Tag Archives: tools
10
Feb
Link

5 Essential Spreadsheets for Social Media Analytics

By • February 10, 2012 • Links • Leave a comment

Whilst the social web is all about conversation, interaction and personality none of those things butter any crumpets when it comes to Board Reports. It’s all about cold, hard metrics. Ann Smarty, a search marketer and web entrepreneur, gives us her links to some fantastic resources for getting fast and meaningful metrics.

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15
Jul

Bradford Social Media Surgery Needs Your Help

By • July 15, 2011 • Blog, Community, Policy, Technology • 4 Comments

Recently a group of interested parties met up in a Bier Café in Bradford to discuss how we re-boot the Bradford Social Media Surgery. Yes, there were some cold beverages taken but the main topic of discussion of how we make the BDSMS more relevant and tailored to the people of the district. The concept of Social Media Surgeries was based on an idea by @podnosh and they have spread like wildfire ever since, with surgeries taking place as far afield as Amsterdam and Tokyo. Basically it’s all about people giving up their time to answer questions from voluntary, community and third sector organisations about the web and social media. I myself have been along to other surgeries in York, Leeds and Huddersfield and these all had a very distinct, very local flavour of their own.

Nick also came up with a very handy site which acted as a toolkit for people wanting to run their own surgeries and the infrastructure provided by www.socialmediasurgery.com has been invaluable. Check it out for further info.

Success?

The Bradford Social Media Surgery kicked off in early 2010 having been cooked up by Kevin Campbell-Wright and I in the last knockings of 2009. Since it started we have held six events, taking place on a very roughly quarterly basis and with varying degrees of success. It’s been pretty common knowledge that we’ve been experimenting with the format for about the last nine months having held some private, themed and invite only and events. Assuming that the main barometer of success is attendance then it’s been almost impossible to chart. The people turning up have ranged from an unsustainable thirty right down to an equally unsustainable, but rather more worrying, four. More importantly though, we’d helped some fantastic people and great organisations do some really good stuff and helped people connect a little bit more. At a time when budgets in the sector are being squeezed we’ve noticed a real interest in people and organisations communicating more directly and more cheaply over the web.

We’re really committed to the idea of the surgeries but we’re equally, not to mention painfully, aware that they’ve not perhaps been the success they have in other places. We’re also all really proud of, and committed to, making Bradford a better place and central to that is the idea of helping people communicate and organise themselves better.

A Solution?

For the last six months or so I’ve been talking to people involved and taking soundings from them about what we can do better, what success looks like for us and how we can achieve it. The main sticking point seems to be one of regularity, everybody pretty much agreed that we need to do it more regularly. Some said quarterly, some bi-monthly and some said monthly but everyone seems pretty sure that regularity is the key. Personally I feel monthly is a bit hopeful and it’s also a lot to ask of the host venues. This leads us nicely on to the next item…

Location. The venue of the surgeries to date has essentially been The Gumption Centre (Check them out, they are great and have given a lot to this) and failing that it’s been held at the Central Library’s Learning Zone. The Gumption guys have been great, never charged us a penny and been a superb venue but to make it more accessible to more people we need to move it about a bit. We’d like to take the event out around Bradford district, not just the city centre but to Keighley, to Bingley, to anywhere willing to have us really.

The last discussion point has infrastructure. As I mentioned above, socialmediasurgeryplus has provided a fantastic bit of infrastructure to people looking for an out of the box toolkit type solution for setting up a Social Media Surgery. But for our one to work better, and with the increase in regularity and venues, I think we need to develop our own place for people to find out about the next event, ask questions, get answers and to have an open, honest and peer-to-peer discussion away from the event and to ask for help on specific topics. With this in mind we’ll be putting together a dedicated site, most probably using Buddypress, which does all of these things and, most probably, a few things more too.

What can you do to help?

Well firstly we need you to volunteer in whatever way you can. If you’d like to help people use the web better then we’d love to have you involved. If your organisation can do anything to help then we’d love to have you involved. If you can offer a venue with wi-fi then we would love to have you involved. If you have some spare laptops or desktops you could bring along we’d love to have you involved. If you want to offer tea, coffee, cakes, samosas or pakorahs at a surgery we would love to have you involved. If there’s anything you think you can do to help, even if it’s just advice or ideas, then we would, surprisingly enough, love to have you involved. Leave a comment below and we’ll be sure to be in touch.

Also, we’d love your opinions on the discussion points above. How regular do you think the surgeries should be held? Where would you like to see them? Should those who can afford to make a ‘thank you’ payment to the venue? How do we spread the message better? What do you think would be useful to have on the site? Should it still just be for non-profit organisations? Should we even call it a Social Media Surgery any more?

We’re aiming to kick off the new events in September so we need your input right now. Please leave comment below, or if you are shy you can drop me an email. If you want to be contacted when things are live then just leave a comment with the word ‘contact’ in the box.

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12
Mar

Social Media Training, some reflections

By • March 12, 2010 • Blog, cool, Policy, PR, Technology, Twitter • 1 Comment

Last week I had the pleasure of delivering Totaal’s first large-scale Social Media Training session at Immage Studios in North East Lincolnshire. I have done many a one-on-one and small group session before but this one was a very different animal indeed.

All in all there were twelve different attendees and representatives from two different companies, not to mention three different parts of one company itself, and the spread throughout the room was impressively wide. We had everyone from Office Managers and Receptionists through to Production Staff, Program Managers, Comms Managers, Web Designers and IT Heads.

One of the really interesting things that came out of the day was the engagement levels of the attendees. The social graph was particularly scattered with some people only keeping up with children at university via facebook, others who eschewed the text based social space and preferred video chat, guys who use youtube as their primary channel and some people who used nothing at all. To top that off we also had some people in the room who had twigged on to the potential of the social web as a networking and professional development tool.

In Short then, a pretty excellent cross section of society.

I decided that, as there was so many different agendas from the attendees in the room, that to fill a six hour session with niche, techy, or geeky content was a losing strategy so I focussed the day loosely around three main themes:

  • The characteristics of the Social Web: How sharing, rating and iterating changed everything.
  • The power of the Social Web: How budget needn’t be a barrier and time vs. ROI.
  • Promoting and managing engagement with the Social Web: Policy building to grow communities

I interspersed the session with some videos which broke things up nicely and ensured that I came loaded with biscuits to keep the sugar levels up. Also, I had a bit of a flash of inspiration at the very last minute and decided to add in The ABBA Challenge. Throughout the day I dropped in the titles of well known ABBA songs and the first person to ‘call’ these on the Ning network I set up to support the day got points which went towards the grand prize of £25 of Amazon vouchers. So it’s true what they say “if all else fails, try bribery”!

I probably delivered about half of the subject matter that I had actually prepared due to interesting discussions breaking out all over the place on copyright, the Digital Economy Bill, spam and how the Social Web impacts on brands. The main thing I learned from the day is to keep agile when doing training sessions of this size, be led by the group rather than your schedule.

Anyhow, I’ve already had some lovely feedback from the day and connected with some very, very interesting people. Thanks to Helen Philpot for arranging it all and I hope to be back across soon. Also, check out Channel7’s website if you haven’t already.

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08
Mar

Google Buzz, what’s all the fuss about?

By • March 8, 2010 • Apps, Blog, Technology, Twitter • 1 Comment

buzzformobileFresh on the heels of the release of Google Wave, billed as a panacea to the problems of communicating by email but in reality just a neat little collaborative tool, Google have released their next product, Buzz. As is becoming customary with Google, the hyperbole was again laid on with a trowel, this time they claimed that Buzz would “Kill” Twitter and Facebook. Somebody should really remind these guys that they had the motto “Dont be Evil” for the first ten years of their existence.

Anyway, Google’s unreliable and hyperbolic schpiel apart, will Buzz be the “game changer” guys like Mashable’s Ben Parr say it will? It certainly has the backing, obviously, to make it big and a great plus point – for some anyway – for it is that it’s linked to gmail accounts.

One of the really interesting things about Buzz though, is that it seems to be somewhat of a chameleon network. It seems to change its skin to suit how you access it. Use it from the desktop and it’s a Twitter style aggregator of content from all of your contacts, use it mobile and it’s a location based realtime network generator more like FourSquare or Gowalla.

It’s largely irrelevant to me though, as I’ve never been a fan of gmail it doesn’t really work for me in any real sense. I have no network to contact with. Sure if I want to import one from Windows Live I can but why would I? Everyone I would connect with through Buzz is already on Twitter, my hotmail account only really contains legacy addresses of people I’ve not emailed in the years since I’ve had my own domain.

I’m sure Buzz will be great for some people but not those without gmail accounts and are also not already on Twitter, I’m no fan of ven diagrams but just draw one in your head and see how big the intersection is there.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/feb/15/gordon-brown-piers-morgan-interview
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05
Mar

Twitter plans to finally put squeeze on clients

By • March 5, 2010 • Apps, Blog, Technology, Twitter • 1 Comment

alIt’s always been a bit of a puzzler for me quite why twitter let their client ecosystem blossom so enthusiastically, I blogged about it before a couple of times speculating here about whether they were finally making the move against clients with their lists feature.

Alex Payne, an engineer at Twitter and head of the API Team no less, put out the following Tweet:

“If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees have, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon.)”

It might not sound like much but there’s now such a flourishing, healthy industry that has built up around Twitter clients that it has a lot of people fearing for their livelihoods. Twitter’s back house team are rumoured to have all manner of cool tools they use to develop things with and it seems that they might have now reached a point where they are able to integrate these into a more coherent stream, one that’s able to actually be deployed onto the site.

The Tweet was later clarified

“Uh, everything I like that’s on the employees-only beta site is actually *built* on public API methods we’ve already given developers.“

and

“I just mean that our web client team is building cool stuff. It’s going to inspire desktop app developers. Same data, new perspectives.”

But it seems as though the genie was well and truly out of the bottle as the rumours spread far and wide across, ironically enough, the Twittersphere. The jungle drums appear to be beating louder and louder when you consider that they have just hired UI Specialist Bryan Haggerty from LinkedIn and API Evangelist Taylor Singletary who all but confirmed his next port of call is but this rather lovely cryptic tweet.

Expect everything to be clarified at Twitter’s Chirp Conference taking place in San Francisco on April 14th. If anybody fancies getting me a plane ticket I’ll be eternally grateful.

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02
Feb

Is Twitter’s star finally losing its twinkle?

By • February 2, 2010 • Blog, Technology, Twitter • 1 Comment

It’s pretty fair to say that 2009 was “The Year of the Tweet”. There’s hardly a TV or Radio show or media personality that doesnt have a twitter account. In some cases there are several, with excellent spoofing of some ‘slebs too. In 2009 Twitter users went from five to thirty million users and between 2008 and 2009 it grew by a staggering 1300%. With meteoric growth like that it’s only natural there will be a period of normalisation, the real key to enduring as a service – if that’s what Twitter could be called, I think it’s what describes it best but others seem to infuriatingly want to call it a site – is how this slowing of growth is handled. The graph below shows this plateau over the last year.

twitter graph

I’ve been lucky to speak to, and be spoken to by, several Twitter staffers over the course of the past year and what best characterises them is, apart from all being incredibly smart, the way they seemed to be focussed with keeping the service live in the face of such immense growth. They also have a surprisingly small staff in comparison to other Social Media behemoths. Twitter suffered several major outages over the last year where the service fell over due to volume and the concentration seemed to be, more or less, making it more robust.

As the year went on Twitter also began to roll out a selection of new features like lists and a revamped retweet feature which, whilst not placing significant load on the service, certainly improved and matured the user experience. It’s also perhaps a sign of the fact that these incredibly talented people had finally been let loose on improving and developing the service rather than just plain coping with the demands placed on them by this exponential growth.

is twitter dead?But that said, are all these reports of Twitter’s growth slowing actually accurate? Neilsen certainly think so, claiming that Twitter is suffering from a deficit of user retention, with 40% of Tweeters coming back the next month after joining, as opposed to 60% with Facebook and MySpace.  Twitter, of course, works very differently from anything of its size that has gone before. Facebook and MySpace have also both constructed a product where 99.999% of the interaction takes place on the site. This makes sense on a number of levels, not least advertising where you can serve incredibly well targeted ads to users based on the detailed information held, but the major drawback is that you have to develop software and capacity on a “one size fits all” basis.

The beauty with Twitter of course is that there are a million and one ways to use it over a million and one platforms. None of which are “owned” by Twitter. This multiplicity of platform is a key difference, not only in keeping a smaller more agile development staff, but also to measurement. It’s actually much, much harder to measure Twitter’s usage because of it. See that graph above? Pointless. I’ve done a count of my follower list and – right up to the point where my eyes crossed – I counted about 5% of tweets that actually came “from web”, that is to say directly from the Twitter site itself. The truth is only Twitter know the full story of their usage. But, much like Facebook, reports of Twitter’s demise are way off of the mark.

Anyway,  Hubspot’s “State of the Twittersphere Report – January 2010” posits some quite interesting theories about Twitter and its direction of travel. For those of you who are time poor here’s what they had to say, more or less:

  1. Users are following more, are being followed more and Tweeting more. (Does this look like a drop off to you?)
  2. Biographical information in profiles stood at 24% in July 2009, up to 53% in January 2010
  3. Location information in Profiles stod at 31% in July 2009, rose to 65% in January 2010
  4. URLs in Profiles were around 20% in July 2009, up to 41% in January 2010
  5. 15% of the top 20 Twitter locations in July 2009 were outside America compared to 40% of the top 20 Twitter locations in January 2010 outside America.
  6. Top location in July 2009 – London and still No. 1 in 2010
  7. 82% of Twitter users have less than 100 followers
  8. 81% of Twitter users are following less than 100 people
  9. Thursday and Friday are the most active days on Twitter, each accounting for 16% of total tweets in our study
  10. 10-11 pm is the most active hour on Twitter, accounting for 4.8% of the tweets in an average day
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15
Jan

Ladies and Gentlemen I give you the single biggest threat to the Social Web

By • January 15, 2010 • Blog, Technology, Twitter • 2 Comments

bringdownie6Chances are that, if you know anybody involved in web development, design or usability, you will already be aware of this but I’m still amazed by how many aren’t. The biggest threat that the Social Web faces today isn’t authoritarian governments, lack of broadband availability or even piracy or hackers. This pervasive threat actually comes from the company that, more likely than not and in one way or another, you are reading this blog courtesy of.

That’s right, the single biggest threat faced today by the Social Web is – dun, dun, duunnnnnnnn – Internet Explorer 6. This isn’t a hatchet job and I’m not a hater of Micro$oft by any means which, given the fact that I own a machine running Windows Vista, surprises even me sometimes. Even Microsoft themselves would suggest you download the later versions of IE and they made the thing! So, it’s probably best then, that I explain what I mean when I say it’s the Osama Bin Laden of browsers. IE6 was first shipped in August 2001, yes that’s before most of us even knew who Bin Laden was, which by anyone’s reckoning is nearly a full eight and a half years ago. Now, I am not a neophile, my car is older than that and – I’ll be honest with you here – so are some of my clothes but just imagine how long a time that is in the world of the internet.

2001Back in 2001 you could almost name your price for any business with a domain name attached to it, almost nobody used google, we were all allowed to download anything we wanted from Napster for free and without fear of legal recourse from our ISPs and the closest thing to the Social Web were sites like FARK, Slashdot and technology like ICQ and MSN Messenger. It’s safe to say that nowdays the web is a very, very different place. So why, even now when the web has moved on immesurably, do roughly 20% of users still browse the web using IE6? I guess the short answer would be the good old fashioned combination of laziness/ignorance. It’s actually different in some Third World countries where web usage is more likely to be via mobile web where it’s actually factory shipped but lets skip over that, it’s fairly safe to say that you aren’t very likely to be reading this from Thailand. So, in an effort to spread the word, here’s why you should upgrade post-post-post-haste if you are using IE6.

Aesthetics:

Aesthetically IE6 is awful, without getting too technical, it’s not really designed to interpret web pages made in the last few years. You know all of those lovely drop shadows, rounded corners, shaded edges and layers? No? Well you must be using IE6. It doesnt even support CSS2! Good designers will factor in workarounds for sites to look passable in IE6 but even the best will sometimes spend hours cursing it, going grey and grinding their teeth. They shouldn’t be doing this though, it’s a waste of everyone’s time that they have to, good designers should be doing better designs and not enslaving theirselves to a technology that, if it were on TV would be in black and white.

Functionality:

i_trash_ie6_tshirt-p235178687636954278q6iv_210An interesting thing has begun to happen around the web, if you use IE6 then some sites will actually implore you to switch or upgrade your browser. Others on the other hand just plain wont work. Twitter, for instance, began doing so around the middle of last year and I virtually jumped out of my chair when they did. Youtube followed suit not long after, and much more brutally too. This isn’t sniffy high mindedness on their part though, it’s for a perfectly valid reason. A lot of the applications that now drive the Social Web actually struggle to work with IE6. Again, without getting too technical, and to use the simplest analogy to hand, it’s like running a car on unleaded petrol when it doesn’t have a catalytic converter. Sure it might work but you’ll be in for a bumpy ride and you’ll more than likely break down pretty quickly. What’s more, you’ll get where you are going terribly slowly.

Security:

If the last two didn’t get you switching then this one will. “As of January 10, 2009, security advisory site Secunia reports 142 vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 6, 22 of which are unpatched”. Tossing aside the likely hood that, if you are still using IE6, you will more than likely have not updated your security patches for it, that is still 22 security flaws in your browser. 22 Separate ways which nasties can still infiltrate your personal data and do beastly things to all your lovely data. I just hope you don’t bank with it.

So there you have it, switch if you can. If you are in a company using ie6, which my last company were up until last year, picket the IT department, send them this link. If you know someone who uses it shun them like a leper. It’s for the good of the Social Web remember, the less time spent on catering on nearly decade old technology the quicker progress will be.

Bin IE666 people, you know it makes sense.

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06
Oct

Future of Web Apps highlights (#fowa)

By • October 6, 2009 • Apps, Blog • 3 Comments

signIt’s official, Carsonified‘s excellent Future of Web Apps conference in London chewed me up, spat me out and landed me back in sunny Yorkshire. I’ve had a ball over the three days catching up with some friends and generally talking tech stuff with tech people. Really the only apt way to describe it would be would be “awesome”, which of course  is pronounced “ah-sum”. I was my first time at FOWA, I was desparate to go last year but underestimated the pull of the event and it got sold out from under me. This was of course made worse over the following few weeks as I heard and read so may good things about it. I was massively excited to see what all the fuss is about at 09, so much so that I enrolled in the workshops the day before. There is though, a rather finite amount you can contribute to workshops if you have been on a train since 6am in the morning. I was also planning to do a little live blogging experiment but had a few technical issues, namely the charger being 200 miles away. So yeah, sorry about that too.

Slightly ironically for a web-centric conference though, the wi-fi was a real issue. Ryan Carson promised us “Weapons Grade wi-fi” but sadly I could barely get a connection, either on wi-fi or my iPhone, for the whole two days. There were also some grumbles from those who had been before who objected to the slightly heavy-handed presence of some of the title sponsors Microsoft, Vodafone, Sun and Paypal. It was a great conference though and rather than go through speaker by speaker, theme by theme, I thought I’d just quickly run through some of the highlights for you all.

Francisco Tomalsky, 280North

Introducing Atlas: A Visual Development Tool for creating Web Applications

280North are a fantastic company formed by Francisco Tomalsky and two college friends, all of whome were former employees of Apple and worked on iTunes and iPhone development. You may know 280North’s work, they are the guys responsible for Cappucino, an open source application development framework for developing web applications that look and feel like desktop applications and 280Slides, the presentation software that works in your browser.

Probably one of the stars of the whole show, Tomaskly gave a simultaneous talk and live demo of Atlas, another wonderful Cappuchino tool which makes creating web apps an absolute doddle. Without going into too much detail or giving too much away, if you can resize boxes then you will be able to create web apps in Atlas. The presentation was so well received that they called him back the next day to show everyone more of what Atlas can do.

Bruce Lawson, Opera

The Future of HTML 5bruce

Bruce is a big personality and has a passion for the internet and within seconds of him taking the stage he lets you know it. This was probably the most eagerly anticipated talk of the whole two days with many people staying glued to the good seats through the afternoon interval.

Bruce’s style borders on that of one of my favourite all time comedians, Mark Thomas, and whilst peppered with jokes and witty asides the stuff that he talked us through was pretty mouth watering. HTML 5′s dynamic graphics capabilities alone were worthy of an entire lecture and the demo of the new feature “canvas” took the form of a first person shooter game (ala Quake, Doom, Wolfenstein etc) which impressed the audience. Bruce, claiming claiming he was “not of a militaristic bent” decided to rejig this and instead showed the audience a first person flower giving game instead.  The bad news about canvas is that it isnt yet accessable (for the visually/hearing impared, that is) but it can be worked around if you use .svg graphic formats as the text is still treated as text.

We were told that we should “think of HTML 5 as a broad form, rather like AJAX” rather than like anything that went before. There’s tons and tons of other very cool stuff that HTML5 can do as standard, multiple file uploads, local and session cookie storage, and a wonderful facility to embed (and thus tinker with) video right in the browser window. There will also be no more calling in of javascript libraries to validate forms as they will be automatically validated in 5 and there are also all sorts of nice things like calendar widgets which should make your designer and developer’s lives a lot easier.  Very exciting indeed.

Aza Raskin, Mozilla

How people will use the web in the future

azaMozilla are great, firefox is great, all of the add ons are great and rather unsurpisingly Aza’s presentation was great. Rather than talk about specific technology he chose instead to look into the future to see what we should be expecting from our browsing experience. Aza asked us to think of the browser “as a broker of trust, as an insanely smart butler”.

He also intruduced us to Ubiquity, probably the most forward thinking add-on available which acts on an intuitive command system based on wants and requests, Aza took us through the many steps that we go through to do what in reality are small, simple tasks online. Ubiquity is an impressive concept, far too esoteric to describe with any brevity, and Aza probably summed it up best by saying “with google you type what you want to fine, with Ubiquity you type what you want to do”.

Ed Anuff & Mike Malone, Six Apart.

The Future of Social Web Apps

Ed and Mike from Six Apart, the company that brought you Barack Obama’s MyBo social tool, took us through some of the developments around Motion, their new tool for the Movable Type platform and Typepad. Motion promises microblogging features which replicate Pownce, Tumblr or Twitter. Activity streams like FriendFeed and really easy OpenID sign in support for commenters, including both Google Accounts and Facebook Connect. I also attended the product pitch on this and it’s a really great tool that I’ll be fiddling with in the future.

Bonus video section:

Kevin Rose, Digg

How to get your site from 1 to 1,000,000,000 users

Cnet review of FOWA

photoAnyway, so with my melon twisted and my mind rammed full of the knowledge of those much smarter than me I headed off into the night and back up north to Yorkshire. But first there was one little thing that I had to settle before I could jump on the train, my little girl had asked me – perfectly reasonably for a two year old I suppose – for a pink dinosaur. The only place I could think of that would even possibly have a pink dinosaur would be the Natural History Museum. I was in luck, one pink dinosaur under my arm it was back off to Kings Cross and the train north.

Thanks to the guys at Carsonified for a great few days.

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23
Jun

Five Twitter tools that you’d be mad not to use

By • June 23, 2009 • Apps, Blog • 9 Comments

twitterObviously Twitter being news isnt really news any more, strangely though many people I know who have embraced digitality with admirable gusto still dont really get it. Essentially what happens is that Josh or Jade Public sign up to their Twitter account, look up @wossy etc and then wander off bored. Try as I might I have tried to explain the concept of Twitter but often many people want their social experience served up on a plate ala facebook.

Anyway, Twitter is not great in and of itself. What makes Twitter great is the fact that the code and content can be molded and shaped into any number of different things and presented in a myriad of ways. Anyway, what I’ve attempted to do here is bring together my five favorite Twitter apps, there are probably about another 10-15 that I’d reccomend people to use for specific purposes.

Number One

Tweetdeck:

Simply wonderful application that allows me to segregate my pretty large band of followers into manageable groups, I use this on my own account and even though you have to download it it’s pretty robust and easy to use. It also has a lovely search facility and shortens your urls for you quickly and easily. Oh and it also shows your facebook friends status to boot.

Number Two

MobyPicture:

Mobypic has been around for a fair old while now, essentially it allows mobile phone camera users to upload their photos and videos and tweets a link to your tweeple. It also works with facebook, youtube, blogger, wordpress etc etc. It’s pretty simple to use and a great way of enhancing your tweeting experience.

Number Three

Autopostr:

This service lets your friends in Twitter know when you post a new picture on Flickr, similar to MobyPicture but obviously flickr based.

Number Four

Twitterfeed:

If like me you run a blog then you’ll find this absolutely invaluable, TwitterFeed checks the RSS feed to my blog every hour (or whenever you like) and if something new has appeared in the feed it takes the link and tweets it for me. It allows me to customise the tweets so I can add a little message (”new on Totaal:” for example) so followers know what the link is.

Twitterfox:

Twitterfox is a great little firefox extension that turns your Firefox browser into a twitter client. It isnt in any way obtrusive, in fact it goes out of its way not to be. It notifies you subtly when your friends update their tweets and allows you to tweet directly from your browser. Great for work based twittering with unsympathetic bosses.

So there you have it, like I say it’s by no means an exhaustive list, just a quick run down of the apps which I find most valuable. Before anybody starts, I wouldve added Seesmic but to be honest I prefer tweetdeck and the assumption I made was that early twitterers would have enough on their plate without multiple accounts to juggle.

(Phil, Sue, Dale) This post is for you BTW :-)

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