Tweleted - Find Deleted Tweets

A co-worker and myself got into a whole discussion about how people are leaving a digital footprint that you can never delete. He mentioned to me that even if you "deleted" a tweet that others can still find it on the Internet. He then proceeded to show me some of his old tweets that he "deleted" on a site called Tweleted. Tweleted scans the last couple of hundred tweets for a particular user and displays these so called "deleted" tweets. So just because you deleted something on the Internet does not always mean it was really deleted.

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.

MegaTweet - SuperTweet on Steroids

Once again @pageoneresults has out did himself. He originally brought us the SuperTweet. Now we have the MegaTweet, a concatenated SMS. A concatenated SMS can consist of up to 255 separate SMS messages. Here is a screenshot with the explanation.

Brand Your Tweets - What Every Brand Manager Needs To Do

One of the first steps to brand your Tweets is to use a custom URL shortener. Coke is a great example of how they created their own branded URL shortner, http://cokeurl.com/. This reinforces their brand, gives credibility to the shorten URL, and ensures that they have no broken links if a URL shortening service goes belly up (read about tr.im). There are several resources to find a URL shortening script, but make sure you read Danny Sullivan's article, URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Should You Use?, to understand what you should look for in a URL shortening service.

When you post from an application like CoTweet, TweetDeck, or Twitterfon, the tweet posts a statement containing the date of publication of the tweet and at what source you have posted the message from. So in the above Coke example you will see that they posted this tweet from CoTweet. The actual text "CoTweet" links back to the CoTweet.com site. So why not do what all of these other applications do and create the tweet from your own domain?

If Coke was forward thinking they would have created a Twitter application on their own domain and thus have the capability to brand this "from" link. This would totally brand the entire tweet. Why allow these third party apps to get all the glory?

Now your are asking do I need to put in the time and resources to create my own Twitter application? Well not exactly. A French programmer developed a PHP script to allow you to set up a brandable Twitter "from" link. The translated article can be found here. Now the script requires PHP5 and an Twitter oAuth account. This script was originally designed to exploit the fact that these "from" links were DoFollow links. Not sure if this script was the reason why Twitter recently closed that loop hole and started to noFollow these "from" links (first reported here).

I recently tested this script and here is a screenshot of my Tweet.

FavTwit - Announce Your Favorite Twitter User

Just launched is a new Twitter Application that asks the question “Who’s your Favtwit?” FavTwit allows users to announce who their favorite twitter user is. People can do this at the Favtwit website or by direct messaging Favtwit.

Dennis Dornon, the creator of FavTwit, calls it a "Silly Twitter App”

Although he calls it a "Silly Twitter App" I do see a couple benefits of such an application:

First, once it’s in full swing you will be able to tell who’s popular among other users of FavTwit and these users could be worth a follow.

Secondly, by using the Top Friends report you can find twitter users who actually interact with others.

The site uses Twitters OAuth for security but if you still can’t be bothered logging in you can send a DM to @Favtwit with @username and it will post both to the site and to Twitter.

Take a moment and pop over to Favtwit and answer the question of “Who’s your Favtwit?”

Characteristics of the Top 5% Most Active Users on Twitter

I came across an interesting Twitter study, Inside Twitter, by Sysomos. The study looked at over 11.5 million Twitter accounts. Since this study found that 5% of users accounted for 75% of all Tweets, Sysomos went a step further and looked at the characteristics of the top 5% of active users on Twitter.

The biggest finding in the new study, An In-Depth Look at the 5% of Most Active Users, is that they found 32% of the top "users" were actually bots. They extrapolated this data and found that 24% of all accounts on Twitter were bots. Now Twitter bots are not all spam there are some useful Twitter bots (here is a short list of top Twitter bots).

Some other interest stats:

• Over 60% of top active users reside in the United States. Followed by UK (6.9%), Japan (4.7%), and Canada (4.3%)
• 33.7% of top active users joined Twitter this year
• 16.5% of top active users Tweet more than 10 times per day
• Retweets accounted for 5.06% of top user's activity versus 4.02% for overall users