Twitter for Mac

If you hover over the ‘Follow’ or ‘Unfollow’ button after navigating to a user’s profile, the title text will tell you if this person follows you or not.

Twitter for iPhone

If you navigate to a user’s profile on Twitter for iPhone, it tells you in plain English if that person is following you.

Twitter for iPad

Um… I wasn’t able to find any way to tell if someone was following you. If you’ve figured it out, please leave a comment.

Fun fact from the apps: the “#15,496,852″ means Andy was in the first 16 million people to join Twitter. If you look up @biz or @jack they are #13 and #12, respectively. I’m guessing a few deleted test accounts got the initial first user id.

If you want to check if two people are following each other and one of them isn’t you, you can use a simple service like DoesFollow.

I think the original blog post was getting at checking to see if you could send someone a direct message (DM). Twitter does a great job of outlining all of the scenarios of who is allowed to do what when it comes to private messages.

If you have any questions about native Twitter clients or what you can do with them, please ask me on Formspring and I’ll share them on Twitter!

Bob King and I grew up on the north side of Indianapolis, and after unknowingly crossing paths continually since probably birth, became friends in high school. I met Ndeto, who is from northern Indiana, when I transferred to a different high school my junior year. Both still live in Indiana, have public Twitter accounts, actively tweet about the wide world of sports, and are connected through me, but the odds of Twitter making that connection are slim and none.

It would be really meaningful if Twitter (or Facebook) could connect the social dots in front of people. This is how you know this person. Here is proof you have things in common. Did you see how close you came to jinxing this stranger?

@MrNdeto do you know @BKing1024? I went to high school with him in Indy. Look at his and your last tweet.

June 12, 2011 6:59 PM via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@maxbeatty

Max Beatty

@BKing1024 do you know @MrNdeto? I went to high school with him in Muncie. Look at his and your last tweet.

June 12, 2011 6:58 PM via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@maxbeatty

Max Beatty

For now, it’s going to take a person interjecting. In the future, I hope it leads to even deeper connections to strangers and even businesses.

First, I’m a huge fan of native retweets. I could tolerate the chaining of RT after RT after RT, but the native method is so much cleaner and you don’t have to worry about editing the original tweet to fit in all the RTs and vias. Still not everyone is on board, but my stream has definitely cleaned up and become more readable (scan-able) since this feature was implemented. I would include examples, but I don’t want to embarrass anyone I know or humiliate a stranger from the search stream.

OLD WAY: RT @someone: RT @another: RT @secondguy this tweet will be popular (via @firstguy)

NEW WAY: This is the original tweet in its entirety. The client or web page will show the originator and the retweeters

Second, replies are probably the best feature and at the same time the feature that users screw up the most. Replying, just like retweeting, wasn’t an original feature. It grew organically from the users. It became accepted that if you began your tweet with someone’s name it was probably in response to one of their recent tweets. These sudo-replies would show up for all of your followers which lead to a lot of confusion because not everyone could follow the conversation.

Twitter made it so you could reply directly to a certain user and their particular tweet. If you reply to someone, only people who follow both of you will see the reply. It cleaned up streams and made conversations great.

Conversation linked together with replies

It’s easy to read because the data is linked together behind the scenes. Only people who follow Pat and I saw the conversation. There is one tiny caveat to this– you have to spell the person’s name you’re replying to correctly. You’d think that’d be simple especially since most clients populate it for you, but people and companies like DIRECTV still mess up on a regular basis which results in the reply be blasted to all of your followers.

CAVEAT: @JohnDoeThis reply should have just been to you and not all of our followers

Since in the past a tweet beginning with a username was considered a reply, people started putting a period in front of a user’s name if it was at the beginning of a tweet. The example above proves they’re wasting one of their precious characters. Twitter is smart enough to know the difference and so are the developers for 3rd party apps

GRR: .@Person is the greatest and I want to guarantee that everyone knows this by starting this with a period.

GROOVY: @Person is great. They know it and now all of you do too even without a period prefacing this tweet.

My ultimate peeve is when people don’t understand the purpose of a retweet and a reply along with the difference. If you have a comment about someone’s tweet, reply to them and only them (plus whoever follows you both). Don’t retweet what that person said prefaced with your comment to all of your followers. You better be uber hilarious or a celebrity if you do. If you like what that person had to say, natively retweet it. That implies your support of the tweet and sends it along to your followers unaltered as god intended.

STOP THIS: OMG SMH #stupidhashtag haha RT: @yourfriendnotmine blarghhh RT: @anotherpersonIdontknow I am silly

Reply is your friend. Reply to your friends. Your friends will see your replies if that’s why you insist on tweeting like this. I have to use a real example so it’s clear what I’m talking about.

There is no value in this.

Thankfully most everyone is in agreement that automatically sent direct messages are pure evil. But, I had to share this cluelessness by Citi from the other week.

Pro Tip: You don’t have to specify who you’re talking to in a DIRECT message

Absolute brilliance from their social media expert/guru/maven.

My last peeve is actually with Twitter’s new follower emails. They’re pretty worthless to me because I don’t care how many followers someone has or how many people they are following. It’s actually a great indicator of whether it’s worth looking at the person’s profile.

If you’re following 100x or 1000x the number of people who follow you, odds are you’re not that interesting. If you have about an even ratio but are still following more than 5,000 people, you probably won’t notice or care if I follow you back. I don’t want to judge by the numbers, but since that’s what I see more often that someone’s profile, it’s all I can do.

I wish Twitter would send me their location, website, bio and maybe a few sample tweets so I know what to expect as a follower.

BONUS PEEVE: People who complain about not having any followers but have a private profile. You will not amass followers with a private stream so either go public or shut up

Don’t Forget

Use Twitter however you want. Twitter only grew to what it is today because people used it how they want. Did you notice Pat’s little ‘cc @23andme’ in his tweet? That email-like inclusion has become more and more prevalent (in my stream) to attract the attention of others. It’s new and I like it. Just don’t misuse and abuse it.

In the past couple months, I’ve fallen out of love with the TweetDeck iPhone app because it’s slow and crashes often (like more than any other app I have). The original reason I started using TweetDeck was for its columns feature and when they announced they would sync those with my iPhone app, I was blown away. When it took forever to load tweets into columns and often crashed on load, I started using it only when I had a few minutes to check updates (and had the patience to let it load). When I wanted to quickly look at updates, I chose Tweetie and still do. Now with all these added features, I fear Tweetdeck will be even slower and crash even more (although they say they’ve fixed the compose crash in v1.1).

Facebook Integration

Facebook integration on the desktop app is great because it saves me from running another AIR app and I can follow both my Twitter feed and Facebook feed throughout the day in the same window. I hardly go to Facebook’s site because of it. When I’m using my iPhone, it’s a different story. I have a Facebook app already and the newest version is pretty solid even though it’s missing push notifications. Some people may like both feeds in one app, but what happens when you want to do something else on Facebook like:

• Check your Inbox
• See whose birthday it is
• See who’s online to chat
• Anything but check your News Feed

The updated TweetDeck app also lets you create Facebook groups that will sync with your desktop. They’re already using the Facebook API so why don’t they allow you to pull your friends lists you’ve already created on Facebook? I would rather see my Facebook friends lists pulled into TweetDeck and synced between Facebook, TweetDeck desktop, and TweetDeck iPhone app.

Video Integration

With the iPhone 3GS video capabilities it was inevitable almost every app would try to add it. Tweetie has video capabilities and offers the option to use either yfrog or TwitVid. TweetDeck only allows you to use 12seconds.tv for video upload even though they support yfrog for image uploads. The problem with using 12seconds is that you can only upload videos that are 12 seconds long.

If you go over that, they are automatically trimmed down so the best part of your video could get cut out if you’re not careful. Yfrog and TwitVid do not have length limits (that I’ve found anyways). If TweetDeck is already using yfrog for image posting, how hard would it have been to tap into their video API as well?

Other Features

I don’t use the landscape keyboard so that’s not a major feature for me. I’ve had an iPhone since day 1 so I’m used to and pretty skilled at the normal keyboard. Including the Bit.ly account is another nice small feature, but I don’t know the last time I shared a URL on the go and wanted to track how many people clicked it. I also didn’t like typing in the 32 character API key.

Features I Actually Wanted

TweetDeck’s bread and butter since day 1 has been their columns feature. Twitter has picked up on how much people liked them so they created lists. I know not everyone has the list function available to them yet as it is slowly rolling out in beta fashion, but I want to see both TweetDeck’s desktop app and iPhone app convert my columns into lists and then continue to sync them with Twitter and my TweetDeck clients. They claim on their blog that “what [they] have planned for Lists is going to take your social media experience with TweetDeck to new heights”.

The “nearby tweets” has been a feature on a number of iPhone Twitter apps so it’s about time TweetDeck added it. They could have 1-up’d everyone by incorporating the new Twitter geolocation feature. If they are using this new feature, why aren’t they bragging about it to separate themselves from everyone else?

The last and least likely feature that I still want to see on both the desktop and iPhone app is retweet. Yes, I know they have the default “RT @username:” but I’m talking about Twitter’s built in Retweet that was announced back in August (along with geolocation by the way). Sure, the limited roll out just started last week, but has TweetDeck already included it in their code? Again, why aren’t they bragging about it?

Conclusion

I love using TweetDeck on my Macbook Pro and still love that it syncs my columns to my iPhone. But, I want more and to know more is coming. I’m weary that all the additional features will bloat the application on both platforms. It’s one of the biggest memory hogs on my Macbook Pro and app most likely to crash on my iPhone. It has outgrown its name as “TweetDeck” and should probably be called something like “SocialDeck” now that it continues to add more social networks. With LinkedIn adding the ability to tweet your status, you have to think they are going to be the next social network to be added. My other prediction is that since TweetDeck is built on AIR, we might see a browser based version of it. Then, Safari can use all of my RAM!

Logo on PizzaX cups (formerly Pizza Express)

If you read my blog, you probably know a logo I designed was selected for the IU Little 500 race this year. One of the many places it ended up was on the side of cups from Pizza Express. Any time anyone in Bloomington ordered a drink from Pizza Express they also received some of my art work. As soon as I found this out, I was ordering their Big X Bargain every couple of days so I could collect as many cups as possible to give to friends and family.

The week after the race Pizza Express underwent a name change to PizzaX which was reflected on their new green cups. I was bummed my cups weren’t being delivered any more but then had a thought they might have extras laying around. I sent @PizzaX a message on Twitter asking if they had any extra cups and if I could have them. A few days later, they sent me a DM saying they had a stack set aside for me at their office and I could come pick them up at my convenience.

This isn’t the greatest story ever told about the generosity of a company, but I thought it was very cool of them. It didn’t cost them anything to set aside some extra outdated cups, and it didn’t take me anything but my spare time to write up a little free press for them (however minimal it may be).

It was also very cool this was all set up via Twitter. We never emailed each other, exchanged phone calls, or met face to face. I hope more small businesses use Twitter to interact with their local customers (and not just to give away free stuff). I would have been just as content if they replied that they didn’t have any extra cups. It was more important that they reached out and communicated with average little me. Thanks PizzaX!

1. Social Bookmarking
2. Self Promotion
3. Awesome Tweets

Social Bookmarking

People love Twitter because of its great content. Most of the people I follow have something to offer me like the latest news, great design posts, and other wacky stuff I would have never heard about if it weren’t for Twitter. I don’t always have time to read every article or the patience to load every web page over EDGE so when I’m on the go I favorite tweets that look interesting to check out later.

Sometimes if they are relevant to Twitter I’ll leave them in my favorites. If it’s something I’d like to share further, I’ll either retweet it, or share if on delicious and it’ll get tweeted out from FriendFeed. (note: most of my newest favorites are usually ones I haven’t decided to keep)

Using your favorites as a social bookmarking tool allows others to see what you find valuable while at the same time sharing interesting content.

Self Promotion

The best way to validate yourself as a worthwhile member of the Twitter community is to be acknowledged by your peers. Sites like MrTweet allow others to recommend you, but it’s just as quick to favorite a tweet from someone who is thanking you for your help or complimenting your latest blog post or design. This is one of my favorite tweets that came from a former student:

Favorite Tweets That Promote You

Awesome Tweets

Sometimes you come across tweets you never want to forget. Sometimes it’s a meaningful quote and other times it’s just something funny. While it may be tempting, don’t favorite a bunch of fake celebrity tweets no matter how funny they are. A better example of an awesome tweet to favorite is this one from Daiv Russell:

Motivation: Ppl are “social” animals. We want to help those who are good to us. To get, give: interest, attn, time, love.

May 21, 2009 7:42 AM via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@DaivRawks

Daiv Russell

It’s my opinion that you should try to keep your favorites under control. They lose their usefulness when you have too many. If you notice you are using your favorites for social bookmarking too much, consider getting a delicious account. If you can’t find any tweets to favorite that promote you as a worthwhile Twitter user, get more involved in the conversation. If your friends’ tweets seem mundane, check out sites like MrTweet to get recommendations on new people to follow that might be more interesting.

How do you use your favorites on Twitter? You can now leave comments using your Twitter account. Try it out!

I have to admit most of the work was done for me by CSSRockstars’s free theme Charade, although I had to do some tweaking to get it how I liked. They used Twitter’s Blogger javascript file to insert the latest update of a user to an element on the page with the ID of ‘twitter_update_list’. It’s really only 5 lines of code to get you started:

<div id="twitter">
<ul id="twitter_update_list"></ul>
</div>

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/javascripts/blogger.js"></script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/<?php echo $mytwitterid;?>.json?callback=twitterCallback2&count=1"></script>

The wrapper div around the list is just for the CSS styling. The CSSRockstars chose to make a separate file where you could fill in your username for Twitter and the other social networks in the header. If you have plain HTML, you can just put ‘username’  instead of ‘<?php echo $mytwitterid; ?>’. The last parameter on the Twitter JSON call is how many tweets to retreive so if you wanted 5 or 10 instead of 1 you change that value. It’s important to note that the scripts are called in the footer of the page and the twitter div is in the header. This allows the rest of the page to load and then make the JSON call so your page load doesn’t hang on it. Here’s the CSS that’s used to style it:

#twitter {
position: relative;
padding: 14px 0 0 60px;
height: 33px;
background: url(img/twitter.gif) top left no-repeat;
color: #7A94A0;<span> </span>
font-size: .95em;
text-align: left;
}

#twitter a { color: #7996A2;}

#twitter a:hover { color: rgb(0, 142, 239); }

ul#twitter_update_list { list-style-type: none;}

ul#twitter_update_list li { width: 550px; }

There are other jQuery scripts, WordPress plugins, and even Twitter’s own badges you can use but I think this method gives you a little more control over how and what to display.

I also added a button that didn’t come from CSSRockstars to allow people to tweet about the current post they were reading. I used to use TwitThis but the button didn’t feel right and it required you to log in through a 3rd party. By the time you did all that you might as well use my custom button and Twitter’s actual site. Here’s the code to that:

<a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Reading: <?php the_title(); ?> < ?php the_permalink(); ?>" 
title="Click to send this page to Twitter!" 
target="_blank" 
class="share7"></a>

The image is actually loaded via CSS in the background using this little one liner:

.share7 { background: url(img/6.png) top left no-repeat; }

Hopefully this helps Marty and anyone else looking to add a little more Twitter to their site!

Log of paying tweets from be-a-magpie.com

In two and a half months, I’ve earned €1.78 from 6 ad tweets. That’s no where close to the €40~ per month they quoted me originally when I signed up. What’s worse is that the ads have become very infrequent even though I’ve been tweeting more and more since November and almost doubled my followers. Either they are struggling to find advertisers or what I tweet about is too sporadic for them to hone in an audience.

I still have it set to tweet one ad for every ten of my tweets, but I tweeted 900 times in December and November and only had 3 ad tweets! (read: something is obviously broken)

I’m going to keep on with the #magpie tweets since they haven’t chased away my followers on Twitter and even with their poor return should make me enough by the end of the year to renew my domain. Something I did do last month was turn off the promotion tweets for #magpie that tried to entice others to join with my affiliate URL. For a few days it was going crazy and tweeted way more than my setting of every other day. 

I’m going to try and fit the Magpie badge in my footer in case any visitors want to sign up (and earn me some commission). Is anyone else using #magpie and seeing good returns? What about other sites like Twittad.com that replaces your background on your profile with an ad?

I could also refer new advertisers for additional coin (30% commission for the first year advertiser runs ads) using my personalized referral link. You might have noticed the badge I placed on my homepage. These became the most popular tweets I ran even though I chose to run them every other day.

#magpie Run your own ads in other people’s Twitter timelines– http://be-a-magpie.com/d6qubl

You can see all the #magpie ads and promotions I ran in the last month via this Search Twitter query. I only ran 3 real ads the entire month! They do a nice job of displaying when, what, and how much on your account page:

You can see that in one month I earned about a dollar (USD) for 3 tweets. I wasn’t able to attract any advertisers even though I gave about 18 tweets to do so. Was it worth it? Yea, I guess. A buck’s a buck.

I think Magpie has a lot of work to do. They never kept up with my moderate ratio of 10 tweets / 1 ad. The ads were pretty on-point, but generic nonetheless. As you can see from my TweetStats, I’ve been tweeting a lot more this semester and on a variety of topics so I would have thought Magpie would have had an easier time fulfilling it’s nearly 40€ per month quote. 

The debate rages on whether or not ads have a place on Twitter and what their role is, but that wasn’t the point of this post. Just my experience using the tool. I liked the initial idea of earning money by doing nothing, but I’m not sure if it’s enough to keep me tweeting for them. I have actually seen an increase in followers as opposed to driving them away with my ads, but I think that has to do more with me becoming more involved on Twitter.

I hope Magpie gets there act together and starts inserting more ads so I can earn more money, but that seems to be how everyone feels on their feedback forum. In the mean time, I’m off to continue playing Sim City on my iPhone!

The rest of the site just provides an email address to contact with comments, feedback, whatever and a short to-the-point terms of service that screams, “I will do whatever I want with your login information.” Are people seriously using this service? What’s the likelihood that some Twitter users out there use the same password for their Twitter account as they do for other accounts? If they’ve used this service, they’ve sent not only their preferred default password for all of their online accounts, but also their main email address! Whoever is behind mail2twitter is now free to troll every website they can think of with your email and password to see if they get lucky.

If people are really using this service, I’m off to register ‘mail2paypal.com’ where you can do everything on PayPal via email. Just include your email and password in the subject, but I probably won’t read the body so put whatever. In my TOS, there’ll be a small clause granting me permission to perform whatever transactions I want with your account information. There isn’t any difference between doing that and using mail2twitter.