Paid Pipers

Most of us would have used so many of those attractive clients. Earlier it was a simple choice to make. But the new clients are making my life a misery by releasing a new client every now and then and I just can’t decide which one to choose. Simple the reason is, “lose something to get something”. Wonder who ever thought this statement, had a great vision.

Now I end up using every Twitter client that arrives and have almost 10+ clients on my laptop.

Frankly I did not find Twhirl to be suitable for my needs though its a great one. Twitterfox is a lousy one and seldom do I use it as I don’t want to run the risk of a tweet from fmylife appear while am on an official presentation if I forget to turn it off.

Not comparing the other clients, I directly jump to the main objective of this post to declare my love to the universe. Yes, it is TweetDeck.

I was slightly distracted to Seesmic Desktop and Statuzer’s arrival, but I lost interest in them pretty very much in an hour max.

Seesmic Desktop tries to give me a feeling of Twhirl like Home where I have all my tweets together. It has the flexibility of detachable columns, not limited to 10 like TweetDeck, which can be rearranged by a swish of your mouse.

Best thing about Seesmic Desktop is that you can see Sent messages, just like your mobile, to see what others are replying about. This can be done in TweetDeck by setting a Saved Search for your twitter handle.

Multiple Twitter accounts, Fb, etc are something in Seesmic that may not suit to my needs. I’d prefer to use two different client for multiple Twitter accounts.

What I need from TweetDeck?

1. Resizeable columns

2. Keyboard sensitivity

3. Mouse scroll click – Horizontal

4. Twhirl like notifications

5. Better performance – End of the day and I see TweetDeck eating upto 700MB of my RAM.

May be this axxo guy’s walking on a beach with his girlfriend thinking how much he contributed to the frustration of the film makers by his addition to the piracy.

One of those names that would pop up on every torrent site is axxo. People just love this freak who uploads one of the best quality DVD rips and he crossed his 1000th movie mark in Dec 2008.

Well, if you haven’t heard of “axxo”, then you have probably never used torrents and you don’t know what it is to be loved and hated by masses at the same time. He’s one of those piracy lovers who uploads movies for the world and expects nothing in return. He’s indeed the Robin Hood of modern times, feeding the poor with movies.

Well, if caught, this guy’s gonna spend more time in jail than what Tim Robins would have spent in Shawshank Redemption. This video pirate grew so very famous for many reasons. He gets you the quality print of movies in just 700 Mb which fits in a CD and in a Divx format with AC3 encoded audio.

Almost 35% of all the movies from torrents are those uploaded by axx. There have been many fake interviews with this guy who’s not revealed his identity yet. Out of those, one which seemed the most trustworthy states that he’s yet a minor and authorities are waiting for him to turn 18 for them to prosecute him.

Man, he’s gonna be more famous once this one Canadian guy finishes his documentary film “Searching for Axxo”.

Salesforce.com, well known for their fast moving tool Service Cloud, now has Twitter extensions added to its Service Cloud which already includes Facebook and LinkedIn.

Service Cloud is powered by home grown Force platform and lets the Customer Support Personnel to look at the conversations going around about their company in the various social media sites.

Salesforce.com lets you to search, monitor and engage in topics that are related to your company or product specifically on Twitter. You can now search the hash tags related to your brand, look for nested tweets, retweets and replies. You can also barge into the ongoing conversations on Twitter.

Though all this is already possible by means of numerous free Twitter clients, Saleforce.com stands out by offering other social networks and Google communities.

We know that Twitter is much faster than the Google spiders and helps catch the topics and issues faster and Twitter is where the world is!!

Salesforce.com's New Twitter Extension

Twitter is so close to simplicity that you can find as many ways as possible to reap its benefits. But what can you use it for? It all depends on the basic assumption that you already have built a strong follower base and the basic reputation level among your followers.

Why not try searching for prospective employees who your trusted followers trust? Your followers are there to listen to you and to gain from you and they would certainly help you out with worthy candidates by responding to your “need PHP developer” tweet.

Need feedback on your new look of your website which your followers like? Tweet asking for feedback and you’d get so many responses with the combined intellect of all your followers all for free!

Anyone in the web loves traffic! Twitter can generate direct traffic! For the amazing original content that you just posted, a tweet on Twitter can generate traffic that would drive you crazy.

My like minded friends know what I like. They give me minute by minute news updates and event information that I don’t use RSS anymore.

Yes, you can make friends in Twitter. Twitter is a different way of making friends. No friend requests (unless you choose to keep your updates closed) and hence you can follow Shahrukh Khan and replying to his updates may get you a celeb friend! Not only that try adding tweetactive friends who you find interesting and they might like your crisp replies and thus grows the network.

Birds of same feather tweet together! People who think alike and want to get to know others who have the same opinion use the hash tags in their tweets to connect to those who pick the same flowers. This may help you to gain business relationships which may generate testimonials or recommendations.

Protect your updates (make your updates private) and add only your employees, subordinates, peers (their updates are also protected) and wo! You now created a closed loop tweet group where you can get all the work related updates like “@sriiniivas build number 2E3 is deployed”

Tweet your new and awaited products’ launch. Your happy customers following you would be more than happier to know that.

I claim that no other info provider gives you better content than Twitter as it’s all UGC (User Generated Content) and brought to you exclusively by trusted people whom you follow, and using favorites for archiving them would let you build a huge stack of information in hours.

Find customers. Search for the keywords related to your products and you can find a large customer base waiting for you to contact them. But you need to be tactful in approaching them. Well, who knows better than you?

Live Blogging is now done on Twitter. 140 characters are no good. But they are enough for quick commentaries. What say?

Most people like to get votes for their choices. Other day a friend of mine wanted help to decide if he should buy a bike or a notebook. Bad for him, he wanted a notebook and all the votes were for a bike!

Nobody would have ever imagined Twitter would grow so powerful and that one would be required to think seriously about his/her Twitter profile.

Your Orkut profile may be completely informal, well who cares about them anymore. Facebook reflects your social identity and LinkedIn, your professional and we may have read who to strike a balance between them.

Twitter on the other hand is a network which firstly, can not be termed as a social network. Twitter is more of a micro-blogging service which would supplement your social media plan and needs to be used right in order to reap the benefits.

Channeling Twitter’s powerful waves in the right meaning would not only let your dreams about Internet Marketing success come true, but also let you build stronger relations with your market which consist of customers and business partners.

Twitter - Not for Chat Source : www.hongkiat.com

How important is your Twitter name?

Twitter username is also referred to as a Twitter handle. Sometimes you may notice in a Tweetup or a social media networking camp, people may be identified with their twitter handles. Many other people are big players in the Tworld. Having a catchy name doesn’t accomplish it. They have first thought seriously about what name they are going to choose before they even thought what they are going to tweet.

Twitter just allows a 160 character long self description and this is all you get to either promote you or your brand or website. So decide what is your reason for existence, atleast in Twitter and choose the Twitter handle which suits your needs.

Importance of the Avatar!

A 48×48 pixel square space is what is provided for you to reflect your or your brand’s image. Never leave it empty, as most of us would not like a “default no image” picture. For a person to follow you, howsoever good the tweets are, one would want to see the person or the brand’s picture. One is not building a social networking site where one connects to friends who know you, in most cases. So follow the elevator pitch idea and reap the benefits.

Profile Completion

All Twitter displays as profile to the Tworld is a photo of yours, a 160 character or “one line bio” and a website which is rather termed as “more info URL”. Make sure all these fields are complete and relevant if you are seriously using Twitter and want it to do magic for you or your brands.

More followers??

It doesn’t make any good if you are following 2000 and just 5 follow you. It would imply that you may be running an app that automatically follows users based on search criteria. It also reflects that only 5 are interested in your updates.

What are you tweeting?

If you use Twitter only and only for promoting your product, site or brand, then it’s a bad idea. You should strike a perfect balance about what Twitter is used for and for what you are using Twitter. In different words, use Twitter to promote your stuff but also don’t give a feeling to your followers that you are here to do just that.

Follow Friday

Follow Friday is a Twitter meme that tweeters use to gather followers. But that’s perfectly okay. But explicit mention of a target for pulling in more followers is that last thing you should do before quitting Twitter.

Hot tweets

Followers are there to gain something out of you and you have them to gain out of them and hence refrain from offending your followers and their respective followers by not getting into heated debates. Try taking them offline via other means.

Twitter Home Design

No harm in using the Twitter default profile page design, but why not monetize on that too when you are allowed to. You may use that big space to display your products or brand in a way that even the most irate customer may like. Display of images that would catch the attention of the users or special offers from your brand etc would be a great idea. Again, don’t overdo it both by means of the image that you set as the background or by constantly asking your followers to visit your profile page.

Anyone who has felt the iPhone at least once, would love to feel it again and to make it a better feeling is what Apple has been trying since two years of iPhone’s market entry.

Yesterday a geeky crowd was seen rushing into the Apple headquarters to see what new features Apple’s Scott Forstall, Head of iPhone Software Development, has to offer.

Scott Forstall at iPhone OS 3.0 release at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California. Photo: Reuters

Though promised that there 100 features which they would take away from the presentation, only the highlighted ones were revealed and that the rest would be packaged later.

iPhone 3.0 packages as a free update to iPhone owners, but iPod Touch users need to pay $9.95, the same price that Apple charged when iPhone 2.0 was rolled out last year.

Now lets dig what my iPhone bearing friend’s gonna get!!

MMS, A basic feature that my Motorola phone had in 2003 is now being offered to only my friends who have iPhone 3G and not the Classic owners.

Landscape keyboard. This is what my friends have been complaining about and those with stout fingers, the most!! SMS, Email, browser, now they can use it anywhere.. finally!!

Cut, copy, and paste, I still wonder if this is a new feature. Being in IT, I understand that the implementation is what is new, but it’s too late to call this a new feature. Now this feature works with text and images and across all applications. Best part was that shaking would undo the selection. Now this is what my geek programmer friend loved.

Full Search, Stereo Bluetooth, full fledge turn-by-turn GPS, meeting invitations and contact forwarding, push notifications, etc would also be packaged with 3.0 but Scott did not refer to them as the biggest changes. He instead pointed to the Apple’s online application mart, which would allow developers to charge users for content subscriptions or for post sales new functionalities. The new “In App Purchases” would enable developers to get the users to pay for additional levels in a game or an in-app shopping cart. This brings another revenue model offering from Apple for those who do big in the Apple App store.

Twitter and Simple are as synonymous like Google and Simple are. So you want to use Twitter more effectively, you can check out these tools which are most popular and most recommended by everyone who lead their lives as Twitter fanatics.

TwitterFox

TwitterFox is a Firefox plug-in which lets you which notifies you with the tweets and also lets you tweet from your browser bar. Best feature is that you can have multiple Twitter accounts configured and lets you switch among them with ease.

TwitPic

TwitPic is a photo sharing site which compliments the need for quick photo sharing on a tweet. It allows you to upload images and post them with a caption on a tweet. It also lets users to comment on the images and maintains a gallery of the previously uploaded images. It works with many Twitter clients like TweetDeck, Twhirl, Twitterific, etc.

Twitter Search

Twitter Search is a part of Twitter itself which most people don’t know about and is often overlooked. Search users, hash tags, topics and what not with this cool search. Prefixing a # makes a word a hash tag and clicking on that from a tweet on web or on a Twitter client would take you to the search results for that hash tag.

Twitterific

Twitterific is a Mac OS application and is one of the most popular Twitter clients. It allows users to tweet, read tweets without using a browser. Multiple Twitter accounts may be configured and it is a compact program which occupies very less space on desktop screen and on the RAM.

Twhirl and TweetDeck are more desktop clients programmed on Adobe AIR and allow you to do more with Twitter.

Twitter Grader

This weeb application lets you know the reach of a Twitter user based on their updates, profile completeness, number of followers they have. You are graded out of 100 and would also let you know where you stand amongst the other tweeters.

Bit.ly

Bit.ly is yet another URL shortener which has two cool functionalities compared to TinyURL. One, it provides, click-through statistic and two, the generated URL is shorter than the one generated by TinyURL which is most useful when you are short for 2-3 character spaces.

Follow me on Twitter

Digg Founder Kevin Rose knew if he dugg his latest project’s announcement, he would gain the maximum momentum.

As simple as the Twitter is, WeFollow accepts any tweet with the text “@wefollow #tag #tag #tag” where #tag would be any category-tag such as blogs, tech, actor etc and three is the max number of a tags in a tweet. WeFollow would then listen to these @replies and then organize the users who tweeted in this format into categories based on these hashtags.

WeFollow - The first tweet

Compared to Twellow and Just Tweet It, its a much simpler Tweeter Directory and has already attracted a huge number of visitors, thanks to Digg. Just like the Twitter interface, WeFollow too lacks the filters and one would end up clicking endlessly on More and Prev. What a pain!!

What is Twitter?

Some friends of mine don’t know what Twitter is and how powerful this simple little tool has become now in almost every domain. Other than the social media giants, IT and ITES companies too have began using Twitter for their needs in various forms which range from PR to building new relations.

For those friends of mine who don’t know what Twitter is, I would not want you to sign up and use it right away as you would not understand in what way it makes sense to others who have been meticulously using the Twitter as the medium to generate more traffic or more income in different ways.

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging tool which allows users to send and read updates via web, mobiles, apps, SMS and RSS (receive only). Currently the local SMS facility is available in US, Canada and India and an International SMS service number from UK.

Okay, what does it do?

Well, nothing actually great. It’s a simple, lightweight RoR application which lets you to tell others what you are doing. Your friends can know what you are doing by following you and you can know what they are doing by following them back.

Twitter Home Page

“What are you doing” is the textbox which asks you the question and you don’t have to only answer that you are sleeping or eating. You may use it for sharing your thoughts or to let the friends following you know what you are planning to do or say, attending a rock concert, etc.

What are you doing? == Tweet

What are Tweeterms?

What you send out as an update is called a Tweet and if you over do it, you are known to be suffering from Twitterrhea. You live in the Tworld and share it with Tweeple. You may Twait while waiting for someone and may even seem to others that you may be Tweetaholic. A Tweeter may find a Tweetheart or find other Tweeters in the Tweetosphere at a Tweetup. End of the day, you’d love the Tweetworking.

If you are confused, adding a “Tw” in front of a lexical word, gives you a tweeterm.

Okay, made sense! But what’s so great about it?

Following and Followers

Though simple, it’s as powerful as Google is. It’s the third most used Social networking site as announced by Compete.com after Facebook and Myspace. With 4-5 million users strong base, it is just rocketing high up in different and unrelated businesses which are finding innovative uses out of twitter which is simple and carries high usability.

Forget me, what do others do with Twitter??

Well, not one, not two, you have unlimited uses out of twitter. Be it Jobs, Relationship advice, Career tips, Business parameters, PR for a startup, Sports or Movie buzz, Politics or Technology breakthrough or even a search engine, Twitter plays all the roles meticulously.

Note down your homework now. Start tweeting….

Before I stepped out of the Facebook Garage at Photon Infotech on Mar 15, 2009, I last checked my tweets and found that one of my tweeples had buzzed about a tweetup at Chennai Terrace House, Royapettah and I was eagerly looking forward to attending one.

As many of my friends already know, I am pretty enthusiastic when I want to know new things and if such things come with a bonus of networking, I take it up. And thanks to many factors, I am now networking more  than what I was two years back.

Back to the point, I called up @msnarain who passed me the details of @dilipm who guided me to the venue and also let me know that they’d wait for us until we arrive. Long journey it was. You know how it is in Chennai. Sunday evening and the only city which is free and traffic free is Chennai!! Driving all the way from Photon Infotech, OMR to Royapettah was exciting and Vamsi of MusicMazaa, Kaviraj of Areapal and my newfound partner in crime Vasanth, who’s my colleague at Photon were all smiles when we were pulled off the road by the cops and fined for skipping a Red signal for no mistake of mine and we were talking the rest of the way about how safe are our roads are and how bad and unmanageable the traffic is.

When we reached the venue, we met Dilip and Joel and they led us to Ashvitha where Dilip was right on the point and began on what was in his mind and which ended up the agenda of the tiny tweetup of 7 guys.

Vasanth and Dilip at tweetup

Question was simple, what least can we do for letting the system know that I don’t get what I deserve as a citizen? And what do we have in the name of roads?

A serious Tweetup at Ashivitha

Chennai and good roads are disjoint sets in all cases. Not just Chennai, its India on the whole. Not pointing a particular person or party, to its the Government. And the bare minimum things it can give to a citizen like me is a clean city and good roads. Forget clean city as it also the responsibility of a good citizen which most of us are not, where do I find the answers for a city full of bad roads.

Take me to a road in Chennai where I would not find a open manhole, potholes or illegal speed breakers, I would do what you want.

For the 10 years I have been in Chennai, I see roads being laid. But they deteriorate much faster than they were were laid. We then keep complaining why roads are bad. One rainy seasons and all I see for six months or may be more is my reflection in the potholes everytime I walk on the roads.

Why can’t I do something which, as a common man and a good citizen, is my duty and let the system know that I am malnutrioned on the basic civic infrastructure and that its the Government’s fundamental duty to keep me as a citizen happy?

Dilip had an idea that just asking a man to vote doesn’t solve the problem and hence we need to let a common man know what is he voting for. We need to let him know that he is not getting what he deserves and we start by drawing his attention to something which no one in this world can now live without – Roads.

Common man walks, cycles or rides on the road and if he suddenly sees red circular paint marks around every open manhole or every pothole on the road, he would certainly feel sorry for the system that has miserably failed in its duties and the circles would look like an examination answer sheet of a student who failed.

The next step would be to take a picture of these red paint circles and conduct an exhibition of these images.

Its not an easy task, as these red circles may be counted to be a public nuisance but all we follow is our fore fathers’ steps to let the system know about the flaws peacefully and mainly create awareness.

Lets all meet on Saturday 21st of march, 2009 at “The Madras Terrace House” at 6 PM.

Tweet me at twitter.com/sriiniivas or Dilip at twitter.com/dilipm for venue details.

You may also read Dilip’s blog post on this Photoshoot.