DISQUS

Thanks for the mention - if you think my @m140z account is good, what will you think of my main account @nicolesimon? ;)) The book is indeed a real published book, 235 pages long on how to use twitter with an extra chapter for business.


The females list is one of many I am hosting (I provided the direct link in this comment form as web address) because most people want to connect based on topic and interest, so I find those very helpful myself.

Back to your point about the twitter ad agency. It is a nice idea but I think one has to realize that twitter is not the only point of interest / entry. It is rather a mixed combination and just focussing on twitter is wrong.

It is of course okay to work with somebody to help you with just twitter, something I do with my clients, but it is never meant as 'just' twitter. It is always about "a) how to use twitter so you dont look like a fool but b) how to integrate it with the rest. There is no other way.

Many of us do have scanners lying around. Take each card, strike out the information not needed, scan the rest in batches of normal paper size, use an outsourcing service to do data entry and get the data back. :) this works if you have a lot of data not needed, but it may be easier to use a service.

As I deal mainly with social media people, the email address is usually enough to fetch their profiles like on facebook or twitter ;)

Okay, as I got some dms on this: yes I read the part about 'When you first encounter a TwitterRemote in the wild, you do need to sign in with your Twitter credentials in order to get your picture to show up, though the creators note that this won’t be necessary once Twitter implements OAuth, which is expected soon." - I am talking about the "won't be necessary" part. In an app like this, is should _always_ be necessary to state your intent. :)

Boris [it is Nicole btw, not Simone ;)] as long as you make sure I will have to do the concious decision of saying yes before you hijack my twitter login, there should be no problem at all.

Boris, you know how much I love twittercounter, but this is the kind of
app where you _know_ before you build them that this kind of argument
comes ... It is like building a webform and afterwards saying "gee I did not think
somebody would use it for spamming" - your api shows that you can do better!

At least with mybloglog (if I remember correctly) I was able to delete
myself once I was on a page I really don't want to be tracked.

That kind of application is a reason not to stay logged into twitter and use a third party app. Afaik there was some discussion on the api mailing list that this behaviour is not intended. Especially since different to mybloglog I cannot "log out" - most of us stay logged into twitter all the time.

So nice idea, but very much a security and privacy issue.

Going away from the more obscure topics suggested by some, I found mainly one shortcoming in the book: the concentration or focus on the one specific style of how you work your business. The new version should include more ground instructions for people to apply in different areas, the most promising probably around the area of people in the cubicle.

Although it does not seem so at first sight, the principle can be applied to everything and once you understand that, things can change. But many people have a problem in 'structuring' work, which is why these kind of instructions need to be broken down more.

Instead of just describing outsourcing (for which many people will claim it does not work for them but still probably is wrongfully the most described content of your book) describe how thinking about this process can be applied to all kind of work.

@Xen, for startes, I have a german and an english account as Twitter does not care to allow for easy separation of languages. A third is the account where I interact with my book readers (a twitter book btw), the fourth and fifth are for the topic of my global business women forum and the girl geek dinners I run. All of the messages are done by me, and I currently use different browsers for managing the accounts.

You say it is about social networking and yes, indeed it is. I do check every single profile who follows me. Still results from twitter can either be processed by hand or for example with somebody else helping out. Like asking for events in Europe and then collecting the data out of the stream of answers, prepping an overview and posting this. Which again brings value back to the stream.

I am also not encouraging that kind of tool, I am the quickest one to block these people and report them.

@jason no you cant. firefox is just a solution for a small need to have more than one account in the hands of one person who only from time to time needs to switch. Then it is useful, and trust me I know Twitterfox.

To begin with: it is not outsourceable (as it runs in your firefox), it does not allow for efficient updates of either the tweets (yes that would be also scheduled tweets) nor the management of the profile (you are aware that people do use the background image for useful scenarios like http://twitter.com/philharmoniker)?

Just to stay with the automated tweeting - and you may lack the imagination when there is a valid use for such - but none of the shiny web services allows you import for example from a text file or spread sheet. [If anyone has one available, please ping me]

My point being: the only ones currently bringing these kind of featuers are the spammy ones, which I really find sad. Given the popularity of Twitter I have to ask why spammy tools manage to bring useful innovation which normal services lack.

Now where is my automated tool where I can quickly search for a phrase through twitter, go to all of the accounts and block them with not many clicks per entry (search - view profile - click block - click yes do blog, repeat)?

And as Karl wrote in his article, the real problem is that they have a business model behind it.

Jason, there is more than just tweeting to using accounts and there are people running more than just one account. I am currently juggeling 5 accounts and yes all of them are valid ones. It would be a real help having professional software available for managing the accounts - tweeting is only a small part of that.

Hell, even a working tool to sync my german account with my main account would be enough. Why do i have to dive into API programming when clearly there are ways to do it differently? Because it is exactly the either or view, the black and white Jason portraits (or shall I say lack of imagination?).

*sigh*

If you have a look at the video, you should note that they do have some good features in there. Now take away the "oh my good spammers" view and look at the features from a real power users point of view ...

I disagree slightly. I would love to have a tool to manage several accounts, and yes even create them automatically for a real purpose. It is throwing out the kid with the bathwater - because banning these tools will make sure that the useful purposes get attacked as well. Back to pen and paper anyone?

Instead people should really head over to forums like digitalpoint / warriorforum and such where these tools are given out with instructions how awesome for spamming (excuse me: advertising and huge amounts of traffic) is - only if you tell them that we do infact watch and react on it there might be a chance to not stop them, but make their life more miserable.

It does not stop there. Spamming is an issue in every system and it is no wonder that they pop up so fast, accompanied by gurus who really are successful in this game - but only because they know how to play it.

I am not saying to give up, just react in a way we know it works. :)

I do host several of those german lists as well as collect links to such list under http://mit140zeichen.de/uebersicht-twitterverze... including top german users, german politicans, PR and communication twitterers as they are also mentioned in my twitter book.

yes it is not as nice as having a dedicated directory, but honestly often they are just that: directories without a lot of additional functionality. My politician list is sorted by party and if it is state or local, the PR list most likely will be done by town or company soon. The reaction of the readers usually goes to specific demands per category which also change quite a lot over time.

my suggestion is to collect them and grow with user demands on them. and dont get discouraged when for example you do a list for politicians and the guys are too stupid to add themselves to your list.

I do host several of those german lists as well as collect links to such list under http://mit140zeichen.de/uebersicht-twitterverze... including top german users, german politicans, PR and communication twitterers as they are also mentioned in my twitter book.

yes it is not as nice as having a dedicated directory, but honestly often they are just that: directories without a lot of additional functionality. My politician list is sorted by party and if it is state or local, the PR list most likely will be done by town or company soon. The reaction of the readers usually goes to specific demands per category which also change quite a lot over time.

my suggestion is to collect them and grow with user demands on them. and dont get discouraged when for example you do a list for politicians and the guys are too stupid to add themselves to your list.

@roo ahem yes, that is the point. besides there being an ethical side to it - so you dont mind that i put up your tweets up on my porn side as an example for a typical customer, right? - there is a legal side to it. you might want to brush up on the topic of copyright and permissions to use your content.

without my permission you cannot use the content of my website without compensation and you try and scrape my content of my blogs. I can waive these rights to a certain degree, but that is about it. you cannot use content without prior consent, period. even the american concept of fair use is something very specific, and tweets are no different to that.

Content creation for them - yes. But on which grounds? Did you agree on being pulled in with your tweets?

And how would you feel ending up with your tweets on a squidoo page just because you used a specific hash tag?

Getting back the banner they had during election so one could see what the current trends are - allows you a peak into what is happening.

RT this - also gets my vote.

And: make the top link of search.twitter.com back to twitter.com.

If I want twitter news, I subscribe to twitter relevant sites. Is it something mashable should cover? Absolutly, but probably a) balanced with other stuff going on and b) in a way as they have done in the past: as thought leader with well researched articles rather than noting all the newest twitter apps. hint: you dont report about most facebook apps either, and my guess it, that would intererst a bigger crowd.

but please continue especially the summary and overview articles on twitter, they make my live much easier. ;)

I tend to send DM to people but only if I know they read them and if I dont know them, I do inlcude my email address. If I do not get an reaction I'll try to get out the mail address of that person, which btw is often hard to do.

Personally I do receive and read ALL of my DM and FB message in my mail inbox as they are forwarded. Depending on the content of the message I do invest more or less time to find out how to answer.

not being able to reply in DM is a reason not to reply at all, etc.


btw @amanda - every single good email client has a decent search feature. if you rely on fb for having search, you have a whole lot of other issues.

Once you are over the "oh my god the sky will fall down" (do get over it, please), you might be able to come up with some useful scenarios beside the spamming.

Yes, of course spammers will use it, so what? We have other mechanisms for this.

I see it primarily the other way round. Put out a trackword (in your blog post, in a competition, in an announcement) and twollow that trackword. Throw out a question and people to answer right away once you follow them. And as @drewie123 said, for brands it is invaluable if they can track certain keywords specifically.

Seeing Liz' comment I am reminded back of the days of blogging, when the first business bloggers arrived, which had vastly different needs and interests than the 'normal bloggers'. And that is fine. Just dont confuse your wishes and needs with what everybody else is needing or wanting.

Just seeing that a message from your boss is not highlighted - Filtering, Quicklinks and automatic starring (you know you can search for stars, right?) work. Lifehacker and other sites have a lot of articles on them.

Rather than doing that, I'd suggest you get yourself an impap client in which you can drag and drop mail more easily for sorting them (though you should not do that with large amounts at once).

Instead of having fun in the hallway and with all the people you have not seen in a while and having a bad feeling about not being in the sessions, this pass provides you with more reasons to stay outside and interact with interesting people. ;))

but i like the toolbar :o( i see the point for new visitors to get them engaged, but I hope the toolbar stays, at least for the major systems.

Having to go _through_ the site every single time to get somewhere will render it quite useless because that is a use for dummies. This of course is the majority of the users who surf the sites, but I assume that the people submitting the sites are the more experienced ones - and they will not really like that experience.

It does not need to be the DESKTOP we work for. Exchangable / retrievable data is something different to insisting on it has to be on the desktop. Dont get me wrong, I am the first to talk about stuff I want on MY machine, in MY control to work on the tools I want to have. But not everything is working on the desktop, nor is it supposed to be.

It is the data we care about and what we do with it. And before you go there - Blogs are basically pretty version of usegroups with a slightly different toolset, and yes I'd like a working nntp gateway for my feeds, thank you. ;)

To stay with your example of Gmail - one of the main reasons to use it is the fact that I can get my data out through IMAP and POP. Google Analytics? Nice features, but also export of the data and automatic sending by mail. As long as you make sure that you have setup a working system to get your data in and out, I think you are covered. Of course most people do not go there - but they do not use decent programms on their system either. ;)

There is this cool tool called zemanta which does automatic links to everything you mention maybe you should try it out? ;)))

http://berlinwebweek.de should have most of the links available for what you mentioned ;)