Computer Tips: Metro Apps For Windows 8 You Should Install

With the release of Windows 8 just around the corner, I thought I would write up an article on my favorite 10 Metro apps so far. I’ve been using Windows 8 for over 2 months now and the number of Metro apps in the Windows Store has really gone up! I’m sure there are going to be hundreds more released by the time October rolls around, but as of now, here are some cool Metro apps you can use on your new Windows 8 machine.

If you are using a different Metro app I haven’t listed here, feel free to post a comment and let us know why you think the app is awesome. Enjoy!

Computer Tips: Metro Apps For  Windows 8 Install Time-- MetroTwit

If you’re a Twitter user like I am, then MetroTwit is probably the best Twitter metro-style app for Windows 8. It’s gone a sleek interface and quickly lets you view your timeline, @mentions and direct messages.

You can post a tweet easily and upload a photo or even take a photo if you have a web cam installed.

You can also do searches on Twitter directly from the app, which is a nice feature since I like to follow a lot of topics on twitter.

"Computer Tips: Metro Apps For  Windows 8 Install Time-- MetroTwit"

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Twitter Tips: Send your blog feed to Twitter

If you’ve got a blog as well as a Twitter account, you can send a tweet each time you post a new blog entry to let your followers know you’ve got some outside content for them to read. However, why bother with that extra step when you can get your blog post sent automatically to your Twitter account? The tool for this task is Twitterfeed (http://twitterfeed.com/), which takes items in from an RSS feed and automatically forwards them to a Twitter account.

Here’s how you set things up:

1.  Go to http://twitterfeed.com/ and create an account.

2.  Click Create new feed. Twitterfeed displays the Create new feed page.

3.  In the Create new feed list, choose Twitter.

4.  Use the Username and Password text boxes to enter your Twitter credentials. At this point it’s a good idea to click Test Twitter authentication to make sure Twitterfeed can connect to your Twitter account.

5.  Type the address of your blog’s feed in the RSS Feed URL text box. To make sure all’s well, I suggest clicking Test RSS feed to ensure that Twitterfeed is receiving the feed loud and clear.

6.  Use the Update frequency list to choose how often you want Twitterfeed to check your RSS feed for new entries.

7.  Use the Include list to choose what parts of each blog post you want posted to Twitter.  Choose Title & description, Title only, or Description only.

8.  If you don’t want your update to include a link back to your blog, deselect the Include item link check box.

9.  If you want to mark these tweets to indicate they come from your blog (for example, “Blog Post:”), type up to 20 characters in the Prefix each tweet with text box.  Figure 9.21 shows a complete feed ready for action.

10.  Click Create. Twitterfeed creates your new feed.Twitterfeed checks your blog feed after whatever time interval you chose in step 6, and it then posts your most recent blog entry to your Twitter account.

"Twitter Tips: Send your blog feed to Twitter"

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Twitter Tips: Using LinkedIn to track tweets about your company

If you have a LinkedIn account (www.linkedin.com), you probably find it a useful tool for making new business contacts. However, you can also use it to track tweets that mention your company.

Sign on to LinkedIn and click Applications. Click the Company Buzz application to open the preview page, and then click Add application. Company Buzz automatically adds topics that cover your LinkedIn profile data, such as your company name, the names of previous employers, and your school names. You can also add other topics to track then within LinkedIn.

"Twitter Tips: Using LinkedIn to track tweets about your company"

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Twitter Tips: Displaying your latest tweet on a photo

SayTweet (http://saytweet.com/) qualifies as a tool if by the word tool you mean “a silly, pointless, but just plain fun mashup that you can display on your Web site.” The idea is that you upload a photo (or provide a photo URL) to SayTweet, click that photo, and then provide your Twitter username.

At the spot you clicked, SayTweet adds a speech bubble, and your most recent tweet appears in that bubble. The site then provides you with some code to add to yoursite, and visitors see your photo and speech-bubble tweet, as shown in figure 9.18. Silly? Check. Pointless? Check. Just plain fun? Check.


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Twitter Tips: Getting your Twitter account ranking

When a site turns up near the top of a Google search, that site is said to have lots of Googlejuice . So if your Twitter account is getting lots of buzz (followers, retweets, shoutouts, whatever), then I guess you could say that it’s got lots of  Twitterjuice .

How would you know for sure, though? You could just go with what your gut tells you, but if you want something a bit less subjective, then I suggest you check out any of the following sites, which can tell you where you stand in the overall

Twitter scheme of things:

1: TwinFluence  (http://twinfluence.com/). This site offers several interesting statistics that aim to measure your influence within the Twitterverse (see figure 9.17). The top number is your overall influence rank and its percentile. Besides basic friends and followers numbers, you also get stats for your second-order followers (the total number of people your followers follow).

Velocity (the rate at which your account is accumulating second-order followers); social capital (the average number of followers that your followers have); and centralization (a measure of how much of your total number of second-order followers is dependent on a few people with high followerships). There’s lots of good math meat here if you have a taste for that kind of thing.

1: Twitalyzer  (http://twitalyzer.com/). This site analyzes your overall influence in Twitter circles using five measures: signal-to-noise ratio (where signal  refers to tweets that pass on information such as links and retweets, and noise refers to everything else); generosity (how often you retweet); velocity (the relative rate at which you post tweets); and clout (the relative rate at which other people reference your account in their tweets).

  

2: TwitterCounter  (http://twittercounter.com). This site shows your total number of followers and a graph of your followership growth over the past week. It also calculates the number of new followers you get per day and predicts how many you’ll have in 30 days.

  

3: Twitter Grader (http://twitter.grader.com/). This site delves deep into your Twitter data to provide you with an overall number that’s supposed to show where you rank against all other Twitter users. The site offers no clue as to how this rank is calculated, so take the results with one or two grains of salt.

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Twitter Tips: Tracking tweets by location

The next tool I’m going to tell you about comes with a warning: This site is so downright compelling that you should only visit on days when you have no pressing deadlines or other time constraints.

That’s because twittearth (http://twittearth.com/) grabs tweets randomly from the Twitterstream, and then displays the tweet text and its location on a gorgeous 3-D model of the Earth, complete with cute little characters to represent the tweeters (see figure 9.16). Two words: compulsively watchable.







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Twitter Tips: Tracking total tweets

The site Tweetrush (http://tweetrush.com/) provides fascinating data on Twitter usage. Its main charts (see figure 9.15) show the total number of tweets per day over the past week and the average number of tweets at a given time of day over Twitter’s lifetime.


You also see data for the day’s most prolific tweeters (yes, the “people” withhundreds of tweets are bots), and the total number of active tweeters over the past week. You can even break down the total tweet numbers by Twitter client. All in all, it’s a great site for data hounds.

"Twitter Tips: Tracking total tweets"

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Twitter Tips: Following Twitter trends

As a source of information, your everyday experience with Twitter probably consists of reading your friends’ incoming tweets, and perhaps occasionally tuning in to the public timeline to marvel at the confusion and sheer incomprehensibility of it all. Looking at Twitter tweet-by-tweet it all seems so random, like so many atoms whooshing by.

However, just as atoms have a genius for combining into tangible objects, so too does the tweetstream produce its own order out of chaos. I’m talking here about Twitter trends, those topics and ideas that suddenly, without anyone planning anything or controlling anything, seem to be on everyone’s Twitter lips.

Twitter itself mines the vast public database of tweets for interesting trends, and displays the top ten on the Twitter Search page ). Of course, Twitter programmers want in on this action, too, so there’s no shortage of tools that let you get a sense of the Twitter zeitgeist. Here are just a few to get you started:

1:  Tweetmeme (www.tweetmeme.com). This site examines the links in the tweetstream and shows which ones have been tweeted most often (see figure 9.13).

2:  Twist (http://twist.flaptor.com). You can use this site to see how often a particular topic has been mentioned on Twitter, and you can even compare two or more topics.

3: TwitScoop  (www.twitscoop.com). This addictive site offers a Buzzing right now feature that shows the most popular Twitter topics in a cloud format, where the more popular a topic is, the larger and bolder its text (see figure 9.14). The addictiveness comes from the real-time display that shows topics growing and shrinking as you watch.

  

4: Twopular (http://twopular.com). This site shows you the trending Twitter topics in different timeframes: the past two hours, eight hours, day, week, month, and ever since the service began (in late 2008). One nice touch is the use of up, down, and sideways arrows to indicate a trend’s direction.

"Twitter Tips: Following Twitter trends"

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Twitter Tips: More Twitter Tools to Play With Scheduling tweets

The Twitterverse is so crowded with Twitter-related tools that it would take another book this size, heck another two books this size to cover them all. I might just do that one day, but for now I’ll 

delve into a few tools that I think are useful, fun, or just plain cool.

Scheduling tweets

Sometimes you compose a tweet, but then realize it would be better if you posted it later. For example, it could be a birthday greeting or other message to a friend in a different time zone who, if you sent it now, might miss it because she’s sleeping. Or perhaps you’re going on vacation for a week and, not being a Twitterholic, you decide to also take a week off from tweeting. However, you don’t want your account to appear dormant, so it would be nice to compose a few tweets now, and then have them posted every day or two while you’re away.

Yes, Twitter is all about what’s happening now, but sometimes your life is about what’s happening then. For those times, you can take advantage of the growing list of services that let you schedule 

tweets. Here’s a sampling: 

1:  FutureTweets (http://futuretweets.com). With this service you can publish a tweet at a specific date and time, or you can set up a recurring tweet that gets shipped out daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly. Also includes the completely unrelated capability of flipping tweet text upside down and backwards. No, I don’t know why.

2:  HootSuite (http://hootsuite.com). This service lets you send tweets now or at a specified date and time. You can set up multiple Twitter accounts and perform most basic Twitter functions (send replies, retweets, and direct messages, unfollow people, see the replies and directs you’ve received, and more).

3:  TweetLater (www.tweetlater.com). The free version of this service lets you post tweets a specific number of minutes, hours, days, or weeks from now, or at a specific date and time (see figure 9.12). TweetLater Professional (for which you must fork over a monthly fee) lets you create recurring tweets. Both versions also include many other tools for managing your Twitter life, including multiple Twitter accounts, automatic follows and unfollows, keyword tracking, and more.

"Twitter Tips: More Twitter Tools to Play With Scheduling tweets"

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Twitter Tips: Posting to Multiple Social Networks

It’s becoming increasingly rare these days to find anyone who can make do with just a single social network. Most of us have two or three or more groups of online friends that we pester with status updates, but logging in to each site and firing off a message just gets too time-consuming. 

Fortunately, the world’s programmers must also be social butterflies because they’ve come up with a few useful solutions that let you post a status update (and sometimes a photo or video, too) to multiple social networks.

Here are a few examples:

  

1: HelloTxt  (http://hellotxt.com/)

  

2: Socialthing (http://socialthing.com/)

  

3: Twitterfeed (http://twitterfeed.com/)

However, the most popular service among the over-networked set right now is Ping.fm, which currently supports 39 social networks, and seems to add new ones on a scarily regular basis. (I don’t know about you, but I didn’t even know there were 39 social networks until I joined Ping.fm!) These networks include all the major online hangouts, including Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, del.icio.us, Flickr, Jaiku, and, of course, Twitter.

That’s impressive enough, but Ping.fm also raises eyebrows with its incredible variety of posting options: e-mail, mobile phone, SMS, MMS, instant messaging (AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, and Windows Live Messenger), gadgets (such as Ping.fm for iGoogle), Web applications (such as Twitterfeed (http://twitterfeed.com/) and the Ping.fm application on Facebook), and desktop applications (such as twhirl).

"Twitter Tips: Posting to Multiple Social Networks"

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Twitter Tips: Getting started with Ping.fm

Your first chore is to sign up, which you can do by following these steps:

 1.  Make a beeline with your browser for http://ping.fm/.

2.  Click Signup.

3.  Type your e-mail address and a password (twice).

 4.  Click Signup.  Ping.fm creates your account and displays the Manage Social Networks page, shown in figure 9.10.

The idea is that you run through the list of social networks, and for each one you use, click the Add Network link and set up your account particulars. Here are the steps to follow for configuring 

Twitter on Ping.fm:

 1.  On the Manage Social Networks page, click the Add Network link beside Twitter. The Settings / Twitter page appears, as shown in figure 9.11.

2.  Type your Twitter username and password.

3.  Leave the Status updates check box and the Micro-blogging check box selected.

 4.  If you plan on posting to Ping.fm using a device with built-in GPS (such as an iPhone 3G) and you want Ping.fm to modify your Twitter location data, leave the Update location check box selected.

5.  Click Submit.

"Twitter Tips: Getting started with Ping.fm"

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Twitter Tips: Getting your Ping.fm application key

If you plan on using Ping.fm with third-party applications such as twhirl (see the next section), iGoogle, or Facebook, then you need to provide those applications with your Ping.fm application

1.  Click Dashboard at the top of any Ping.fm page. The Your Dashboard page appears.

2.  In the Services / Tools section, click Application Keys.  The Application Keys page
appears.

3.  Click the Desktop / Web Key value. Ping.fm automatically copies the key.

4.  Open the third-party program, access the Ping.fm application, gadget, or whatever, and then paste the application key when prompted.

"Twitter Tips: Getting your Ping.fm application key"

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Twitter Tips: Configuring twhirl to use Ping.fm

If you use twhirl  to post to Twitter, you can also use it to pass along your tweets to Ping.fm. Here’s how:

1.  In twhirl, click Configuration (the wrench icon).  The Configuration dialog box opens.

 2.  Display the General tab.

 3.  Select the Ping.fm check box.

4.  Type your Ping.fm app key.

 5.  Click Save.  twhirl saves your new settings, and will now also send your tweets to your Ping.fm account.

"Twitter Tips: Configuring twhirl to use Ping.fm"

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Twitter Tips: Posting with Ping.fm

Posting a status update with Ping.fm is this easy:

1.  Click Dashboard at the top of any Ping.fm page. The Your Dashboard page appears.

2.  Use the Ping My list to decide where you want the message to go:

A:  If you want to update all your networks that accept status updates (including Twitter), either leave the Default item chosen, or choose Statuses.

B:   If you only want to send the update to a single network (such as Twitter), choose that network in the list.

3.  Type your message in the large text box.

4.  Click Ping it.

"Twitter Tips: Posting with Ping.fm"

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Twitter Tips: Other photo sharing services

TwitPic may be the Big Kahuna of Twitter photo-sharing services, but it’s not the only game in that particular town. Here are a few others to check out:

 1:  Mobypicture (http://mobypicture.com/). This service lets you share photos not only with Twitter, but with a wide variety of sites, including Facebook, Flickr, Jaiku, and blogging platforms such as WordPress and Blogger. For these other sites you have to create a Mobypicture account, but for Twitter, you don’t need to create a new account (unless you want to, of course); instead, you log in using your Twitter credentials. You can then upload your photos using the Web site, via e-mail, MMS(multimedia messaging service), or the Mobypicture iPhone app.

2:  Pikchur (http://pikchur.com/). This site also supports a wide variety of sites, including Facebook, FriendFeed, identi.ca, tumblr, and many more. On the login page, be sure to choose Twitter from the list, and then type your Twitter account credentials. Once you’re in, you can upload via the Web site or set up an e-mail address to post from your phone using e-mail or MMS.

3: SnapTweet  (http://snaptweet.com/). If you have a Flickr (www.flickr.com) account, you can use SnapTweet to post tweets that link to your Flickr photos. Sign in to SnapTweet using your Twitter account username and password, along with your Flickr address. You’ll see your latest Flickr photo, and you can start uploading.

4: Visual Twitter (http://visualtwitter.com/). This service lets you post photo tweets via e-mail using your mobile phone. Log in using your Twitter account credentials, click Setup, and then enter your mobile phone number. Once your phone number is confirmed, you can send photo tweets by e-mailing a photo to me@visualtwitter.com.

  

5: yfrog (http://yfrog.com/). This site presents a simple interface (see figure 9.5) that lets you upload either a local photo or a photo on the Web. Type a message, enter your Twitter username and password, and then click Post it! to send the tweet. One of the nice features of yfrog is that when people click the link to load your photo, the yfrog page include a (Re)Tweet this image link that enables tweeters to easily retweet 

your photo. The yfrog site is also optimized for the iPhone, and pointing mobile Safari to yfrog.com displays the interface shown in figure 9.6.

"Twitter Tips: Other photo sharing services"

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Twitter Tips: Sharing videos

Although photo sharing is the type of media most often shared by tweeters, video is right up there, as well. That’s not surprising given the immense popularity of YouTube and other video sharing sites. Here are four Web sites that make it easy to share video with your Twitter tribe:

  

1: ffwd (www.ffwd.com). This interesting site lets you build a personal list of channels , which can be TV shows, Web-based video shows, and more. Once you add achannel to your account, you browse through its video offerings, and when you come across something you want to share, you click the Share on Twitter icon, sign in to your Twitter account, and then post the update. For faster service, you can add your Twitter credentials to your profile (click Profile and then click Account).

2:  TweeTube  (http://tweetube.com/). This site is designed to help you easily share YouTube videos with your Twitter posse. The home page includes a text box that you use to paste the address of the YouTube video you want to feature (you can also use the TweeTube site to search for YouTube videos). Click Get Video and TweeTube retrieves the video, as shown in figure 9.7. Type a message, type your Twitter account username and password, and then click Share this video.

  

3: Twiddeo  (http://twiddeo.com/). This new service lets you upload and share your own video with your tweeps. You can upload a video file from your computer, beam in a video captured on your phone, or even record a video straight from your Web cam. 

4: TwitWall  (http://twitwall.com/). This site enables you to share not only videos, but also images and music files. Log in with your Twitter account credentials, click Add an Entry, and then specify a message and your video specifics. For the latter, click the Embed Tags tab and then your video code (such as the <object> tag code associated with a YouTube video).

"Twitter Tips: Sharing videos"

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Twitter Tips: Sharing music

Got a favorite song you’d like to share? That’s awfully nice of you. Fortunately, sharing a tune on Twitter is easy if you use any of the following music sharing sites:

  

1: Blip.fm (http://blip.fm/). This site lets you set up your own broadcast station. Create an account and then configure it to share with Twitter by typing your Twitter credentials. Locate a song from the Blip.FM archives, click Blip, type some text to appear in your tweet, and then click OK.

2: Song.ly (http://song.ly/). This site is a combination music search service and music sharing service. Type an artist or song title and click Search, and Song.ly looks for matching music on the Web. In the results (see figure 9.8), if you see the song you want to share, click the Tweet icon, sign in to your Twitter account, and then post the tweet.

3:  Twiturm  (http:/twiturm.com/). You can use this site to share your own music by uploading an MP3 file, or to share Web-based MP3s by specifying a song’s Web address. Log in with your Twitter username and password, and then click Upload. Specify a local file or a Web address, type a message for the tweet, and then click Upload.

4: twt.fm  (http://.twt.fm/). This site is by far the most popular music sharing service among Twitter users. Twt.fm associated with IMEEM (http://imeem.com/), so it has access to the millions of songs in the IMEEM database, but twt.fm can also locate music streams on the Web or share your MP3 links. The home page asks for your Twitter username, an artist name, and a track name. Click Preview and, if twt.fm finds 

the track (see figure 9.9), click Yes! Tweet It to switch to Twitter where you can post the tweet.

"Twitter Tips: Sharing music"

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Twitter Tips: Using TwitPic

The gold standard in photo sharing for Twitter is TwitPic (http://twitpic.com/), which is by far the most popular photo sharing service for tweeters. This is partly because almost every Twitter application that comes with some sort of “Share a photo” feature uses TwitPic to handle the dirty work of uploading the photo and shortening the URL. However, the TwitPic site itself is really easy to use, and you can even use TwitPic to upload photos by e-mail (from your camera phone, for example).

Here’s the procedure to follow to upload a photo and post a tweet using the TwitPic site:

1.  Navigate to http://twitpic.com/ and type your Twitter account username and password. Your TwitPic home page appears. The photos you post will appear here.

2.  Click Upload photo.  The Upload and post a photo page appears.

3.  Click Browse.  (If you’re using a Mac, click Choose File.) The Choose File to Upload dialog box appears.

4.  Choose the photo you want to upload and then click Open (or click Choose on your Mac).

5.  Type a message to go along with your photo, as shown in figure 9.3.

6.  Click Upload.  TwitPic uploads the photo, shortens the photo’s URL, and then posts that address and your message as a tweet (see figure 9.4).

"Twitter Tips: Using TwitPic "

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Twitter Tips: Sharing Photos, Videos, and Music

Facebook users get to share photos and videos with their friends, and MySpace users also get to share their favorite MySpace bands with their peeps. Twitter is, obviously, a text-only medium, so sharing media with your tweeps is out, right? True, you can’t embed media directly into a tweet, but you can embed links to any media that you’ve added to other sites, such as Flickr and 

YouTube.

That works, but the entire process is a bit on the exhausting side, particularly if you want to share 

lots of stuff:

1.  Go to the site where your media is hosted.

 2.  Upload the media to the site.

 3.  Copy the address of the page that displays the media.

 4.  Go to a URL-shortening service and shorten the address from step 3.

 5.  Go to Twitter or load your favorite Twitter application.

 6.  Compose a tweet about the media, paste the shortened URL, and then fire away.

My but that’s an awfully roundabout way to perform a task that takes only a few mouse clicks on Facebook or MySpace. Ah, but the Twitterverse can be remarkably resourceful when it senses something missing from its vast toolbox. So now there are special Twitter-friendly sites where you can perform all of these steps in one place. It’s the civilized way to share photos, videos, and music. 

The next few sections tell you about a few of these sites.Sharing photos If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a single photo is the equivalent of about seven tweets! 

Fortunately, you only have to post a single tweet to share a photo using any of the many photo-sharing services that support Twitter. In the next section, I show you how to TwitPic and later I give you some info about a few other photo-sharing sites.

"Twitter Tips:  Sharing Photos, Videos, and Music"

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Twitter Tips: Adding a Twitter gadget to your iGoogle page

If you’ve got a customized iGoogle page loaded with gadgets, why not add a Twitter gadget into the mix.

 Here’s how:

1.  Head directly to your iGoogle page by surfing to www.google.com/ig.

2.  If you don’t have an automatic sign-in, click Sign In, type your Google e-mail address and password, and then click Sign in.

3.  Click the Add stuff link. Google displays the Gadgets tab.

4.  In the Search for gadgets text box, type twitter and click Search. Google displays a list of Twitter gadgets.

5.  Check out the gadgets by clicking the link for each gadget.  In the page that appears, you see a screen shot, a description of the gadget, user reviews, the number of downloads, and more. Use this information to select a gadget that suits you.

6.  Display the page for your preferred gadget and then click Add it now.  Google adds the gadget to your iGoogle home page.

7.  Click Back to iGoogle home.

8.  Use the gadget to log in to your Twitter account. Figure 8.21 shows Twitter Gadget in my iGoogle home page.

"Twitter Tips: Adding a Twitter gadget to your iGoogle page"

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