Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [107]
Six essential types of tools
The Twitter ecosystem is really complex. It can be overwhelming. A shortcut to make sense of it is to think about six essential types of tools that most any twitterer should try. We also include some of the best examples for each:
Networking (Twellow, FriendorFollow): Your network is the most important thing about Twitter, but tools to find, follow, and keep track of your connections aren’t that great yet. For now, we have directories.
Desktop client (TweetDeck & Seesmic Desktop): Dedicated software on your computer that makes interacting with Twitter easier.
Smartphone client (Tweetie/iPhone, TwitterBerry/BlackBerry, PocketTwit/Windows Mobile): Dedicated software on your phone that makes interacting with Twitter easier.
Search and listening (Twitter Search): Search tweets in real time, monitor keywords and hashtags, and subscribe to search results.
URL shortener (bit.ly): Make links fit into 140 characters, keep track of what you’ve linked to, and preferably, keep some kind of records of how many people clicked, repeated, or also shortened the link.
Multimedia sharing (TwitPic, Qik, Last.fm, Utterli): Embed and share links to photos, video, or audio, to make your Twitter stream a whole lot more than a bunch of text.
Recent contender to the throne is Tweetie for Mac OS X (www.atebits.com/tweetie-mac) and iPhone (www.atebits.com/tweetie-iphone), mainly because of the one-two punch of mobile plus desktop, combined with some favorite TweetDeck style features.
Seesmic Desktop/Twhirl: Managing Multiple Accounts
www.twhirl.org
Type: Desktop client
Twhirl is owned by Seesmic, a video messaging company that has fully integrated its video service into the new desktop application for Twhirl. Twhirl is missing a few key features for managing (and listening to) many followers, but it makes up for its shortcoming in the ability to have multiple accounts open at the same time. As this book went to press, Seesmic was publicly beta testing its Twhirl replacement Seesmic Desktop, which offers a great deal of new functionality.
Twhirl offers ways to interact with some of your other favorite social services, such as identi.ca (http://identi.ca) or 12Seconds (http://12seconds.tv), Facebook (www.facebook.com), and FriendFeed (http://friendfeed.com), for example.
CoTweet: Corporate Tweeting
https://cotweet.com
Type: Business dashboard
If you want a corporate solution that lets multiple users monitor and update a single account and displays all of your Twitter accounts in a single interface, you should look at CoTweet. Like the social media listening tool Radian6, CoTweet lets companies assign individual tweets to employees for follow-up. Still in beta (meaning that new features and functions are being added all the time), this service is hit or miss on features, but the planned feature set should take care of most of your company or organization’s Twitter needs, from keeping organized and letting more than one person maintain an account to scheduling tweets ahead of time.
Make sure that you have full disclosure in your profile somewhere if you have multiple people tweeting for your company or you have a ghost tweeter tweeting for you. For shared accounts, authors usually sign the end of their tweets with an ^ and their initials.
Speaking of disclosure, Laura advises both CoTweet and a service named TipJoy that appears in Chapter 15. She played no part in selecting which companies to profile in these chapters and, in fact, only found out which ones Leslie and Michael chose just before the book went to press. Both CoTweet and TipJoy are unique innovators in their areas and got into the book on their own merits.
Smartphone Clients Tweetie, PocketTwit, and TwitterBerry
http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-iphone
http://code.google.com/p/pocketwit
http://www.orangatame.com/products/twitterberry