Archive for the 'Twitter' Category

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TweetNews Test Drive

Published on March 30, 2009 in Search Engines, Social Sites and Twitter. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Following breaking news stories using Twitter is a lot faster than aggregation sites like Google or Yahoo News. The TweetNews search tool ranks search results based on Twitter links. It follows Yahoo News and compares its headlines with news story links on Twitter updates. A story’s popularity amongst the tweeting masses will push the story up in the TweetNews results. See Zooie’s Blog for more details.

TweetNews uses the Yahoo! Build your Own Search Service (Boss). This provides  a clean search API that turns off the usual restrictions that control the presentation of the results.  For example, it allows you to re-rank results and include external content without having to cite Yahoo! for the search results.

Tweet Scan

Published on March 23, 2009 in Search Engines, Social Sites and Twitter. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

Tweet Scan  is a microblog search site that tries to organize it all.

Services indexed by Tweet Scan:

This Tweet search business is becoming quite a crowded market. I’m starting to wonder if searching using anything but Twitter Search is really worth the time and effort.

Twittequette

Published on March 13, 2009 in Social Sites and Twitter. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Twitter Etiquette: 5 Dos and Don’ts

Like any social network, the Twitter community has its own set of unwritten guidelines – or etiquette – that dictates good (or bad) behavior on the service. Some people call it Twittequette.

The Dark Side of Twitter: What Businesses Need to Know

As companies tighten their ad spending, inexpensive social media is clearly the next marketing frontier. As with any new craze, there are enormous opportunities—and large pitfalls that must be avoided.

For this article, I spoke to some marketing professionals who’ve been exploring the Twitter terrain for a while. My quest was to identify the Twitter landmines so you can fast-track your adventure into this vast new frontier.

Twitter Style Guide

A style guide for Twitter will hit iTunes by the end of the month, the New York Times reports. The e-book, 140 Characters: A Style Guide for the Short Form, will lay out key style points from the Twitter canon,

Twingly

Published on February 25, 2009 in Search Engines, Search Strategies, Social Sites and Twitter. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Twingly is designed to search Twitter, Identi.ca, and many other microblogging services. It also searches blogs. However, its results from Twitter are not as timely as Twitter Search for some reason.

Twingly has some very interesting search capabilities. For example, to search for tweets and other microblog entries posted since the beginning of this year, use the search syntax: since:2009-01-01 then the search term. Using until: you get results from before 1 Jan 09.  To search for microblog posts sent to or by a particular user enter from: or to: and the user’s name.

Like Tweetag, it doesn’t seem to measure up to Twitter Search for timely results. It is hard to judge how it performs with the other microblogging services.

Whostalkin Test Drive

Published on February 23, 2009 in Search Engines, Search Strategies, Social Sites and Twitter. 2 Comments Tags: , , , .

Whostalkin, a beta search engine, focuses on social media sites and blogs.  The concept of expanding searches to include social sites is gaining momentum.

Whostalkin looks  promising for finding information from social sites such as Twitter, blogs, blog search engines with meta searches, and a number of other types of social sites. This might return hits that represent ‘inside chatter’ as it searches many content-rich, but offbeat, sources.

I don’t have a lot of experience with this, but I will use it as much as possible over the next couple of months to get a better understanding of its utility.

Tweetag

Published on February 20, 2009 in Search Engines, Social Sites and Twitter. 5 Comments Tags: , , .

Tweetag is a search engine for “tweets” that allows you to look for trends on Twitter and helps you find Tweet discussions that matter to you.

According to the FAQ, “Tweetag analyses more than 200k tweets per day. For each tweet, we do a little magic to automatically tag the tweet real-time. As all tweets are now tagged, we can generate nested tagclouds which offer a great new way of browsing through the sea of tweets.”

For popular topics just add the topic to the URL as in http://tweetag.com/obama/.

Corporate Yammering

Published on January 7, 2009 in Methods, Social Sites and Twitter. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

 Office Tweeting

…she sent me this article, When Is Social Networking Kosher In The Office? from NPR. You can read it or listen to it.

I had to share this one, because we hear companies discussing this all the time – the pros and cons of social networking. This story talks about Yammer as one workplace solution for team microblogging.

Yammer takes the basic idea behind Twitter and moves it into the workplace, where it is only accessible via SSL  to employees with a valid company email (and other security restrictions).

Yammer might be a useful tool to manage projects and keep track of what teammates or employees are doing without exposing their “Tweets” to the whole world.

State of the Twittersphere

Published on December 23, 2008 in News, Social Sites and Twitter. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Online marketing firm, Hubspot, released a report today that details the “State of the Twittersphere” for the fourth quarter of 2008.

The report lists the following Twitter statistics:

  • 70 percent of all Twitter users joined during 2008
  • approximately 5,000 to 10,000 new accounts opened each day
  • 35 percent of Twitter users have ten or fewer followers
  • 9 percent of all Twitter users don’t follow anyone

The full report is available on Hubspot’s research page.

Tweet Twools

Published on December 11, 2008 in Search Engines, Social Sites and Twitter. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Here are some Tweet Twools that I have been using successfully:

  • Twitter Search where I bookmark my search so that you won’t have to reenter terms.
  • TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application that is currently in public beta. I create a search then monitor it.
  • Twilert  sends me email notification of search results much like Google Alerts.

Tweet by Tweet – Mumbai

Published on November 26, 2008 in News, Social Sites, Sources, Terrorism and Twitter. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Twitter news about the terrorist attacks every few seconds, at Mumbai, Bombay, #Mumbai, and @BreakingNewz.

The Wikipedia page about these attacks features a picture of a gun-toting attackers and is becomining the clearing house for information about the attacks just as it did for the Virginia Tech shooting. In the Virgina Tech shooting over 8000 amendments to the Wikipedia article were posted in 2 weeks.

Twitter and Maritime Disasters

Published on October 30, 2008 in Competitive Intelligence, Search Engines, Search Strategies, Social Sites, Sources and Twitter. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Loose Lips Sink Competitors

Competisaurus has just let the world know my secret techniques for predicting maritime disasters. Twitter Search is like sitting in a dockside bar listening to enemy sailors plot some dastardly attack. If you understand that competitive intelligence isn’t a guessing game like Battleship, then searching Twitter might help your marketing salvo sink a competitor’s Battleship. Now keep this to yourself, let it be our little secret.

The Twitter Threat

On the other hand, landlubbers at US Army intelligence wrote a report on the Twitter-threat. The report postulates that Twitter could be used for coordinating terrorist attacks. The report supposedly states, “Twitter was recently used as a counter-surveillance, command and control, and movement tool by activists at the Republican National Convention,”. “The activists would Tweet each other and their Twitter pages to add information on what was happening with Law Enforcement near real time.”

Must we tweet this Twitter-threat stuff seriously?