Which Class Of Twitter Users Are You In?

Chris Brogan has published an interesting article where he reviews his use of Twitter and comes up with a few different classifications of Twitter users.

Out of the different classes of Twitter users that Chris presents, I have determined that I am within the Announcers vs. Conversationalists class.

Announcers vs. Conversationalists

This is a current hammer-target for Eric Rice. He’s railed out about people (including me) using Twitter as a promotion engine. I understand this, insofar as some people do nothing but twitter links to their blog posts, their flickr pictures, and whatever else turns them on. (Note: I will Twitter that I posted this article when I’m done writing it).

But conversationalists know to use a mix. They talk with other Twitter users, using the @ function to make sure people see the threaded conversation. They engage with the flow of people twittering around them, building a social sculpture, and engaging in what Jeff Pulver calls amorphic communications. Conversationalists reach into Twitter and move people back and forth.

In the beginning, Twitter was a social networking tool that I believed I could use as a promotional stepping stone for my blog. I added all sorts of people to my friends list because I knew, most people would end up following me simply because I chose to follow them. After using Twitter for a few months now, I have changed my way of thinking. I still use Twitter as a tool to share postings on my blog that I think are good conversation starters, but I also participate in conversations with those I follow. I’m also beginning to follow only those people that I actually have an interest in.

I’m currently being followed by 54 people while I’m actually following 84 people. I wonder just how many of those that are following me actually give a damn as to what I post on Twitter. I am also starting to wonder if I should delete everyone that I am following and start over from scratch. Now that I have a sense as to the correct way of using Twitter as a social tool, I think I should either start over, or I should fine tune my friends list.

Thank you Chris Brogan for the inspirational post. It’s really made me step back and realize how and why I’m using Twitter.

If you enjoy what I write on this blog and you have an account on Twitter, consider adding me http://twitter.com/jeffr0 I need more social-media, social-web, web2.0 people to converse with. Outside of the Internet, no one has a freaking clue about Web 2.0 or any of the cool stuff going on in the Cyberworld.

Yappd Finally Getting Somewhere

Yappd, the service that was awarded my first negative review which can be read here, has released a few updates which finally make the service worth using. These updates include uploading photos, public API and TinyURL Support.

Yappd members can now upload photos via their web site. Yappd has also added in support so that you’ll be notified if friends on your watchlist have posted any Yappd messages. If your a developer, and for some reason would like to integrate Yappd into your application or website, you can now visit http://yappd.com/api to tap into their Beta API.

Yappd claims they are focusing on the capabilities of their platform by allowing member’s of other microblogging websites, to have their other “messages” posted as Yapps automatically. Another item on their to do list includes, expanding their mobile carrier support for picture messaging and international support.

With these updates in mind, I may have to go back to the Yappd site and give it another try.

SHOULDdoTHIS – The Internet Suggestion Box

Here is an interesting site I came across the other day. It’s quickly being referred to as the internet suggestion box. SHOULDdoTHIS resembles Twitter with unique spin on the micro-blogging idea.

This is one of the few services I have come across that supports logging in by using my OpenID user account, which made creating a registered account a breeze. I wish more sites would include this type of login access. In my opinion, OpenID will play a big role in creating a unified login across multiple sites. So the more sites that support OpenID, the better.

While Twitter provides an avenue for you to tell the world ‘What Are You Doing?‘ SHOULDdoTHIS allows you to give your opinion as to what should be done, and who it should be done by. For example, in the ‘Someone Field‘ I typed in EA. In the ‘do something great field‘ I typed in ‘Should release one last major patch to Battlefield 2‘. Unlike the 140 character limit found on other micro-blogging services, there doesn’t appear to be any limit to the amount of text that can be placed within the ‘Do Something Great‘ field. After I clicked the submit button, my suggestion was published to my account where users can do a number of different things.

On the right hand side of the site, users can choose whether or not the suggestion is likely or unlikely to happen. Underneath of that, users can guesstimate when the suggestion will take place. Suggestions can be tagged but as I was browsing around, the tags feature didn’t appear to be used by quite a few people. Just like Twitter, each user has an RSS feed attached to their account. After adding a suggestion, there is a text area which appears at the bottom of the post which lets users give a detailed explanation as to their suggestion. I believe this is a nice touch as quite a few suggestions can not be explained in a short amount of detail.

Final Thoughts:

Everyone has an opinion, and this service let’s you get your opinion out in the open. If Robotcoop releases a public API for SHOULDdoTHIS, I see no reason as to why sites and services, especially those with actual products wouldn’t use something like this as a suggestion box. SHOULDdoTHIS is not a Twitter clone as I feel the service has taken the micro-blogging idea and put a very nice twist to it. Considering there are sponsored ads that appear on user account pages, this site already has a monetization model, but if they charged a price to use their service for commercial use, I think they would do very well.

If you sign up and give the service a try, let me know what YOU think.

Track Web 2.0 Startups With StartUp Search

Track the crazy Web 2.0 startup race from an investor perspective by using StartupSearch.org

StartupSearch.org is a directory of startup companies, products and investors that are changing the landscape of the web. At the time of this writing, there are 76 companies, 86 products, and 136 investors that are being tracked. StartupSearch takes information about new startup companies and compiles the information into easy to digest profile pages. Let’s use Twitter as an example.

Twitters profile page displays information such as, company founders, funding, photos tagged with Twitter, company address, Twitter specific news brought you by an RSS feed, and a Googlemaps image showing the location of their headquarters.

Each company that is profiled on StartupSearch receives a Startup score. A Startup score is made up of two parts, buzz and traffic. The buzz score is a measurement of the conversations taking place on the net involving the product. StartupSearch tracks unique citations excluding the originating site, total and unique links from the blogosphere, mentions within blog posts, and other mentions.

The traffic score measures a site’s visitors as well as the site’s visitor behaviour as reported by StartUpSearch’s traffic sources. Here are the elements that make up the traffic score: total unique users, total visits, visists per users, and other metrics which help to determine the overall behaviour of the site’s visitors.

One last thing to mention before I let you go. StartUpSearch provides an RSS feed which contains a weekly wrap-up of news related to the companies being tracked. This could be a nice addition to your feedreader to stay ahead of what’s happening.

Overall, StartUpSearch does a wonderful job in presenting company specific information. I have to imagine that there are more than 76 companies online that need to be tracked but because the site is maintained by only one person, it’s probably a moot point in trying to track every startup company that comes online.

If you happen to visit this site, let me know if you like the way StartUpSearch displays company information when compared to CrunchBase Techcrunch’s version of company profiles.

Twitter Introduces Profile Search Feature

Twitter has pushed out a new feature dubbed “Profile Search“. This new features adds a search bar to your profile page, allowing you to search for like minded users.

The new search function allows users to search across information such as name, location, bio and url. This is intended to help users find other ‘like minded‘ individuals to follow. For instance, I did a search for ‘Ohio‘. As it turns out, there are 690 Twitter users who have Ohio listed as their location in their Twitter profile. That’s nothing compared to the 1,930 Twitter users who live in California which is then trumped by New York with 2,155 people. Just for giggles, I searched for ‘web 2.0‘ which netted me 277 results.

So now, instead of randomly following people and claiming them to be your friend, use the search tool to find Twitter users with similar interests.

Yappd Support Question Answered

Yappd, the non Twitter Killer has responded to my support email. In my email, I asked them how to add images to Yappd postings. Here is what they replied to me with.

The way you add pictures right now is only by cell phone through picture message. Early next week we will add photos upload from the website.

You read it here first folks. Next week, Yappd will allow users to send images along with their posts. I don’t want to bag on Yappd anymore than I already have, (see my review Yappd Reviewed – Non Twitter Killer ) But this feature should of been released with the service on day 1. However, I’d say thanks to Yappd for responding to my email.

Yappd Reviewed – Non Twitter Killer

As mentioned on AppScout and TechCrunch, Yappd is a Twitter like service which gives users the additional privilege of posting an image along with their Yappd message. Lets take a tour of this service to see if it’s the new Twitter.

Synopses:

Yappd is a brand new company founded by three individuals, Brendan Lim, Brent Collier, and Andrew Tilt. The two founders, Brendan and Brent, both are Software Engineers that decided that it was important to let your friends quickly see what you’re doing. Also, to develop it quickly, the two founders decided to develop Yappd using Ruby on Rails.

Signing Onto The Bandwagon:

The signup process for Yappd is fairly straightforward. What is required to create an account? A first name, last name, preferred username, email address, and preferred password. The standard mojo.

Using Yappd:

Once you log into your Yappd account, the first thing you’ll most likely notice is the Twitter/Jaiku like text area where you can type in your message. Notice how many characters Yappd gives you, 150. Thats right, 10 more characters than what those other guys offer to help you get your point across!

Your watch list, or what is more commonly known as your friends list, is located on the left hand side of your user page. Once you add someone to your watch list, you can watch what they Yapp about from your user account page. One of these days, one of these services are going to use the word STALK as a way to add and monitor friends. At any rate, the Yappd layout is pretty similar to Twitter and Jaiku as all three use Tabs as a way to distinguish between your own messages, your friends messages, and all messages.

Yappd provides a few different ways of posting messages. You can either yapp by email, website, or phone. If you want to yapp by phone, all you have to do is send a text or picture message to yapp@yappd.com. Your yapp will be posted within 1-2 minutes. You can yapp by e-mail the very same way you yapp by phone. Just shoot off your yapps to yapp@yappd.com. Your yapp will be posted within 1-2 minutes. What about the cost, associated with using your phone to yapp? Yappd does not charge you any fee to yapp by phone. You will, however, get charged, the normal rate for a text or picture message from your mobile phone carrier.

A feature almost not worth mentioning is the REMIND ME feature, which if enabled in your privacy settings allows other Yappd users to essentially poke you. This feature is suppose to remind users that they haven’t Yappd in awhile. This small feature reminds me of the POKEing going on in the world of Facebook, just on a smaller scale. I’m glad that Yappd decided to make this a user enabled or disabled feature as I’m sure most folks would not have to be reminded that they are neglecting to Yapp.

Now, I realize the title for this article highlights the fact that in some way shape or form, you can add images to your Yapp messages. I have to admit, I can’t figure out how to perform this function of the service. I have sent an email, asking their support team how this feature works and how it’s defined. I am beginning to think that you can only add images to your Yapp account through a camera enabled mobile phone but until they reply to my email, it’s anyones guess. I tried visiting their HELP section but honestly, it didn’t really HELP me.

Conclusion – Final Thoughts

With Twitter and Jaiku being considered established leaders within their niche (micro-blogging) , I am pretty disappointed to see a service such as Yappd come online without at least, if not more, functionality and features than their competition. I don’t understand why companies who want to enter this space don’t end up taking what’s already available and taking it to the next level. Instead, these companies come online and they look like barebone versions of their competition.

Yappd, has no way of allowing you to direct message your friends, doesn’t have an XML or RSS feed of your own messages, no way to customize the look of your Yappd page, no way to embed your Yappd status or messages into your blog or some other website, no clear concise documentation which would really make the help section, the HELP section and is missing even more features from both Jaiku, Twitter and Pownce that I care to mention.

This is the kind of crap that gives credence to the ongoing debate on whether or not, we are in a Web 2.0 bubble. I will withhold my thoughts and feelings as that is another blog post for another day, but if any of you Yappd guys read this, please as soon as possible, make your site something worth switching too. I’d love to see a blog post from Yappd that explains their vision and where they plan on taking this service as I’ve already seen one of their employees Yapp about how they plan to be around for the long term. I’m sorry, but unless you guys do something revolutionary or at the very least ‘catch up’ there won’t be a long term.

iWebTools Visual Page Rank Checker

Using this tool will enable you to view all the links along with the pageranks on the page that you require to view.

For those that do not have the SearchStatus FireFox extension which shows you a sites pagerank along with it’s Alexa ranking, can use this site to figure out the page rank of not only that web site, but of all the sites that link to that particular page.

Giving this tool a try using my URL, I noticed just how many sites I link to which have a page rank of 5 or higher. The visual pagerank checker loads the website in question and then places little pagerank icons next to every link within the website. What is interesting about this tool, is that, I can actually view the page rank for a tag which is linked to Technorati. For example, the tags blogger, podcasts, seo, and twitter all have a pagerank value of 6.

Give this tool a whirl yourself and let me know what you think. http://www.iwebtool.com/visual_pagerank

My Second Co-Hosted Talkcast On Talkshoe

It turns out that Pete’s apprentice has quit the program. I think the thoughts of blogging, twitter and everything else just became too much to wrap his head around.

Since the apprentice was no longer going to be on the show, I ended up co-hosting another podcast with Pete most commonly known as xyour925job. In this latest episode, we discussed SEO, I gave an audio review of 10Links.net and shared my user experience. We then discussed Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce and why they are useful services that should be used by every blogger.

I told Pete how well my site has been doing, despite being new. I talked about a few of the strategies I have used so far and how I plan on gaining traffic in the future. At the very end of the show I mentioned that the podcastawards were taking votes for the best podcasts. The show is about an hour long. We didn’t have any callers or any chatters for that matter in this episode which means Pete and I had to try and do the show without tanking for 60 minutes. Hopefully, I provided some good information for you to use. I wouldn’t mind some critique as I am thinking about doing my own show. Any tips or words of encouragement would be appreciated.

To listen to the latest episode of the Internet Marketing And SEO Tips Podcast click the following link to download the mp3 file.

Poll Results Regarding Pownce

Earlier in the month of July, I asked visitors the question if, Pownce will ever triumph over the competition? After allowing the poll to be published for 30 days, here are the results.

17 of you voted NO,
9 of you voted MAYBE
while only 6 of you voted YES.

Granted this poll was created in the beginning of the month before the announcement of Pownce releasing a public API in September.

I personally think because of the type of financial backing in combination with the people who are directly involved with the service, it will be quite awhile before Pownce disappears off of the radar. I honestly don’t use Pownce as much as I use Twitter simply because I can’t tie my Twitter updates into Pownce.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of the woodwork in terms of Pownce related plugins/mashups due to the API being released. Perhaps someone will develop a way for me to Pownce through Twitter.

On a side note, please vote on my new poll question which is: Should I Produce A Podcast For This Site? I am seriously thinking of starting up a show on Talkshoe but I’d like to know if there is an audience who would be willing to participate in the show. I have a vague idea as to what I would like to accomplish with the show, so please cast your vote and let me know.

Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff

The Musings Of Jeff Chandler

twitter