tweets

Tweeght – Digg-like voting for ‘thoughtful tweets’ from Twitter

February 15, 2009 By Dan Thornton

Tweeght is a new site described by it’s creator as offering Digg-like voting for ‘thoughtful tweets’ – although the voting is actual more like Reddit with a simple up or down arrow.

It was built by Aditya Kothadiya in under a week, and is pretty simple to use. You can either post a tweet by submitting it on the site, which requires your Twitter username and password, tag Tweets with #tweeght, #thought, or #quote, or send the Tweet to @tweeght.

From the site, you can vote individual messages up or down, Retweet them, or reply – and there’s a Leaderboard of the most popular users.

Aditya says “The goal was to launch something quickly but it should be valuable, usable, beautiful and dead simple.” And you can follow Aditya at @adityakothadiya.

It’s definitely a nicely designed site, but is the timing right?

Previous attempts at social ranking sites for Twitter I previously covered, included Microblogging.com and Dwigger. Both have closed, with Dwigger shut for good, and Microblogging hinting that a new service will appear in the future.

Now I’m not the biggest fan of Digg, but I do see the value on social ranking/aggregation sites. I’m a reasonably frequent user of Stumbleupon, and I do use Delicious (although I’m taking a break until I can sort out my messy tagging!).

But I can see two major problems for this approach to filtering Twitter –

1. The scale of Twitter is hard to accurately judge, but the most generous estimates would put Twitter as a whole under the size of Digg’s monthly active users.

2. Social aggregation sites are useful for filtering the entire internet – over 133 million blogs monitored by Technorati, for example, plus mainstream media sites, video, images etc, etc. Has Twitter reached the point where it needs filtering in this way?

3. The ranking approach always involves viewing messages via an external site, taking you out of Twitter or your client. When you’re using Digg, Delicious or SU, you’re inside that community, whereas with Tweeght you need to have a separate browser tab or window taking you out of the community stream to see what’s being rated.

4. Twitter is built on personal relevance and connections. I can’t help feeling that external ranking systems are a little web 1.0 for adding value. Would I rather see thoughtful tweets from people I’ve never contacted or followed, or would I rather see what my friends and contacts are saying, and have them highlighting anything they see which is thoughtful or brilliant.

That all said, Tweeght might have come along at the right time, with the recent huge rise in users driven by mainstream media coverage of Twitter – and some of those new users could be the Digg-type audience Tweeght needs. After all, Malcolm Gladwell makes a great case for success being hugely dictated by factors such as timing his recent book Outliers.

Awesome new Twitter plug-ins for WordPress

January 12, 2009 By Dan Thornton

You may notice a new icon on every post. It comes from Dan Zarrella (@danzarella), who I continue to be hugely impressed by.

It started back in December when I spotted his interesting analysis of Retweeting, and I’ve followed his Tweetback project. But now he’s gone waaaaay further with the TweetSuite Plug-in for WordPress.

It includes:

Server-side (no-JS or remote calls) TweetBacks
ReTweet-This buttons for each TweetBack
A digg-like Tweet-This Button
Automatic Tweeting of new posts
A Most-Tweeted Widget
A Recently-Tweeted Widget
A My-Last-Tweets Widget
A My-Favorited-Tweets Widget

I’m using it here and on www.thewayoftheweb.net, and so far it’s been simple and easy to use, and has worked ‘out-of-the-box’.

Interestingly, there’s already an alternative to Tweetbacks – The Twittbacks WordPress Plugin created for Smashing Magazine by Joost de Valk. (He’s also on Twitter as @jdevalk)

One outcome of the two plugins is an interesting post by Jonathan Bailey on whether reproducing Tweets could lead to copyright problems.

In the meantime, I’m using TweetSuite, and so far I can highly recommend it – the only suggestion that immediately sprang to mind is that the icon might be better placed at the footer of a post rather than top left or right, but that’s a minor point!

Testing Magpie advertising within Tweets…

November 28, 2008 By Dan Thornton

I’ve seen a bit of feedback about new Twitter advertising service Magpie, which places paid advertising in your messages on a user-defined ratio – e.g. you can choose anywhere between posting one normal message then an add will appear, up to posting 200 messages before the advert posts.

Advertising is flagged by #magpie or a custom message within each advertising tweet. And you can pre-approve adverts, or allow them to autopost.

I’ve currently got the radio set at 10 normal posts before an advert appears, as I’m a fairly frequent poster. I’ve also asked people in advance for their thoughts, and a couple of people have said they’ll unfollow anyone who even starts using Magpie, whereas the majority have either said they don’t really mind, or they’re fine if it’s just a test.

In all honesty, there’s going to be monetisation of Twitter at some point, and the most logical place for any type of advertising-based revenue is around either the content or search functionality, because those are the areas which get attention from users.

For all we know, some of the growing number of services could be approved by the Twitter team behind the scenes as a way to experiment without alienating any users!

There’s a few reasons for testing:

I hate writing about things I haven’t tried for myself
My Tweeting and 140char were both started with aims other than making money, but at the same time, I don’t really want to be running a blog that costs me money at the moment.
Monetisation will happen for Twitter, and this is one viable method in terms of getting attention. So it’s worth investigating now to be able to provide an educated response if it’s adopted as an official monetisation method.

But in the meantime, here’s the figures for my test:

Magpie started: 28/11/2008. Current followers: 1579.

And if you’re going to sign up to test it or use it yourself, why not help out 140char by using our referral link? http://be-a-magpie.com/bkq4mw

How to use live twitting and tweets in events

October 14, 2008 By Dan Thornton

Here’s an interesting guide to live twitting from events – guest posted by Julius Solaris, blogger and event planner extraordinaire.
On the 29th of November 2008, I’ll be involved in ecoCampLondon a BarCamp about the environment and sustainability. The aim of the camp is to produce a document with all the discussion of the sessions. For the previous edition we just gave out a template which the session promoter needed to fill in. Boring and time consuming.
We felt that this solution was a bit 1999, so we decided to look at new ways to collect discussions. And here it goes: LiveTwitting

How does it work?
– Every attendee needs to follow either @livetwitting or @livet

– There are very simple commands to learn

FUNCTION	COMMAND
To start livetwitting	d livetwitting ON Name or ID of Conference # Session Title Example: d livetwitting ON BlogWorld 2008 # Keynote Example: d livetwitting ON 25 # Keynote
To record your notes	Just type away! Every status update will be recorded until you turn it off. You can send direct messages (d livetwitting your notes) if you don’t want to share your livetwitting with your followers.
To mark a segment with a Topic name (optional)	d livetwitting TOPIC Name of Topic
To mark a speaker (optional)	d livetwitting SPEAKER Speaker’s Name
To mark a Question & Answer segment (optional)	d livetwitting QA
To pause recording (i.e. to say hi to someone else)	d livetwitting PAUSE
To resume recording (after a pause command)	d livetwitting RESUME
To end livetwitting	d livetwitting OFF

– You can manage all the sessions talks on the LiveTwitting website.

BarCamps are a fork of Open Space Technology. The aim of these unconferences is to produce something in a team effort rather than just loosing all that precious interaction among attendees. When the method was elaborated it was the mainframe era and static websites were common. With Web 2.0 things change.
Twitter allows to capture conversations in a great unbiased manner and therefore should be used for most if not all conferences, tradeshows and events in general. The 140chars nature of the service pushes attendees to actually summarize what is going on and synthesize the content in a great way.
Making your event more compliant with new technologies is the way to go and you may be missing out on precious feedback and content if you fail to do so.

Twitter quote of the week:

July 22, 2008 By Dan Thornton

I thought I’d start republishing and compiling some of the best Tweets I see. Not only do they illuminate what happens inside Twitter for anyone who hasn’t jumped in, but they can also be funny, inspirational or downright odd…and a good balance to listing business cases!

First up appropriately comes from one of the co-founders @ev, quoting one of the more famous and oft referenced users, @zappos.