You have a Twitter account. You’ve learned the lingo, you know how to tweet, you keep everyone updated. But you know there’s more than just sending tweets and trying to keep up with your twitstream.
Third-party developers have created an array of applications to help (almost 300K at last count), whether you need to run Twitter in a corporate environment; find out what others are saying about you, your company, or your product; use Twitter on your desktop or mobile phone; read event tweets; add widgets to your website…the list is almost endless.
(Some people started calling this presentation "The Zen of Twitter" :-) )
26. All river pictures were taken by Richard
Engelbrecht and are licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-No
Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by-nd/3.0/us/)
http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/14/twitter-event/
90% public / 145 million registered users
[71% no reaction / 6% 1 RT / 23% get replies (85% of the 23% only get 1 reply)]
3,750,000 per hour / 62,500 per minute / 6,250 per second on average
No wonder people think of Twitter as a fire hose!
But…you can’t disseminate the blast from a fire hose. You can’t pull out just specific drops of water from the stream. It’s not the quantity of water being blasted that matters…the value of the information in Twitter is being able to extrapolate what’s important to you.
So I say that Twitter is a river. There’s still a lot of water, but instead of a massive thrust, we’ve got these different areas where you can dip your toes or wade or swim. Trending topics create whirlpools of excitement.
Rivers are fed by tributaries and each tributary contributes something to the stream: a person, a company, a hashtag, a subject, etc. Using different tools, you can filter these tributaries to limit your twitstream to the information that matters most to you.
Twitter includes a search feature (at http://search.twitter.com).
Use hashtags in your tweets to help others find the information quickly. For example, the hashtag for this conference is #lavacon. Search for hashtags to find tweets related to the subject.
You can use Twitter search or hashtags.org. Some applications (like TweetDeck) let you set up custom filters, where you can search for one or more terms or hashtags.
Some Twitter clients can be installed on multiple OSs. Some are designed to work with only one. Before you install one, ask (on Twitter!) what people are using and what they like/don’t like.
Apple users have installed EchoFon, Tweetie (now Twitter for iPhone), and TweetDeck.
Android users have installed Twidroyd, TweetDeck (latest OS versions only right now), and Swift.
Windows users can choose from Rummble and moTweets (TweetDeck is coming).
Blackberry users can use TwitterBerry and Blackbird.
The only way to find out which one works best for you is to install one and use it. If you have problems, try another.
Reading and Filtering: TweetScan: http://tweetscan.com/. See what’s happening now on Twitter. Sort of.
Reading and filtering: Tweetbeat: http://tweetbeat.com/. Semantic analysis. Wants to be used in place of hashtags. Uses statistics and semantics to analyze tweets based on currency (time), tweeter (influence), and quantity to create clusters.
Note that they say they analyze 3000 tweets per second…which is half of what is actually published.
http://twitstra.appspot.com/. Get an email whenever someone mentions your Twitter name. (Also, see http://twitfilter.com. Same concept, although it combines multiple replies into one email. But I’ve noticed some issues lately…sometimes email from Twittfilter stops and I don’t know why.)
Analysis and Quality: (http://www.refollow.com) You get lots of analysis options with refollow! Use the options at the top to narrow the list of people, and then sort the list by Last Tweet, Tweet Count, Screen Name, Follow Count, or Friend Count. Use the options on the right to find people to follow, to unfollow, or to block.
Analysis and Quality: (http:foller.me) Analyze the Twitter activity of any person with foller.me. Get a brief synopsis of followers, following, and status updates, along with the date of the first tweet and description from the Twitter profile. See some of the recent topics you tweeted about, the recent hashtags you’ve used, and the people who have mentioned you. (There’s also a spot for “Followers geography”, but the map has never loaded for me.)
Analysis and Quality: (http://klout.com)
Location: (http://friendorfollow.com) List your fans, followers, and friends by username, name, location, and more. Note that for location, people without an entered location or with a non-standard location are entered first.
Corporate environments can create collaborative Twitter accounts with Yammer and CoTweet. Yammer requires that everyone has the same work email domain.