Joshua Guffey

Archive for the ‘social media’ Category

Further big changes are coming to Twitter, we can be sure of this. Especially since Facebook’s PR stain, more users may gravitate more towards Twitter without actually closing their Facebook accounts.

End in the end, it will all just be an interesting chapter in web history — but, for now, when big Twitter changes come…what will it bring? — Okay, enough setup…here’s the meat of it.

Twitter is changing. We may not like it but it’s happening. So what will it mean? Well it’s very possible that a flatening may be occuring.

What I mean is this…
Much of what has made Twitter so significant has be that it’s been a democratic platform. Anyone can post. Anyone can read. Anyone can follow… You get the idea.

It’s also been less then impressively profitable for the founders given it’s global (and relationally…instantaneous) proliferation and impact. Only Facebook has seen faster numbers of adoption.

It’s been interesting to watch as Facebook makes moderate to serious changes to their platform on practically a seasonal basis, while Twitter has remained, largely unchanged in comparison.

Facebook has managed to piss off millions upon millions of people simultaneously. — Simultaneously! And on many occassions. Twitter’s community, on the other hand, is significantly smaller, but in many ways more loyal to the brand.

Facebook has become the social network of convenience. While Twitter is largely untapped. Which is why I think it might be wise for the powers that be at Twitter to continue to make changes slowly. We’ve seen what happens when you change something emotionally charged for millions of people. Massive trust is lost.

Now is an opportunity for Twitter, but if they go about changing too much too fast, I’m afraid they may leave some of their audience behind as well. Or at least their trust and loyalty.

I was going to write some kind of introduction to this post and then realized… you’re here to find Twitter peeps… so get to it!

Here are a few ways I’ve discovered to find the peeps that you’d most like to follow.

For the newbies: (you can probably skip this part)

• Follow some of your Gmail contacts. If you didn’t do this when you started your Twitter account, you can do that here.
• See who they are following. You’ll usually find more friends in your circles this way; often people you wouldn’t have thought of on your own.
• Tweet about topics that you want to connect with others on. People want to connect with others on similar topics and with people who share their same basic attitudes that they themselves possess.  So tweet!

Once the training wheels are off:

• Browse Listorious for who is listed in the topics that interest you. Follow whole lists or just people.
• Run some simple Twitter searches for the more obscure terms that interest you (perhaps kayaking San Diego)
• Explore who is on lists that were made by those who you already follow or who you find to be interesting or influential.
• Follow insightful, funny or interesting commenters on blogs that you read.
• Explore some influencial tweep’s favorited tweets (such as Scobleizer’s favorites) for interesting twitterers to follow.

Ninja skills:

• Twiangulate some of the peeps you already follow to see who they commonly follow.
• Use a free service called RSSFriends to watch who certain tweeps follow.  You can then decide if they are someone you’d also like to follow.
• Find tweeps using Tweepz, a site that allows you to search by bio, name and location — and to sort those results based on follower/following counts, language and more. You can even combine search metrics, like this search which uses both the bio search terms “twitter addict” and the location search term “san diego”.
• Run a specialized Google search to find people on Twitter by words used in their name/username or their bio (example “work at Google“).
• When you meet interesting people in real life, ask if they Twitter.  It really doesn’t have to be “weird”.
• Engage in interesting conversations and be useful to those who follow you.  Don’t be spammy.
  (I know that this isn’t really advanced, but you’ll know why it’s listed here)

For every technique I’ve listed here, I’m sure there are many more that I’ve missed. Why not add to the conversation by adding your peep-finding strategies in the comments?  Be sure to leave your Twitter handle for others to find you.

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So I started to write about a related topic and the keyboard revolted. Or maybe it was my fingers.

In any case this post about “which are my favorite Twitter clients and why” pretty much wrote itself.  It’ll be useful for you if you are looking to reduce confusion or streamline your interactions on Twitter.

What is a Twitter client and why do I care?
The best user experience for Twitter is generally achieved using a Twitter client, an application that acts as an intermediary between you and Twitter and does some of your bidding; or at least makes the experience easier and more enjoyable.  Twitter clients also tend to make engaging on Twitter more feature-rich and faster than if you were to engage simply using the web interface.

My favorite Twitter clients and why they’re worth your time
On my Mac I use Tweetdeck.  It’s powerful, customizable and I find that it keeps me in the conversation.  It can however be overwhelming if you have many columns and haven’t customized the notifications to only alert you of the high priority items, like your @ mentions and lists you like to keep a close eye on.  If you need help doing this leave a comment on the blog here and I’ll help you out.

I also use Tweetdeck on the iPhone but strictly for the lists functionality.  I use it to stay up on my local peeps as well as lists I follow for news and happenings in the spaces that concern me.

Tweetie for iPhone has been for a long time my absolute favorite iPhone Twitter app.  It’s really great for accessing my main Twitter home feed and responding quickly to peeps I see there.  It’s highly intuitive and pretty fast.  Where the performance begins to break down is with lists.  Which is exactly why I use Tweetdeck for lists.  Tweetie is just too slow in this regard.  For most everything else it’s great though.

Hootsuite is good if you have a need to schedule individual tweets. Like for example, you have a thought or find some news at 11:20pm when you know that nobody will see it if you share, so instead with Hootsuite you can share it at a later time.  Just select ‘send later’ and choose the day and time you’d like it sent.  This functionality is available on both the iPhone app and the web app.

Tap 11 is my new shiny object as Twitter clients go.  I’m an analytics guy.  I get my kicks from stats and from drawing actionable conclusions from patterns.  If you like to track things too, you might like Tap 11.  In addition to being a more than decent Twitter client, it offers the added ability to view charts and stats about all manner of things you can geek out on.  It is still in private beta though, so you’ll need to request access.

What are your favorite clients and why? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below. Thanks for reading.  ;-]

-@JoshuaGuffey (whispers: “follow, follow”)

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photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/evablue

You know you want one!

Now adding a Facebook button to your WordPress hosted site is as simple as installing a new plugin.

A bit ago I posted about adding a Facebook ‘like’ button to your posts.  The process was a bit janky since no developers had yet released any WordPress plugins to accomplish this task.  Now there are about a jillion plugins to accomplish this. Hooray!

I looked over several of them and settled on WP Facebook Like. I certainly didn’t test them all, so there may be a few out there that have some extra bells and whistles, but this one seemed solid, so I’m giving it a go.

The nice thing about adding this to your posts is that as people visit and ‘like’ your stuff, that shows up in their ‘recent activity’ stream, which is nice if your trying to use social media for business.

To install it:
Go to Plugins > Add New in your WordPress admin and search for “wp facebook like”.  Click the install button.  It’s that easy.

Like I said, there are several, so if you’re trying to get this exact one, be sure that you’re not installing some variation on this name.  The most notable of which simply adds the word “button” (ie. “wp facebook like button”).

By default you’ll see the button on all posts after the post content.  some users may want to have the option to exclude the button from certain posts or enable it manually only when desired, and I’m sure either a later version of this plugin or a different one currently available will offer this, but that wasn’t important to me.

So far I like it a lot.  It’s simple. It works. Tada!  (try it out below)

[note: If you're using WordPress version 2.9.2 or earlier it seems you'll need to select "iframe" as the embedding method. The default of "xfbml" works fine on WordPress 3.0 beta-1.]

For more ways to implement social media for business or just to connect, follow me on Twitter or subscribe to this blog

Yesterday at the f8 conference Facebook introduced their new ‘open graph protocol‘.

Essentially what this means is that Facebook has now made it possible to not only integrate elements of it’s interface, such as the ‘like’ button, into everywhere you go on the web; they’ve made it possible for you to bring the Facebook experience and your friends along with you wherever you go.

This also makes it possible to navigate the web as YOU; being served up web pages that are tailored specifically to your ‘likes’ from across the web.

Some of what this means now:

• Implementation of Facebook features across the web very rapidly.
• See what your friends like on websites all across the web.
• Ability to essentially be connected to your Facebook friends all the time across the entire web.
• Facebook becomes the hub for your ‘likes’ and those of the rest of the world.
• Share documents with friends via docs.com (a direct attack on Google Docs)

What we may see in the near-term future:

• Social search further threatens Google.  Facebook and Microsoft are working together so there may be some further implementation into Bing in the future.
• Expect advertisers to start to take into consideration your ‘likes’ from across the entire web and display customized ads on the pages you’re currently viewing.  This may position Facebook further as the most targeted advertising platform available. Imagine Google Adsense ads being replaced by Facebook ad panels.  This won’t happen immediately since data needs to be gather and frameworks implemented…but expect something like this to emerge.
• Increased competition for the web’s social default.  I’m thinking Google may jump in with their Gmail-based, relatively untapped, Buzz, however I’m unsure how well this would take hold.  The ideal would be an open source platform that keeps competition going, such as some implementation of XAuth.  Xauth isn’t ready (or even designed) for this type of use, but I’m still holding out hope for an open source, social web.
• This could further position Facebook as the go to location for data to fuel the emerging Social CRM trend.
• Third-party tools for accessing and manipulating Facebook’s open graph data in useful and meaningful ways.  Much like the third-party explosion of applications we’ve seen for Twitter.

Further thinking on how ‘open graph’ changes the game

This effects a lot of the web (basically all of it) and the many of the major players in the game.

First, it’s an attack on Google’s reining web-dominance.  As the web and search becomes increasingly social these two giants are pushing forward into this ever overlapping arena.  Google currently wields a tremendous amount of data about our web use and the information from its suite of services for organizing and managing our lives .  While Facebook seeks to be the hub of our likes and interest and seeks to make our daily web activities more social and personalized.

Facebook has now made itself essentially as open as Twitter while at the same time distributing itself across the web via the developer’s ability to embed certain Facebook interfaces into non-Facebook pages.  They’re counting on the rest of the web community to use this as the new standard and they seem to have significant forward motion in that direction.

Still, this poses the problem of disgruntled users who had come to expect the privacy the Facebook used to tout as central to their policy.  In March of 2008 Zuckerman, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb, said “If that data is published off-site, then there’s no longer any control over the data for users”; this clearly isn’t their policy anymore.

Google could perhaps implement a similar system which enables a personalized web experience without Facebook’s vision of complete social integration; and perhaps offers a more low-key way of sharing, connecting and collaborating with friends online.

How do you expect these new changes to effect the way we use the web? Leave a comment below to voice your thoughts.

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