Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [109]
You can use Xpenser to get yourself in the habit of recording your expenses. Because the updates are made via direct message, you don’t have to worry about your followers seeing the information.
Chapter 15
Ten Useful Twitter-Based Services
In This Chapter
Staying in touch with the world through Twitter services
Organizing your Twitter life
Keeping up with the folks on Twitter
With events like the Hudson River plane crash, Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher and Oprah coming to Twitter, buzz about the service is making Twitter go mainstream fast. Because of that, many businesses, causes, and people are creating Twitter-based presences, and hundreds of innovative Twitter-based services are emerging to support that. Some have separate Web sites, and some you just use directly through Twitter. In no particular order, here are ten that stand out because of their usefulness and overall appeal to Twitter audiences.
BreakingNews
@BreakingNews http://www.bnonews.com
Type: News. This simple feed gives you ongoing breaking news from around the world. Actual humans maintain and update it, not an automatic RSS feed. It has a good track record of beating many of the major news outlets for breaking news — and it has a good track record for accuracy, as well.
StockTwits
@StockTwits http://www.stocktwits.com
Type: Financial. Cofounded by Howard Lindzon, best known for mashing up Wall Street with video podcasting to create the highly successful WallStrip, StockTwits plays off the fact that investors who tweet like to tweet about stocks. StockTwits is essentially a community and social exchange of snippets of conversation about stocks, using Twitter as the conversation medium at its core. You can use StockTwits at its Web site, by following @stocktwits, or by using the TweetDeck plug-in.
Tweecious: Use Delicious to Organize the Links You Tweet
http://friedcell.net/tweecious/get
Type: Publishing. If you post links to Delicious (http://delicious.com; a social bookmarking service that allows you to share links with your friends), this little tool makes it easy for you. Now, your posts to Twitter that include links can also automagically go to Delicious. Tweecious even looks at the rest of the tweet and automatically tags the link with relevant categories or keywords. Once you have a Delicious account, Tweecious takes only a moment to set up, and it even reads shortened URLs and extracts the original link.
People who like to keep track of a variety of Web pages and tend to lose them on Twitter may find this tool very handy.
TipJoy
@Tipjoy or www.tipjoy.com
Type: Financial. This payments service offers you a way to pay the person, business, Web site, or charity of your choice. Originally developed to let you tip bloggers — or any Web site — you can make payments with TipJoy right on Twitter incredibly easily. Follow @tipjoy on Twitter or go to its Web site to create an account. After you fund that account (you have to go to the Web site to do so), you can pay any amount to anyone on Twitter by simply tweeting p $amount @username.
Many people like to include a note or link about what the payment is for right in the tweet, which can help spread the word about an interesting cause, project, or product.
TipJoy was founded by husband and wife team Abby and Ivan Kirigin and launched in a startup incubation program known as Y Combinator. After working together to raise $25,000 for Laura’s @wellwishes holiday and birthday charity campaign for charity: water, TipJoy invited her to become an advisor. We can personally vouch for their legitimacy and reputation.
ExecTweets
www.exectweet.com
Type: Networking. Like millions of other people, Laura pretty much laughed at Twitter when she first heard about it. Turns out that’s pretty normal. But what made the difference for her was noticing that she could use it to surround herself with successful, interesting people who would