Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [55]
After you put the badge code into your social-networking Profile page, Twitter updates the badge each time you send a tweet. You can use a badge to quickly and easily share Twitter with people outside the service, letting them know your status and what you’re up to on a daily basis.
Facebook, the most popular social network, doesn’t let you embed code onto profiles. You can, however, install the Twitter app on Facebook (http://apps.facebook.com/twitter), which lets you choose to either display a badge on your profile or have your Twitter updates set as your status message on Facebook. Because some people on Facebook get confused when they see a lot of tweets out of context, it’s not a bad idea to only share some of your tweets with your Facebook friends. You can share your tweets by using a special tag (see the Facebook Twitter app for instructions) in your tweets to designate which ones to also re-post to Facebook.
Figure 8-3: You can put the Twitter.com widget on a blog.
Services such as Ping.fm (www.ping.fm) and HelloTxt (www.hellotxt.com) allow you to send the same tweet or update to many social networks, such as MySpace and Facebook, in addition to Twitter, all at the same time. This service saves you the trouble of logging into each site separately, but it can get impersonal and alienate your followers. Use these services with caution!
Auto-Tweeting
Auto-tweeting is exactly what it sounds like: automated tweets. You can auto-tweet by using one of a number of third-party applications built for that purpose. These third-party applications use the same API as the Twitter readers (which we talk about in the section “Using Third-Party Services,” earlier in this chapter), but these auto-tweet applications apply the API for a different purpose.
Some auto-tweet applications, such as TweetLater (www.tweetlater.com), allow you to schedule tweets in advance. Mostly, marketers use these applications, and some Twitter users don’t like them because they undermine the spontaneity of Twitter by having things pre-scheduled (which, in our opinion, defeats the purpose of the “What are you doing?” question). However, you may find TweetLater useful if you’re going on vacation or plan to be off the grid for some other reason. You can schedule a post or two while you’re away from your computer, just to check in and remind your Twitter network that you may be out of touch. It’s also useful for businesses, announcements you know about in advance and can plan for, or special projects like Laura’s tweeting her great-grandmother’s diary as @ggpratt.
Services in the section “Sending RSS feeds back to Twitter,” earlier in this chapter, are also essentially automatically tweeting for you.
Chapter 9
Embracing the Twitter Ecosystem
In This Chapter
Using tools to enrich your Twitter experience
Finding programs that make using Twitter easy
Playing around on Twitter with games and memes
Twitter is a useful tool on its own, but by design, it remains extremely simple, even stark, in its functionality. The folks who created it wanted to make Twitter a platform for users to build on, improve, and enhance, so they opened up Twitter’s API (application program interface), or code, to the public. Enterprising and creative software developers, as a result, can create applications that work with Twitter to offer even more compelling features and ways to make use of the dynamic system.
Twitter itself is constantly evolving and changing — from design facelifts to new features to changes in how the back-end technology works. The Twitter team pays close attention to how people interact with the system and