Twitter has become a megaphone for Trump and the freaks that still follow him. With that inevitable carnival coming to a close sooner or later, keeping the pipeline open for the next lunatic fringe makes good business sense.
Jack Dorsey Explains Why Twitter Didn’t Block Alex Jones, Bucking Big Tech Trend
Dear People of Earth can we agree on one thing? No it’s not about war, religion, politics or anything that will save lives or benefit humanity. It’s about your social media icon. Can we all agree that by now everyone on the planet (that can access the internet via a computer) should be able to log into a social media channel and upload a picture of themselves or what they represent. Is it still too hard to do?
Perhaps its a vanity problem? Are there just too many good pictures of you to choose from that you cannot settle on just one? Really? Maybe its another problem entirely and the other pictures of you don the walls of the US Postal Service. Whatever it is, come out of the Cyber closet. So which is it?
I hope it’s not simply the fact that nobody has taken the time to help you put a picture on your Facebook or Twitter accounts that would be just sad, and kind of counter to the helpfulness that social media was originally intended for.
If you fall into the later category in earnest and need help please write me. I am here to help.
In 2009, I found myself in constant learning mode. I learned lots more about social media, what works, what doesn’t and what I can use. I also learned about iPhone applications that work, don’t work and the ones I plan to use going forward. I promise to work smarter in 2010 and put iPhone and cool toy blinders on. I figure I cost myself thousands of dollars figuring out new apps when I should have been worrying more about being more profitable.
I have weeded out quite a few applications on the iPhone and I will share my thoughts this is a blog after all.
I will use TweetDeck for twitter on my laptop computer and iPhone. I like it, it can handle 2 accounts on twitter, does facebook and now also LinkedIn as well. As I personally transition to whatever is next in my professional life, I may need a few twitter accounts to pull it off with and with TweetDeck I think I am covered.
I plan to use Posterous. I plan on using it to post pictures and short blurbs too big for twitter but too small to blog. @chrisbrogan used it very effectively until he abandoned all logic and dumped his iPhone and went with an android and Pixelpipe . I give Chris credit however, I cannot for the life of me figure out Pixelpipe, and in keeping with work smarter not harder I pick Posterous.
I am torn between Qik and Ustream for mobile lives treaming of iPhone video partially because both are so new and both need work to make the video streaming better. I cannot therefore make a clear choice between apples and um apples. Maybe Livestream will blow them both away. Until then I will keep both and hope one improves greatly and makes my choosing easier.
I will stick with Foursquare over Gawalla or odwalla or whatever its called. @JoselinMane said to me early in April 2009 that foursquare had too many bugs in it to catch on. It did at the time. I was then using loopt on iphone. Anyone remember that program now? I blame @stevegarfield for my foursquare addiction thanks Steve.
For videos under 10 minutes I will use YouTube, for those over 10 minutes I will use Vimeo. Vimeo has great quality video, a good price point, and good analytics.
I chose Delicious over Stumble upon. I did not think I needed two bookmarking sites. Both are really good bookmarking sites that share the sites you like with others. You can bookmark an article, a blog or website that way and tell others easily.
I added Digg for news. I still have not figured out the blog RSS reader thing but hope to do so in 2010 (time permitting of course)
Other apps I deleted this year. I got rid of Tumblr, it was a good application and app on iPhone but I never used it. Another deletion was Joost, again nice application and iphone app but I just did not use it. Going is a good email about whats going on in Boston but was only a so so IPhone app again just my opinion. Boxee is another program I jettisoned. I was just able to figure out the install for mac TV when the Mac TV upgrade deleted it. Bye Bye Boxee…
I use Yelp and the application Around me to find stuff like restaurants when traveling. I will use around me first then see what people have yelped about it.
I also use the IPhone linkedin application at social media events, and other social events. Mike Damphouse at green leads @damphoux taught me that trick early on in 2009 and it helps you research who you are talking with. Knowing who your audience is certainly helps.
Anyway, I better get back to work I have already wrote too long a blog here and I have some accounting to do, some more wordpress blog to figure out oh joy. I am also working on my new book “Be Seen with trust agents crushing it” . jk
Have a very safe and happy new year.
So your on twitter and you wonder what about all the gadgets offered by companies that help you twitter. There are many and I have tried a few with varying degrees of success. I offer the following because it’s what I know from personal use. I do not endorse any of them and I have no affiliation with any of them.
TweetLater:(free with paid upgrade available) has a couple of free tools that allow you to automate some of your Twitter tasks. You can schedule a retweet, or a twit for later in the day. You can also vet your new followers with an automated welcome message. It can also look at your new followers and sort them into accept, ignore, block or spam which can be helpful. Twitter booted a bunch of people who were using Tweetlater saying that, that was not the reason why they got booted. Those counts were all reinstated however except for the spammer ones I suspect.
True Twit: (free) This filter sends a message asking that the person on the other end respond and verify they are a real person. This is common in email practices and spam programs and now there is one for twitter. I used it and it was a very good functional tool. However, I did have one person contact twitter and claim that I was spamming her. She did not know of this program apparently and was not able to google it before sending the automated response to twitter. I tried to apologize but then this person also blocked me so maybe she was spam?
Twitter adder: (free trial then paid program) I tried this program and it is a program. It will download and allow you to do a few tasks up to a point when you will have to purchase it to continue. You can use this to bulk add people, or delete them etc. You can add followers of people you already follow, and also delete others that don’t follow you back. While the program worked fine, it seems to detach you from the whole process and part of twitter and adding and following people is being involved I thought? no? How can you engage new followers politely and correctly otherwise?
Tweet deck (free iphone and desktop) I use tweetdeck on my iphone and like the interface and its quick add feature. I also like being able to search columns etc. This is a very good free application. It is available on itunes.
I used the tweetdeck beta on my Mac desktop and while it was very good it caused my Mac pro-book to overheat so I stopped using it. I heard it was API related (not sure hwta that is ) but when I took it off my pro-book problem was solved. I have heard there has since been an update but I am all set thanks.
Seesmic Desktop: ( free desktop MAC) I use this program on my laptop now and love it. In addition to all the twitter functionality you can also post on facebook which is nice also. You just have to remember where you are posting if that matters to you.
Co-tweet: (free) I tried it but found that it is more geared to large companies that have multiple twitter accounts and its more about maintaining presence then just tweeting as a small business owner and Producer. Maybe it’s something to re-investigate when my company is much bigger.
Sites and companies mentioned.
http://www.tweetlater.com/
http://tweetadder.com/
http://tweetdeck.com/beta/
http://cotweet.com/
http://seesmic.com/
In Dirty Harry the last line of the film was “a man’s got to know his own limitations” I may be good at video production but as far as being an early adopter testing things like Friend feed and feeding it to face book and twitter I am a doofus.
Interesting tonight I pleaded to the Twitter cosmos to see if anyone had similar problems. 1 person a friend and colleague responded. Thanks Jason. The thing I also noticed that in my rant of frustration I got 10 more followers on twitter. 10 more people but no more help on this problem.
Chris Brogan got me and another 100o plus lemmings to respond to a Star Trek trivia question which of course I knew the answer on.
“ a mans got to know his own limitations”
The Bensleygram 