While people are still busy finding the most efficient way to do it use the following to make your way through.

Tagalus: Tagalus is a simple dictionary for hashtags. It’s very easy to find information on thousands of hashtags as defined by other users.

Twubs: Uses a wiki system to help disseminate information on a hashtag. It aggregates tweets and imports pictures to help illuminate the topics being discussed.

Hashtags.org: While not the best at helping you understand the meaning behind a tag, Hashtags.org is good at showing you its use over time and recent tweets, which oftentimes is enough to figure out the meaning behind the tag.

What the Trend?: This useful little service makes it really easy to learn about trending hashtags. When something starts trending.

Tracking the Twitter world via the hashtags.

If you are a journalist, marketing pro or just an individual and like to track the topics of your interest, you can do so via the hashtags. Monitter and Twitterfall are good choices recommended by Mashable to do so.

If you need to track a less popular Twitter hashtag, try setting up a Twilert to get a daily email of the use of a specific hashtag.

Is it really that simple to understand and use?

Yes it is unless some of the unwritten rules are followed. Twitter hashtags are just like Google’s meta keywords [ if you don’t find youself on the same page with us we recommend reading through this article.]

Use them don’t abuse them. If you make every word of your tweet a hashtag then firstly It doesn’t look neat and secondly it doesn’t make sense. It’s just like copying pasting the whole webpage in the keywords field.

Give your hashtag context. Most people won’t actually know what your hashtag means, so give a quick explanation in one of your tweets or, if you’re making a hashtag, make it very apparent what it’s talking about. Be specific and use specific tags instead of generalized words.

I guess that would be end of the gyan from us. We would like to know from you all how you have used hashtags to make the most out of your tweets. Do leave a comment.

Twitter hashtags 101

Limitation is the mother of innovations and twitter hashtags is a wonderful example of it.  Twitter is one of the fastest growing website with more than 600 tweets per second. And it was becoming too difficult for the tweeple to keep track of the topics of interests with more and more tweeple following each other. And hence the #tag was born.

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post ~ via Search Engine Journal

Twitter provided no easy way to group tweets or add extra data so the Twitter community came up with their own way: hashtags.  A hashtag is similar to other web tags- it helps add tweets to a category. A hash tag is simply a way for people to search for tweets that have a common topic.

Hashtags have the # symbol before the keyword.

For example # + Google = #Google is a hashtag.

It’s not case sensitive so #google and #Google is one and the same thing.

#tag image
This snapshot from siesmic shows a tweet with #USB #futuregadgets and #gadgets . This signifies that the tweet emphasizes on usb, featuredgadgets and gadgets and has information about some usb gadget that has been featured on the article that can be found on that particular shortlink.

How does it work?

The words that are preceded by # are treated special by Twitter. They become the keywords and kind of help the users track the tweets and trends in a better manner.  #tag has more weight than a normal word without a # when searched for.

Suppose we are searching for tweets related to newly launched Buzz by Google. We just need to look for the #Buzz or #Google and this would list the tweets that contain any of these two #tags in them.

Suppose we want to start our own trend then we need to just decide on a keyword. And before just going ahead with adding a # to it and start tweeting we just need to check whether the #tag already exists. If it doesn’t we can use it and then tweet and tell our friends about out #tag and start a trend of our own.

The larger the number of tweets containing a particular #tag more popular it gets and hence has a higher trend. To check what are the trending topics [#tags] check out #hashtag.

TOP Twitter ranking Sites: Whats your rank?.

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Twitterank


Ranking  or percentile and the confidence is truely opposite. Lol . The percentile means that my account is “better” than a certain percent of of other Twitter users… but, not to worry, the algorithm has only very low confidence in the score.    Seems pointless to use it.

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Twitterholic


Even after clicking the “Crawl My Stats!” button, nothing is updated. They seem to base the rankings solely upon the number of followers you have, which can be a factor if you’re up there, or can really not make a difference if none of your followers are active – or, uh, human.

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BuzzOm


Apparently my “Twitin” score on BuzzOm is amazing. Under the FAQ section, they describe the score as “a measure of your social activity in Twitter. These are calculated using simple behavioral model of the user. This has been tested among 2 lakhs users.” Huh? What is a “lakh user”? (This seems to be from an overuse of Google Translate, perhaps.) Thankfully it’s gone into more detail in the next question, and says it takes in consideration a user’s retweet, tweet efficiency, and influence scores.

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Tweefight


Tweefight is actually kinda fun, and doesn’t give an official ’score’. Tweefight compares you to another Twitter user and you go head to head to “fight” it out.

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What is it basing the fight results on? “Tweerank,” which claims to be made up of any factor you can think of (i.e. a user’s involvement, followers, updates, etc). Who cares? It’s still fun.

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TwitRank.me


Not much explanation, but considering they first display my amount of followers, how many folks I’m following, and how many total updates I have, these are likely the deciding factors. This gets me to thinking, what if a company, that knows nothing of social media, looks to hire an ‘expert’ and uses their Twitter account ranking as a deciding tool? Well, that means so many of these wannabe “social media experts” will be getting jobs, without knowing how to get the results for clients. Would that make them con artists, spammers, or just ignorant?

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Twitter Score


On Twitter Score, there are two different ranks/scores listed. No explanation provided for either number, but there is a nifty little graph of followers/friends available. Useful? Not without a shown method to how it calculates scores.

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Twinfluence


They calculate followers, plus second-degree followers, to come up with your ‘reach’. So apparently if  my ‘reach’ is to 100% of the Twitterverse, which means that if I Tweet something with great impact, that Tweet could potentially be seen by all Twitter users. They also somehow calculate the constant growth and the individual influence of your followers, so that apparently works into the score – though it doesn’t say which.

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FollowCost


Let me stop laughing first at a few of my friends that are “nuclear” to follow. Okay. It is seemingly useless, but so much fun. FollowCost lets you know how annoying it will be to follow any given Twitter user, based upon the average amount of Tweets they make per day.

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If they update too much, the screen shakes (well, the browser screen) with a graphic that says “Nuclear Follow Cost,” meaning don’t follow this person unless you’re obsessed with them.

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Retweetrank


Here we get to see the scores of our fellow Tweeple based upon how many mentions they’ve gotten from other Twitter users. This is the essence of the popularity contest.  Retweetrank shows how much you’re being retweeted and publicly messaged, plus what percentile you’re in amongst other Twitterers

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Twitter Grader ( One of the Best)

I use it personally . The ranking is based upon the total number of followers along with the ratio of your following. Also checks  how many have subscribed to your updates,  amount and pace of updates, and how engaged you are in tweeting.

Amazing feature is it can take you to elite function wherein , Twitter Grader ranks you based upon your location.

Tweet by highlighting – TinyTweet

I … [hmmm I need to change the starting style most of my posts start with I].

This is for all twitter users who like to tweet all the cool stuff which is found on the internet. Now there are two ways to tweet the info you like.

You use twitter on website.

>So you copy text you want to tweet and paste into the twitter box.

>Then you copy the url/link.

>Goto any url shortening service website to get a shortened url and copy that.

>Paste that in twitter box

>And finally click update. whoaa… thats too tiring… at least for me…

The second way is use some twitter client like tweetdeck that saves a step by shortening the url by itself. But still if u want to share a lot of good stuff then it becomes tiring.

I always wanted to have an application that allowed to me to highlight the text to be tweeted and if that text contained a link then that link should be shortened and appended to the end of the tweet.

I asked a few friends how to go about developing it on my own… As its a well proven fact that I am a lazy person so I waited for this kind of app to be developed and kept checking continously and today I have found one.

Ladies and gentlemen, bloggers and tweeple let me intoroduce to you a firefox addon which does just what I had wanted to develop and in a better manner… the mighty TINYTWEET

tinytweet

This add-on gives you the power of twitter at your mouse pointer!
Simply highlight any text inside of any web page, and a “tweet this” button will appear. Click it, and an automatically generated bit.ly link is created, and the selected text is ready to be tweeted!