Tag Archives: My Space

More on Twitter

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I have examined Twitter‘s search capabilities in an earlier post. I was initially wrong in what I said about its capabilities in this regard. But I still wonder how useful Twitter is. On the surface it looks like a mobile SMS service. You can only use a short sentence or two. You can include a web address, if you want to. When you twit a web page or blog, the URL is a tiny url, thereby disguising the nature of the URL. I’m not sure why this is.

The thing is, some people developed Twitter as a basic unit and left others to make other applications to go with it and it is those other applications that make it more useful. More and more of these come out on an almost weekly basis.

Let’s look at TwitScoop. Twitter concentrates on news in real time : weather conditions, tragedies, deaths, sport results, celebs, movies.  Twit Scoop concentrates on what trends are rising and falling. You can integrate it into TweetDeck. On the Tweet Deck toolbar, you can access Twit Scoop.

Now what are those #hashtag things you see on Twitter. They are for the very cool people who know all about Twitter. They delineate keywords. So I might add to my Twitter post #photography if that is what I am tweeting about. Others can also search that way. They can just put in search #photography. These hashtags can be somewhat annoying, I think and you can still search by subject in Search, but these tags are filling up by twitter users and you have to learn that language. No subject categorisation by a librarian here, but I see the need for one. I mean, what does #journchat mean. How is anyone to know to search for that.

So you have to search for the hashtag currently in use on Search, before using it or not as the case may be. You can just add your own if you want and maybe it will catch on. Might be quite an excerise for anyone with nothing much to do.

To use some of the other applications you need Adobe Air which is a free program and installs when you download Twitter.

Let’s look at Twhirl Twhirl is so you can switch back and fro between multiple twitter accounts. Why have more than one, I wonder. It works with some social networking sites and that’s useful.

Okay, TweetDeck. This one can get content from Facebook. My friends use Facebook mostly. I think MySpace is going out of fashion except for the young maybe. This one is like Twhirl and they are competing at the moment.

So now there is Spaz This one specialises in skins and CSS swapping. People create them and swap them.

Twitterific? You have to buy this and it for Mac users and iPod Touch and iPhone and iTunes. It gets information from social networking sites.

Digsby actually looks quite useful. It’s for Windows. It combines many social networking sites : IM, emails, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, AIM and Yahoo.

I might head off to Digsby I think. Do you like Twitter?

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Social networking sites to which you should belong

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I’m a member of about 11 social networking sites, most of which work in the same way. They also help you get more traffic to your web site or blog if you are a member of them. You might meet some people too.

I’m going to send you to my profile of each of the sites. From there you will be able to jin up as well as see what I’ve done with them. Unabashed self-promotion. What else?

Bloglines is important because you can read other blogs there and put a widget on your blog. Make comments on blogs you read.

Twitter is a simple application mainly for phone contact.

Facebook is a bit different in that you can use many applications there to build up a detailed view of what you have been up to! I’m a bit sick of Facebook and don’t want any more apps!

Flickr is mainly for photos

Squidoo is a place where you can create a web site.

A swicki is a site where you can create as many lens as you like and place the tags on your web site. These lens are on any issue. You can then tag you own web site so it is the first one that the searcher will find for that topic. I get a lot of traffic from these.

Linkedin is more for the professional trying to find old professional colleagues.

Stumbleupon is where you submit sites or blog posts you like so that it is user moderated rather than spidered by a bot. I think we should all use this one a lot more unselfishly unless we want to rely on Google and Yahoo. You should not stumble your own posts

Now ning is my new baby. Here you can add many things: a blog, photos, videos. You can create a group and join groups.

Everyone knows MySpace, but I haven’t bothered developing that one.

Digg is where people submit newsy type stories and like Stumbleupon you should not Digg yourself. I find non-USA sites very difficult to find here. The Australian market is so small that our cyclones are not of interest to the rest of the world.

I haven’t joined the next 2

Workbench is more for the business person.

Mixx is one I don’t know much about. I find I get social networking burn out pretty quickly.

If you join all these and work at them, you should get more traffic to your blog and/or web site. Join me there!