Posts Tagged ‘twitter’
Twimailer helps combat Twitter Spam
In April, I wrote a post about a Twitter application called, Twimailer. Twimailer is a service that shows you details about new followers. It includes the number people they are following and that are following them.
I thought it was a pretty convenient way I could decide if I wanted to follow someone back. What I hadn’t realized at the time, is that it is a great tool to manage and block Twitter spammers.
True, if I am not following them, I won’t see their posts, but I like Twitter and I want to keep the environment useful.
This morning, I had three follow request in my inbox from people whose only tweet was im into finding a nice guy , interested ? – with a link that followed.
Needless to say, I blocked those users immediately from the link provided at the bottom of the email. I also reported the users as spam – another quick link at the bottom as well.
If you are starting to get a larger amount of followers, Twimailer makes it easier to sort out the wheat from the chaff.
The Demise of Twitter and My Twitter Free Friday
My co-worker said to me “I am getting sick of Twitter” – I understood. It felt like people were twitter crazy and the spammers has already invaded. Yes, the tool has experienced a meteoric rise. According to Google Insights (see inset chart),the term “Twitter” had gone from an index of 12 in January to 100 in April.
As incredible as this might seem, the rise of Twitter seems to have met a peak and started a decline in May.
Looking at the metric I wondered about the overall decline of Twitter. Apparently, I am not the first predicting the demise of the tool. Nielsen posted an article about the subject in late April.
The article points out that: “more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent.”
Even more alarming to me is that fact that there are so many new tools being built on Twitter’s API. When you see Smashing magazine post an article called “99 Essential Twitter Tools” it makes me think we are already overboard. I don’t have 99 essential tools. It is too much. Even worse, what will happen to these essential tools if Twitter goes away or closes their API.
There is a definite Twitter Tribe that feels like the tool is invaluable. When I suggested a Twitter-Free Friday, this is one of the responses I got from noted Visual Thinking Expert Dave Gray “@snookerwolf ha! You might as well suggest an alcohol-free Friday. Good Luck with that! 
”
It will be interesting to watch Twitter and see if it can continue the rise. If it does, who will be knocking at their door with a bag full of cash to buy the technology.
Don’t get me wrong, I do like Twitter, but you won’t hear a Tweet out of me tomorrow.
Social Media Mashups
Now that the internet age has started to crawl into the days of web troika, the idea of created a social mashup is an interesting one. There are so many tools that are centered around Twitter, it makes me a little nervous.
Don’t worry about what happens when the servers fail, what happens if Twitter goes away? A lot of small ventures have been formed around the success of Twitter. As my boss likes to say, only 10% of people on the internet use it.
Why not created something in the spirit of Twitter. As my graduate poetry professor said, “Minor poets borrow. Great poets steal.”
Why not take the qualities that made twitter popular – mobile accessibility and brevity – and integrate that into a product.
There are a few people out there doing that – and I don’t mean direct Twitter competitors like Plurk. The one that comes to mind is ZapTag.com.
ZapTag is a place where you can vent your road rage about drivers. It has the same trappings of a social network, the brief messaging of Twitter, social media tagging and the integration of Google maps. A social media mashup.
It is not an important website, but some of the comments are hysterical. My current fav is “The red, octagon-shaped sign the person in the glowy vest was holding said STOP. If you can’t wait two seconds to let a bunch of kids cross, try leaving your house earlier.”
Some are interesting from a legal standpoint because they have busted people who hit and run – “Hit and run. Too bad he does not realize that I have pictures of him and his car.”
Mostly, I like seeing that someone else built a functionality that applies brief messaging that was not built on the Twitter API.
Follower Notification Details on Twitter
I am not talking about your Twitter Ranking and how many cool people you are follow or are following you. I am talking about knowing who is following you when you get that first follow alert email.
Twimailer has a nice service that shows you a little bit about a user when the original notification comes out. The service gives you some insight about how many people they are following, their location, their bio and few of their most recent updates.
I really like the idea that it comes to me instead clicking onto twitter to determine if they are worth a return follow.
As twitter starts to grow and the number of follow request expands with it, this service helps me triage quickly.
Who is Tweeting Your URL?
Yes, twitter is often a subject of many of the posts. It just seems like there is a new tool once a week that is being launched.
The tool is also becoming the darling of marketing departments. It is true, you can use twitter to drive traffic to your site. The success of that effort can be found by digging those facts out of your analytics package. However, there are a lot of referring sites that provide one or two hits. How does that add up, and stack up against some of your competitors? Sometimes, it is hard to tell.
Twitturly is a service that tries to dig up all of the twitter references to a URL and score it.
For example, the Dahlai Lama recently opened an account on twitter. The news traveled pretty fast. On Twitturly the article about it is one of the top links on Twitter. The full tweet history of the link is available.
As a marketer, Twitturly allows you to post a link, see if there is any traction through RT (sorry – retweet) and determine the type of conversation around it. This capability also allows you to find other tweeters who are interested in the same subjects.
It seems to me that the twitter-sphere of tools keep evolving to answer the same types of things we ask in the offline world such as
- How is talking about me?
- What are my friends doing?
- How popular am I?
- How popular are my friends?
Although these tools are hugely successful, sending a foamee it still is not the same as sitting with them and having a Guinness.
More Twitter Tools
There has been a health dose of posts about Twitter on View from West 6th. One of the things I find so fascinating is that so many companies using Twitter and the 752% growth the property experienced in 2008.
Part of the power of Twitter is the ability for programmers to use the Twitter API and the company’s Wikipedia for it to develop other tools. There are so many tools, that Mashable gave up counting and just calls it 140+ tools.
Here are a couple more that I stumbled upon today:
- Flickr Backgrounds for Twitter
- Pop up messages for the Twitter homepage
- Outwit – integrating Twitter with Outlook
- Secret Tweet – for when you need to post anonymously
- Tweet Later – schedule when you want tweets to be published
You can also check out Mashable’s entire list of Twitter tools to see if there is a tool that fits you tweeting needs.
Twitter Conversations in Context
When Gmail first launched, I was really attracted by the way Google made email conversations more like a message board. They grouped all of the related messages together so you could read the email updates as a stream.
On Twitter, although a great tool that I love, it is sometimes difficult to follow conversations over a period of time if you are not constantly in there.
Tweetree now offers the message string functionality that I find so useful in Gmail.
The application also addresses something else I find slightly annoying about Twitter – everything is a snipr or tinyurl. You don’t really get any context about where the link will take you. Tweetree shows you the extended title page and in some cases the website URL.
For someone you have been following and that you trust, it isn’t so much of an issue. With someone you don’t know, it is a bit scary. Considering the recent Twitter phishing scam, it makes me even more aware.
Granted, I do a lot of twittering from the web, so I don’t use alot of other tools out there, but there is a reason to make a shift to Tweetree is you are a web user.