AIR
Top 15 Twitter Power User Tools
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 | AIR, Beta, Hack, RSS, Tools, Twitter, Utilities, WebApps | 2 Comments
With the hundreds of Twitter applications, websites, bots and scripts out there designed to do just about everything under the sun for you and your Twitter account, I decided to compile my own list of the top 15 Power User Twitter Tools that really provide the most value. Speaking of which, if you like this list or feel that something is missing from it, follow me on twitter – @brentter and let me know.
This is my latest addiction. It’s a free service that sends you an email update whenever someone un-follows your twitter account. I don’t know why, but I figure they send you an email when someone starts to follow you, they might as well send one when they leave.
Pretty much this is Twitter for those of you with too many ‘groups’ or followers. It lets you break down your ‘tweets’ into separate feeds that you determine. These can be based on a specific topic, affiliation, location or any other attribute you manage to dream up. It’s also an Adobe Air desktop application that’s still in beta, so there are a few bugs from time-to-time.
Here’s a service that tracks all the links posted on Twitter and ranks them based on the number of recent appearances. There are then many different filter options you can run on the list to narrow it down and even an export function to grab it as an RSS feed.
Twitterfeed takes any RSS feed and posts it to your twitter account. Made specifically for auto-updating your twitter account every time you post a new entry on your blog, Twitterfeed can easily be used to post new entries from in just about any RSS feed (i.e. baseball scores from espn.com).
Now here’s a unique new service that’s still in beta and aimed at those trying to utilize Twitter as a marketing tool. With EasyTweets you can manage multiple Twitter accounts, schedule future tweets (i.e. special announcements), post items from your RSS feed and more. It’s still pretty new but is shaping up to be a great utility for managing your brand identity on Twitter.
#Hashtags are a way to automatically add your tweet to a specific category, for instance lets say I wanted to create a single location for anyone to be able to add to and see what’s being said about NYE09 on Twitter. I would just go and create the hashtag #NYE09 and anytime that a tweet contained #NYE09, it would automatically be added to the hashtag.org website. The beauty of this service is each hashtag has its own RSS feed and usage statistics. To start using hashtags all you have to do is follow @hashtags and anything with a # in front of it will be added to that specific group.
These aren’t really a ‘must use’ but they are pretty neat. They’re icons that twitter accepts as valid characters in tweets. To use them, just copy and paste the desired icon into your message box and voila!
A free collection of unique background patterns for twitter. Pretty cool designs to choose from created by the folks from olivemanna.
Here’s a service that lets you email twitter updates to your account as well as gives you the option to have all your twitter replies emailed back to you.
Here’s a cool new service that monitors keyword density on twitter to show us what the ‘Hot Trends’ might be, or at least what is the most popular topic. It’s updated every 20 seconds and also has a widget & RSS feed for your own personal use.
Here’s a brand-spanking-new service that lets your monitor/track twitter for up to three separate terms in real-time. It also lets you narrow the results based on the users location. RSS feeds available as well.
It’s a URL shortening service that also lets you track how many times people click on your link. Works with both Twitter and FriendFeed.
This is a cool little tool that lets you compare trends in Twitter through a variety of different graphical methods. It also has the latest “Hot Before” and “Hot Now” terms sweeping across the Twittsphere. This may look familiar because it was used a lot to show the difference in social media mentions that Barack Obama received compared to McCain in the last few weeks of the election.
Graph your Twitter stats including tweets per hour, tweets per month, tweet timeline and your reply statistics.
Twitter Search (formerly Summize)
Real-time searching of what’s being said on Twitter. Each search provides it’s own RSS feed along with the ability to search for specific users (i.e. @brentter). Formerly known as Summize, it was purchased by Twitter earlier this year. One more thing to note, it auto-updates with each new addition your search.
So, what do you use to manage your Twitter account? Tell me on here or by following me at @brentter on Twitter.
Identi.ca ‘dents’ vs. Twitter ‘tweets’ – Twitter Wins Again
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 | AIR, Beta, News, Tools, Twitter, WebApps | 2 Comments
Many different services have been touted as the “Twitter replacement” recently, including FriendFeed, Pownce, Plurk and even the Google-owned Jaiku. All enter the scene with much fan-fare, typically gaining temporary popularity as Twitter users migrate over to check out the new service, ultimately returning to Twitter after giving up on having to build a new community/following. So far FriendFeed has been the closest in becoming a viable alternative to the ever-growing Twitter community in that it allows for users to comment and track posts to a variety of different social media services (including Twitter). It’s basically a way to combine all your social-media/blogging habits into one stationary form for easy cataloguing of conversations. Conversations? If you’re like most people, upon reading that word you are either scrathing your head or are skipping the rest of the post to hit the “Post Comment” button – Twitter doesn’t allow for traditional “conversations!” Well, I hate to admit this, but FriendFeed enables you to not only hold a conversation by pinning all related comments to a post, but also export them in a variety of ways including a custom RSS feed. Because of features like this, bloggers have been continually talking about the merits behind FriendFeed vs. Twitter. When Twitter goes down, people scamper over to FriendFeed…when they succumb to information overload, they scamper back to Twitter. Now there’s a new dog on the circuit – Identi.ca.
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Adobe AIR + Flex Builder 3 Final Released!
Monday, February 25th, 2008 | AIR, Adobe, Flex, Software Update, WebApps | No Comments
Today Adobe announced the release of both the latest version of their AIR project as well as the final release of Flex Builder 3 (A GUI front-end for the now open-source flex platform). This means those beta’s copies that you’ve been using are soon to expire.
Adobe AIR, formerly code-named Apollo, is a project that lets developers use practically any programming language to build Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s) that can be deployed across almost any operating system. It also allows the developer to create an application that can store data offline and easily re-synch later on when re-connected to the database/internet. There are already a handful of applications out there that are build around this project, with my favorite being Pownce. Speaking of which, feel free to stop on by my profile on Pownce here: www.pownce.com/brentter/ and add me as a friend if you’d like. It’s a combination message board, calendar, file exchange server, and image host. To cut down on server load they’ve incorporated Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) to house all their file storage needs.
Another useful implementation of Adobe AIR is a desktop-based app that lets you check on your Google Analytics accounts without ever having to open up a browser. You can sign-up for the beta download on About Nico’s site.
Download Adobe AIR (for free) from the official Adobe AIR page.
Flex Builder 3 Pro clocks in at a whopping $699 with the standard edition coming in slightly cheaper at $249. If you are a student or teacher however, they STILL offer a free copy to those that apply (which I think is one of the best things any software company could have done). The Flex 3 SDK can be found on their official Flex page for a free download if you don’t want to shell out that kind of cash for the complete Builder Application. Apparently there is a big difference between the standard and pro edition too – with the pro version including built-in memory/performance profiling tools, their “Advanced Datagrid,” and comes with its own set of scalable charting components for “rich data visualization.”
Flex Builder 3 was in beta for quite a while, which let users learn how to utilize it’s advanced database manipulation features, most of which can be viewed on the Flex Showcase site.
Today’s announcement was most likely timed to coincide with the big 360|Flex Conference that kicked off today here in Atlanta, GA. It runs from the 25th-27th and features some of the leaders in Flash/Flex development. Day passes are still available if interested.
Something interesting with Flex is it gives you the ability to manipulate whatever you design with other programming languages in ways that were almost un-heard of using flash. My favorite is its integration with Ruby On Rails. RoR can be used as a streamlined back-end solution for your web-app, using Flex as a pretty front-end to display the data. A really great site I’ve come across with helpful examples of Flex/Rails in use is Derek Wischusen’s site – FlexonRails.net. If you want to see an example of both pieces of technology being used in new ways, check out his post where he explains (with source code) how to do a Server push with Ruby on Rails using Flex, JRuby, and BlazeDS. Another interesting one is where he tries to integrate as many new forms of languages/services as possible is his post on integrating Flex, BlazeDS, and a web-app framework for Scala called Lift
Read more about Flex Builder 3 and the Flex SDK on Adobe’s official website – www.adobe.com/products/flex/
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