Now you can track all your twitter movements automatically with the latest FREE research tool just released by FlowingData. Appropriately named your.flowingdata, it’s only a quick 2 minute setup and then the webapp will start collecting all of your twitter data for you to later explore with built-in tools that resemble IBM’s Many Eyes dashboard. As with any behavioral analysis tool, the more data you have the better the results will be so I can easily see this tool being widely used by researchers and interactive planners alike for a seriously long time (I wonder if they have any personal database limitations that would prevent one infinite 365 day data-stream?). Worried about exposing your private twitter habits? Have no fear my friend, all the data collected is automatically set to ‘private.’ If at a later date you’d like to release it to the masses then that’ll be up to you, but for all you tin-foil hat wearing twitter users – you’re secrets are still safe.

Here are some screen shots showing a sampling of the reports that are built-in to the dashboard, they look amazing!

If you use twitter you’ve undoubtably come across a twitter bot, sadly there’s a very good chance it was because it was spamming you. In this post I’ll provide you with all the tools, source code and know-how to be able to build and launch your own twitter bot, and i’ll even give you resources to do it in the programming language of your choice. Why? Because there are so many positive uses for a twitter bot….including anti-spam! Go take a look at the twitter tag project for some good examples of bots currents on twitter if you’re not able to come up with any on your own.

First, if you’d like to fool around with an automated bot on twitter but lack the technical knowhow, go pay a visit to the Botomatic site. There you can create your own bot using their easy-to-use GUI. It’ll take you two seconds and you will be up and running.

If you’re a beginner, have no fear there’s a pre-configured setup for you as well. Go download and install the Twitterbotscript from Tyler Colwell. It’s 100% free and was coded to include a helpful GUI to control the bot functionality. It’s actually a pretty cool package that uses the API. I’ve taken a lot of his code and re-used it in various test bots of my own so i’d definitely recommend anyone looking to script their own bot in PHP to download his app.

Now for the PHP programmers out there, the first example of a great PHP5 twitter bot framework is from the folks over at ohloh.net (Jason Allen and Scott Collison). This one is setup to allow you to search and retweet what you’ve found.

If you’d like to incorporate Jabber/XMPP into the bot (that way you can access it via gchat), then there’s a great tutorial over on jazzychad.com. Tenderapp.com has on their blog a PHP tutorial with full source-code for a twitter bot that will look up the traffic conditions and tweet them when messaged. This one also has a walk-through for getting it up on xmpp/jabber. Here’s the source for a similar bot that looks up the weather and retweets it on command.

If you’d like to setup a twitter bot using Python, Halotis.com has a great tutorial that uses a sqlite backend to keep track of what it’s messaged. For a more elaborate version of an automated bot using python, there’s a script over on the flowingdata.com blog that also incorporates a local mail server to send and receive messages to the bot.

Last but not least, all of you Ruby folks….here’s a Twitter Ruby Gem to go along with the Twitter4R and Twitter Ruby Gems already found in the library. The site also takes you through a few different commands available with this new gem. For complete source-code of a twitter bot written in Ruby, head on over to this snippet of a Ruby RSS Twitter Bot.

Easy as pie and now you’ve got your very own automated twitter bot!

Starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT this Saturday, June 13th, you can finally get an easy-to-share username for your Facebook account! Facebook explains the process that will start once their countdown page – www.Facebook.com/username/ reaches zero in a recent blog post on their site.

No longer will you have to copy and paste your profile link (which just consists of a string of numbers representing your user id) when sharing your online profile with others, now you can give your Facebook account it’s own vanity URL. Not only great for sharing but it has it’s own obvious SEO benefits which is why I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a large amount of “username-squatting” come Saturday! Below you can see an example of what the search results for that username would pull up on Google.com.

With Facebook.com being a high authority site in the search engines, this has the potential to benefit your brand and/or campaign if used correctly. In the meantime get ready to see a whole gaggle of variations on www.Facebook.com/people/Lose-Weight-With-Our-Diet-Pills/234234324 addresses pulling up in the SERPS.

A new twitter worm is running rampant through the microblogging community infecting those who are easily enticed with the idea of gaining more followers. It’s actually very simple, all it does it tweet out to the infected hosts followers, “OMG I just got over 1000 followers today from http://twittercut.com.” Anyone who visits the site will be prompted to enter their twitter login credentials in order to “access the twittercut tool” however upon submitting the info it then just goes and mass-tweets to all of your followers and the cycle continues. Playing of the desperation many seem to have when it comes to becoming ‘popular’ on the network, A twitter search pulled up thousands of folks who fell victim to this trap.
If you see one of your friends twittering “OMG I just got over 1000 followers today from http://twittercut.com”, you might want to tell them to change their password ASAP before it’s changed for them.

So the source of twittercut apparently is a Twitter user named JordanEmbry. It’s also the same name used on the whois records for the twittercut.com domain. Twitter has already disabled his account but using the Google cache you can still see the profile + recent tweets. You’d have to be a moron to use your real info on a scam like this, so I can’t imagine this is really the culprit.

He’s hosting it on free-webhost 110MB.com, so I just sent them a message letting them know about the TOS/Abuse Violation… hopefully they’ll take the site down soon.

Brand management firm ElectricArtists just recently launched Trackingtwitter, a site that tracks media, entertainment and consumer product accounts on the microblogging site.

Trackingtwitter follows Zappos, Whole Foods, Starbucks, Jet Blue and Comcast, among others. It broadcasts the brand category (“sports,” “television,” etc.), the Twitter usernames, number of followers, most recent tweet and any personal notes they may have collected about the account.