Digitivity » Twitter

The Top 5 Mistakes People Make on Twitter

Digitivity — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 06:21:10 +0000

David Risley has a blog post on what he views as the top five mistakes people make on Twitter.

Read them here.

Most of his points have to do with spammy behavior, basically using a program to perform Twitter actions, like tweeting, following, and direct messaging.

I somewhat disagree with his point about following, though. Why is it considered bad to follow people? Is the goal to have 10,000 followers and only be following 20 or so?

Will that show that you’re a very important person? You are worth following for thousands of people, but there are only tens of people who are more interesting or worthwhile than you?

Cadmus Helps You Avoid Social Media Overload

Digitivity — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:20:41 +0000

I found out about a new social media organization service called Cadmus the other day.

If you’re active in social networking like Twitter, you probably get a lot of updates in your incoming streams.

Cadmus

organizes these streams and prevents you from having to wade through duplicates.
identifies trends among your friends’ Twitter conversations
groups @replies and groups those too. You can open or close an entire conversation instead of looking through all past updates to find the original post to which they are replying.

Signing up for Cadmus

On the Cadmus website (thecadmus.com) , click on the signup link:

You’re taken to Twitter.com, where you’re asked to authorize Cadmus accessing your Twitter account. Note: Cadmus doesn’t take your password. Rather, Twitter gives an authorization token to third-party websites to allow them to update your account. Click on Allow:

After signing up, you’re taken back to the Cadmus homepage. Like Twitter, if you’re not signed in, the homepage gives you information on Cadmus. Once you’re signed in, the homepage shows your account’s updates. Initially there are none, because Cadmus hasn’t had a chance to analyze your tweets:

After a few minutes, Cadmus shows your tweets:

Cadmus identifies major topics within your tweetstream. Click on a topic to view related tweets. Cadmus calls this “personal trending topics“:

You can also view trending coversations within the last 6 and 12 hours, and one, three, and seven days:

Cadmus also organizes your FriendFeed and RSS streams. Click on “Add a Service” and choose what you want to add:

Cadmus API

In addition to the website, you can add access Cadmus’s organized streams through the Cadmus API (aplication programming interface). That means you can view or show Cadmus info in a desktop or phone application or on your website.

Check out Cadmus here: http://thecadmus.com/

Backupify Social Media Backup Free Account Offer Extended

Digitivity — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:14:31 +0000

I wrote the other day about social media backup with a new service called Backupify.

It was offering free accounts till January 31.

Now the offer has been extended until the 15th of February.

Granted, sometimes companies like to extend offers many times just to get everyone that could possibly be interested in their product. But since it’s totally free, there’s no reason not to sign up.

See my previous blog post about backing up Google, Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress for details on how Backupify works.

Resources

Backupify

Back Up Gmail, Facebook, WordPress, and Other Social Media with Backupify

Digitivity — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 17:40:48 +0000

These days many people prefer to have their applications in the cloud, instead of hosting them by themselves.

For example, people who use Gmail prefer accessing e-mail through a web browser instead of downloading their e-mail and viewing it with an e-mail program.

But what happens if Google loses your e-mail? The answer, for some, might be Backupify, a new cloud backup service.

Coincidentally, today is the last day they are offering free accounts, and today is the day I found out about it. So before you read the rest of this article, go and sign up for an account here: https://secure.backupify.com/signup

Note: Although it asks for your personal details (including address and phone number), all you have to enter is your name and e-mail address to get signed up.

Why you need to back up your social media accounts

How much did you pay for your Gmail account? For your Twitter account? Facebook? $0?

Well, how much liability do you think they have if they lose your e-mail, your tweets, your updates? Right, zero dollars.

While it’s true that these services have all kinds of great servers hosting your data, it’s also true that problems do occur. If you get a lot of advantage from your social networking presence, you’ll likely not want to take the risk of losing all of your hard work.

Cloud services that Backupify backs up

Backupify backs up:

Flickr
Twitter
Delicious
Zoho
Google Docs
Photobucket
WordPress
Services in Beta
Basecamp
Gmail
Facebook
FriendFeed
Blogger
Hotmail

It will back up the following cloud services later:

Youtube
Xmarks
RssFeed
Tumblr

After you sign up, you’re sent to the Settings screen:

Backupify Settings

Just click on a Manage for a given service to back up your account on that service.

Backing up Twitter

For example, to back up your Twitter account, click on Manage for Twitter, and then provide your account credentials:

Backupify: Backup Twitter

Backupify goes out to Twitter, downloads your tweets, and backs them up.

You can choose to back up daily or weekly.

Backing up WordPress

Backupify can back up your WordPress blog, too. To do this, you first have to install a WordPress plugin.

How Backupify works

Backupify uses account information that you give to access your accounts. For some kinds of services, it doesn’t send a username/password over the wire, but rather depends on something called a token to avoid having to exchange authentication information.

To the extent possible, Backupify keeps your data in encrypted format. It’s true that you have to trust them to a certain extent. If you don’t trust them, don’t give them any of your user account info.

It’s worth mentioning that, according to Alexa, Backupify is about the 15000th most popular website in the United States, so it’s not just a fly-by-night operation.

My comments

Although I haven’t decided to what extent I want Backupify to back up my social media accounts, I’ve gone ahead and signed up for the free account, which, again, they say the last day for is January 31.

Thanks to Bob Buskirk, whose article on Backupify I just caught today.

Resources

Backupify

Top 10 Twitter Clients for Windows

Digitivity — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 13:10:58 +0000

The Tarangana blog has a great post about the top 10 Twitter clients for Windows.

Just about all are free, and many are open-source, too.

Via Artima.

The list:

1. Twhirl
2. Snitter
3. Tweetdeck
4. TweetyBot
5. Twitteroo
6. Spaz
7. Witty
8. Pwytter
9. Mitter
10. Chirp