Twitip

Welcome back from a US Bank Holiday, Labor Day! TwiTip took the 4-day weekend off, and we’re proud to present today’s post. It takes a closeup look at a really great thing happening on Twitter surrounding one man’s idea to blame his cancer for all the problems in his life. Read about how the story’s unfolded to mean so much more for many others fighting the battle.

By Neal Wiser (follow him @nealwiser) and Peter Marinari (follow him @krisis)(http://twitter.com/krisis).

First in a series of brief case studies about using Twitter for social good.

Sure, you can use Twitter to tell people about your literal and metaphorical dirty laundry (you really shouldn’t), or you can use Twitter to try to overthrow governments such as Iran and Moldavia (please be careful), but personally, I believe that one of the best uses for Twitter is to rally people around good causes.

And despite the annoyances that can sometimes result when people misuse and abuse Twitter, except for television there has probably never been a technology that can spread the news about events faster than Twitter. As a result, Twitter may just be the perfect platform for charitable causes and institutions.

Getting the Word Out

While some may argue that anything you do to raise awareness of your cause is a good thing, what you really want is to have people take a desired action and actively participate. Otherwise, your cause is just an idea, not a movement, and it’s movements that drive change. (more…)

by Glen Allsopp of PluginID. Follow him @viperchill.

We all have our reasons for being active on Twitter, the popular micro-blogging site. Whether you want to grow the readership of your blog, want to connect with like-minded people, or simply want to socialise online, you have your reasons for being a member.

Today I want to look at Twitter from a different perspective, and cover seven uses for Twitter that can be highly useful but certainly aren’t very common.

1. Reputation Management

A few days ago Darren mentioned how Twitter have now tweaked their title tags which allows for higher search engine rankings for your profile name. This may seem like quite a small and irrelevant change to some, but those with their focus on reputation management will know this is a big change.

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by Paul Anthony of Web Distortion – Follow him @webireland

The great thing about Twitter is that it has the potential to solve real time problems extremely quickly. With a host of people available online at a particular moment, you can use it to get help on a multitude of levels.

This real time capability has helped establish Twitter as a ‘help engine’ and the twittersphere is awash with stories of how Twitter has helped its users. Guy Kawasaki has had a laptop cable hand delivered by a fellow Twitter user – Matt Perez has used it to test different versions of a website on various mobile devices. It has even had more humanitarian benefits helping to prevent death threats at a school. It has even proven it’s worth through live tweeting at conferences, when a speaker became ill, and people rushed to help.

Many of us are now turning to Twitter as the first place to get an answer or help on a potential problem, its alot quicker than waiting for a reply on a message board. So, if you decide that the Twittersphere is the place you want to ask questions and get help, what are the services and sites you should be following on Twitter?

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Put this one in the novel uses for Twitter basket – how to use Twitter to turn off your bedroom lights.

I saw this a few months back – but was reminded today about it by Momma. Enjoy!

Control Lights with Twitter from Justin Wickett on Vimeo.

What other fun, novel, bizarre uses have you seen for Twitter?