Photo Sharing

• Twitgoo is probably the most “Twitter-like” one of the bunch. You can tweet right from there (after logging in) and include an image right from the section where you post your Tweet.
• Pikchur Use your computer, cell phone, or any other mobile device to post your pics, and Pikchur takes care of distributing them all over the social web for you! Offers a paid “PRO” package to track stats too, which is different.
• yfrog 1. Upload an image or video from your desktop or from an URL 2. Enter your message 3. Enter your credentials to Twitter 4. Click post it. VERY simple interface. From the same people who created ImageShack.
• TweetPhoto offers a lot of the advanced options you might enjoy for free: Stats, geo-tagging, favoriting/retweeting, etc.

Video Sharing

• TwitLENS Simply login with your Twitter credentials and you are ready to start sharing media on Twitter. Uses OAuth.
• 12seconds Create short video clips that you record with your webcam, mobile phone, or upload. Show people where you are and what’s going on. Uses OAuth.
• Twiddeo Upload from the web, your cameraphone and record from your webcam.
• TwitC Use Twitc to organize, search, view, comment, share, embed, batch download, collect, favorite, rate uploads, view timelines and profiles, post links to or embed files, and send updates to your profile on Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and 35 other sites.

Are there any others that I may have missed? Have you tried any of the above? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



8 Photo And Video Sharing Tools For Twitter You May Not Have Seen

• 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)

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Sunday Link Love Roundup: Pixels, Maps, and Blue Whales

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

There are three things you can do at Buzzom:

1. Flush. You can unfollow people en masse simply by checking the boxes and clicking “Flush”.
2. Grow. You can follow new people, again by checking boxes and clicking. (I’m a teeny bit nervous about this one when the spammers find it, but still…)
3. Reciprocate. This one tells you who’s following you, that you’re not following, and you guessed it, allows you to follow back with checkboxes and a button.

All three sections also have what’s called “Lock”. This means, on the Flush page, if you “Lock” someone, you’ll prevent them from showing up on the Flush list again. It essentially is saying “I don’t ever want to flush that person, so stop asking me!”

Here’s a clipped screenshot of the “Grow” section:

If you take a look at the right sidebar, there’s also a section where you can send out an instant tweet. It’s pre-filled with a plug for buzzom, but if you really wanted to, you could tweet anything from there.

It also features numbers under some headings:

Stars: This means number of people who you are following but they are not following you back.
Friends: This is the number of people you are following, who are following you back.
Fans: This means number of people who are following you but you are not following them back.

All in all, yes, Buzzom does require your username and password in order to work, however I see it as a pretty neat tool to help manage and grow your Twitter account follower/following lists!

Have you tried it? What do you think?

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Quick Twitter Tool Review: Buzzom

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.

As I added followers, and people started following me, one thing became abundantly clear, there is a lot of information to keep track of. To make all the Tweets I receive manageable, I created multiple groups in TweetDeck.

The next problem was how am I going to contribute to the twitosphere, but still have time to actually work and spend time with my family?  Like Tim Ferris says in his classic book, “The Four Hour Work Week,” you need to automate, and that is where HootSuite came into my life.
HootSuite allows me to efficiently: schedule tweets, link my existing RSS feeds and tweet them out, utilize Ping.fm tweet broadcasting, manage multiple twitter accounts, track tweet statistics, and allow for multiple editors so I can get a break!

The primary reason I chose HootSuite is for its ability to schedule tweets.  I originally was using Tweetlater, but I like the HootSuite interface better (its the Mac guy in me), plus it allowed me to link RSS feeds from my blogs and tweet them out automatically. Scheduling allows you to create a series of tweets and send them out at whenever you want.  For a business, this is great since it allows you to create a series of tweets that may lead to a “special” deal. Or you could be promoting a special event or webinar. Of course the other nice thing is it allows you to take Friday’s off by scheduling all your tweets earlier in the week! Scheduling tweets is very simply in HootSuite, you simply click the “send later” button in your tweet box. You will then see a calendar option for you to schedule the date and time of when your tweet will be released.

While I was navigating around HootSuite, I discovered another great timesaving tool, RSS feed integration.  Found in the Settings section, this tool allows you to link up to 5 RSS feeds to your HootSuite account, and it tweets them out when you tell it to.  I don’t know about you, but I find it annoying when I see a 5 tweets in a row come from one twitterer. A nice option for the RSS feed integration tool is to only take a maximum of one RSS story every hour (or 2, 3, 6, 12 or 24hrs).  It also allows you to prepend tweets with a some relevant words (i.e. “Latest News:” or “Jeff Says”).  This also has the added benefit of helping you promote your blog. This took me a whole 5 minutes to do, and now HootSuite is automatically promoting all of my newest blog postings without me needed to do any additional work!

For even more automation, HootSuite also allows for Ping.fm integration. Now you can have your tweets automatically sent to all your social networking accounts you have set up in Ping.fm (i.e. Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, flickr, friendster, friendfeed, yammer, etc..).

HootSuite will also shorten urls for you, and it will also keep track of the statistics of how many people have clicked those tweets.   You can click on the stat’s button of a specific tweet, or you can see the stats of all your tweets. It also give you a summary of your most popular tweets. One caveat here is that you must use HootSuite’s url shortener (ow.ly) in order to get these statistics.
If you run a small (or large) business, another great administrative tool is that you can have multiple people manage your HootSuite account.  As well, if you have multiple Twitter accounts, you can easily add them here and watch them all on the dashboard.

One additional tool that HootSuite has is an add-on browser app called the Hootlet. This great tool allows you to quickly tweet out a webpage you come across within 10 seconds.

As with many of the great Twitter tools available, HootSuite is currently free, but with all these great time saving benefits I strongly recommend you make a donation.

With the multitude of great time saving features, HootSuite is a must have for any busy business or blogger.

Have you tried HootSuite? Leave your thoughts in the comments…

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



TwiTip Reader Review: HootSuite

Twitter can be dangerous. That being said, Twitter is fun, useful, informative and overall entertaining; in this guest post I’d like to build upon my previous post 11 Useful Twitter Tools That Don’t Require Your Password and talk a little about security do’s and don’ts.

Twitter has become the place for events that are happening now, however with great technology, comes great responsibility. The following list contains a few basic measures we can take to ensure Twitter remains safe and fun:

Security Don’ts:

1. Never use your password on suspicious third party sites, hundreds pop up everyday and we can not know for sure witch ones are legit.
2. Don’t be too specific: there’s a big difference between “Just bought a gazillion caret ring on XX Avenue, leaving store now” and “Just bought and engagement ring, wish me luck!”
3. On that note, say it, don’t spray it: Don’t spit excessive personal information, this is about as dangerous on Twitter as it is on any other social network.
4. Call the police, don’t tweet about it!: inspired by recent news involving celebrity blogger Perez Hilton and Black Eyed Peas front man Will.I.Am.
5. Don’t tweet about moving servers, changing passwords or any other type of situation where your security could be compromised more easily.

Security Do’s:

1. There are hundreds of twitter tools everywhere, so try to use oath whenever possible (Oauth lets third party tools access your twitter’s information in a safe way as long as you’re logged on Twitter). In your Twitter Settings you can manage witch applications have access to your data and which don’t in the Connection tab.
2. Choose a strong password: Twitter’s famous attacks have been known to start by a hacker guessing someone’s password. I recommend using a strong password generator.
3. Do use direct messages when appropriate, not everything is meant to be said in the wild.
4. Consider having a private separate account for work or project related purposes.
5. Finally, have fun! It’s not about being paranoid .)

What other security do’s and don’ts would you recommend? Share those important tips with us on the comment section!

[image credit: seanmcgrath]

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Twitter Security Do’s and Don’ts

• TwitLogo – an online service that lets you generate your own Twitter-like logo.
  
• TinyTwit – Lets you share files on Twitter, also URL shortening service and tweet app.
• Philips_VS – A new Twitter competition where anyone may challenge Philips with their crazy ideas. By simply sending a reply to the latest update on our Twitter, we will quickly re-tweet a Photoshop image, animation or a video of the idea. The prize-winner, picked by the Philips jury at July 10th, will be the participant submitting the most original and creative entry. The winner will not only win a Cinema 21:9 TV but also get his or her idea produced into a professional viral film.
• TweedleDM – Pulls direct messages straight from Twitter and allows the user to search by keyword, username etc.
• 100 Tips, Tools, and Resources for Twitter Research – TwiTip was included in this list!

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Sunday Twitter Link Roundup

Datatoy – Turns tweets into charts. You can tweet about your visits to starbucks, calorie consumption, glasses of water you’ve finished… and Datatoy will automatically produce a graph for you. You can also use widgets to take it to your blog if you want to display your graphs to the world.

Twesents lets you send virtual gifts to your twitter friends. Everything from cutesy to risque, you can send gifts just like you can do on FaceBook.

ShortGPS – A new service that helps you save postal addresses or locations in a unique and short URL to exchange via tweets, email, or SMS. Locations can be changed via the Map and a satellite/hybrid version of the map are also saved into the URL.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Sunday Twitter Roundup: Charts, Twesents, and GPS

TweetIE – An extremely simple Twitter add-on for IE called TweetIE, it works for IE 6,7 and 8. FireFox plug-in is also available. When it is installed you can select a text on the web page and click a toolbar button, it will send a text as an update to your twitter account and attach a short URL of that page.

multiTwit – New, free widget lets you send tweets to multiple Twitter accounts at once. Helpful for those who just can’t get beyond their multiple twitter personality disorder, and need to have more than one account.

TweetBrain – A purposefully built crowdsourcing tool for the Twitter community. Many are using TB creatively for polling, contests, customer support, even educational purposes.

Twitpaper – Another site for 100% free Twitter themes, layouts, and backgrounds. Site claims to add 5-10 new themes a day and will also design custom themes for free.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Sunday Twitter Tool Roundup

Most businesses who are trying to stay on top of what’s being said about them (or their competition) are very familiar with Twitter’s standard search engine. Search.twitter.com will provide a reasonably comprehensive set of results for term and hashtag references, but that may not be enough for businesses who need to stay on top of all relevant conversations.

One shortcoming of Twitter’s standard search is that it will fail to catch those tweets that may have linked to your/your competition’s site, yet don’t contain the specific terms or tags that you are probing for.

Imagine that someone has tweeted only the words “my favorite latte” and has provided a link to the coffee house you own. In this instance no key terms were used, and you’d likely never know that the reference ever existed.

Enter Backtweets. With Backtweets, you simply enter a URL (the service will auto-resolve shortened ones) into the single field presented and hit return. It will deliver a reverse-chronological list of tweets containing the requested link.

In addition, it provides an RSS feed so that you can be notified automatically as new relevant tweets appear. If you would prefer to receive the updates via email, one option is to enter the feed URL into a service such as FeedMyEmail, who will send you a daily email.

The creators of Backtweets tell me that service will provide up to 500 results for any single search result at one time, and searches for links going back about 2 months.

(Click the image for a larger view.)

Our sentiment is that Backtweets is an invaluable addition to the toolkit of any professional who needs to stay on top what’s being said on Twitter.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Brand Monitoring in Twitter: BackTweets Alerts you to Linking Activity

For new Twitter users, understanding Twitter and how to use it may change in those first few days after signing up. It could mean working through the learning curve or it could mean too much frustration to continue. Some people stay, others move on, realizing Twitter wasn’t for them. I know of some people, including me, who stopped using Twitter but came back and tried it again to find out they really enjoyed it. The problem is, as with many things in life, there is a learning curve. I want to offer three important steps to surviving the Twitter learning curve.

Locate
If you’re particular about who you want in your friend and follow lists, finding people you want to follow can be a bit tricky. It’s relatively easy to amass followers by following them and hoping most of them will follow you back. But most of these type of followers will probably be people who will never communicate with you. And you probably won’t receive a shout out from anyone in the top 500 rankings, either. See Twitterholic. Here are some basic ways of finding people with whom to network:

• Try Twitter tools like Twubble or Twellow to help find people with interests similar to your own. TweeterTags is a new tool that allows you to tag yourself with your interests and also find people with similar tags.
• My interests are in writing, blogging, and social networking, so I look for people with similar interests. My preferred method to find people is simply using Twitter itself and look up my favorite and respected friends to see who is following them.

Communicate
The obvious principle behind Twitter is communication, but sometimes it’s hard to feel engaged in the medium when you send out a tweet, @Reply, or DM and no one responds. At first Twitter can seem like a black hole and conversations may be more one-sided with people in your network. But it won’t always feel that way, and here are some reasons why:

• You will find friends who have things to say that interest you and provoke a response (It’s hard to become engaged when you don’t care what is being said).
• You will learn how to tweet messages that are interesting and evoke a response.
• People will begin to engage in conversation with you over something you tweeted.
• People will retweet your tweets, and you will think, hey, I really made an impression!
• You will become comfortable with the format and enter into more and more conversations.
• You will find your favorite tools for making Twitter fun and easy to use. My favorites for the communication part of Twitter are TweetDeck and Seesmic. A key function in their design is to help you manage your friends and followers groups, which makes conversations a snap.

Negotiate
Managing our lives requires negotiation. Relationships require negotiation. Using Twitter requires some level of negotiation on how to fit it into your lifestyle and schedule. Here are some ideas to keep in mind when negotiating the Twitterverse.

• Don’t feel you are locked in to your game plan for using Twitter. If you want to build a big follower base, change the way you do business. If you realize having thousands of followers is not what you really want out of Twitter, feel free to change your goals and strategy.
• Don’t feel you can’t unfollow someone. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out. For instance, if you don’t like the comments from a particular individual, hit the unfollow button. Poof!
• Don’t feel you have to follow everyone who follows you. Sure, an etiquette about following back has developed, but if it doesn’t apply to how you want to use Twitter, don’t follow back.
• Don’t feel you have to respond immediately, or ever, if someone sends you a message or reply. You only have so much time and you can only do so much in a day. Time, friends, followers, etc. all enter into your negotiation.
• Sometimes followers leave. If they do and you’re no longer interested in following them, you can certainly unfollow. Applications like Tweetlater will even auto unfollow if that’s something you choose to do. No need to take it personally.

As a new user, understanding and using Twitter can seem overwhelming. It can be frustrating, it can even feel depressing. And you may decided it’s not for you. But remember that these are sometimes symptoms of working through a learning curve. Ultimately Twitter becomes how you re-invent it for yourself.

My Twitter Learning Curve graph from TwitterCounter

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Surviving the Twitter Learning Curve