Tweeterism » Tips on Using Twitter

Refollow Helps You Bulk Manage Your Twitter Network

tweeterism — Sun, 10 May 2009 16:32:22 +0000

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.

All this means that you can follow back users who are following you or drop users who don’t follow you back…especially if you think having mutual follow friendships is important. In any case, it can also allow you to enter another Twitter username and see which of their followers are following you and who you are following as well.

But Refollow goes beyond just managing your own friends. You can easily see the users which are followed by any specific user. It’s an interesting way to find new people with similar interests. Instead of clicking around on many profiles, you can just enter in usernames and work from there to follow people they follow or follow their followers.

Refollow uses Oauth, so you don’t need to give them your password, all you need to do is to sign in through twitter. It also uses the API which means there is a limit to the number of people you can follow or unfollow at once. The API limit can be seen at the bottom of the screen. Most likely you will have to run this tool in batches if you want to manage/follow/unfollow a lot of users.

Learn How to Use Twitter Text Commands

tweeterism — Fri, 08 May 2009 17:50:58 +0000

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.

Still, if you’re using a mobile device like your phone or your favorite app, these text commands are a very quick way to perform specific tasks effectively. Here is a list of the twitter text comamnds, taken from Twitter’s support page.

Turning Twitter off and on: device notifications

ON: turns ALL phone notifications on.

OFF: turns ALL phone notifications off.

STOP, QUIT: stops all messages to your phone immediately

ON username: turns on notifications for a specific person on your phone. For example, ON alissa.

OFF username: turns off notifications for a specific person on your phone. For example, OFF blaine.

FOLLOW username: this command allows you to start receiving notifications for a specific person on your phone. Example: follow jeremy
LEAVE username: this command allows you to stop receiving notifications for a specific person on your phone. Example: leave benfu

Fun Stuff: friends, favorites, and stats!

There’s more to Twitter than OFF and ON! Use the commands below to send private messages, mark updates as favorites, or even remind someone to update their Twitter page if you’re wondering what they’re doing!

@username + message

directs a twitter at another person, and causes your twitter to save in their “replies” tab.
Example: @meangrape I love that song too!

D username + message

sends a person a private message that goes to their device, and saves in their web archive.
Example: d krissy want to pick a Jamba Juice for me while you’re there?

WHOIS username

retrieves the profile information for any public user on Twitter.
Example: whois jack

GET username

retrieves the latest Twitter update posted by the person.
Example: get goldman

NUDGE username

reminds a friend to update by asking what they’re doing on your behalf.
Example: nudge biz

FAV username

marks a person’s last twitter as a favorite. (hint: reply to any update with FAV to mark it as a favorite if you’re receiving it in real time)
Example: fav al3x

STATS

this command returns your number of followers, how many people you’re following, and which words you’re tracking.

INVITE phone number

will send an SMS invite to a friend’s mobile phone.
Example: Invite 415 555 1212

Noteworthy Facts

Using on/off username from your phone only stops notifications to the place the command comes from; you’ll still collect a person’s updates on the web.

Using follow/leave username from your phone is the same as using on/off username

Following someone from a phone for the first time will also cause you to follow them on the web

There is no way to stop following a person on the web without visiting their profile and removing them. The off, leave, stop, and quit commands will only disable updates for the device(s) from which they were sent.

You don’t have to use ON/OFF username from the phone, you can also set individual notifcations from a person’s profile page, or check your following page and manage all phone notification settings there.

How to Use Twitter as a Money and Food Diary

tweeterism — Fri, 08 May 2009 11:48:30 +0000

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.

Not only can you easily get statistics on what you’re spending, both services can operate under limits… for instance, if you tell yourself that you can only spend $50 a day and set that as a budget limit, tweetwhatyouspend will inform you when you are reaching that threshold so you won’t exceed it.

Pretty useful. Ideally, both services should be used while you are on-the-go/mobile so you can update even when you are outdoors but if you have a good memory, you can come back on, get online and manually update it. If you’re a mobile Twitter user, both sites will be terrific way to track what you eat or spend.

There’s also a social aspect to both sites, you can look at what other people are spending money on or eating and then share thoughts about that. If you’re not into that, you also have the option of keeping your activities private.

Here’s a screenshot of a user profile on tweetwhatyoueat along with the homepage of tweetwhatyouspend:

Five Real-Time Ways to Find Twitter Users Near You

tweeterism — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 15:02:15 +0000

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.

2. Nearby Tweets

Nearby Tweets allows you to find twitter users who are tweeting near your location. Enter in the keyword for what you’re interested in and select a location: you’ll then see a list of Twitter user avatars on the left and the latest tweets on the right.

In the screenshot above, you’ll see that I did a search for ’swine flu’ and ‘New York’.

3. Twitter Local

Twitter Local was one of the earliest location filtering tools, it used to be web-based but now its an Adobe AIR app. You can’t do much interaction with other users although it allows you to keep your browser closed.. you can pull it up anytime for a quick glance at what’s happening.

4. Monitter

Monitter allows you to input a couple of keywords and track what the twitter community is saying. It’s a browser-based tool, and all you need to do is to open it in a new tab, put in your keywords and the tweets will stream past continuously. You can chose to receive tweets from a specific location, for example 10km of Manhattan.

5. TwitterFall

A simple Twitter keyword tracker, Twitterfall streams tweets on a topic constantly and you can click on trending topics or geo-target tweets by selection a location and the distance. After that you can slow down the frame rate and if you are logged in, you can even reply users directly, which is very convenient.

How to Add a Retweet Button to the Twitter Web Interface

tweeterism — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 22:38:58 +0000

‘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: Get Twitter Replies in Your Email Inbox

tweeterism — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 20:04:51 +0000

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 Bookmarklet: A Really Fast Way to Post to Twitter

tweeterism — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 19:16:04 +0000

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 already using either one, Twitlet might not be necessary but still its a novelty item. It’s easy to use and its appeal comes mainly from its strict minimalism. Note that your username and password are stored on it so this isn’t that advisable for shared computers.

TwitterMail: How to Update Twitter Using Email

tweeterism — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 17:26:38 +0000

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.

A nifty tool to use if you work in a place which blocks twitter.com or when you want to update Twitter sneakily while checking your work mail inbox. You won’t get caught using Twittermail!

Slideshow: A Beginner’s Guide to Twitter

tweeterism — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 23:22:05 +0000

Twitter for beginners

View more presentations from Paul Bradshaw. (tags: journalism bcumedia)

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):

Creating a Twitter Feed for Conferences and Events

tweeterism — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 20:03:01 +0000

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.

So, for three conferences now I’ve created a Twitter RSS feed for those who are not at the conference to read the posts of those that are. The method or system isn’t perfect but I think I’ve got the major bugs worked out. So here’s how you do it.