Refollow is yet another online Twitter app which allows you to manage your followers/friends. Like Tweepular, it allows you to bulk follow, unfollow and block user with two clicks and its very easy to use. It helps you filter your Twitter friends to find the ones that are following you, the ones you are following as well as the ones that are not following you and the ones you are not following.
Twitter text commands are words you can type in order to get Twitter to perform a specific action like turning notifications off or on for specific users or for general messages to your phone. Some of the Twitter commands were pretty useful in the early days of Twitter but now that there are many Twitter clients which can perform similar actions, they don’t seem to be used by many people anymore. Apart from ‘@username’ or ‘d’ of course.
The brevity of Twitter updates makes it an ideal tool to be used to jot down short notes, observations or reminders to yourself. While you can manually record what you eat or spend everyday, your tweets might be difficult to archive in a way which can be viewed with a single glance. That’s where websites like tweetwhatyoueat and tweetwhatyouspend come in. Both of them allow you record what you eat or spend on a daily basis and make it referenceable via an online interface.
There are several ways to find out who is tweeting near your location.. apart from searching on Twitter ranking lists, you can do a real-time scan of tweets using several tools. Here are some ways you can find Twitter users near you!
1. Twitter Advanced Search
Twitter’s very own Advanced Search gives you the option of zeroing in on tweets from users withint a specific location.See the images below for Twitter’s built-in advanced search. I did a search for ‘Swine Flu’ and ‘New York’. You can click on this link to see the results yourself.
‘Retweeting’ is the process of sharing a tweet that you like with your Twitter followers. Basically this involves copying and pasting the whole tweet in your tweet box and adding a ‘RT’ in front of the tweet or a ‘via’ at the back of the tweet.
Most Twitter clients have the retweet function built in but if you’re using the web interface, you can also include a retweet button using a greasemonkey script called Retweet This. You’ll need to use a browser like Firefox or Flock though.
Here’s a screenshot of my web interface with the retweet button added:
Tweet Replies is a simple tool that does what it says: it sends all your twitter replies (things people say to you) to your email inbox. You don’t even need to give your password, just put in your username and email address. Great stuff for those who are afraid of missing any Twitter replies.
Twitlet may just be one of the fastest ways to send out tweets. It’s a javascript bookmarklet you can click to open a pop-up box to type in your messages. It’s faster than clicking to twitter.com or opening up your favorite twitter client. But as a speed tool it faces stiff competition from some other Firefox clients like TwitterFox (update with two clicks from status bar) and TwitterBar, which alows you to post to Twitter from Firefox’s address bar itself (very easy and quick).
If you’re bored of the usual Twitter clients and ways to update Twitter, you can try writing a tweet via email. Twittermail allows you to post to twitter by sending an email to an address they give you when you sign up for an account. Not only that, you can send a message with ‘friends’ or ‘f’ as the subject line to get the last 20 posts from all your friends. TwitterMail also allows you to schedule your posts by adding something like ‘+4 hours’ to your email subject line.
Paul Bradshaw has created a slideshow that’s a beginner’s guide to Twitter. It basically explains what Twitter can do for you although it would be great if we could hear the actual presentation. Some people are still baffled by the purpose or meaning of Twitter and these slides should give them a very rough overview of how Twitter’s possibilities. For complete beginners, I recommend viewing the famous common craft video (see below):
The Traveling Librarian blog has an simple post on how to create a Twitter conference feed so as to share content and messages about the specific conference to others who are attending or not. It’s quite easy to do and very useful especially if you are the organizer for the conference and are placed in charged of media communications.
I would add that one should designate the hashtag beforehand and actively promote it along with the account via the official marketing literature. Perhaps the conference account can be included in a press release to be sent out to the media as well, should they be covering it. This might provide them a greater experience of the conference especially if they are not attending in person.
