@replies Archives - TheWayoftheWeb

If you use Firefox for web surfing and Twitter (I do!), then you might find Search Cloudlet is a useful plugin.

It’s simple and effective to use – it inserts context-aware tag clouds in Google, Yahoo and Twitter pages.

Apparently the addition of Twitter was the suggestions of @cleverclogs, who suggested I give it a try. And having installed it, I now have a tag cloud on my Twitter home-page, plus search pages, profile pages, favorites and the public timeline.

You can click between the tag cloud for keywords, or, on Twitter, a tag cloud of @ replies, which is quite useful. And there’s a handy ‘Off’ option as well. You can also select to turn it off permanently on your own page, other profile pages, or on Twitter search.

To be honest, I don’t use it a lot – following 2000+ people means that I need more than a tag cloud for the latest page of updates to really look into the available data – but it can be quite handy for checking out who I’ve replied to recently, especially as a reminder if there’s a username I need to look up.

But it’s no hassle to have it turned to ‘Off’ for when I occasionally need it.

Have you used Search Cloudlet and found it useful?

And what Firefox Add-Ons would you recommend using with Twitter, or other microblogging platforms?

I’m a big fan of the TED talks, the conferences which started by covering Technology, Entertainment and Design, and now include a huge range of thought-leaders on a variety of topics. (More about TED here)

Somehow I hadn’t got around to watching the talk by Evan Williams from Twitter until I saw a good article about it by Garr Reynolds at Presentation Zen.

One interesting point is how Evan has followed a couple of hunches to build projects – Blogger and Twitter.

Secondly – Twitter was designed as a broadcast medium – one message went out to many.

But users invented the @reply functionality, the API, the use of hashtags, and started using it to raise awareness around issues, raise money for causes, implement marketing and business use, etc.

It’s a pretty quick presentation at just 8 minutes – and worth watching until the end to see what happens when TED Curator Chris Anderson uses Twitter search to look for mentions of Evan Williams.