How to use Tweasier’s Scheduled Tweets

How reliable do we expect our social networks and tools to be now?

I was reading an interesting post by Patricio Robels this morning on econsultancy entitled: Can brands trust social media platforms? My first thought is not really but does it really matter all that much that they are not 100% reliable.

In the post Patricio comments:

Upon logging in to Twitter on Monday, I was greeted with the news that I was following nobody and had no followers.

So while this was a temporary glitch resolved within a few hours, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world if all was indeed lost. Yet for a brand that has invested heavily in Twitter, logging in to see ‘0 following‘ and ‘0 followers‘ would probably be the source of confusion, worry and possibly even anger.

The good news is that Twitter seems to have improved its reliability over the past year. The fail whale hasn’t retired, but it makes less frequent appearances. The problem with my account, however, which wasn’t isolated to just me, highlights an inconvenient truth: for all of Twitter’s improvements, it’s still not exactly what one might label ‘reliable‘.

I tweeted about the same issue yesterday as I noticed it as well – see the image on the right. I have to admit I don’t share Patricio’s optimism that Twitter has improved its reliability. I have noticed more outages in the last six months than in the previous two years and these are mainly down to the development of new features and the new look twitter which has been widely welcomed and that was highlighted in an a poll today by Mashable.

I think we have all become accustomed to things working all of the time but the fact is these social networks are complicated pieces of kit that have taken years to develop and you can take that from someone who has been developing a twitter management application for almost nine months. However, that said should we now expect our social tools to be reliable all of the time? And does this change if the service is free like Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare or Doplr? Or do we all accept that web applications break from time to time and this is now the norm?

I have my own views but let me know what you think – thanks.

Cross posted on Dead Dinosaur.

An interview with Tweasier CEO Chris Norton featurs in Web Designer Magazine

Twitter management tools – why did they remove bulk unfollow tools?

For the last nine months I have been working on creating a Twitter management application that added value to the Twitter experience. The application, called Tweasier, is currently in beta testing and has several hundred people using it on a daily basis – I have found their feedback absolutely invaluable and I now recognise the importance of having a beta period. During these nine months I have seen a variety of Twitter applications have their services or features throttled by Twitter and I have been asking myself why?

A good example of this was Twitter Karma which allowed the average Twitter user to sort their friends by people who were following them back. It was a useful tool which meant that you could cleanse your account from time to time and keep the numbers down to a reasonable and manageable level. Sometimes people you follow, just stop using Twitter altogether, so a spring clean can be effective.

As Twitter has grown, so has the noise in an average users Twitter account. The early adopters of Twitter used to see pretty much everybody’s tweets but now, as there are so many interesting and insightful people out there to follow, you can occasionally miss an important tweet or two. For a news junkie like myself I hate to think that but that’s the way it is on Twitter these days and we have all come to accept it.

Too Many Fail Whales

Twitter has had a bit of a bad run recently launching a few new features which have stumbled and cause the network to break down on regular occasions. Sometimes I actually feel I might as well start having a relationship with the FAIL WHALE as I see him more often that my own account. However, this has prompted Twitter to reduce the limit of requests third-party-applications like Tweasier, Tweetdeck and Hootsuite can make it to its API (down to 175).

By doing this applications have become much less stable and I personally think this may well start affecting the user’s relationship and love for the network.

My Advice to Twitter

So my first bit of advice to Twitter is to sort the stability of the network out and return the trust to the users and the developers which have helped make Twitter as popular as it is toady.

My second piece of advice is to re-examine bringing back bulk unfollowing. Now don’t get me wrong I am not a spammer and I don’t believe in spamming but surely there is a better way to stop Twitter spammers than removing the usefulness of bulk unfollowing from all third-party applications.

Twitter actually changed its rules and now only allows single line unfollowing. In my opinion this is wrong, so please bring back features like bulk unfollowing, so the regular users can trim their accounts when they need trimming otherwise it makes it a far harder process to spring clean an account and people will be following dead accounts which is surely a bad thing for Twitter anyway.

My answer to stopping the spammers is simple, when a users syncs their account with an application their details are kept in the user’s profile. Why then can’t Twitter just have something that flags up when an account is growing and reducing at an alarming rate using one of these applications? Ban these guys whose accounts fluctuate and keep the users happy by giving us back a useful features.

I would love to offer Tweasier’s users the capacity to select all but the way the rules stand that won’t be the case for some time.

New Twitter tool needs your feedback

At Tweasier we are busy finalising our Twitter application but we need your help to tell us what features you would really want from a Twitter application.

We also want to hear what you like about our current version and what you think could be improved. We will be spending the next few weeks using all of your feedback to hopefully create a Twitter application that adds real value to the Twitter experience but we simply can’t do it without your help.

I will be filming a series of walkthrough videos of the features, so here’s a 2 minute taster of our search function which is pretty useful.

If you want to join the fun and get involved in our exclusive beta programme click here and register your email.

Tweasier’s search facility explained in 2 mins

We have had a great response to the beta invites but I am acutely aware that Tweasier has a lot of clever features that our users would like explaining very simply. So I have created this two minute video walking you through how to use the search facility in the Tweasier application.

The Tweasier Twitter Management Application launches in Beta

Well the time has finally arrived and Tweasier is entering the first stages of beta testing.

The idea for Tweasier came from an idea after I started blogging here specifically just about useful Twitter tools. The Tweasier blog started to grow in stature and popularity and I started to think that maybe a tool should be developed which has some really great features. I suppose you could say it’s because of you guys.

The application is only in beta testing (so please be gentle) but we are hoping you guys (its users) will help us find the nasty bugs so we can eradicate as many as possible before we launch this tool to the world.

The new Tweasier application is packed with helpful services, allowing Twitter users to do any of the following:

• Run, save and clone Twitter searches based on location, keywords and personal biographies so conversations can be monitored.
• Receive personalised email notifications informing the user about their activity within the Twittersphere
• Visit Tweasier’s fully equipped analytics suite – providing more than 30 different up-to-date statistics on any Twitter account. Some of the graphs and data can also be exported for use in future presentations or reports.
• Sort an account’s friends or followers by more than 20 different criteria such as: people that haven’t tweeted in the last 30 days, people that didn’t follow the user back and also prune your friends to clear an account up if necessary.
• Users can take a quick peek at Twitter conversations between two people to get both sides of the story.
• Users can read messages, tweet, direct message and even shorten long URLs using Tweasier’s dedicated Twitter client.
• Scheduled tweeting – users can write and save several tweets until later in the day
• Users can use Tweasier’s own in-house ranking system which easily shows whether a user is worth following or not

For those of you more social, you can like Tweasier on Facebook, follow us on Twitter or simply subscribe to the blog.

I hope you like Tweasier but if you have any questions, feel free to drop me or one of the team a line. If you would like an invite email me.

We will look forward to hearing what you guys think of it.

Five cool ways to add tweets to your blog

If you are one of the millions of people active on Twitter then there is also a good chance that you may be creating content elsewhere on the interweb and committing your thoughts more fully to the blogosphere. If that is the case then you ought to consider using one of the many widgets available that enable your tweets to appear on your blog (or website for that matter). Not only is this aesthetically pleasing and gets readers involved in your tweets, it also helps strengthen your personal social media ecosystem – by this, I mean using one platform on which you are active to sign post traffic to another. So there you have it – this post was borne out of necessity to highlight some of the tools available that allow you to make your tweets show up on your blog. I hope this post highlights a few widgets from the basic, up to the more sophisticated.

Twitter

Twitter allows you to embed your tweets fairly easily by copying and pasting some HTML into your blog. If you’re just starting out in the blogging game, I would recommend you use this widget as it creates the code in a matter of seconds. Whilst, the Twitter option is functional, easy to use and offers some personalisation, it is perhaps less visually pleasing than its cooler rivals. However, simplicity is not necessarily a bad thing and for someone with an urge to create content, rather than get bogged down in the intricacies of code, you could do a lot worse than using the standardised Twitter widget. To get this quick bit of code, simply visit the Twitter Goodies site and choose from a profile widget, search widget, faves widget or list widget.

TwitStamp

TwitStamp is very much in the same vein as the standard Twitter widget in that it speedily offers you a choice of funky badges that displays your latest tweets. This app scores higher when it comes to personalisation in comparison to the Twitter widget, whilst retaining its user friendly feel. There are some other great features that let you play around with the badge’s size and background, as well as a handy TwitCard feature you should check out that incorporates your name, avatar, bio, latest tweet and number of followers.

Language is a Virus

This writing prompt (and somewhat unusually named) website offers hundreds of widgets that you can select by size, colour and style. If you are looking for something unusual that other people (probably) won’t have, then this site should be your first port of call. Whilst, there are many, many widgets which are not to my taste, the sheer breadth of designs is worthy of your attention. The main problem will be choosing just one. Again this site guides you through an easy step-by-step process and gives you some code at the end.

Tweetizen

Tweetizen is a slightly more complex widget as it incorporates tweets from particular groups. This is ideal for blogs with several authors or companies who have their employees tweeting for them. It’s fairly straightforward and produces a piece of embed code that you can add anywhere on your blog or website. In addition, you can even customize the look and feel of it by adding an extra stylesheet to override the default CSS stylings.

Tweet

In common with a lot of Twitter tools and apps, the best ones are often created by small teams of developers elsewhere. The beauty of opening up your API is that the crowd can take it on, change it and ultimately make it better. Tweet is another fine example of just that. This unobtrusive piece of JavaScript code enables you to do lots of things, way above and beyond just embedding your latest tweets. For instance, you can display tweets from a particular Twitter search, incorporate tweets from other accounts, as well as the automatic linking of #hashtags. Whilst, this code enables you to do all sorts of creative things, a decent understanding of coding basics is required.

This is a guest post from our good friend Ben Cotton you can read the original post here. Ben is currently employed by Edelman Digital, having previously worked in PR research, a professional cricket club and busy press office. You can find out more about Ben from his blog, Tweets or Linked In profile.

The Tweasier Twitter application launches in beta in 7 days

UPDATE: This will now be launching around end of April as we have decided to add a few more features following feedback from some Twitter users.

A while back I wrote a post about an internet (fashion) community I am involved with (http://www.thefashionpixie.com/) and I said it was just one of several web projects that I was undertaking as well as my usual digital pr and social media consultancy.

Well I have been working hard during the last five months on a Twitter application and the wait is finally almost over. We are planning to launch the product (Tweasier) in beta form in just seven day’s time. So if you use Twitter quite a bit and want to have a play and give us your feedback just add your email to the form on this holding page.

Also if you blog and are interested in blogging about Twitter tools, news, tips and advice. We are also looking for others to join our growing team of bloggers on the Tweasier blog.

We will be rolling the application out gradually over the next month and then we will have a full launch which you should all hear about in the media and (hopefully) on some of my blogger friends sites.

Thanks guys – I appreciate all of your support.

Cross posted on: Norton’s Notes

Tweasier is looking for beta users

The Tweasier team have been busy building a Twitter app which will do lots of exciting stuff which you will hopefully find useful. We have been running our specification past Twitter and we are hoping to have something ready for you to try very soon.

If you would like to get involved in our beta development and be part of our community we would love to hear from you, please click on the link below and add your email address and as soon as the beta is ready we will drop you an invite.

Thanks in advance.