Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

How to Backup all your Twitter tweets with Twistory!

Screen shot 2009-09-24 at 14.49.22What if Twitter got attacked and lost all the tweets? Literally all of them? Well would you be sad about all your hard work?  Well then, it makes sense to backup and export all your tweets and although there is no official way of doing it; I have found the perfect explanation.  The answer is Twistory.net and if you have a twitter account you have no excuse to not use this service!

Twistory is undoubtedly the missing part of the Twitter puzzle now enabling you to crawl back through the archives to words you tweeted last year! With Twistory you can very very easily, and I’m not kidding how easy the process is, export all your tweets to your computers calendar application like iCal, Outlook, Thunderbird or Google Calendar.  You simply enter your Twitter name then click a link and it downloads them all to your application.  Normally new tweets take about 24 hours to become available in your calendar application and I found (at least in iCal) you may have to manually refresh the Twistory feed every time you want to update them in your calendar.

Then you have an amazing presentation of all your tweets pinned down to the time and day you tweeted them. Wondering what you did last Christmas Eve? Well with a simple change of months you can click on the 24th December and see what the heck you tweeted. You did tweet on Christmas Eve right? Anyway this service is a great tool for keeping your tweets backed up, in a type of diary style and I’ve had no problems with it. You can even see your tweeting patterns how much of an increase (or decrease) in tweets you’ve made!

So if you’re a Twitter user then this is a must use service unless you are not bothered about (potentially) losing your tweets.  As long as they are a bit more constructive than “I’ve just had a Coca Cola” then Twistory.net will mean something to you.  Do you use another service or do you find Twistory.net satisfactory? Let us know with a comment below!

Photo Tweet App Review for the iPhone or iPod Touch

photo.jpgThere are many many Twitter applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch and this is yet another one.  However Photo Tweet doesn’t control all your Twitter mobile needs but instead takes on the image idea and that’s all it does.  Is it enough for a total separate app?

Available for 59p (a lite version is available for free) all Photo Tweet is, is essentially a photo uploader for the twitgoo service.  And it works exceptionally well for what it touts and I’ve had no bugs or problems running it. The only little niggle is a constant “Optimizing” message coming up everytime I boot the application which takes some valuable seconds.  A great advantage is the ability for the app to automatically resend the photo if you lose connection at all and I have tested this and it works brilliantly.

However what the app is, is also it’s biggest downfall.  It’s just a photo uploader.  Most twitter applications for the iPhone have all of this built in and there is nothing new here. But focusing on just the images is a unique niche idea and only a handful of other apps are trying this and this is where I believe Photo Tweet should expand.  From my experience there are many twitter picture hosts (twitpic,twitgoo etc.) and I think an easy option to select between these would be necessary, as I don’t feel the urge to suddenly stop using twitpic and reallocating my pictures to a new service which Photo Tweet is forcing me to.  Obviously this won’t be as much of a problem if you’re already on Twitgoo but I think it immediately can turn off some users.

The ability to save a photo tweet and schedule it for upload later is apparently contained in the app according to the iTunes description but I can’t seem to find it myself.  This is great for people in a hurry or if you’re a Pay as you Go customer who has no data usage and must wait for a WiFi hotspot.  My apologies if this feature is there but I think a way to make it more user friendly would be to add a Save button next to the Send button when you’re writing a tweet.  This way you could easily decide whether you want to send the photo tweet immediately or to save for later on.

I think the biggest opportunity for Photo Tweet to distance itself from competitors would be to offer image customisation to the market.  Imagine the simple effects (B&W,Sepia,X-Ray) that are in the Mac application Photobooth and now apply them to Photo Tweet.  The option to rotate or crop photos as well as adding speech bubbles on the actual image would be great!  So far I haven’t seen other applications going down this route and these options could add some more fun to the photos you tweet.

So in a way Photo Tweet is a disappointment in it’s current abilities but then again it doesn’t claim to do everything and it does what it claims perfectly.  Hopefully the application developer will see about further enhancing Photo Tweet to distinguish it from the countless Twitter applications out there and make it a must-have app for Twitter addicts.

Better your Twitter Experience! Link your other social sites!

Picture 1.pngTwitter is a sort of a hit or miss at the moment. Sure it’s very popular but so many people sign up then never use it again and apparently over 60% of users don’t return to Twitter.com after their first tweet.  So apart from the obvious status update why don’t you make Twitter a gateway to your social online world? It really is easy to link your Twitter feed to your music tastes, your gaming interests, your special photos or even your favourite blogs.

Twitterfeed -- http://twitterfeed.com/

  • Most sites nowadays will give out a RSS feed of information be it a news site or personal blog.  Overall Twitterfeed is the most useful and can adapt to most needs so should definitly be checked out if you want to enhance your everyday Tweets.

Raptr (Gaming) -- http://raptr.com/

  • If you’re all about gaming, be it on the Xbox, PS3, Wii or the PC you can use Raptr to track your gaming history.  Not only will it store the time played or the achievements earned but also tweet out (at your recommendations) what you’re playing.

LastfmLoveTweet -- http://lastfmlovetweet.com/

  • If you use the Last.fm service to track your music habits you can spread that to your Twitter followers by getting it to automatically tweet out your loved songs. Spread the love!

Twittergram (Flickr) -- http://flickr.twittergram.com/

  • Whether you’re a professional photographer or just someone who likes to show off their snaps then Flickr is probably one of your favourite sites.  With Twittergram you can get it to automatically tweet every new photo that you upload so why not? You never know you could become the next famous photographer!

So with these automated services you don’t need to worry any more about tweeting everything going on in your life. Go on, give it a go and if you find any more interesting Twitter services let us know in the comments below!

How to: A Beginners Guide to TweetDeck

Picture 1.pngDo you have Twitter? Well if you’re furiously refreshing Twitter.com to get your latest tweets maybe it’s time for you to turn to software and a Twitter client.  It’s a growing market and there are loads out there as I mentioned in my last blog post but today I’m going to focus on one of the market leaders -- TweetDeck.  A easy to use program yet full of features, TweetDeck will serve your needs whatever.

So first of all you are going to be concerned with the looks of the software and TweetDeck satisfies that by presenting a clean outlook.  Buttons are neatly arranged at the top giving you numerous options if you want but also unobtrusive enough to forget if you don’t want them. The colours come default as dark greys, black and white but you can customise all of these to whatever you want so if pink and yellow are your favourite colours you’re sorted… There are no flashy graphics here, nothing absurdly popping out with the only thing being your Twitter’s avatars and if you like something to stand out then this may not be it but then again it’s the Twitter content that counts!

The biggest advantage of TweetDeck is it’s features. Literally everything about Twitter you need has been well implemented into the user interface so you have all the power.  You’ll see the usual shorten links option, Twitpic uploads and even seeing the recent Twitter trends. However one of my favourite additions is the “Group” feature where out of all the people you’re following you can choose a select few to see their recent tweets in a new column. For example say you follow everyone that follows you, the problem is the few people you are really interested get lost in the enormous amount of tweets so with the group option you can put them in there.  That way you can have the main feed column with everyone and then your selected people on another column. Great! The newest feature is Facebook integration, which means you can now update your Facebook status from within TweetDeck without having to open up facebook.com.  This would be useful for people who are on it a lot but I find for me personally it’s just not for me but it is nice to have it there.  There is also a translate feature so you can talk to people abroad however I can’t vouch for its translation quality, we all know how poor Google translate can be…

So there it is a beginners guide to using TweetDeck and I hope it helps you if you’re treading carefully into the new world of Twitter. It’s an amazing world out there so feel free to experiment and if you use any other software or have troubles with TweetDeck, let me know. Have fun everyone!

Do you use Twitter Clients? TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop compared

Twitter has exponentially grown into a phenomenon and is gaining new users everyday.  But apart from the simple website interface there are other options. Do you use Twitter enough to quantify using a software client? There are loads available: Twitterific, Twhirl, TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop etc.  They really give you a great overview of the ever evolving world of Twitter…

Recently Seesmic Desktop came out and even as a 0.1 Beta release is it worth trying? Well it’s very similar to TweetDeck with multiple columns which is what I like. It’s all set out simply with no flashy graphics getting in the way of your browsing.  There are more features available for TweetDeck, with newly added Facebook updates integrated, however the interface on Seesmic is a lot simpler for a novice.  Both clients have audio/visual alerts, if requested, for Twitter updates so you are always be up to date with your friends’ latest tweet.  In my opinion Seesmic is great but as I want a bit more I’m more inclined to stick with TweetDeck for now, but who knows?  What’s great about the majority of Twitter clients is they are free and easy to install, both TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop are built on the new and successful Adobe AIR platform (both Windows and OS X) which you will need installed first.

Will Twitter continue to grow and attract larger audiences? Are we that involved in Twitter to justify using clients, that really just means we spend/waste more time on Twitter? Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/daz4590 So why not experiment and find your own favourite client and let us know below by commenting below!