Tonight’s insanity was motivated by Jeff Utecht’s post on Twitter as My RSS Reader especially when he says:
Lately I’ve been thinking about Twitter as an RSS reader. My Netvibes page has about 30 RSS feeds in it, but my Twitter account has over 700 people or feeds that I can learn from. What I have found recently is that I’m reading and following more links from Twitter than I am from my RSS reader.
Yes, I love Twitter (it’s well known) but I’ve been getting a touch frustrated by the number of Twitter friends that are doing exactly what Jeff highlights here. In many cases their RSS feeds aren’t being read; they’re totally relying on people to post the links in Twitter which if they’re not careful could ultimately limit their learning by getting sucked into group thinking.
Snagging URLs from Twitter
However I decided to keep an open mind and inspired by Jeff’s post work out how to effectively collect the links posted in Twitter. Off course I’d just read a post recently, in my Google Reader, which talked how snag the URLs in Twitter –Frank suggested TwitBox. And if I was going to road test a twitter application - I might as well also compare my Snitter with Twhirl that Jeff likes to use (for those new to Twitter these applications make it easier to use twitter than using Twitter’s web interface).
The insanity part — it wasn’t probably the best idea to run all three twitter applications at the same time. Unfortunately whilst I could cope with running the three applications — it appears they couldn’t (think it was an issue with TwitBin and the other two).
Have to admit - Twhirl is really, really pretty and the colours are a nice change from Snitter (this is important to some of us) — and more importantly can be used for connecting multiple user accounts.
Twitbin definitely snags the URLs from your twitter followers; but to capture them all you would need to keep it running all the time (and Frank’s right– it’s ugly looking) plus it only snags the URLs, not the entire twit which provide you with the reason to want to check a link.
Tracking URLs Posted by Your Followers
I think there is merit in grabbing links from Twitter but we need an application that makes it time effective — like a TweetScan or Terraminds application that searches for URLs within your followers and delivers the entire twits.
Meanwhile I’ve been grabbing some excellent posts to read by tracking terms using both TweetScan & Terraminds and subscribing to the RSS feeds using Google Reader.
Personally I believe I take the whole 10 signs of Twitter Addiction to an entirely different level. Perhaps the Twitter Addiction signs should also include:
- You’ve got more than one twitter account, doesn’t everyone?
- You run more than one desktop twitter application
- You track multiple terms in twitter using TweetScan and Terraminds
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Regardless of whether you are into Twitter or not, most people will acknowledge it has been the killer application for 2007. For such a simple application, Twitter has many layers, and it was overwhelming me thankfully my readers helped me out yesterday to get my Twitter magic back.
Martin Weller highlighted that effective management of twitter lies with:
- Processes i.e. how many people you choose to follow, how you choose who to follow and your purpose for using twitter
- Technical i.e. the tools you use to manage twitter
Processes
It is really important to decide, when you are starting out with twitter, why and how you want to use it (for ideas read Chris Brogan’s Twitter Revisited post and Beth Kanter’s Twitter tips for Non Profits post). How many people you follow will be influenced to some extent by how you want to use twitter. Chris Brogan, who follows close to 2,500 people makes, an excellent point:
Don’t look at Twitter as a great conversation place, especially once you have a lot of friends. Look at it as an idea bank, a place to gather information or think of new things, or see what your friends are doing.
Most comments on my post by my readers indicated that they prefer to limit their numbers of followers and be selective on who they add.
Brian C. Smith said “he tries to limit who I follow to around 150 people based Gladwell’s Tipping Point The Magic Number 150 (research suggests an individual can only have genuine social relationships with 150 people. Groups larger than 150 are prone to fragmentation, and it is often best for the group’s health that it split) and the fact that I find it simply too hard to filter from too many folks”.
Howard tips are:
- Rather than follow everyone in a network, select particular people in a network who are well connected with people/areas with which you are interested e.g. I choose not to follow everyone I think is important in education in the World but to pick the eyes out of the network choosing individuals who look interesting.
- Selectively filtering followers e.g. selecting tweeters who extend my thinking and feeling versus those who just provide online bubble-wrap/filler
Alan Levine says “he fails to reciprocate on about 95% of the following notifications I get, and only nab the ones for people I know. Maybe every few months, I go in an prune the accounts where there have not been updates in a long time”.
Susan Morgan told me her “solution is to follow people who follow me AND tend to provide good resources instead of chatter. It’s fun to get to know people, but I didn’t have time to go back through pages of tweets each morning either. If it’s important, I’ll see it somewhere!” Check out Susan’s post for more information on how she uses twitter.
They all reminded me that I needed to make the shift to accepting that I will miss some of the conversation as Martin Weller said “like blog posts - you know you can’t read them all, but accept that you’ll get enough of the overall conversation”.
Technical
What tools, and how you use them, impacts greatly on how effectively you will interact with Twitter. This was part of my problem — I was not using the best tools for managing twitter how I wanted to i.e. maximising conversation and effectively accessing overnight twitters.
Snitter
Warlach suggested that Snitter would probably help and he was right. You will need to download and install both Adobe Air beta 3 and Snitter Alpha but it is definitely worth it. I have used Google Talk, Twitterific, Tweetbar, the Twitter web interface and Snitter is the absolute best of them (perhaps some may say too good because I have been very prolific on Twitter today). Thanks Warlach!
Bookmark Toolbar
John Pederson told me how to use the bookmark toolbar on Firefox and Safari for faster reading of overnight tweets. Excellent idea providing a quick and fast solution.
John said “set up a folder on that toolbar called “Twitter”. Inside that folder bookmark the twitter pages e.g. Twitter1 for home, then go one page “older” in Twitter and bookmark that, calling it “Twitter1″. Continue doing that until you get to “Twitter10″. Then when you want to quickly scan back through all pages go to the Twitter folder and click on open all in Tabs.
As John points out you can’t go back more than 10 pages by pressing on older at the bottom of your twitter page but if you ever want to go back further just type the page number in the URL (tip courtesy of Darren Draper) — interesting though you use to be able to use this to go back through your entire history but this is not possible at the moment.
Tracking Feature
Martin asks if hashtags may be useful however the tracking feature of Twitter may be the better option.
Twitter tracking works by setting it up so that anytime someone sends a tweet containing the keyword you want to track it is sent to your IM client.
So I have set up Twitter to notify me of messages to Google Talk and have switched all the people I follow to notify off (because these tweets are already being sent to Snitter). Then to track a term I click on Twitter in Google talk then type track and the term I want to track e.g. people often use suewaters instead of my twitter name dswaters.
Mobile Web
I use m.twitter.com to interface with twitter on my PDA.
FINAL THOUGHT
There is sooo much to twitter that I am bound to have missed tips. Here is a couple that didn’t fit in the above categories. Gigicolo comment that “I wonder if any programmer is trying to develop an application as I can listen (Yes LISTEN) the twitt while I am driving!” was a good one. Can’t support Kevin’s solution of new twitter accounts because I would lose mine.
Please feel free to provide further tips.
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