Twitter Tips: Adding the Twitter Application to Facebook Profile

On the surface, Facebook, while ostensibly a member of the same social networking club as Twitter, is a social horse of a different color. You can post photos and videos that people can comment on; you can write on a friend’s wall; you can join groups; and you’re free to encrust your profile with as many applications as you feel like configuring. However, although many Facebook users take advantage of all these social knickknacks, the truth is that all most Facebookers do is update their status every now and then.

As a nod to this reality, Facebook recently redesigned the user home page to display a “News Feed” of posts from friends and, most tellingly, a “What’s on your mind?” text box at the top that you use to update your status, share information, or crack wise. Wait: a “What’s on your mind?” text box? Remind you of anything? Of course! It’s Twitter, Facebook-style.

This leads to a very obvious question: If you’re already using Twitter’s “What are you doing?” box to update your status, share information, or wisecrack, do you have to then repeat each tweet in Facebook’s “What’s on your mind?” box? You could, I suppose, post different updates in Facebook, but who has the time or energy to maintain two feeds? For that matter, who has the time or energy to post the same updates on two different sites.

Fortunately, you don’t have to. The kindly coders at Twitter have come up with a Twitter application that you can add to your Facebook profile. This application includes an option to update your Facebook status when you post to Twitter, thus killing two social network birds with a single tweet stone (or something).

You can add the Twitter application directly via your Facebook account (click Applications, click Find More, and then run an application search for Twitter), or indirectly via Twitter. Here are the steps for the indirect method.

 1.  Sign in to your Twitter account.

 2.  Direct your Web browser to http://twitter.com/badges. The Get a Widget for Your Site page appears.

 3.  Click the Facebook logo.

 4.  Click Continue.  The Twitter for Facebook page appears, as shown in figure 7.5

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5.  Click Install Twitter in Facebook. If you’re not already logged in to your Facebook account, Facebook prompts you to log in (or sign up, if you don’t have an account). If you’re already logged in to Facebook, the 
Allow Access page appears, so skip to step 7.

6.  Type your Facebook account’s e-mail address and password, and then click Login. Facebook’s Allow Access page appears.

 7.  Click Allow. Facebook asks you to log in to your Twitter account.

 8.  Type your Twitter username and password, and then click Log in.

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You end up at the Twitter on Facebook page, shown in figure 7.6. (To get to this page in the future, click Applications, click Edit, and then click Twitter.) The Twitter application shows your friend timeline, as well as a What are you doing? text box, which you can use to post tweets from within Facebook. When you want to return to your real Twitter life, click one of the following tabs: Twitter Home, Profile, or Settings.

If you want your tweets to also get posted as your Facebook status updates, click the Allow Twitter to Update Your Facebook Status. When the Twitter application asks you to confirm, click Allow Status Updates.

"Twitter Tips: Adding the Twitter Application to Facebook Profile"


Reference : wiley.com 




Twitter tips: Adding a “Tweet This” link to Web site

A great way to get the word out about your Web site or some content on your site is to get people to tweet about it. The problem is that it requires quite a few steps to construct a tweet about a site or page. Here are the general procedures:

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 1.  Navigate to the page and copy the page address.

 2.  Switch to Twitter and paste the address in the update text box.

 3.  Return to the page and copy the page title.

 4.  Head back to Twitter and paste the title in the update text box.

 5.  Add your own text and then send the tweet.

Whew! However, you can do your would-be tweeters a favor by helping them to condense steps 1 to 4 into a single click of a link, which ought to make them more willing to tweet about your site.I’m talking here about creating a “Tweet This” link (or perhaps “Tweet This Site” or “Tweet This Post” or whatever fits your situation), which you place strategically on your pages (for example, at the end of a blog post or article).

If you use an online editor provided by your Web host, place the cursor where you want the link to appear and add the link text (such as “Tweet This”). Select the text, click the editor’s link tool, and then type the following general address:

http://twitter.com/home?status=Title (URL )”


Here, replace  Title  with the title of the page, post, article or whatever, and replace  URL with the address of the item. Here’s an example:

http://twitter.com/home?status=Word Spy (http://wordspy.com)”

If you need to edit HTML to add the link, open the page or file in your HTML editor, place the cursor where you want the link to appear, and then type the link using the following HTML code:

<a href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=Title (URL )”>
Tweet This
</a>

Again, replace Title  with the item title, and replace URL with the item address. Here’s an example:

<a href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=Word Spy (http://wordspy.com)”>Tweet about Word Spy
</a>

Figure 7.3 shows how this code creates a Tweet about the Word Spy link on my site. If a tweeter clicks that link, the browser switches to Twitter, asks the user to sign in, if he isn’t already, and then displays the specified text in the What are you doing? box, as shown in figure 7.4. Now all the tweeter has to do is add his or her own text and fire off the update.

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" Adding a “Tweet This” link to Web site "


Reference : wiley.com 

Twitter tips: Displaying a badge that shows total followers

If you have a successful Twitter account that’s amassed a sizable following, you might feel like bragging about it. I don’t mean that you should cover the top of your page with a massive banner that shouts out your total follower ship. Please don’t do that. I’m talking here about something a lot more subtle: a Twitter badge that not only points to your Twitter home page, but also includes a regularly updated count of your followers.

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The code wizards at TwitterCounter (whom you meet again in Chapter 9) offer just such a badge, and adding it to your Web site is a relatively straightforward matter of copying and pasting some code. First, use your Web browser to navigate to the following address, where your name is your Twitter username:

"http://twittercounter.com/pages/buttons/yourname"

TwitterCounter displays a page that includes four button styles, as shown in figure 7.2.

Below each button style you see a text box that includes some HTML code. Here’s an example:

<script type=”text/javascript” language=”javascript” 
src=”http://twittercounter.com/embed/?username=wordspy”>
</script>

This code points to a script that resides on the TwitterCounter site, and that script contains the necessary instructions for contacting Twitter and grabbing your current follower count. This all happens behind the scenes, and fortunately you don’t have to give any of it a second thought (or even a first thought, for that matter).

After you decide which style you prefer, click inside the text box that appears below that style. Your browser automatically selects all the text, so press Ctrl+C (or Ô+C on a Mac) to copy it. Now open your online or local HTML editor, place the cursor where you want the badge to appear, and then press Ctrl+V (or  Ô+V on your Mac) to paste the code. If you’re working on a local copy of your page, be sure to upload the revised file to your Web site.

" Twitter tips: Displaying a badge that shows  total followers "


Reference : wiley.com 

Twitter Tips: Adding Twitter Bling to Your Web Site

Now that you’re well established on Twitter and you’re tweeting away with your 140-character-or-less observations, ideas, and updates, it’s time to fly your Twitter flag. If you have a blog, personal home page, or other Web site where you live your online life outside of Twitter, you should dress up that site with text or image links that take people to your Twitter home page. If people like what they see and use Twitter, they need only click your Follow button to get onboard; if they’re not on Twitter yet, you might just inspire them to get an account so they can keep up with your tweets. Either way, you end up with more followers and life just keeps getting better.

Adding a Twitter link to your Web site

The simplest way to point someone to your tweets is to add a link to your Twitter home page. Ideally, you should place this link near the top of your page where people are sure to see it. Most sites have content that  automatically appears on every page (such as a site header or a sidebar), and that’s the ideal location because it means you only have to add the link once to that section and it appears automatically on all your other pages.

Creating a text link

If your Web host provides you with an online editor, use it to insert your links. How this works varies from host to host, but the following general steps are nearly the same with all hosts: Place the cursor where you want the link to appear and add some text (for example, “Follow Me on Twitter” or “See What I’m Doing on Twitter”). Select the text, click the editor’s link tool, and then specify the address http://twitter.com/yourname, where  yourname is your Twitter username.If your site requires you to edit HTML to add a link, open the page or file in your HTML editor, place the cursor where you want the link to appear, and then type the link using the following HTML code (replace  yourname with your Twitter username, and modify the link text to suit your style).

<a href=”http://twitter.com/ yourname ”>Follow me on Twitter!</a>

Creating a Twitter badge link

A humble text link is better than nothing, I suppose, but if it’s Twitter bling you want on your site, then plain text just doesn’t cut it. Instead, you need to get yourself a Twitter badge  (also called a button ), a small graphic that includes something Twitterish (such as a bird or some variation on the Twitter logo), which you then set up as a link to your Twitter home page.

Your first task is to locate a Twitter badge that you like. Here are some sites to check out:Limeshot Design:  http://limeshot.com/2008/follow-me-on-twitter-badges Randa Clay Design: http://randaclay.com/freebies/free-twitter-graphics/Shia Design: http://siahdesign.com/archives/150Vincent Abry: www.vincentabry.com/31-logos-et-boutons-pour-twitter-2480

Note that it’s considered bad form to link directly to a badge on another site. Instead, you should download the badge you want to use to your computer, and then upload the file to your own Web site. Here are the instructions for using Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari to download an image to your computer:

Internet Explorer:  Right-click the image, click Save Picture As, choose a location, edit the file name, and then click Save.

  Firefox: Right-click the image, click Save Image As, choose a location, edit the file name, and then click Save.

  Safari:  Right-click (or Ctrl+click) the image, click Save Image As, choose a folder on your Mac, change the file name, and then click Save.


Once the image file is safely stowed on your machine, upload it to your Web site using either an FTP program or the upload tool provided by your Web host.If your Web host provides you with an onlineeditor, use it to insert your badge. How you do this varies depending on the host, but the basic steps are pretty much universal: Open the page in the editor, place the cursor where you want the image to appear, click the editor’s image tool, and then choose the Twitter badge file. Click the image to select it, click the editor’s link tool, and then specify the address http://twitter.com/yourname, where  yourname is your Twitter username.

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If you add stuff to your site by editing HTML, open the page or file in your HTML editor, place the cursor where you want the badge to appear, and then insert the image and link using the following HTML code:-

<a href=”http://twitter.com/ yourname ”>
<img src=”filename ” />
</a>

Here, you need to replace yourname with your Twitter username and filename  with the name of the badge file (for example, twitter.png).

If you uploaded the badge to a folder, then you need to alter the code slightly. For example, if the badge resides in a folder named graphics, change the code to this:

<a href=”http://twitter.com/ yourname ”>
<img src=”/graphics/filename ” />
</a>

Reference : wiley.com 

Twitter tips:Search Engines and Tools TweetScan Twitterfall TweetGrid BackTweets TweetVolume etc

Integrating search into the main interface shows the newfound importance of search to the Twitter powers that be. However, there’s another sign that mining Twitter for tweet gold is becoming a big thing: the existence of a large and ever-increasing collection of Web sites that extend and enhance Twitter Search. 

There’s a kind of gold rush feel to all this as companies recognize a great opportunity: Twitter is going mainstream, for sure, and Twitter Search itself is merely okay, so there’s a fantastic chance to become the de facto Twitter search engine. The result is a slew of Twitter-related search sites and tools. There are way too many to list here, so instead I’ll just run through the ones I use most often, which are covered in no particular order.


Tweet Scan

When I’m in a simple mood (a not uncommon occurrence), I prefer to deal with sites that offer simple, uncluttered interfaces with nary a bell or whistle in view. For searching Twitter, the simple site I like is Tweet Scan (http://tweetscan.com/). As you can see in figure 6.29, Tweet Scan’s home page includes just a humble text box for your search string (which supports the standard Twitter search operators), plus a tag cloud that shows the most popular Twitter topics. (The larger and more bold the type, the more popular the topic.) Search results are automatically refreshed every 90 seconds, you can reply to tweeters, post the results as a tweet, and there’s an RSS feed address for each search.

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Twitterfall 

When I’m in a complex mood (rare!), I don’t mind navigating sites that are festooned with options, settings, links, and other bric-a-brac. When it comes to third-party Twitter searching, perhaps the champion site for complexity is Twitterfall (http://twitterfall.com/), which shows real-time,constantly updated results for one or more search terms. The “fall” part of Twitterfall refers to the animation the site uses: as a new result appears, the existing results slide down the page.

When you access the Twitterfall site, it first displays the results for the currently popular Twitter trends. To run your own search, type a term in the text box in the Custom area, and then click Add. You’re free to create multiple searches, and you can turn individual searches on and off using check boxes.

Figure 6.30 shows Twitterfall with two custom searches running: one for “iphone” and another for “ipod.” Notice that when you hover your mouse over a tweet, the fall pauses and you see a collection of icons to the right of the tweet. If you’re logged in to your Twitter account, you can use these icons to reply to the tweeter, send a direct message to the user (if you’re mutual followers), retweet or favorite the update, follow the user, and view the tweet in Twitter.


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TweetGrid

If you want to monitor multiple search queries, you could set up each one as a feed in your feed reader, which is fine for results that don’t change much. However, if you want to monitor these results in real time and you want Twitter interactivity such as sending replies and marking favorites, your feed reader would have no idea what you’re talking about.Instead, I highly recommend a great site called Tweet Grid (http://tweetgrid.com/). 


The “grid” part of the name means that you can display multiple Twitter searches, each of which appears in its 
own box, and those boxes are arranged in a grid. Several grid structures are available, such as 1 × 1 (a 
single search), 1  × 2 (two searches arranged in a single row with two columns), 2 × 3 (six searches arranged in two rows and three columns), and more. In each box you get a text box to enter your search string (you can use the standard Twitter search operators), and a Search! button to click to start the search. Figure 6.31 shows TweetGrid with a 2  × 3 grid running six different searches, all updating on-the-fly!


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TweetGrid also lets you interact with Twitter. Type your username and password in the User and Pass text boxes, respectively, and TweetGrid uses that data whenever you want to exchange data with Twitter. For example, hover your mouse over a tweet and several icons appear in the lower-right corner of the tweet. (In figure 6.31, you see these icons in the first tweet of the top-left box in the grid.) These icons enable you to reply, retweet, or favorite the tweet, send a direct message to the tweeter (if you’re mutual followers), view the tweet in the Twitter archive, and send the tweet via e-mail. You can also use TweetGrid to send a tweet


Monitter

If your Twitter searching is all about location, location, location, you could add the near: and within: operators to your search queries. However, an easier way is to use Monitter (http://monitter.com/). This site lets you define multiple search queries, and the results of each query are displayed in a column. More importantly for location fans, you can filter all the results using distance and location, as shown in figure 6.32. For each tweet you get links to reply, retweet, or view the tweeter’s profile, plus you see the tweeter’s location.

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TweetBeep

Have you ever used Google Alerts, the service that sends you daily or weekly Google search results? It’s an incredibly useful service, and if you’ve ever wished you could get the same convenience with Twitter, wish no more. With TweetBeep (http://tweetbeep.com/), you can define a Twitter search query, and then TweetBeep sends you a daily or even an hourly e-mail alert with the latest results.

After you create a TweetBeep account, you can immediately start creating alerts (although TweetBeep won’t send you any alerts until you confirm your account by clicking the link in the e-mail message it sends you). Click My Alerts, and then click New Keyword Alert to display the New Keyword Alert page, as shown in figure 6.33. The layout of this page is nearly identical to Twitter’s Advanced Search form. Fill in the fields to define your search criteria, click Save Alert, and then sit back and let TweetBeep do all the work.

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Twemes 

Hashtags are an easy way to track tweet topics, and you can use the hash (#) operator to search for a tag using Twitter Search. However, that only scratches the surface of the surface when it comes to hashtags. To delve deeper into this powerful tool, check out Twemes (http://twemes.com/), which specializes in viewing and searching hashtags. The Twemes (the name is a mashup of Twitter  and  memes ) home page shows you a list of hashtags that have been recently updated, as well as a hashtag cloud (bigger and bolder means more popular).


You can also search for a hashtag by typing a topic (without the #) in the search box and clicking Search. In the search results, click Start live update to follow the hashtag in real time (see figure 6.34).


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AskTwitR

AskTwitR (http://asktwitr.com/) is a very basic Twitter search engine with one unique feature that makes it just a bit addictive: When you run a Twitter search from the simple home page, the first thing you see on the results page is a Google map. Within seconds, locations start popping up on the map, each of which is a tweet from the search results (see figure 6.35). Each pop-up shows the tweet text and the tweeter’s avatar, and the pointer shows you the user’s location on the map. It’s oddly mesmerizing. Scroll down (if you can drag yourself away from the map) and you see matching Flickr photos, matching YouTube photos, and then (finally) the matching tweets.


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BackTweets

If you want to see who has mentioned your Web site on Twitter, you could simply enter domain.com as a Twitter search (where domain is your domain name). However, the results miss all those links to your site that have been cut down to size with a URL-shortening service. (And because most addresses on Twitter are shortened, you’ll miss a lot of tweets!) A better approach is to let BackTweets (http://backtweets.com/) handle this for you. You enter the address you want to search — it could be a simple domain name, a partial address, or a full URL— and click Search. 

BackTweets looks in the Twitter links for the address text you specified, and then displays the matching tweets. Best of all, it can even ferret out the address within a shortened URL (see figure 6.36), so you won’t miss a mention.

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TweetVolume

If you’re researching a topic, it’s often useful to run Google searches on different words and then compare the number of results that Google finds. If one term is vastly more popular than another, then you might decide to use the more popular term in a post or a marketing campaign.For example, when I began writing this book, I couldn’t decide how to refer to people who use Twitter: Twitterers? Tweeters? Tweeple? Tweople? For the most part.

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 I use tweeters , if only because Twitterers  is hard to say, and  tweeple is a plural-only term.However, what I should have done is use TweetVolume (http://tweetvolume.com/) to research each term within Twitter. TweetVolume is very simple: You enter up to five search terms, and the site returns the number of matching tweets, all displayed in a nice bar graph for easy comparison. Figure 6.37 shows the results for my four Twitter user terms (with Twitterati thrown in just for the 
heck of it). As you can see, tweeter is the winner!


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Reference : wiley.com













Twitter Tips: 7 things you should know about.Twitter


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Scenario

Edward, an instructional technologist in Ohio, was gen-erally familiar with Daniel’s research on active learning at his institution in California, but when they met at a conference and had an opportunity to talk, they real-ized their separate research projects had considerable synergy.Daniel’s  research  team  included  two  others at his institution, as well as three more people around the  country,  whereas  Edward  was  working  alone  on his  project. Daniel found  Edward’s  results  very  inter-esting, however, and invited Edward to combine their two  projects. 

 Because  Daniel’s  team  lived  in  various places, they had already set up a number of tools to facilitate communication  across  locations  and  time zones.  One  of  those  tools  was  Twitter,  a  Web  site that  let  the  team  members  communicate  as  a  group through  mini-updates  displayed  in  blog-like  format. 

The team exchanged e-mail and had conference calls, but  they  met  in  person  very  infrequently.  Daniel  told Edward that Twitter helped the group stay connected in ways that other means did not.Edward  was  skeptical  at  first.  He  set  up  an  account, added  the  other  researchers  as  friends,  and  started participating in their Twitter posts, or “tweets.” 

All were short (tweets are limited to 140 characters), some had nothing to do with the research, and many referred to people,  events,  and  even  long-standing  inside  jokes that  Edward  knew  nothing  of.  For  the  first  week  or so,  Edward  felt  very  self-conscious  posting  tweets.

He  kept  with  it,  though,  and  found  that  the  more  he used  the  site,  the  more  valuable  it  became—his  un-derstanding was cumulative. Even though he couldn’t pass fellow researchers in the hall and exchange a few words,  those  exchanges  happened  electronically.He soon  understood  their  jokes  and  references,  and  he found himself checking Twitter even before he read his e-mail.

Through  Twitter,  Edward  came  to  understand how Daniel had earned his reputation as not only a bril-liant researcher but also an effective team leader. In his Twitter postings, Daniel was able to provide the team with guidance and support while being casual and at times extremely funny. Over the weeks and months of the project, Twitter allowed Edward to experience the dynamic of the research team, developing a sense of who the individuals were—both personally and profes-sionally. He found he was able to discern their moods and how well their research efforts were progressing. When Edward finally met the full team at a conference, he felt as though he already knew them. 



1-- What is twitter.

Twitter is an online  application  that  is  part  blog,  part  social  net -working site, part cell phone/IM tool, designed to let users answer the question “What are you doing?” Users have 140 characters for each posting (or “tweet”) to say whatever they care to say. Many tweets do answer the question of what the user is doing, but plenty of others are responses to other tweets, pointers to online resourc -es that the user found interesting, musings, or questions. Similar to social networking sites like Facebook—which has itself evolved to  include  mini-updates.

Twitter  lets  users  create  formal  friend -ships,  which  collectively  establish  numerous  and  interconnected 
networks of users. In addition, Twitter works with cell phones and other SMS clients, making it an easy way for mobile users to stay in touch virtually anywhere.


2-- who's doing it

Although Twitter launched i,s6, the number of Twitterers and the amount of attention the site has received grew consider -ably  in  the  first  half  of  2007.  A  lot  of  people  are  talking  about  it, and  plenty  are  using  it,  including some  presidential  candidates, well-known high-tech gurus, and celebrities. Although it’s unclear whether college students are using Twitter in large numbers, many IT professionals in higher education have become active users, as have a number of faculty.


In many cases,a Twitterer is not an individual but a group of peo -ple,  an  organization  (or  part  of  it),  or  an  event.Live  Earth  2007, for  example,  a  global  concert  to  increase  awareness  of  climate change, has a Twitter profile that featured updates leading up to the event. Dell maintains a Twitter profile that advertises short-term (a number of hours or days) promotional specials on computers and other hardware.  Opinion Journal, an offshoot of the Wall Street Journal, has a Twitter euters, which posts new headlines with links to the full stories.


3--How does it work

After creating an account, you can personalize your profile page and enter tweets into a text field. Unless your tweets are protected, they appear on a “public timeline” page, which displays all public tweets in reverse chronological order, like a series of “micro-blogs.” Each  tweet  identifies  the  Twitterer,  whose  screen  name  links  to that person’s profile page, showing all of her previous tweets and her  friends’  tweets.  If  you  are  registered,  you  can  add  her  as  a friend, see a list of her friends, and add any of those people as your friends.

Once you have established at least one friend relationship, your Twitter home page shows the tweets posted by you and your friends, though you can still access the public timeline separately. You  can  also  send  private  messages  to  friends  or post  a  direct reply to another tweet. All of the Twitter functions are available through SMS. If you provide Twitter  with  a  cell  phone  number  or  IM  contact  information,  you can “follow” individual users, even if you are not friends with them.

By choosing to follow a user, you will be notified by phone, IM, or both  any  time  that  person  posts  a  new  tweet.  Twitter  integrates with blogs and other Web pages, providing Flash and JavaScript code  options  that  allow  Web  pages  to access  Twitter  updates. Twitter also provides RSS, which allows news aggregators to subribe to individual feeds, which can be one Twitterer’s posts, your friends’ tweets, or the public timeline.


4-- Why is it significant

The  experience  of  using  Twitter  has  been  described  as  walking into a room of conversations and looking for a “hook” to decide if and when to jump in. While some people find the public timeline interesting and collect hundreds—if not thousands—of friends and followers, many see the value of Twitter in keeping connected with a select group of colleagues and acquaintances through a shared space.  Tweets  offer  information  about  a  person—likes,  dislikes, frustrations—that might never make it into a professional conver -sation. Some of the information is trivial, some boring, and some perhaps better kept private, but the sum of all this information can be getting to know someone quite well, warts and all.

For colleagues who don’t live in the same town, Twitter can serve as  a  “virtual  water  cooler”  where  people  talk  about  work,  the weather,  sports,  or  anything  else  that  comes  up.  Twitter’s  net-working component lets you make connections with your friends’ friends, and this dynamic can lead to serendipitous professional or personal relationships with other Twitterers. Twitter creates a new channel of communication, but it also facilitates a new way of see -ing  and  understanding  people:  although  most  individual  tweets 
say very little, ardent Twitterers say that the magic comes from fol -lowing people over time, developing a sense of who they really are and  knowing—at  nearly  any  moment—what  they  are  doing  and 
how they feel about it.  


5-- What are the downsides?


The most common criticism of Twitter is that it enables inane inter -action. Tweets that sathing more than “I’m eating pickles” or “Really tired today” are not uncommon, and, indeed, the value of such postings to the casual user is minimal. Moreover, as an asyn -chronous broadcast service, there is no guarantee that any 
indi -vidual tweet will be read, let alone responded to. Twitter can also be  a  distraction  for  frequent  and  committed  users.  If  you  follow Twitterers on your phone or by IM, or if you find yourself constantly 
checking  the  Web  site  for  updates.

  Twitter  can  be  a  time  eater. If you interact with the site through a cell phone, the SMS charg -es  can  accumulate  rapidly,  and  the  sheer  number  of updates— particularly if you have a large number of friends or friends who are active users—can be unwieldy.


6-- Where is it going?

Twitter  publishes  an  API,  and  applications  are  regularly  being developed  that  build  on  that  platform.  Early  tools  let  users  add Twitter  functionality  to  their  desktops.  Some  newer  applications add  location  information  to  Twitter  data,  letting  users  not  only read what people are doing but see where they are. An applica -tion called TwitterCamp lets users display tweets in large-format displays,  such  as  projectors.  

Other  applications  let  users  post short  audio  tweets—an  idea  that  seems  to  introduce  the  notion of “micro-podcasts.” These and other applications built on Twitter will come and go, with the community of users determining which ones last and which ones don’t. Facebook has become a place where users share considerable amounts of information, and the site offers a wide range of options for restricting how much and 
what kinds of information you see. Likewise, as Twitter grows, it will likely add more (and more detailed) filters to balance the amount of available content.


7--what are the implications for teaching and learning?


Much has been written about the benefits of active learning strate-gies—using  tools  and  techniques  that  engage  students  in  ways other than simply listening to an instructor and taking notes. In the same way that clickers facilitate active learning, Twitter, too, could be used in an academic setting to foster interaction about a given topic.  Metacognition—the  practice  of  thinking  about  and  reflect -ing on your learning—has been shown to benefit comprehension and retention.

 As a tool for students or professional colleagues to compare thoughts about a topic, Twitter can be a viable platform for metacognition, forcing users to be brief and to the point—an important skill in thinking clearly and communicating effectively. In addition, Twitter can provide a simple way for attendees at a con -ference to share thoughts about particular sessions and activities 
with others at the event and those unable to attend.

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Reference: educause.edu/eli.com

Twitter Tips: Translating a search result to English


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Twitter is a pleasingly global phenomenon, with tweeters tweeting from dozens of countries around the world. Chances are the people you follow write in English, but you never know what language might bubble up when you’re searching, particularly in the new interface, which doesn’t have a language setting.

In the old search pages, if you come upon results written in a foreign language, you have two choices:

A:-  Use the Show tweets written in list to choose English. This removes any non-English tweets from the search results.

B:- Click the Translate link. Twitter uses Google Translator to translate the page. For example, figure 6.26 shows some search results written in French, and figure 6.27 shows the same page translated into English.

No joy here in the new search interface where the Translate link is noticeably absent. Is there a workaround? Of course! Here you go:

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 1.  Run the search.

 2.  Copy the resulting URL from the browser’s address bar.

 3.  Navigate your browser to Google Translate at http://translate.google.com.

 4.  Paste the address into the Enter text or a Web page URL text box.

 5.  Under the text box, use the left list to choose the language you want translated.

 6.  Under the text box, use the right list to choose English (although this is the default value). Figure 6.28 shows a Google Translate page ready to go.

 7.  Click Translate.  Google redisplays the Twitter search results with the text translated.
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Reference : wiley.com

Twitter Tips: Marking a search result as a favorite


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You’ll often come across useful or fun tweets in your search results, but what happens when one day you stumble upon a perfect pearl of a tweet that not only scratches whatever itch caused you to perform the search in the first place, but that you know you’ll refer to again and again? Why, save it to your Favorites list, of course! Here’s how:

A:  New Twitter search:  Hover your mouse over the search result to display the Favorite icon (see figure 6.25), and then click that icon. Twitter colors the icon orange to mark it as a favorite.

B:  Old Twitter search: Click the New Tweet link to load the archive page for the tweet, move your mouse over the tweet text to display the Favorite icon, and then click the icon. Twitter marks the tweet as a favorite by coloring the icon orange.

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Reference : wiley.com

Twitter Tips: Using a feed to monitor search results


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Some searches are one-time-only deals where you run your search, check the results, and then return to whatever you were doing. Sometimes, however, you want to run the same search frequently. For example, you might want to know whenever a tweeter talks about a particular product or service, your company, or yourself. (Don’t worry, everyone searches for themselves on Twitter; call it egoTwittering .) In those cases, it would sure be nice to have some way to monitor the search results.

I mentioned earlier that Twitter monitors your current search query in the background and kindly lets you know if new tweets that match your query show up. That’s fine as long as you have the Twitter search page displayed, which these days isn’t all that inconvenient because all the major Web browsers support tabbed browsing, so you can leave your search open in a tab while you move on with other things.

Of course, you’ll eventually close that browser session or turn off or reboot your computer, so the next time you’re back in the Twitter verse you’ll have to run the same search all over again. To avoid that, a better monitoring idea is to create a feed for the search, which will let you monitor the search from the friendly 
confines of your favorite feed reader, such as Google Reader, News Gator, or Bloglines.

Fortunately, creating that feed is just a click away because Twitter displays with each batch of search results a link to a feed for that search:

 A: New Twitter search:  At the bottom of the sidebar, click the RSS feed for this query link.

 B: Old Twitter search: At the top of the sidebar, click the Feed for this query link.Either way, when the feed page opens, copy the URL from the address bar. Now switch to your feed reader, create a new subscription, and then paste the address when the feed reader asks you for the feed URL.

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Reference : wiley.com

Twitter Tips: Sending your search results as a tweet


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When you’re searching the Twitter landscape, you might come upon some sight or landmark that’s particularly striking, so much so that you want to share your discovery with the people who follow you. That’s very nice of you. How you go about doing that depends, yet again, on which search interface you’ve got.

Life is beer and skittles in the old Twitter search regime: near the top of the sidebar, click the Twitter these results link. This immediately posts a tweet that uses the following format:

Searched Twitter for query linkHere, query is the search string you used, and  link is a handy link to the search results. Here’s an example:Searched Twitter for twitter from:mashable http://tinyurl.com/dy7359 Unfortunately, as of this writing, this convenience is nowhere to be found in the new Twitter 
search interface.To duplicate it, you need to follow these steps:

1.  Run the search.

 2.  Copy the resulting URL from the browser’s address bar.

 3.  Click Home to return to your Twitter home page.

 4.  Type a short message that describes the search. If you want to include the 

search query, click your browser’s Back button, copy the search text, click your 

browser’s Forward button, and then paste the string into the update box.

5.  Click Update.

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Reference : wiley.com

Twitter Tips: Adding Twitter Search to Firefox


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Adding Twitter Search to the Firebox Search box is quite a bit easier than with Internet Explorer. 

Here’s all you have to do:

 1.  Navigate to the Twitter search page.

 2.  Pull down the Search box menu, as shown in figure 6.24.

 3.  Click Add “Twitter Search.”  Firefox adds Twitter Search to its list of search engines. 

Now that was easy!

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Reference : wiley.com

Twitter Tips: Adding Twitter Search to Internet Explorer


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By default, Internet Explorer’s Search box uses the Windows Live search engine. If you want to get Twitter in there, you need to create what’s called a custom 
search provider . 

Here are the steps to follow:

 1.  Navigate to the Twitter search page.

 2.  Run a search using TEST (all-caps) as the search string.

 3.  Copy the resulting URL from the Address bar.

4.  Click the drop-down arrow to the right of the Search box, and then click Find 

More Providers. Internet Explorer displays a list of search providers.

 5.  Scroll to the bottom of the window and click the Create your own Search 

Provider link.  The Create your own Search Provider page appears.

 6.  Click inside the URL text box and paste the address from step 3.

 7.  Use the Name text box to specify the name you want to appear in the Search box list (such as “Twitter”).  

8.  Click Install Search Provider.  The Add Search Provider dialog box appears.

 9.  If you want Internet Explorer to use Twitter as the default search engine, select the Make this my default search provider check box.

 10.  Click Add. Internet Explorer adds Twitter to the list of search engines.
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To use Twitter within Internet Explorer, pull down the Search box list, and click Twitter (or whatever you name your custom search provider). Type a search query and press Enter and Internet Explorer displays the results in Twitter, as shown in figure 6.23.

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Reference : wiley.com

Twitter Tips: Locating Tweets that Contain Links


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For many Twitter fans, the most important tweets are the ones that contain links to other sites, because they’re often the most interesting, the most useful, or the most fun. So it’s great that the Twitter search engine includes an option that lets you specify that it should only return tweets that contain links.

Here’s how to use this option from the Advanced Search page:

 1.  Click the Advanced Search link in any Twitter search page to open the Advanced Search page.

 2.  Select the Containing Links check box.

 3.  Enter your other search criteria.

 4.  Click Search.  Twitter returns only those tweets that have at least one link.To get your Search box-based searching to return only tweets with links, include filter:links as part of your search string. included filter:links to hopefully find some links to cool things.

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Reference : wiley.com

Twitter Tips: Finding Tweets by Date


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As I write, today Twitter is celebrating its third birthday, so you’ll have more than three years’ worth of tweets to search by the time you read this. That’s a decent chunk of time, but you’d never know it from the search results because they’re always sorted by when the tweets were sent, with the most recent appearing at the top of the list. That fits with Twitter’s relentless focus on “What’s happening now?” However, it often makes it hard to find the information you want.

For example, search Twitter for the word inauguration and you might get some tweets where people are still talking about U.S. President Barack Obama’s inauguration, but you won’t see the actual tweets sent that day because it’s too old. You could click the Older link that appears at the bottom of each page of search results, but I assume you have a life outside of Twitter.

The problem is that Inauguration Day was January 20, 2009, and with Twitter sorting search results chronologically, the tweets from that day are simply too far back. To fix that, you can specify the tweets dates you want to see in the search results. You can specify a start date and an end date.

Follow these steps to search for tweets by date using the Advanced Search page:

 1.  Click Advanced Search in any Twitter search page. The Advanced Search form appears.

 2.  In the Since this Date text box, type the start date. Use the format yyyy-mm-dd. You can also click the calendar icon and choose the date from the calendar that pops up.

 3.  In the Until this Date text box, type the end date.  Again, use the format yyyy-mm-dd, or click the calendar icon.

 4.  Enter your other search criteria, as needed.

 5.  Click Search.  Twitter displays a list of tweets that were sent within the specified distance of the location.

To perform date-based searches using the handy Search box, you need to familiarize yourself with two operators:

A- since:  Use this operator followed by a date in the yyyy-mm-dd format to specify the start date.
 B- until: Use this operator followed by a date in the yyyy-mm-dd format to specify the end date.

You can use each operator on its own to restrict the search result on one end only, or you can use them together to set a date range.

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Reference : wiley.com

Twitter Tips: Searching for tweets by location

If you use a Twitter client on a mobile device that includes a global positioning system (GPS) sensor, chances are that the client can use that information to update your Twitter location information. For example, the iPhone clients Twittelator Pro, Tweetie, and Twitterific can all take advantage of the GPS sensor in the iPhone 3G. Tweets you send are tagged with your current position.

 So many Twitter updates have an associated location. (For tweets from people who haven’t specified their location or who’ve used some vague or jokey location, this information isn’t so useful.)If you’re interested in locating people who are tweeting near a particular location.

You can use Twitter Search to specify that location as well as a distance. For example, you could search for tweets that were sent within 10 miles of Kalamazoo, Michigan.Here are the steps to follow to search for tweets by location using the Advanced.

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Search form:

 1.  Click the Advanced Search link in a Twitter search page.  The Advanced Search page appears.

 2.  In the Near this Place text box, type the location.

 3.  Use the Within this Distance list to select a value.  The choices are 1, 5, 10, 15, 25, 50, 100, 500, or 1000.

 4.  Select either Miles or Kilometers.

 5.  Click Search.  Twitter displays a list of tweets that were sent within the specified distance
of the location.

To perform location-based searches from the Search box, you use two operators:

  A: near: Use this operator followed by a place name to search for tweets sent from that
location.

  B: within: Use this operator followed by a number followed by either mi (for miles) or km (for kilometers) to search for tweets within that distance of the location.

One advantage you get with using these operators is that you can use them on their own. For example, using near: on its own returns all the posts sent from just that location. Similarly, using within: on its own returns all the posts sent within the specified distance of your current location.Figure 6.19 shows a search query that looks for posts sent within 10 miles of Indianapolis, and I’ve also added the search term restaurant.

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Reference : wiley.com

Twitter Tips: Searching for tweets that mention a person


Reply tweets always begin with @username , but plenty of tweets mention users by including @ username  somewhere within the tweet text. It could be a retweet, a shout out to someone, an acknowledgment of an original post, a FollowFriday recommendation, or whatever. For these types of tweets, you can search for updates that include a reference to a user, possibly also filtered with other search criteria.

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To search for tweets that mention a user with the Advanced Search page, follow these steps:

1.  Click the Advanced Search link in a Twitter search page.  The Advanced Search page appears.

 2.  In the Referencing this Person text box, type the Twitter username of the person whose mentions you want to search.

 3.  Use one or more of the text boxes in the Words section to specify which tweets you want to match.

 4.  Click Search.  Twitter displays a list of tweets that mention the person and that match your other criteria.

To search for a user’s mentions from the Search box, use the @ operator, which you insert immediately in front of the username. In figure 6.17 I’ve put together a search query that looks for mentions of the user wordspy that contain the text RT (so they’re retweets).

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Reference : wiley.com

Twitter Tips: Searching for tweets from a person.


Running an advanced people search

Although most of your Twitter searching expeditions will scour tweet text for matching posts, it’s also useful to search based on people. For example, you might want to see all the posts sent by a user, all the posts sent to a user, or all the posts that mention a particular user. You perform these people-related searches using either the Advanced Search for or the Search box.


Searching for tweets from a person

If you want to see all the tweets that someone has posted, it’s easiest to navigate to that person’s profile page on Twitter. However, what if you want to see only some subsets of those tweets? For example, you might want to see only those tweets from that person that include a certain word or phrase. For that, you need to take it up a notch and construct a search engine query.

Here’s how you can search for tweets posted by someone using the Advanced Search page:

 1.  Click the Advanced Search link in any Twitter search page.  The Advanced Search page appears.

 2.  In the From this Person text box, type the Twitter username of the person whose tweets you want to search.

 3.  Use one or more of the text boxes in the Words section to specify which tweets you want to match.

 4.  Click Search.  Twitter displays a list of tweets from that person that match your other criteria.

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You can also search for a person’s tweets from the Search box. The operator you use is from:, and you insert it immediately in front of the username. In figure 6.15 I’ve constructed (and run) a search query that looks for posts from the user cshirky that contain the word media.

Reference : wiley.com