Fantar - Brand Your Twitter Avatar

Tweetphoto launched a new service called Fantar. Fantar is "fan + avatar". Brands can create fantars for users to update their current Twitter avatar with a branded message or logo. Now the service only offers four categories of brands right now: Charity, Internet, Music, and Sports. There are a total of 12 brands participating in this service currently. I expect more brands will jump on board. Right now Music is the largest category with Kiss, Lenny Kravitz, Rob Thomas, Counting Crows, John Legend, Matisyahu, and Demi Lovato.

The service is real easy to use. All you need to do is to log in with your Twitter credentials (not sure why they are not using oAuth). Then the service pulls in your current Twitter avatar. You get to select the brand you want to add and then choose one of the many versions to preview. One thing I did not like is that some of the brands want to put their whole logo as your avatar. I think the smarter brands will use a smaller footprint to brand the avatar.

Tweetboard - A Twitter Sidewiki

The Twitter application, Tweetboard, acts as a "Twitter-power forum" for your web site. I like to equate it to the new Google sidewiki. It is a sidebar tab that flies out to display your site's latest tweets and then proceeds to thread any conversations. Tweetboard also provides the ability to post a comments to the forum as well as notify the visitor of any new Tweets since their last visit to your site. Tweetboard tries to be real time, but they state that updates could take up to one minute.

My big concern was how much coding would I have to do to install this application and will it work for my site. The makers of Tweetboard made their application platform independent. It is also lightweight as it is only one small line of JavaScript code.

Currently Tweetboard is in private Alpha, but you will need to request an invite through a Tweet from your account. The application is also free and has a knowledgebase to assist in installing the application on several of the major blogging platforms.

Topify - Twitter Email Notifications

I came across Topify which notifies you via email when someone follows you or direct messages you through Twitter. The email notification provides some nice insight into those that start to follow you.

Topify lets you know if you are already following that Twit. If not, you just hit the reply button in your email application and you start to instantly follow that person. The Topify email notification also provides you with the Twit's Following to Follower ratio (a signal used to see how influential that person is). The notification also pulls in the data from Mr.Tweet. Mr. Tweet's data shows how engaging the person is and how many recommendations they have (another signal for influence).

In addition, the notification provides the ability to quickly block the person, unfollow them, or even report them to @spam directly from the email. I find this service very useful as it alerts me to new Twits that are worth the follow (or the block). I recommend signing up this service. It is currently in beta, but they are pretty quick in providing an account.

Twitter Group Lists - Create, Manage, and Share

I came across this interesting site called TweepML. TweepML allows you to create, manage, and share Twitter group lists. This service provides the ability to easily create a Twitter group by either searching on a specific website that has Twitter user names listed on it or allows you to manually enter a list of Twitter users. You then can manage the list, share the list or even embed the listing into your web site. Once the list is completed TweepML provides the ability to also follow the entire list of Twits or choose the individual Twits you would like to follow. The service is free and currently has around 1500 lists created so far.

Twitter Click Tracking Being Implemented

Noticing today that Twitter has implemented click tracking on all links. I think this is part of their bigger plans for business accounts, but could also lead to some type of tracking report for all accounts. You will not notice the tracking link until after you click on a link, but go back and hover over the link and you will see the tracking URL. Here is an example:

/link_click_count?url=http%3A%2F%2Fshorturldomain.com%2Fu1BluI&linkType=web&tweetId=3679734683&userId=9726112&
authenticity_token=1bc57cbc4fb242b0b920ebd8901027d4b221772e

So you will notice that it tracks the outbound link, the type of link (in this case from the Twitter web site), the specific Twitter post id, the account id and some sort of authenticity token.