Twitter for Dummies (21 page)

Most of the downloadable third-party applications that you can use to view Twitter on your desktop require an additional download called Adobe Air, a free program that many of the applications are built on. Generally, when you choose to download an app that requires Adobe Air, Air also downloads automatically.

We cover these third-party tools in depth in Chapter 9.

Sharing Tweets All Around the Web

Twitter’s a far-reaching service, but you can also pull your Twitter presence out onto the rest of the Web by using social-networking widgets (some of which are powered by RSS) and a few other nifty tweaks.

Social networks
are those sites online where people can go to meet and stay in touch with new and old friends and colleagues. Twitter itself is a social network. Some of the social networks you may use already include MySpace, Facebook, Ning, FriendFeed, and LinkedIn. And — you guessed it — you can put your tweets on social networks.

If you’re a MySpace user, for example, Twitter makes a badge (or widget) that you can embed right onto your Profile page. Twitter offers a Badges page at
http://twitter.com/badges
, where you can go to customize the look and feel of your badge for each network. This page also gives you instructions about how to embed the badge code, which is also compatible with blog templates on platforms such as Blogger and WordPress so that your blog readers can see what you’re up to and connect with you on Twitter, as shown in Figure 8-3.

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 what those users want to do with it. Because the long-term success of Twitter depends completely on a healthy base of users generating a regular stream of content, the management obviously wants to do their best to keep Twitter on its toes.

As a result, Twitter is a living application and community, extending far beyond what Twitter itself controls. Conventions and third-party tools have popped up to fill in functionality that Twitter may have missed, chosen not to implement, or intentionally left for other developers to handle.

You can find a rich toolset online to enhance and personalize your own Twitter experience. In this chapter, we introduce many of the third-party tools that enrich the service. We’d like to note, though, that it’s very hard to capture the vast and dynamic Twitter ecosystem in these few, and static, pages. The daunting challenge of writing a book chapter to direct people to the best tools and services is a significant reason for the very existence of Laura’s startup oneforty inc. (
www.oneforty.com
).

By the time you read this book, dozens, if not hundreds, of new mashups, services, applications, and other tools and products will be built out onto the Twitter ecosystem. Please check out
www.oneforty.com
and the book’s official Web site at
www.twitterfordummies.com
for up-to-date guidance on how to find the best and latest tools.

Finding Interesting Twitter Talk with Search Tools

With so many conversations going on every day on Twitter, how can you manage to find the ones that are relevant to you? You can use search applications to manage your interactions with Twitter; you can track people and topics, find data about what’s trendy and buzz-worthy up to the second, and more.

You can search Twitter many, many ways, but here are three noteworthy things for you to know:

Twitter Search (formerly called Summize and now finally integrated right into the pages at Twitter.com)

TweetScoop and TwitScoop

Hashtags

Twitter Search

Summize, a powerful search engine that trawls through the enormous volume of public tweets in real time, emerged in 2008 and soon became the go-to tool for searching Twitter. The powers that be at Twitter noticed. Seeing the value in Summize’s application, Twitter acquired Summize and began a slow process of incorporating it into Twitter itself, renaming it Twitter Search. So although the Summize name is a thing of the past, Twitter Search is a powerful and important part of the Twitter experience. Just as this book went to press, Twitter formally rolled out its search functionality displayed right on Twitter.com with the rest of your account. Search is still also available at its own Web address,
http://search.twitter.com
, as shown in Figure 9-1, or by clicking the Search link at the bottom of your Twitter Home page.

Twitter Search isn’t static: It keeps searching for your query, even after you click the Search button. When Twitter Search finds a new search result, a link appears at the top of your Twitter Search results telling you how many new matches for your search term have appeared since you last hit the Refresh button on your browser. This may not seem like a big deal, but it’s extremely useful when news is breaking, or you’re following a live event. Just click a trending topic to see what we mean.
Note:
Search as embedded into Twitter.com is static. You have to hit Refresh to see whether any new results have come in.

Figure 9-1:
Find what you need by using Twitter’s search engine, formerly called Summize.

Something else that makes Twitter Search so useful is how specific you can get with Advanced Search. You can fine-tune searches by usernames, locations, or keywords. Keep in mind, you’re better off using only a couple of advanced search settings at a time, or you may find no results at all!

Here’s more on how to use advanced search:

1. From the Twitter Search page, click the Advanced Search link located below the text box.

A new page appears that contains a fill-in-the-blank interface to help you search for the information and people you want to find.

2. In the Words panel, fine-tune your search by word.

You can specify that a search match all or none of the words in your query, the exact phrase you input, Twitter hashtags (which we talk about in the section “Hashtags,” later in this chapter), or even set your advanced search defaults to all or one of 18 different languages. (
Persistent
off to the right of the Languages drop-down menu just means that the language you select will remain your Advanced Search default until you select a new one.)

3. In the People panel, specify whether you want to search by user.

You can search tweets that come from or reference a certain username.

4. Enter information if you want to search by location or distance, as well as by date, in the Places panel.

For example, you might search only tweets of users who enter their location as a given city.

5. In the Attitudes panel, select whether you want to search for “positive” or “negative” tweets, or search for tweets that ask a question.

These options search for natural language clues about the tweet that imply whether it’s positive or negative.

If you use Twitter to improve customer relations for your business or a client, the Attitudes panel search can really help you find certain types of feedback. It’s not perfect, of course, but it can make rooting out negative or positive feedback much easier.

6. In the Other panel, specify whether you want to search for tweets that have links.

You can also limit how many results are returned per page.

7. Click the Search button, which appears both at the top and bottom of the Advanced Search page.

Your search results appear.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind about search:

Remember search is a living thing. Having fine-tuned a useful search, many times you’ll want to do something with it, like watching it over time, subscribing to it, or sharing it with others.

Keep the search window open to watch as new results come in or subscribe to the RSS feed for the search to monitor it longer term.

You can also share the search results by selecting the Twitter These Results option on the search page or by copying and pasting the search URL from your browser bar. (
Hint:
Shorten that URL, or it will be difficult to tweet.)

TwitScoop

Time and again during news events, (earthquakes, wildfires, politics, accidents, deaths) as an extension of popular culture (TV shows, sports, movies, celebrities, fashion) and for emerging information of any kind, Twitter shines as a powerful way to find out what’s going on in almost real time. TwitScoop (
www.twitscoop.com
) is one of many applications that display what trends are rising and falling. TwitScoop does this both at a Web site and as a feature built into popular Twitter client TweetDeck (
www.tweetdeck.com
).

Built into TweetDeck, TwitScoop, shown in Figure 9-2, helps you track keywords and trending topics, which can be really useful and is mandatory if you’re using Twitter to keep tabs on your brand. You can access TwitScoop by clicking the button with the small bird icon in the TweetDeck toolbar (which is a row of icons along the top left of the application). A new TweetDeck column dedicated to trending topics and the information related to them loads.

On the main Web site that is behind the TweetDeck application, you’ll find trending topic and keyword tracking in a browser interface. From the TwitScoop home page (
www.twitscoop.com
), shown in Figure 9-3, you can see tags, tag clouds, popular hashtags, and other words that are trending on Twitter. You can also use a handful of widgets to embed a list of trending topics on your Web site or blog.

Trending topics let you know how popular something is by tracking keywords and hashtags. For example, if you’re running a meeting or conference, tell attendees to mark their tweets with an agreed-upon hashtag and then follow the conversation by tracking that hashtag on TweetScoop in TweetDeck or on the TwitScoop site. Twitter also offers a Trends tab now, which gives you a short, unsorted list of popular topics in real time.

Figure 9-2:
TweetDeck can run a TwitScoop column.

Figure 9-3:
TwitScoop shows you a tag cloud and hot trends.