Twitip

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…)

 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…)

By Karl Staib of Work Happy Now! Follow him @workhappynow.

Twitter only allows 140 characters. There is an infinite amount of things you can say, but only so many ideas to pull from. It’s hard to keep people entertained with your tweets.

The best way to keep from burning out and giving up is to have a brilliant plan that will allow you to reach your goals and meet amazing people.

1. Stay Creative

Tweeting looks so easy, but we all know it’s not. There is a lot of thought that goes into each tweet. Penelope Trunk of Brazen Careerist (@penelopetrunk) has each tweet reviewed by an editor before she sends it out. Well that’s what she told us.

You need to find new ways to get onto other tweeters’ radars. Don’t be afraid to switch around words. Tweeting is an art and sometimes you need to stand out by being different. Don’t be afraid to disagree. Don’t do this too often, but every now and again you can spur on an exciting conversation.

It’s the routine that kills the most tweeters. All they do is link back to their blog and they wonder why they aren’t meeting cool people and having fun connecting with other tweeters. (more…)

By Nathan Hangen, follow him @nhangen.

As I’ve been following people on Twitter, I’ve noticed an interesting trend. More and more people are starting to use a validation service to create a gateway between themselves and new followers. On the surface, this looks like a great idea, but I’ve come to realize that it might not be – here’s why: (more…)

Yesterday I posted a reader question looking for your Top 3 Twitter Tips. The answers were quite varied, but here are some of my personal favorites that came in:

• Don’t tweet & drink- it is worse than drunk dialing. @recruitnik
• Engage people around you. @ reply them, FollowFriday them, talk with them. You get a lot more out of Twitter when you engage. @jbwagner
• Don’t be one of those obnoxious “auto thank you” people. @jessicawaters
• Don’t answer Twitter’s question of what are you doing? Unless you’re mega-famous, nobody care’s what you’re doing. @robneville73
• Forget “monetizing” (other things are more important – and that’s not a real word, anyway). @SpikeTheLobster
  [Though I disagree that it's not a "real word" - I do agree that it's best kept off Twitter. - Lara]
• Don’t make it all about you and your company and don’t post the same type of update over and over. @timeontaskva
• Use TweetDeck to filter your followers. @pereca

If you have more Top 3 Twitter Tips to add, please feel free to do so here or on the original post.

By Jeff Hurt of Midcourse Corrections: Views From The Trenches. Follow him @JeffHurt.

Finding your community in Twitter can sometimes be a challenge, especially for Twitter beginners. Social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and NING have flourishing and established communities that are easy to find. Twitter has some growing and thriving communities too but it’s often a best-kept Twitter secret.

Enter #hashtags and Twitter chats.

Twitter chats offer an effective way to meet people with similar interests and share insights into specific topic. Currently there are more than 35 weekly scheduled Twitter chats on certain days and times with like-minded professionals discussing a variety of questions. Here’s how you can find your Twitter community and participate in a Twitter Chat.

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by Nathan Hangen – Follow him @nhangen.

I like to compare Twitter to a new relationship. At first, you are interested, but your guard is up. However, as time goes by, you find yourself spending more and more time together until the relationship blossoms and takes on a life of its own. Twitter has a great way of pulling you in like this in a way that no other social network can. Everyone seems warm and friendly and you quickly find that you can take your guard down and start talking with people from all over the world as if they were a guest in your home.

I love Twitter for this reason because it seems that it has never been easier to build so many relationships so quickly. This is really something most of us, unless we are celebrities, have never had to face before. That is, having to deal with thousands of friends at once. At first, a few hundred friends are easy to manage, but soon you have a list of thousands that you have to sort through. It can become a daunting task trying to keep up with everyone, much less interact with them. This is why I don’t think I’d be able to use Twitter without TweetDeck and why I think that the following advice just might save the Twitter interaction that you’ve come to love.

What we are going to do is turn a normal Twitter feed into something that is easy to use and makes interacting with people much easier. If you don’t have TweetDeck, then I highly recommend that you go and grab it now before you finish reading this post. Although Twhirl does come in handy for certain tasks, in my opinion, nothing works as seamlessly with Twitter as TweetDeck does.
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by Janet Fouts (follow her at @jfouts).

DestroyTwitter?

What kind of name is that for a helper app? Hmm, let’s take a look at this new Adobe Air app for Twitter. Because it’s an Air app, it runs on multiple platforms and outside the browser, freeing up your browser for other work. The UI looks a lot like TweetDeck in layout. You can choose from three different “canvases” displayed in columns:

• Home, Replies and (Direct) Messages
• Search, Saved (Favorites), and Sent
• Preferences, Account, People

Each pane is pretty much self explanatory for most Twitter users, even though they’ve given them slightly different names.. The account pane shows your profile information and the people pane shows user information when you click on an avatar, similarly to Tweetdeck. Unlike Tweetdeck you can’t create custom columns for groups, probably the most important feature in TweetDeck in my book.

The preferences pane is where the best features are. You can fine-tune your preferences to open the app at start-up, manage the size of the workspace and how many tweets you want to show at once, or make the font size larger (essential for me, the font when it first launches is unbelievably small). In these days of limkited API calls to Twitter, you can set how often you want DestroyTwitter to ping Twitter for new Tweets and you can set different rates for search and messages, so you can ration your 100 calls to the API per hour based on how you use Twitter. Like the new release of TweetDeck, you can also see how many calls to the API you’ve made, and if you’ve gone over limit, when you’ll be able to call again.

All in all it’s a slick app with some thoughtful features and a very web two oh design. Will DestroyTwitter replace Tweetdeck on my desktop? Not yet. It won’t replace Twhirl either. At least not until it adds a multi-account feature anyway. That said, not bad for an app that was realeased with only “ten days of design and development”. Wow. Look for interesting things from this team.