Twitip

As usual, it’s Sunday here in The States and with the notion of taking things easy, I’ve drawn up a list of some of the things that have found their way into my inbox.

Let me know what you think if you’ve tried any of these tools, and if you have any you’d like to share (or any posts you’ve written on your own blog related to Twitter) please don’t hesitate to let me know about them!

• Twitoria – Many people seem to have re-discovered this one recently, as it’s been mentioned here on TwiTip before. You simply enter in your Twitter username, and select a time frame from the dropdown. You then see the number of people you’re following who haven’t updated their Twitter stream in that time. Fortunately most of the people I follow are regular updaters, but this tool is helpful in trimming down your list if you’re so inclined.
• Tweet4Blood – An interesting concept, for sure. “Using tweet 4 blood you can tweet your blood requests to followers @tweet4blood who are donors. Tweets are also hashtagged city wise for easy finding. You don’t have to login to tweet it from here. But make sure not to spam the community.” Currently seems like it’s mostly used in India, but I can see how it would be easily spread around the world.
• Print Your Twitter – Since Twitter’s archive only goes back so far, using Print Your Twitter allows you to save the history of your Twitter account, favorite hashtags (#topic), and so on, right down to your computer. What were you doing a year ago on Twitter? Find out by checking your own personal archive.
• Followformation – Helps users quickly follow dozens of categorized Twitter users. This tool is meant for Twitter users that would like to make sense out of following. For new Twitter users, this can be especially intimidating. Followformation helps the social media newcomer simplify the first few steps by dividing the top people on Twitter by categories, and automating the entire following process.

I love getting tips and links submitted to us for Twitter related stories, tools, and so on. Here’s a roundup of what’s come into my inbox over the past few weeks… feel free to send in your discoveries or new Twitter tools to us via the contact form.

• 24 Free Sets of Twitter Icons in “pixel” style by Eren Emre Kanal.
• TwtMaps – a nifty new web app that allows you to enter your Twitter name and get a map that shows all your friends locations, as well as a little bit of info about each Twitter friend. (It’s cute, but it only shows a small fraction of people. Mine only showed me 59 of the 879 people that I’m following who are following me. I currently have 1665 followers and am following 1115… but it’s cute for a “sample geographic” idea.)
• proxifeed – Per the proxifeed site, “Proxifeed’s fully automated service creates relevant postings and broadcasts them into your Twitter feeds. Lean back and see your follower base grow!” Seems that basically they set you up with automatic tweets in your niche pulled from other feeds determined by keywords or manually added by you. They freely admit that it’s a test bed for contextual advertising on Twitter, however I think there’s some merit in this if it’s used properly. (If you’re using proxifeed, or have tried it, and are willing to write up a full review for TwiTip, please contact us.)
• Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem – Still not sure if the Twitter connection here is intentional or not, but it’s pretty funny none the less! (hat tip – David Halpert of SciFi Watch)

At some point in time, everyone who becomes a “Power Twitter User” bemoans the fact that it’s hard to follow too many people, or keep up with the emails telling us who’s following us. Twitter’s site interface doesn’t make checking your followers or adding/removing followees very easy or intuitive.

Introducing Buzzom, which uses Twitter’s API to make it all super easy to manage your follower/following list at lightning speed. (more…)

by Jeff Russell- Follow him @iapam

Like many of you, I’m a member of so many social media networks, the last thing I wanted to do is join another one.  But this Twitter thing just kept coming up over and over again. I kept thinking what am I going to do with a microblogging service that is limited to only 140 characters? My time is limited as it is, and if I’m going to invest my time, like any business expense, I want to know my ROI. Yes, it really comes down to how is getting a Twitter account going to make me MONEY!

Well, after creating an account, and identifying and following key people in the my industries, I knew this was like nothing else out there.  Not only did I create one Twitter account for business-related tweets, but I quickly created another account for my Foodie alter-ego. I use twitter to keep up to date on the latest breaking news, industry trends, my competition, as well as getting creative ideas for articles and marketing.

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A new version of Tweefind, a rank-based twitter search engine has been released.

New features and improvements:

• Rank: It’s getting more accurate over time, more parameters are taken into account.
• New sidebar with related content:
  • Top-ranked related Twitter users containing the searched keyword on their bio (taken from Tweepfind.com)
  • Related content from other blogs/website: Mashable, Techcrunch, R&W Web, CNN, NY Times, Venturebeat, Techmeme, BBC, Google News
  • Latest related content from Friendfeed
  • Related content from YouTube
• Google (and Bing soon) search immediately available for the same keywords and results enriched with thumbnails.

Check it out and let us know what you think in the comments!

We received an email from Dan Zarrella, regarding the launch of his new site called TweetPsych (beta). You can read Dan’s blog post about the launch, or check out TweetPsych yourself.

From the site:

“TweetPsych uses two linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC) to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets. The service analyzes your last 1000 tweets and works best on users who have posted more than 1000 updates. It also works best on accounts that are operated by a single user and use Twitter in a conversational manner, rather than simply a content distribution platform.”

This does sound very interesting, and you can see Darren’s results below:

Cognitive Content

1. Occupation & work
2. Senses
3. Present tense
4. Time
5. Upward motion
6. Media, entertainment & celebrities
7. Social processes
8. Past tense
9. Insight
10. Cognitive processes
11. Future tense
12. Tentative

Primordial, Conceptual and Emotional Content

1. Constructive behaviors
2. Social behavior
3. Abstract thought
4. Order

And for giggles, here are my results:

Cognitive Content

1. Present tense
2. Social processes
3. Tentative
4. Past tense
5. Self reference
6. Upward motion
7. Cognitive processes
8. Positive Feelings
9. Certainty
10. Negative emotions
11. Time

Primordial, Conceptual and Emotional Content

1. Social behavior
2. Abstract thought
3. Temporal References
4. Affection
5. Glory
6. Anxiety
7. Order
8. Audio sensations
9. Moral imperative

Looks like Darren’s pretty much all on the same alignment with his tweets, and I’m kind of all over the place! What do you think about your TweetPsych analysis?

by Yohay Elam of Forex Crunch. Follow him @forexcrunch

Twicli is another service for posting photos to Twitter, yet it stands out from the rest with a set of very useful features.

Twicli is provided by Picli, a photo sharing site based on users’ votes, or “Photo-Digg” if you wish. Picli has adapted itself to the Twitter era with Twicli. They harness the features of a photo sharing site in a nice way. (more…)

by David Turnbull of Mellow Business – Follow him @dturnbull

Whilst Twitter is the hottest tool at the moment to build a brand, interact with like minded individuals, and have content go viral, online video is the hottest medium. Wouldn’t it be great if we could blend the two?

Luckily, the guys from Fliggo saw that the connection should be made and so they launched TwitVid.io, a web application which they quite frankly stated was designed to become “the TwitPic of video”.

Although the service appears to be getting some traction since its recent launch, I’m still yet to see many of the people I personally follow use video within their Twitter stream, which is a shame because a short video communicates so much more than 140 characters can.

You can take advantage of this current lull however (because I’m sure the service will explode in popularity) and differentiate you and your Twitter stream by injecting personality into your Twitter stream.

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By Brett Weaver of SpotlightVT – Follow him @spotlightvt

I wanted to point out a brand new tool called TweetLister that was built specifically for marketing real estate on Twitter. I’ll also give you a quick one-two punch for using it to build a Twitter feed that any home seeker would be glad to subscribe to.

How it Works

You sign up for the free service using your existing Twitter credentials. TweetLister provides a form to collect all the usual property listing data such as address, square footage, number of rooms, etc. Most of the fields have drop-down menus with the most common choices which minimizes typing.

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Splitweet review by Jason Drohn – Follow him @jasondrohn

Who says you can only have one Twitter account? You have (at least) two emails, don’t you? One for work and one for your personal stuff? Or phone numbers – one for the office and one for you cell? Why not have two Twitter ID’s?

As Twitter continues to grow, more and more people will find a need for multiple handles.  Usually, it’s a case where your mom doesn’t care about what’s going on in the tech world. She does want to see the photos of your kids on Flickr, though!

Desktop Applications Don’t Cut It

Multiple Twitter accounts poses a problem, doesn’t it? Most of the desktop Twitter applications allow just one profile. You could log in and out of your various profiles all day – but who wants to do that? Splitweet has the answer.

Splitweet is a Twitter multi account manager that lets you do all the normal stuff like monitor your Twitter feeds, send replies and send direct messages. The difference is you can do it for multiple accounts!

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