Twitter Tool Allows Centralized Censorship

Four Twitter Tools to Make Your Followers Happy

There are a lot of Twitter apps out there for managing your account, tracking and sorting followers, using lists, and enhancing your ability to market your business. New apps pop up daily, and the lists just keep on growing.

I’ve done a few posts on these various Twitter tools, typically focused on extending the way you use Twitter and helping you get more out of it as a participant. For example:

• 6 Twitter Clients You May Not Have Heard Of
• 7 Tools to Make Better Use of Twitter Lists
• 5 New Twitter Apps to Play with Over the Weekend

Today, instead of focusing on apps that only benefit you directly, I dug up a few tools focused on making your followers happy. Here are a few of the best tools your followers can use (or you can use for your followers) to improve the Twitter experience.

Link Different

Link Different allows you to check if a link has already appeared in your followers’ streams so you can provide fresh content and keep your followers engaged. To use the tool, you install a bookmarklet and click it from any page before sharing the link with your followers.

Muuter

Muuter lets you mute Twitter users individually by manually selecting a user, or automatically by identifying keywords. Although the service actually unfollows the muted party from your account for a specific period of time and then refollows them, it works like simply muting someone with the benefit of not forgetting to refollow later on. You can use Direct Messages from any app or device, including SMS, to initiate a mute.

Tweetizen

Tweetizen is a web-based tool designed to help you filter the daily influx of tweets, and find the ones that are relevant to you. You can use Tweetizen to create Twitter groups, filter tweets and invite others to join your group. You can also embed your groups on your own website and blog.

twtQpon

twtQpon allows you to create a Twitter coupon to share with your followers. This can be a great way to promote a product or service by providing followers with an incentive to purchase. To use the service, create an coupon on the twtQpon site, and a tweet goes out with a link that takes people back to your website to redeem the coupon.

What follower-focused app would you add to the list?

This article originally appeared on sitepoint and was written by Alyssa Gregory we would like to thank Alyssa and Lisa Lang for giving us permission to use it on the Tweasier blog.

Nsight a twitter tool that allows you to search the Twitter archives

Social media aggregator Nsyght caused a stir last week with the launch of a new feature aimed at serious Twitter users: the ability to search the archives of people you follow.

Users of the first feature can look for all references to – and comments on – particular topics made within their Twitter lists. For example, you can search for all references to PR within a media list, or references to Apple within a technology list.

Currently, the Nsyght lists feature can only search for tweets posted within the last couple of months, although it may be eventually extended further back in time. The feature also works across other social media: specifically Last.fm, Delicious, Flickr, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Digg and MySpace, allowing those topic searches to go truly multimedia. You can, for example, narrow your search down to all references to photos or videos on a specific topic – a company event, a presentation, a keynote, a YouTube video, etc.

The business potential is obvious: with social media an increasing focus of attention for B2C companies, brands could use Nsyght to quickly and easily keep track of what is being said about them across the web.

Sounds great, right? Unfortunately the registration function doesn’t appear to be working at the moment. Hopefully a temporary blip – I have my eye on this site!

This was a guest post by Cameron Patterson, a writer and PR professional with a big interest in Twitter and social media in general.

A twitter app that tells you which tweets turn your followers off and on

I have been playing with TweetEffect this morning which is a new twitter application that tells you which tweets helped you gain and lose followers. I find this app rather egotistical and I think you could over analyse yourself after reading it.

You insert your Twitter username and it then processes your tweets and brings back a list of your tweets in chronological order. If they are highlighted in green you gained followers and if they are highlighted in red you lost them.

I used it on the @tweasier twitter stream and it told me that overall we had lost 79 followers recently. Note to self, I must be more interesting and write interesting tweets. lol

Tweeteffect describes itself in the following manner:

Simply enter your twitter name and we analyze your 200 latest updates and flag those up that made people follow or leave you.

Of course there are more factors that make people come or go, but it is an interesting indicator about the effect your tweet might have had on the world.

you could call it a hack to try out some of the Twitter API functionality mixed with free Yahoo and Google services. Maybe this will go places, maybe it won’t.

I think this is a nice little app that could be useful if you were using lots of Twitter accounts and you needed to why your followers were leaving. However, I would advise all users of this twitter tool to be thick skinned and use it as an indicator but not as gospel. Personally, I don’t unfollow people based on one tweet it tends to be when that person has tweeted too many salesy messages or tweets far far too much. If you want advice on how to tweet properly here are our beginners tips and our post on why people don’t follow you on Twitter.

What do you think of Tweeteffect?

Twitoaster – A twitter tool for threaded conversations

This week I have been using a tool I found called twitoaster. Basically it helps you see the threads of your conversations in one place and gives you a few statistics from your tweets.

This is how it pitches itself:

“Twitoaster threads and archives your twitter conversations, bringing you all the background, context and statistics you need. It’s all about improving & optimizing the way you communicate with your followers. It groups replies and retweets with the tweets that inspired them, displaying threaded discussions. Twitoaster provides analytics and statistics, helping you to tweet at the right time. It also archives and indexes all your conversations in a conversational search engine.”

This tool is the brainchild of Arnaud Meunier from Paris who now works for Twitter, so he must have done his job on this application pretty well. However, he made this great tool back in 2009 and is now focussed on his work with Twitter (According to the blog) so it says the application is unlikely to evolve much.

I think this is a useful little twitter application that presents your conversations easily. On the downside I think the RT statistics it presents could be a little out as the way Twitter produces these did change recently. So I think it might miss some of those, however, that said for a free application I think it is worth a play. One of my favourite elements is the graphs that tell you the best day of the week and hour of the day although for us these statistics were a little out.

What do you think of Twitoaster?

Link Different: The Twitter Tool for Keeping Links Fresh

Hello Tweasier readers, today we bring you a new and exciting Twitter tool that I’m sure your all keen to try out.

Have you ever wondered if your followers have already seen the link you’re just about to share? Don’t you want to be person who breaks fresh, new content that nobody has read or seen before. If you do, read on…

Link Different

Let me tell you a little bit about Link Different. Link Different, allows you to check if a link has already appeared in your followers Twitter stream’s allowing you to provide more fresh content and keep your followers more engaged.

How it works

To setup Link Different you install a bookmarklet and click it from any web page you thinking about Tweeting, before sharing the link with your followers. Link Different, will tell you how many people have already seen that link to ensure your not duplicating something that has already been popular.

This could be quite a useful tool, I won’t take it’s results as the law though. Use these results as an indication of a links popularity or that it might have already been tweeted before by people you follow or whom follow you.

About this blog post
If you enjoyed reading this blog post, then you can take a look at Illiya’s other posts on his blog or follow him on Twitter.

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.

Twitter places launches but breaks everything else causing major outages

As you probably already know the Tweasier team has been busy rolling out the beta of our Twitter application this week. It has been a bit of a bumpy ride due to several Twitter outages over the last week or so (not the best timing) and a few speed issues which the team here are working on.  We have had some great feedback from our users and we will be sending out more invites as soon as we have fixed everything.

Well whilst we have been busy, so has Twitter, as it is currently rolling out a new feature to help meet the demand for location tagging. Unfortunately, we are lead to believe this feature has lead to a few outages of its own. Twitter has now fixed these problems so hopefully everything should be fine and we won’t be seeing the Fail Whale anytime soon.

Twitter Places was launched earlier this week and it allows users to tell their followers where exactly their tweet is coming from. It has used the example of world cup stadiums in South Africa which could be tagged to inform individuals if they are actually at the stadium.

People can click onto a Twitter Place within someone’s message to see all the other tweets that it has been used for.

The Twitter blog revealed several other features of this launch including: 

• Foursquare and Gowalla integration: Many Foursquare and Gowalla users publish check-ins to Twitter. Location is a key component of these Tweets, so we worked closely with both companies to associate a Twitter Place with Tweets generated by these services. This means that if you click on a Twitter Place, such as "Ritual Roasters," you will see standard Tweets and check-ins from Foursquare and Gowalla.
• API: We are releasing API functionality that lets developers integrate Twitter Places into their applications. 
• Support for more browsers: Now, you can add location to your Tweets from any browser—Safari and Internet Explorer, in addition to Chrome or Firefox.

You need to look out for the "add your location" box as it unveils the new addition in 65 different countries. We are pretty excited that it is set to launch another API to allow Twitter Places to be used with Twitter applications (like ours), so you may well see this feature cropping up in Tweasier soon too.

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.