Twitter for Dummies (24 page)

Although new applications come out frequently, bit.ly (
http://bit.ly
) remains our favorite of the URL shortener crowd. bit.ly, shown in Figure 9-12, offers a complete tracking service that lets you see where the URLs you shorten and share are going, and what kind of results they’re getting. This application’s tracking includes location and metadata, two huge pieces of information that can help you target your audience in a more refined way.

bit.ly also integrates with TweetDeck, and you can set bit.ly to remember your Twitter handle(s). So, unlike other URL shorteners, bit.ly catches your tracking data for you no matter what Twitter interface you use when you post. In Figure 9-13, you can see bit.ly tracking results (how many people clicked and when) for a link that was shortened in bit.ly and then tweeted.

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 sensation Ze Frank organized Color Wars (as shown in Figure 9-16). In the Color Wars, Twitter users joined teams designated by color in a summer-camp-inspired game, and those teams proceeded to complete tasks such as online scavenger hunts and Photoshop challenges.

Figure 9-16:
Color Wars!

You can use Twitter for creative games, as well. TwitStory is a game in which people create a story tweet by tweet, all collaborating on the outcome by adding individual lines. You use other people’s tweets, rather than your own, to build the story, fitting unrelated lines together like a puzzle. You can read how TwitStory #3 came out on its creator’s blog at
http://andypowe11.net/blog/?cat=10
.

Web sites for Twitter games are popping up. One of the first of these sites is Twoof
(http://twoof.doof.com
), which lets you play interactive games with your Twitter friends. Individuals have also tried to amass people to play a Twitter-enhanced game of Battleship by using the hashtag
#twitships
(
http://www.squidoo.com/battleships-board-game-twitter
), but the game does not appear to be active.

In addition to games, many Twitter users like to use its potential to spread virally, from one person to another, to create
memes
— trends that flow through the Twitter stream with many people participating. Sometimes, users create hashtags to spark discussion, such as
#favoritehappysong
or
#favoritefallfood
. When Twitter users see the hashtag go by in their Twitter stream, they voice their own opinions, answering the implicit question and tweeting it out with the hashtag attached. You can have fun going back to visit these games in Twitter Search later, and you can also use them to find out a little more about your Twitter connections.

One popular meme that doesn’t seem to ever die out is the Overheard meme. You may have noticed a lot of tweets containing OH and wondered, “What’s the deal with Twitter and Ohio anyways!?” OH just abbreviates “overheard” and is usually followed by something funny or awkward or even quite horrible. The twitterer is sharing it as if to say, “Can you
believe
this?!” Hear something funny or crazy in real life and want to share it? Just type OH and then put the quip you heard in quotes. Most of the time, you don’t use any names, keeping the OH anonymous — it’s funnier out of context. Some OH tweets are racy or raunchy, but most are just average things people say that seem funny at the time.

With all the creativity on Twitter and its general fun-loving nature, you may well create your own Twitter game or meme — either just for kicks or even as a marketing strategy. Don’t be shy!

Tag Clouds

TwitScoop, Cloudlet, trending topics, and hashtags all have something in common: They all can generate a Twitter
tag cloud,
a visual display of words where the relative size of the word corresponds to how many times it has been mentioned. Tag clouds provide an easy visualization of what’s going on in the twitterverse in real time. Words that twitterers are using a lot will appear in the tag cloud, and the more mentions a word gets, the larger, darker, and bolder its display will be as well. It’s another, often quite visually appealing, way to see what is really going on.

You may enjoy watching tag clouds. Applications such as Wordle (
www.wordle.net
) even let you play with tag clouds a little so that you can generate graphical representations of whatever your topic is (as shown in Figure 9-17), which you can then use on slides and Web sites. Tag clouds are an interesting way to present what topics and keywords around your subject are interesting to the group at large and can give your presentation or blog entry a little more punch and relevance.