Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [62]
• PocketTwit (http://code.google.com/p/pocketwit): A new contender, which comes from Google Labs, for the touch screen Windows Mobile market. Its slick, fully functional interface (shown in Figure 9-11) operates much like most desktop clients and looks gorgeous. It’s still in beta (early testing release), so it has some occasional freezes, and you have to be ready to download regular updates. But if you want your mobile client to look and operate just like your desktop client, this one can do the job.
Figure 9-10: You can use Twobile on your Windows Mobile device.
You can use a site called the Twitter Fan Wiki (http://twitter.pbwiki.com/apps) to find out more about Twitter clients, both mobile and desktop. Active Twitter users have written up their favorite Twitter applications and provided links that can point you to the download sites. There are several other directories, but none of them, even the fan wiki, is remaining very current or user-friendly with the fast pace of innovation within the Twitter ecosystem. We sincerely hope to fix that with www.oneforty.com. We’ll let you know on www.TwitterForDummies.com how that goes.
Figure 9-11: PocketTwit is a new Windows Mobile device client.
Keeping Your Tweets Short with URL Shorteners
One of the main issues with Twitter is space. The 140-character limit makes it easy to run out of room before you finish what you want to say. Sometimes, you want to show your Twitter network a link to a Web page that you find fascinating or amusing, to a blog post that you wrote or an article about you, or to just about anything on the Web. But those URLs can be quite long, often well over 140 characters themselves.
URL shorteners are extremely easy Web-based applications that take long URLs from Web sites and make them shorter by turning them into coded small URLs that forward the reader to the original linked page. The URL shortener permanently assigns the link to that shortened URL.
Twitter uses TinyURL (www.tinyurl.com) as its default URL shortener. If you enter a whole, unshortened URL in the Update window on your Home screen on Twitter.com, Twitter automatically shrinks that URL to a more manageable size by using TinyURL. You don’t have to do a thing.
If you’re looking to save as many characters as possible, you can use a URL shortener that promises to make your URL fit into the smallest of spaces on Twitter. To use one of these shorteners, copy the URL from the address bar of the Web site that you want to share, and then paste that URL into the input field at the URL shortener site of your choice.
Some URL shorteners offer added services, such as a way to track who’s clicking your link in Twitter, how often it’s being clicked, and other statistics that you can use to gather data on the effectiveness of your (or your client’s) Twitter account:
bit.ly (http://bit.ly): Tracks clicks over time, clicks on other shortened versions of the link, where clicks are coming from, key information from the target page, and retweets of the link (even if they use a differently shortened URL)
BudURL (http://budurl.com): Tracks the IP address of visitors and how many times your link was clicked
You can find many options by doing a Google search for the term URL shortener.
Although new applications come out frequently, bit.ly (http://bit.ly) remains our favorite of the URL shortener crowd. bit.ly, shown in Figure 9-12, offers a complete tracking service that lets you see where the URLs you shorten and share are going, and what kind of results they’re getting. This application’s tracking includes location and metadata, two huge pieces of information that can help you target your audience in a more refined way.
bit.ly also integrates with TweetDeck, and you can set bit.ly to remember your Twitter handle(s). So, unlike other URL shorteners, bit.ly catches your tracking data for you no matter what Twitter interface you use when you post. In Figure 9-13,