Tag: Twitter

Its time to say ‘Bye’ to Old Twitter

After moving away from Old Twitter ten months ago and asking users to shift to New Twitter, now its time to say ‘Bye’ to Old Twitter. All users will be upgraded (seems like a package 🙂 ) automatically within this week.

For Nine months the message displayed at the top of screens was just asking users to switch to the new updated Twitter, however the message changed last month to “You will Automatically be upgraded to New Twitter very, very, soon.” (See the pic below).

The color of the top bar was also changed to dark yellow with black text. It also supports a “Switch to New Twitter now!” in white text and blue background.

There are still some people who have a preference for Old Twitter however it seems that the number is very low as compared to the user base of 200 Million.

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2 Tools for Tracking Twitter Unfollowers

Its always good to follow people who tweets matching your interest area but its equally important to unfollow spammers and dead accounts. There are several websites available over the internet which helps you identify and understand your Twitter followers. I discussed about Qwitter around couple of years ago which sends you a weekly email telling about people who unfollowed you.

One of the tools under discussion today will tell you about your followers and other will let you follow or unfollow them.

TwitterCounter

This website generates a line graph for number of followers in a weekly, monthly, quarterly or 6-monthly formats. You can also generate similar graph for following i.e. accounts which you follow. It also allows you to create a bar graph for number of tweets made by you over the same time frame. You can also select an option to receive these stats delivered in your email on a weekly basis.

This website provides you few useful stats regarding your account such as average daily change in followers and following in addition to you global ranking on the basis of your number of followers. You can also compare your stats with 2 other twitter handles to track your growth with other users.

Another nice feature of this website predicts your follower growth after analyzing the past trend or activity of your Twitter handle. You may also get suggestions to improve your twitter account using their Profile Checker feature.

Friend or Follow

This service is an easy way to find all those Twitter accounts that you follow but they are not following you back. This will help to easily identify people whom you can unfollow or more importantly generating a list of people whom you can not send DMs.

Simply enter your Twitter handle (like @thekunalmathur) in the big text box on Friend or Follow homepage and it will generate a grid of accounts that are not following you. You may hover on Twitter display pics to get more information like name, location, bio, following & follower count , number of tweets and last tweet. You may further filter down these stats by Verified, Protected or Normal accounts and have a functionality to view it in List or Grid view.

It also allows you to find out your Fans – people who follows you but you don’t follow them and Friends – people who you follow that follows you.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a microblogging and social networking website which allows you to tell the world, “What are you doing?” by short text messages of 140 characters in length, called “Tweets“. These tweets are  displayed on your profile page called as “Timeline” and gets posted directly on your friends Twitter timelines who are called as “Followers” in Twitter terminology. You can also receive tweets by visiting the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, email or via a third-party application such as Tweetdeck, Hootsuite etc. In addition to Tweets you can also send “Direct Message” to your connections which works similar to emails.

Twitter can be used for both personal and business purposes. It’s a great way to keep in touch with friends and people you want to get connected to such as personalities from Media, Sports, Politics, Entertainment Industry etc. Twitter is a way to quickly spread any information about where you are and what you’re up to. For example, “I’m going for a movie tonight. Anyone wants to join me?”

Businesses can tweet about their company’s latest news, product launches, blog posts etc. With the use of Twitter, companies are interacting with their prospects, clients and customers. Twitter has drastically reduced the time of interaction between clients and companies. In the recent past, we have seen that people are posting their problems on Twitter rather than writing emails or making calls to the companies. This also holds good in case of appreciating any brand or product by actual users.

How are you using Twitter?

Who Unfollowed you on Twitter? Find out using Qwitter

It feels good to get a mail whenever someone follows you over Twitter but losing a follower is not so happening event.  Even worse, you can not figure out that who stopped following you (in case you have a good number followers).

To solve this problem, you can now use Qwitter to track people who stopped following you. The application requires your Twitter handle and an email address to send you a weekly email showing all your Twitter unfollowers (see below pic)

Now, you can find out that which Tweets made you lose followers. This is a Free application so go ahead and make best use of it.

Twellow – A search engine for Twitter

There is a new search engine in the online world. Is it another competitor to the daddy of search engines called as Google? No, its a new search tool for discovering Twitter users that may change the way people use the microblogging service and it has been named as called Twellow.

Twellow has indexed approximately 300,000 Twitter users and sorted them into categories such as marketing, graphic design, entertainment, education and several others. This will help to find users at a same place who have mentioned these keywords in their Twitter biographies. They have also created sub-categories as well for example, Entertainment has television, humor, entertainers etc. as its sub categories.

By default, if you search for some keyword, results are sorted according to number of followers. However, you can also sort the list as per most recent activity. If you are unable to find yourself over Twellow then you may also add yourself. It also provides you an option to subscribe for RSS feeds for each category and its sub-category which will be very useful to track tweets or follow contacts from a specific category.

Living without Twitter with No Regrets

I was going through my normal routine this morning of IV’ing my daily allotment of caffeine into my system, reading my email, going through my blog feeds in FeedDemon and then finishing up with a good round of FriendFeed when I realized something. My Twitter client wasn’t running, and in fact, it hadn’t been running for almost three days.

You know what?

I hadn’t missed not seeing all those tweets go by one little bit, which made me wonder if this whole thing about being available all the time wasn’t as important as it is cracked up to be. After all, I successfully get all my important stuff dealt with through either email or IM. As a matter of fact someone who wanted to talk to me about something specific got a hold of me with no problem via both Skype and MSN Messenger because that information is right there on my WinExtra blog’s About page. It wasn’t until this morning when I was checking my email that I even knew that he had followed me on Twitter.

Sure I use FriendFeed and some will say that is the same thing, only a little different. Well if it is the same or even the same but a little different, why do I need to worry about Twitter anymore? The funny thing is that I probably wouldn’t have been interested in Twitter as much as I have been if it wasn’t for the fact that I wrote a desktop client for it at one time. I might have gotten caught up in it the same way that I have with FriendFeed but there is the rub – why do I need both anymore?

As it is, I have enough communication tools running at any one time on my system that if someone really needs to get a hold of me they can. Whether it be by email, IRC, IM or even FriendFeed, I am reachable. Do we really need to have this feeling that we must be in constant contact with people? What is this pressure for constant contact really bringing to the table for us? I always joke in the WinExtra IRC chatroom that “Just because it’s called a chatroom doesn’t mean you have to chat” and I have seen the better part of the day go by before anyone says anything other than “pass the coffee.”

Communication is a great thing but over-communication I think can also be a detriment. We seem to want to spend so much time talking about literally nothing in order it seems to justify our use of these tools. Communication tools are meant to enhance our lives and our work but it seems that they have become more of a means to lose ourselves in the mundane instead.

Do you really need this hyper-connectivity or could you live without Twitter as well?

Courtesy: Mashable.com

Twitter Got $15 Million in Funding

Twitter finally cleared all silent whispers regarding the $15 Million funding. Still not confirmed but according to the rumors, Boston based Spark Capital is the new lead investor in this funding. Existing investor Union Square Ventures also participated in the funding. This new funding will bring Twitter’s valuation to about $80 million.

This funding is timely as Twitter is clearly experiencing a growth spurt in users with constant server outages. The interesting trend to watch will be the advertising standard that will be used in micro-blogging services like Twitter.

Is Facebook feeling Threat from Twitter?

Facebook started a new concept of copying other websites to enhance its features. The users  can  now post their “Status Updates” just like Twitter allowing them to  tell their friends what they are doing at any point of time. So Facebook has copied or imbibed a feature similar to Twitter with a minor change enabling the posting and reading with status updates via SMS. It’s a move that kills off any possibility of a link up between the two. Google and Yahoo are most likely to be interested in buying Twitter these days. Yahoo would most likely buy it because it’s cool and then recently it failed to acquire Facebook. That said, Yahoo is currently ahead of Google when it comes to interest in expanding to big social media networks.