Daily Tech Bits

Twitter Tool: My Tweeple

One of the things that drives me crazy about Twitter, which I mostly love, is the impossibility of managing my followers and followees easily. The inbuilt interface is clunky and not very helpful and there’s no way you can match up who you are following with who follows you. (Call me a statsaholic, but I like to know that kind of thing.

That’s why I was happy to discover MyTweeple, which syncs with your Twitter account to provide an easy way to manage the people you are following and those who follow you. You can see at a glance:

• who is following you
• who you are following
• if the following is mutual

And that’s not all. You get an at-a-glance view of their profile, so you can see their website, the number of updates they have made, the number of people they are following and who follow them and the ratio of followers to followees. (Not that important to me, but kind of interesting, all the same.) You can block, hide, follow and unfollow from that page and it updates your Twitter account.

Another cool feature is the ability to see people’s latest updates by clicking on the ‘view’ link. You can even indicate which people are being spammy by clicking a ‘ding’ link. I was pleased to see that most of the people who appeared in my stats had no dings, and I plan to look at the others very carefully.

I think that MyTweeple provides some much needed Twitter functionality, and I plan to use it at least until Twitter improves its own tools for managing followers.

Tweeting The News

When I first signed up with Twitter, I didn’t really get it. Not at all. In fact, I suspected that it would be a humongous waste of my time. I did a couple of experimental tweets, then left it alone. Fast forward to March 2008 and I rediscovered Twitter and found all sorts of interesting ways to use it. That will be the subject of another post, perhaps, but it’s made me search out new ways that other people are using it.

The guys at ReadWriteWeb have been using Twitter for journalism. They see it as a great source of breaking news as the 140 character limit actually helps with making quick updates. They’ve also mastered the Twitterview and see it as a good way to poll the public.

We recognize that people using and replying on Twitter may not be generally representative of the population at large, but for qualitative interviews it’s a tool that’s hard to beat.

They also use it for QA and promotion. Read the full article to get some ideas.

Facebook Psychology

If you thought Facebook was just for connecting with friends and playing silly games, then think again. Facebook is more than just a particularly successful social networking site; now it’s also a psychology course. Stanford University professor B J Fogg is teaching a course called Psychology of Facebook. The inspiration from the course came from seeing the social media site as a new form of mass persuasion, in which an unknown application could go viral almost overnight.

The class dissects different aspects of Facebook to see how they work and what users are trying to do with them. Understanding how Facebook works is not just about the social networking site itself, but about other sites that may use similar methodology in the future or, as Fogg puts it, ‘those blockbusters yet to be invented’.

Want to know more? Read this account of a typical Psychology of Facebook class.

Social Media Optimization Explained

Social Media has grown to offer new online technologies to help people share their opinions and experiences with each other in the form of text, links, images, audio and video. It allows businesses to reach their target audience via a whole new channel. Social Media is worldwide and user-driven, which is both good news and bad news for companies as the user community can have enormous power over the reputation of a brand or a company.

There are many different optimization techniques available to the Webmaster including Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Social Media Optimization (SMO) is the most recent and looks at the social aspects of your website helping your business to interact better with your website visitors and customers. The Internet is continually changing and new technologies appear all the time.

SMO is about the strategies used to set up Social Media components on your website that allow your customers to interact and participate with you during their online experience. The whole point is to make your site more accessible to your visitors by allowing them to interact with your content via the following means.

Tagging and Bookmarking
The social web is all about sharing information and tagging your web pages allows people to easily bookmark your content by adding your web pages to their list of favourites on Explorer or one of the many social websites such as Digg, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube.

Blogging
A blog is simply a means of displaying content, one article after another on your website. This allows visitors to easily interact with your business and your services. A blog is easy to set up and is a great way to record daily events on your website.

RSS Feeds
Providing RSS Feeds for your services, products, blogs, etc allows users to know instantly what has changed on your website through the use of a Feed Reader. RSS Feeds help to get your content distributed across the web and is a simple way to tap into the Web 2.0 technology.

Discussion Forum
Forums allow your visitors to discuss and comment on your services and products. This can be of great benefit to companies, as monitoring the Forum will give you the chance to understand your customers and put you in a position to talk to your customers directly and in real time.

Online Videos and Images
Creating videos in the form of Podcasts can be a great way to communicate with your customers and bring life into website. Share your videos and pictures with popular social network sites for optimisation benefits such as YouTube.

Mixx Adds New Features

Mixx, an up and coming, social news site which is quickly becoming one of my favorites recently announced several new features of note. These new developments may not be earth shaking in terms of breaking new ground but they do certainly add to the end-users overall experience.

Here is a list of the new features as reported by the official Mixx Blog:

• Public Groups - Now when you create a group, you can opt to have it accessible to the entire Mixx community.
• Email Digests - A once-a-day update of all activity on Mixx—who Friended you, any comments on your submissions, group activity, and whatever else has been clogging up your in-box.
• Address Book Importer - As the name implies, you can now import your address from any of the four largest email providers.
• On-deck - Allows you to see the stories that are close to crossing into the Popular category.
• More Robust Duplicate Checking - A reworking of the duplicate checker in an effort to catch more duplicates before they are submitted.

Mixx is relatively new but the creators seem to be paying attention to what the end-user wants to see in a social news site. It still has a long way to go but I really like the direction they are headed.

Zivity Founder Bares All

Without a doubt, one of the most controversial startups of 2007 was Zivity. The site basically acts as a social networking venue for aspiring adult models by allowing the models to upload photos and build a following. It’s also one of the first adult sites to receive financial backing from Silicon Valley.

The founders describe the service as:

… a reality media platform for sexy models and beautiful photography where members get to distribute royalties to the models and photos they find appealing via Zivity’s patent-pending dollar-backed voting system. With a $10 subscription, members receive five votes every month to cast for their favorite Zivity stars.

One of the models is co-founder Cyan Banister. Banister already has a set of pictures uploaded but they are apparently strictly PG-13. Next week, she reportedly plans to add another set that includes topless photos, and says that she may go completely nude in future updates.

In 2000, at just 22-years-old, Banister won the “Sexiest Geek Alive” award so she isn’t exactly new to getting attention for her looks but has never gone nude.

You can expect to hear more on Zivity over the next few weeks. They will be expanding the number of beta users and will soon begin to open the site up to some of the 20,000 people who have already signed up to get a peek.

Source: TechCrunch