November 19, 2008

15 Secrets of FriendFeed's Power Users

By Daniel J. Pritchett of SharingAtWork.com (FriendFeed/Twitter)

The FriendFeed social network is a powerful resource. With it you can connect to some brilliant people and learn new things as they learn them. Converse with interesting people around the world around similar interests. Stream together separate news sources into a single place and then kick off some great discussions about them. Read on for fifteen ways that other users are making FriendFeed a more valuable tool for all of us.

1. Promote other people's shares with likes and comments. Robert Scoble does a great job of directing his tens of thousands of readers to worthy content via his Comments+Likes page as well as his Google Reader shared items.

2. Promote other users' profiles to get them broader exposure Mike Fruchter puts out a regular series of "FriendFeed users to follow" on his blog.

3. Run an excellent room. Zee moderates some hugely active rooms like Startup Success and Apps. Hutch Carpenter created a different style of room: The Enterprise 2.0 Room doesn't have much user interaction but it splices together E2.0 news from a variety of sources like Twitter and Delicious.

4. Share videos. Not everyone is here to read blog posts and text blurbs. Rahsheen does a great job of publishing personal and humorous videos on a regular basis.

5. Cross-link as much as possible. If a related discussion springs up elsewhere on the internet, cross-link the posts so that people picking up one part of a thread can join in the conversation.

6. Build a well-liked FriendFeed add-on. Benjamin Golub's FFtoGo was so well received that Ben got a job at FriendFeed!

7. Pictures get attention, so post directly to FriendFeed when possible . This can include repurposing Google Reader shares. Take a look at these pictures to see how much more activity my native FriendFeed posts get than my RSS imported posts.

8. Stream in your other social media profiles when appropriate. If you use FriendFeed often enough you'll find yourself crafting your Tweets and your Google Reader shares with FriendFeed in mind. "How will this share display on FriendFeed? How can I make sure FF readers know what this link is about and why they should click on it?"

9. Advertise FF and your stream outside of FF. Zee has made his FriendFeed profile the centerpiece of his personal homepage. Louis Gray has his FriendFeed profile in a sidebar widget on his site. Get your own widget on the FriendFeed tools page.

10. Bring a good mix of content. Some of us tend to focus our FriendFeed activities around a particular niche that interests us. Others take a wider approach and share wonderful things from all over the internet. Check out Mona Nomura, Cee Bee, and Mo Kargas.

11. Share the things that make you unique. I love the fact that FriendFeed has a lot of librarians like Jill who are ready to jump in whenever I post a misguided thought on information science.

12. Tend your shares. Respond to comments on your posts and the posts you've commented on. Keep the conversation going and you'll add lots of value to the community.

13. Bump someone else's post rather than creating a duplicate. You've just read a great blog post and you want to share it with the FriendFeed community like the selfless poster you are. Before linking it directly, why not search and see who else has posted this? This is a great opportunity for you to "Like" an existing post and then add a useful comment of your own. Doing this will probably find you a few new worthy people to follow. Example: GMail's new Themes feature got a lot of simultaneous reactions. You can take your pick of posts on this topic and join an in-progress conversation.

14. Give a hat tip to the source that brought you any re-shares. This is good practice for any medium. Sometimes I'll find a good link on someone else's blog but then share the original article with a comment like "thanks Ted for finding this" and a link to Ted's related post.

15. Contribute to the FriendFeed Feedback Room. Anyone can do this and it's a great way to help the FF community. You'll be impressed at the quick responses of the FF staff.

More, more more!
Contributors are discovering new ways to interact with FriendFeed every day. Why not leave a comment describing your most valued FriendFeed practices?

Read more by Daniel Pritchett at SharingAtWork.com.

15 Tools for Your Twitter Toolbox

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)

There are hundreds of Twitter applications on the market, many of which have been covered previously on this blog, including a number of clients, such as TweetDeck and Posty. With the Twitter ecosystem continuing to grow, as evidenced by last night's post on SocialToo, I wanted to touch upon a few that I use, and that I feel are unique and useful. This post highlights fifteen different Twitter tools that I believe would be excellent additions for your Twitter toolbox.

1) Twuffer



Twuffer is a simple, useful utility that allows you to schedule pre-written messages for posting at a later date in time. You could use this tool for setting up reminders for upcoming birthdays, meetings, appointments, paying bills and so forth.

2) Twistory


Twistory brings Twitter and Google Calender together for a marriage made in heaven. Simply add your Twitter backlog feed into any of your favorite calendar applications, and you have a perfect date/time synced Twitter diary. This is a great tool for efficiently creating one central, what I call, visual productivity hub for your Twitter data. This application makes Twitter an ideal application for a digital Rolodex.


3) Tweetake


Tweetake only has one purpose, and that is to provide you with a backup of all your Twitter data. Data is backed up via a .CSV file. It's good to periodically download a local copy of all your Twitter followers, tweets etc. If Twitter ever suffers a catastrophic technical failure, it can not recover from, you will be isolated from any data loss.


4) TweetStats


TweetStats is nice metrics tool that gives you graphed visual statistics for data, such as posting interface used, tweets per day, tweets per hour, tweet timelines and reply statistics. You can also see the latest trends being talked about on Twitter.


5) TwitterCounter


Twitter Counter gives you a graphed snapshot of your daily follower counts. You can track daily growth or lack of it, and it will also give you an estimated follower count for the oncoming month, based on it's data. The other notable feature they provide is a Twitter follower count chicklet. It's identical looking to the Feedburner counter chicklet, whereas this one displays your Twitter follower count.

6) TweetCloud


Everyone loves a good word cloud. Tweetclouds allows you to create a word cloud from a public Twitter users stream, or from any words of text you freely input.


7) TwitterLocal


This is a great tool for finding and filtering out public tweets within a certain geographical area. You can search for activity by city, state, or postal code. An RSS or XML Feed is generated for your search results. Add the RSS feed into Google Reader, and track local activity there. They also offer an Adobe Air App, so you can track tweets from your desktop.


8) Tweetburner


Tweetburner is a URL shortening service. It allows you to create short URLs, share them with your friends over Twitter, and view click statistics for your shortened URLs.


9) TwitStamp


TwitStamp allows you to create badges to display your most recent Twitter statuses on your blog or website. You can also create "twitcard"badges, as pictured below. These are clean and simple, and should compliment any website or sidebar nicely.


10) Qwitter


Qwitter is a helpful and creative way for using Twitter, basically as a support journal and tool for smokers looking to kick the habit. Each time you smoke, send Qwitter the number of cigarettes you just smoked by posting an update to Twitter. Every day, Qwitter adds together all the updates you sent that day and adds them to your progress graph. Qwitter can also connect you with other Twitter users who have or are going through the same experiences as you.

11) Twinfluence

Measure the combined influence of you and your followers. This could be a great boost to your ego. How influential is your Twitter social net?

12) Less Friends


Do all the people you follow on Twitter follow you back? This tool will help you find out. It may be time to do some pruning.

13) Twitturls

Twitturls shows you the most popular links being talked about on Twitter, in real time. Content is pulled from public Twitter streams, ranked and listed on the site. You can see what the current buzz is all about.

14) iTweet


iTweet is an alternative Twitter interface for use with both your web browser and your iPhone. The web based interface has a clean user interface, and comes loaded with pretty much everything you need. It has built-in auto-refresh, search and hashtags, full follow, block, notifications user profile features and more.

15) Twidroid


Twidroid, I thought deserved a worthy mention, because it's the first full-featured Twitter client available for Android mobile phones. It was released only a few weeks ago, and is currently available for download in the Android market.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

November 18, 2008

SocialToo Launches SocialSurveys for Polling Via Twitter

For the last few months, I've been using a service called SocialToo to transparently and automatically follow those people who choose to follow my accounts on Twitter and Identica. Rather than resort to manually deciding who to add to my list, or going to other services, such as Twitter Karma, SocialToo has been automatically synchronizing my lists. Today, the author, Jesse Stay, also a frequent contributor to this site, has rolled out a new feature aimed at making the service much more interactive and differentiated, with the launch of SocialSurveys, a viral way to quickly poll your followers on Twitter.

As with other online polling engines, creation of the survey consists of posting a question and listing potential answers. You have to list at least two choices, of course, but you can theoretically post as many options as you wish.

When the survey is completed, you can then check the box that sends the URL for the survey via Twitter, and hit submit. This sends the survey to Twitter, and automatically reduces the URL using the is.gd engine, to fit in Twitter's strict 140 character limit.

Given that SocialToo is "social" by nature, you can even sign up to follow surveys your friends have created, using RSS.

The addition of SocialSurveys is an interesting wrinkle atop what is already a fairly strong feature set for SocialToo, despite its spartan interface. You can not only autofollow the Twitter and Identica registrants, as I mentioned, but you can blacklist people from ever following you, or even automatically unfollow those who stop following you, essentially acting as your own personal Qwitter in the background. And if you want, you can even route your personal socialtoo.com domain to your Facebook profile.


How SocialSurveys Appear to Visitors


The Results of the SocialSurvey, In Bar Chart Form

SocialToo, authored by Jesse, is partly owned by Guy Kawasaki. Kawasaki, upon the launch of SocialSurveys, is sponsoring the site with Alltop ads for the first few weeks.

My ID on SocialToo, as with just about all other services these days, is "louisgray", and louisgray.socialtoo.com routes to my Facebook page. To see my first SocialSurvey, on who will own Yahoo! by 2012, check out: http://socialtoo.com/survey/view/49.

Simultaneous Downtime for SmugMug and Twitter

There comes a time in every site's life when it'd be easier to lay down than to keep fighting the uptime fight. And tonight, for whatever reason, both SmugMug and Twitter have opted out of the process. While life continues to function, and geeks still have the option to head to Flickr, FriendFeed or Facebook (or any other social network starting with F) to get attention, two of Web 2.0's more engaging companies took a much needed rest around midnight Tuesday morning, and as downtime is a much discussed issue, it appears both sites have gone the extra mile to deliver high-quality graphics to keep us amused as they tackle database issues or anything else that might be getting in the way of their standard operation.


SmugMug Takes A Breather

That means instead of floating birdies and a failed whale, we get pictures of an ice cream cone and caterpillar from Twitter, and the SmugMug logo watering old servers in vain.


Twitter Cools Off, Whale-Free

The Twitter Status blog doesn't indicate the reason for the database efforts, though it may be related to SMS delivery problems mentioned earlier in the day. Meanwhile, SmugMug's service blog doesn't mention any reason for the unexpected downtime, but image display on FriendFeed was completely broken.

As both services use Amazon S3, this could be signs of a wider outage, but that's just speculation at this point.

Meanwhile, Google is still up.