Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [63]
Figure 9-12: The bit.ly interface.
Figure 9-13: Some bit.ly tracking results.
Getting All Your Online Activity in One Place by Using Aggregators
Aggregators are sites that bring all your social-media activity into one place, pulling in your accounts from sites such as Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and so on. An aggregator gives you one stop where you can see all your social profiles and all the updates from your friends and colleagues on those services, without having to spend a lot of time clicking from Web site to Web site so that you can keep up with what’s going on.
The most buzz-worthy aggregator right now is FriendFeed (http://friendfeed.com), shown in Figure 9-14. FriendFeed can pull in accounts from any social network, any blog or Web site that has an RSS feed, photo-sharing sites such as Flickr, social music sites such as Last.fm, social bookmarking sites such as Digg, and more.
Figure 9-14: Combine all your online activity by using FriendFeed.
Not everyone loves FriendFeed, especially at first. It’s pretty complicated. It has some issues with user interface, although a new one just launched as this book went to press. You may find figuring it out a bit difficult. Some people find that putting so many accounts into one place just makes things noisy, and it gets too hard to follow meaningful conversations or keep up with friends. But many active twitterers love FriendFeed because it handles vast amounts of data from both you and your contacts with ease. It also works with Twhirl and Seesmic Desktop, so you can see it right on your desktop Twitter client.
You can find plenty of other aggregators out there, and you can use many of them much more easily (and they look prettier) than FriendFeed, even though they don’t necessarily have the hardcore community that FriendFeed does. We kind of like Strands (www.strands.com) but you can also use SocialMedian, SocialThing, Plaxo, Spokeo, and many more. Facebook itself now pulls many third-party services into its News Feed, making that News Feed function very much like an aggregator.
Using Trending Topics to Stay on the Twitter Cutting-Edge
When you use Twitter, you can see topics trending (becoming popular) in real time. Twitter Search offers a short list of the top ten or so trending topics by tag word on its main page http://search.twitter.com. TweetDeck offers a column for a tag cloud in its desktop application.
You can most easily keep up with trending topics and popular tag words on Twitter — assuming that you don’t have TweetDeck doing it for you — by going back to the Twitter Search home page.
You can also use a service called Twellow (www.twellow.com) to search the latest trending topics and popular tag words. A tag word is the same as a hashtag or keyword. It’s just a word that people are using frequently to discuss a certain topic or issue.
Trending topics also appear at a service called TweetGrid (www.tweetgrid.com), and on sites such as the Twitter Trending Topics RSS Feed (http://twitter.trends.free.fr). You can also follow the user @TrendingTopics (http://twitter.com/trendingtopics), a bot that claims to track and report live trending tag words on Twitter. Twitter also recently added a Trending Topics button that expands into up-to-the-minute trending keywords and topics when you click it (as shown in Figure 9-15).
Why should you care about trending topics? You can use them to gauge the popularity or success of anything from a specific person to a political theme to a marketing campaign. They can also help you figure out what the Twitterati find newsworthy. Trending topics give you real-time statistics on public appeal.
Figure 9-15: You can check out Twitter trends with the Twitter navigation bar.
Playing with Twitter Games and Memes
Hardcore Twitter users are a playful bunch. They’ve been known to turn the service into a wacky social gaming platform on occasion, such as when Internet