Twitip

Twitter is a wonderful communications tool and while it does many things really well, there are a few things it doesn’t do so well. One of those things is having discussions about specific topics with specific groups of people. This is often known as a TwitChat.

The Problem

I participate in a number of weekly TwitChats. These TwitChats are often very educational and can be a lot of fun; that is, for the participants. For everyone else, they can be a real hassle.

The problem is that while you’re having a heated debate about the merits of origami (no offense to origami fans), you’re going to have followers who couldn’t care less. Moreover, if you fire off fifty or sixty tweets during an hour long TwiChat, you can really flood some of your follower’s streams. I’ve had plenty of people unfollow me because of this and if you participate in TwitChats, I’m sure you have too. (more…)

Photosharing on Twitter has historically been left up to sites like Yfrog and Twitpic, and according to news posted very late last night on TechCruch, 3rd party photosharing is about to become a thing of the past.

Twitter has been spending money left and right, and it seems that every time we turn around, they’re doing something to demolish what people have been used to. Their reasoning, they claim, is that they’re working to “avoid having the user stream disrupted”. Personally, I think it’s because they would rather make the money from advertising themselves, and not allow others to gain financially from the use of their API. They’ve got to pay back their investors somehow… right? (more…)

Image credit: Michael Hamburg.

Twitter introduced the concept of lists about 16 months ago to enable the manual grouping of people into categories.

If you visit Formulists or Listorious you can type a keyword and see the different lists that people maintain. Searching for the keyword apples, for instance, you can read Twitter biographies of the 491 people who someone added to a list about honeycrisp apples. You can either follow the list or follow its members individually.

Any Twitter user can create his or her own list, or follow an existing list — such as the above one about apples. (more…)

Richard Barley

If you use TweetDeck then you may have heard of or met Richard Barley (@richardbarley), TweetDeck’s Community Manager. I first “met” Richard last year when he provided some thoughtful comments to a pair of posts I wrote about TweetDeck, 10 Features I Want to See in TweetDeck and 9 More Features I Want to See in TweetDeck.

I had planned to ask Richard for an interview, but it got put on hold on my end. Finally, after long delay, that interview is here (you can also listen to an extended version of this interview on my podcast, Addicted to Social Media). (more…)

Friday, March 11, 2011 was a black day in Twitter history.  On that day, Twitter announced that they don’t want anyone to make any more third-party Twitter clients. While Twitter didn’t say that there couldn’t be any more clients using the Twitter platform (some services would be grandfathered in and all would have to follow a strict code of conduct), but as far as Twitter’s massive eco-system of third-party developers are concerned, the announcement was essentially a cease and desist order.

I’ve previously written about Twitter’s behavior towards its third-party developers and the risks they’re taking if they focus only on developing Twitter-based tools (See Twitter Commits Suicide and Twipocalypse Now). The bottom line is that building a business that is entirely dependent on a single partner isn’t a safe model to follow. (more…)

So you’re a student in a college and you’ve picked up Twitter like everybody else in this social networking trend. However, Twitter is much different than Facebook or even LinkedIn. It’s more of a barbecue-type setting between professionals. Look, I didn’t believe it either, that was until I secured a very desirable internship in my field last summer because of Twitter. So how do you use Twitter to progress professionally? Simple, begin with these four basic steps, and expand accordingly. (more…)

There are often comparisons between various Twitter apps and discussions about which is better; however, there are several benefits to using Twitter.com without using an app at all.

One benefit to using Twitter.com is the ability to send and receive Tweets more quickly. Apps can only retrieve messages in intervals so there is usually at least a short delay in receiving messages. Users of Twitter.com can send and receive instantly without having to wait. (more…)

How do you say what you want to say in less than 140 characters? Ask any writer out there. Writing short is difficult.

But it’s something comedians have been doing for years – writing short, pithy punch lines. Ask Comedian Michael Ian Black who recently decided to add advertisements to his tweets. Black wrote in his blog “As of today, I’ve written 2,655 tweets. That’s a lot of free material, all of it contributing to the entertainment of the 1.5 million people who follow me, as well as the multibillion dollar capitalization of Twitter itself.” (more…)

 When you first get on twitter, it’s likely the thing you care most about is how many followers you have. I’ve even been to parties where people will judge my status by the number of followers I have. It’s like walking up to somebody and asking them how much money they make. A year ago when I first got on twitter, I met a girl at a party who I asked me how many followers I had. At the time I didn’t really know how to use twitter, and I had roughly 100 followers. She then proceeded to tell me about a mass follow tool of some sort, so I went home and went crazy following people. I’ve never interacted with her on twitter, and I have no idea what happened to her. (more…)

It’s about time! The ever popular twitter app, Tweetdeck, has finally come to Android. Just announced, Tweetdeck 1.0 can now be downloaded after a few months of beta testing.

Tweetdeck had a whopping 36,000 beta testers prior to this launch in an effort to make sure the app worked without fail. (more…)