Twitip

Have you ever been at a concert and wondered what the rest of the audience is thinking? Or been at a presentation and had a good point to add? Or at a nightclub and wanted to request a song but not deal with the security surrounding the DJ? Well, there’s a great way to do all this and more.

Connecting Twitter to TVs or projecting it on a screen at your events will add a whole new level of audience participation. Plus, you can grow your list of followers at every event. Creating a live Twitter feed to aggregate tweets sent to users, from users, or including keywords or hashtags can be quite a task.

You can run a real-time search using TweetDeck but it isn’t really optimized for screen and your audience will be squinting.

You can try to build your own Twitter feed widget but it’s a pretty daunting task involving JQuery, JavaScripting, CSS and HTML knowledge.

There’s an easier way. StreamTwitter is a little script designed for streaming tweets in real-time to any video source. Just open the script, change your search term, switch the graphics to be your own (optional) and connect your laptop to your video source. It’s optimized for TV screen resolution and looks amazing. It updates automatically with beautiful jQuery sliding effects. It can filter out bad words if desired. It is the easiest and best way to have a live Twitter feed streaming tweets including your desired search term at your events. It also comes with easy-to-follow instructions and 3 months of support if you have any questions.

If you’ve got experience with StreamTwitter, or any questions, please feel free to share in the comments!

By Joe Mescher of Social Media Commando. Follow him @JoeMescher.

How would you like to end the debate that ‘Twitter is just for sharing what you had for lunch’ once and for all?  This post is about how to use Twitter for a common good, much like I’m doing with the help of my Tweeps in Burlington, VT.

The whole project started with a simple idea, my Twitter handle, and a few hundred interested followers… (more…)

Since new Twitter tools are popping up what seems like every day, I figured I’d give a list of some of the latest ones I’ve seen people discussing. There are the standards that most people use, like TwitPic and TwitVid.io (which we covered before here) but here are some you may not have seen before.

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!

By Owen Kelly of The Indie Digest. Follow him @ojkelly.

Twitter provides a unique opportunity to everyone that has never really existed before. Not only do you have the ability to follow every minute detail of your favourite band, but you can also have a conversation with them.

It’s often been said that twitter is like a bar full of people. You can listen or jump in with any conversation at the bar. Keep this in mind when you tweet.

If you just blurt out “Click here to see my new video!” Then you closely resemble the people handing out crappy pamphlets at the train station, that end up in the bin seconds later.

Anyone attempting to promote a product, be it a song, CD, or even a book, needs to be aware the usual rules do not apply on Twitter. It has evolved with its own set of rules and etiquette. To successfully promote your product you need to be aware of a few things.

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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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This video has been around for a while but I wanted to include it for those new to Twitter who might need an introduction.

Thanks to the team at Common Craft for putting it together.

There has been lots of good Twitter news, reports and ideas around this week:

The State of the Twittersphere [REPORT]

Hubspot has produced their State of the Twittersphere report. A few stats from it:

• 35% of Twitter users have 10 or fewer followers
• The average number of followers is 70
• The average number of people that Twitter users follow is 69
• Top locations on Twitter include London, San Francisco, New York and Chicago

Here it is in full:

State of the Twittersphere – Get more Information Technology

ReadWriteWeb takes the stats in the report projects forwards – concluding that Twitter would take 36 years to catch Facebook.

Facebook, Twitter and Traffic [STATS]

Also on the topic of Facebook and Twitter – Jacob Cass reports that he gets more traffic from Facebook than Twitter despite having fewer Facebook friends than Twitter followers and shows some stats from his metrics package.

I tweeted this link earlier today and had a heap of people tell me that their own results are quite the opposite. I decided to check my own and mine are completely different to Jacob. To my ProBlogger blog I had 11,500 visitors come from Twitter.com over the last 30 days and only 1500 come from Facebook. My links to new posts go up on both as Jacob describes.

Here on TwiTip the stats are even more one sided towards Twitter – although that’s skewed because this blog is about Twitter of course.

I don’t dispute Jacobs results – but would argue that it is always going to vary from site to site and topic to topic.

ReWeeting [ANALYSIS]

Pistachio Consulting has a good analytical post this week on the Phenomenon of Retweeting

Twitter for Business [VIDEO]

Laura from Pistachio also has a great presentation on the topic of Twitter for Business. It is well worth the look.

Check out her powerpoint deck here.

Twitter and Legal Ramifications [LAW]

Law.com has an article up talking about how tweets could get employers in legal trouble. Sounds like a whole lot of articles we saw a few years back on the dangers of blogging to companies.

Round Follow Buttons! [DESIGN]

And the news of the week – Twitterrati notes that follow buttons went from square to round!

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?

Enhance the richness of your followers experience of Twitter by going multimedia with your tweets. In this guest post Michael Martine from Remarkablogger (@remarkablogger) shares three tools for sharing Images, Video and Music on Twitter.

The array of Twitter tools is growing rapidly, but I only want to focus on 3 of them that really enhance my use of Twitter and offer something to give my followers beyond the basic 140 characters: Pictures, video, and a super-easy way to share links (especially music).

1. TwitPic

TwitPic lets you upload pictures and automatically tweet links to them on Twitter. Think of it as “Flickr for Twitter”. Be prepared to spend an hour or two on the home page, because TwitPic uses a Google Maps mashup to show you where TwitPics are coming from around the world in real time–it’s very mesmerizing!

TwitPic also integrates with many popular Twitter desktop clients, such as TweetDeck. Pictures can be rotated, tagged, commented on, shared through social media, and embedded on your own website.
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A few months ago I asked my Twitter followers why they loved Twitter. This video is a compilation of their responses.