Twitter

When the world was younger, and so was Twitter, I became fascinated with selecting the best Twitter client for my several computers.

I first encountered Twitteriffic, which was a lightweight, visually appealing piece of software. It gave you tweeting sounds when you get new messages. You could customize the color scheme. You can even set transparency. It was free, at least for a while (then you could opt to either pay or get ads every few minutes or so).

But it was Mac-only. And in my wide array of computers in my so-called development lab (a.k.a. home office), I only had one Mac. And since it was one of my older machines, it was hardly my main work computer. It wasn’t my most portable computer, either; that honor went to my cutesy little Asus EeePC, the first generation of which ran Linux.

And so on my Windows-powered computers, I had to scour the web for a good client. There was Twitterlicious, Twhirl, and a host of others. They were cute and customizable, too. But in my opinion, none was as solid and lightweight as Twitteriffic. And I had to either install a certain iteration of .NET or Adobe Air to run these pieces of software. I didn’t want overhead bloat! Oh, wait, wasn’t Windows itself just that? At any rate, I just wanted something to run as light as possible.

And this still didn’t address my need to be multi-platform. On my linux machines, I wanted something as easy to install as apt-get, which was, to say, very optimistic on my part. And so I tried Twitterfox, which was an add-on for Firefox, which–you guessed it!–ran on Windows, OS X and even Linux (but of course!).

Twitterfox wasn’t as elegant, though. In hindsight, I wasn’t even sure if it notified you of new tweets. Not that I needed notifying, as the folks I follow post updates ever so often, anyway.

And then it hit me. What if I stuck to just using the Web interface? Twitter clients have this knack for taking over your life. The moment Twitteriffic’s birdies tweet, you get an impulse to open the notification window, if doesn’t pop up automatically already, with your friends’ and their cats’ trivial concerns.

So I’m sticking to the Web client. And when I’m mobile, I don’t bother to use standalone apps, as I also prefer m.twitter.com. I like life simple.

Will I still change my mind? Maybe. Send over some links to cool Twitter clients and I might try them out (and even review them here). But I’d like something that helps me get the most out of microblogging, not something that would take hold of my life. I like life simple.

I’ve always thought that immersing oneself in social media is best done through individuals rather than an organization or a group. But in our case, Splashpress itself is deeply involved in social media (or so we’d like to think) that it’s probably high time we got the network its own Twitter account. Hey, the Blog Herald has its own @blogherald, so why shouldn’t Splashpress?

And so please do follow @splashpress for updates, tips, and other hopefully intellectual discussions about social media and whatnot. Several of us editors would be contributing here, including my colleagues from the Blog Herald, 901am.com, Forever Geek, and other established and up-and-coming brands.

Do follow us!

Oh, the “follow me” button is courtesy of TwitterButtons.com.

David Peralty over at BloggingPro.com, has put together a list of Twitter account of all but four employees of Automattic, the fine folks behind WordPress.com. If you’re a big fan of the open source project WordPress.org or have an employee favorite, this list should help you keep tabs on what’s happening in the world of Automattic.

Speaking of following WordPress people on Twitter, check out this post I wrote back in June 2008 which contains 31 notable WordPress enthusiasts to follow on Twitter.

If you operate either a brick and mortar or an online business, you’d do yourself some good by having a Twitter account associated with your business. Why you might ask? Because this account can be used to develop personal relationships with not only your customers but also enables you to grow your online presence. One other benefit that using Twitter provides is the ability to right a wrong.

What the web has enabled customers to do so easily now a days is to speak out against a bad customer service experience or, simply moan and complain about a product or service. Companies that are in the know should have someone dedicated to watching their online presence to monitor situations in which someone has a bad experience. For example, the other day on Twitter, I had mentioned that Ustream.TV sucked because none of the videos as well as the chatrooms ever loaded for me. A few minutes later, I received a reply from a Ustream support representative through Twitter. I discussed my issues with them which were then handled on the Ustream site. As it turns out, I helped Ustream discover a weird anomaly that was only seen a few times before. I worked directly with a customer support representative and resolved the issue.

A few minutes after that, I sent out a Tweet apologizing for my rant against the service and then commended them. Not only did they turn a wrong into a right, but this was all done in the public’s eye. Using email is ok, so is phone support, but with immediate action taking by Ustream using a service such as Twitter, they were able to convince me that they care not only about what people say about their service in the public lime light, but also about customer service.

To make a long story short, use services like Twitter to monitor what the public is saying about your business. Try to right wrongs and do your best to offer personal care and support. Turning a wrong into a right can really boost the positive word of mouth effect such as the case with me and Ustream. As a business, using services like Twitter to leverage your customer service experience can only be a good thing. It’s great for businesses and even better for consumers. A win-win situation.

Rohit Bhargava blogs on Mr. Tweet about the five stages of Twitter acceptance. These five are, from his view, different levels of how a user actually uses Twitter. This ranges from just signing up for the sake of having an account to engaging in meaningful conversations with other users.

I can say I’ve been having a mix of #4 and #5. But what I can perhaps highlight from my personal experience is not the where in these stages, but rather the how much aspect of it.

I’ve been a user since practically the service started. And I’d become so much of an avid Twitter user that my account even turned into something akin to an instant messaging client at one point. But lately, I’ve found myself only logging in to check for updates once or twice a day (or even less). And most of the time I lurk and listen, rather than contribute. I’m on the lookout for interesting things that other users might link to or say, which makes for good tips on what to write about. And then there are the occasional bursts of being #3–that is, posting links about the latest goings on in the network, which includes Performancing.com and our various services, new and old.

Because of this I feel I may not be maximizing my use of Twitter, if only for lack of the time spent actually connecting and communicating. But then, however rare this may be, I can still say that I probably fall under the new category (#6), too, which is Collaborating: Actual, meaningful relationships and collaborations have occurred out of my usage of Twitter. A lot of my colleagues, clients and service providers are on Twitter and we do sometimes discuss projects over a few tweets.

Which category do you fall under?

To all those who use Twitter:

Please stop filling my public timeline with your automatically generated content. I don’t want to know your exact location. I don’t want to know what you just listened to on Last.FM. I don’t want to see what you just listened to or downloaded on iTunes. I don’t want to know what you just purchased. I don’t want to see your automatic welcome Tweets to new followers.

Have a nice day and thank you 🙂

Really, all of that information is what I consider to be crap if nothing else, noise. At this point, I follow 615 people on Twitter. The stream of information that is manually submitted to Twitter by these end users is what I am interested in the most. But you might be one of those people who thinks that streaming your Last.FM recently played tracks to Twitter would be an acceptable social thing to do so those who follow you can know the type of music you’re interested in. However, I am seriously wondering if Twitter is the appropriate place for people to be aggregating this information?

Why do I follow someone? It’s because of what the individual says in 140 characters or less. I could very well just block people or unfollow them to clean up my stream but in some aspects, it would be a shame to do so because these same people have very interesting things to say. I can’t control what they decide to aggregate through their account but I would like to see people aggregate that information to somewhere other than Twitter. Perhaps on a blog or an entirely separate Twitter account.

Am I the only one who feels this way?

Twitter, FriendFeed, Plurk. What do all of these services have in common? They all provide a way to share and discuss things outside of blogging. One of the complaints I’ve heard from a number of people is that, all of these services provide a means for the conversation to move off of the blog and onto these services. Unless you’re a member of these services, knowing when and if someone is talking about you or your blog has been difficult.

Thanks to a WordPress plugin written by Dan Zarrella called Tweetbacks, at least one of those microblogging services will be routed back to the blog. Tweetbacks works in a similar fashion to trackbacks except instead of links back to the originating post, Tweets or Twitter messages will be shown instead.

So how does it work?

It currently finds mentions of the URL through the top 5 most popular URL shorteners on Twitter: Tinyurl, Bit.ly, Is.gd, Twurl, and SnipURL. I used cli.gs’s list of top shorteners to prioritize. To prevent it from running afoul of Twitter’s search API rate limits it functions via javascript.

Installation is fairly straightforward and only requires adding one line of code to your template where you want the tweetbacks to be displayed. Tweetbacks is a great way to route the conversation back to your blog.

For directions and information on using the plugin, visit the plugin release page.

In a technique that has mostly been confined to email has now spread to micro blogging services such as Twitter. In a post published in January 3rd on the official Twitter blog, the service warns users:

If you receive a direct message or a direct message email notification that redirects to what looks like Twitter.com—don’t sign in. Look closely at the URL because it could be a scam.

Ever receive an email from Ebay or someone claiming to be your bank asking you to confirm your username and password? Those are phishing scams. So how does this particular phishing scam work as it relates to Twitter?

This particular scam sent out emails resembling those you might receive from Twitter if you get email notifications of your Direct Messages. The email says something like, “hey! check out this funny blog about you…” and provides a link. That link redirects to a site masquerading as the Twitter front page. Look closely at the URL field, if it has another domain besides Twitter but looks exactly like our page then it’s a fraud and you should not sign in.

For tips on how to avoid this and other phishing scams, read this article that was published on Fraud.org. If you find yourself a victim to this phishing scam, Twitter recommends you immediately click on the RESET PASSWORD link for your account. The reset password email will be sent to the address on file allowing you to change the password to something you know and reclaim your account. If that doesn’t work, try contacting their support team.