Did you knows the average Twitter user has 126 followers and only 20% of its traffic comes through the Twitter website. The rest of the tweets come from third party applications.
Evan Weaver, Twitter’s lead engineer discussed this fact at QCon 2009.
Everything Social Networking
STEVEKHART.COM
You’ll find all kinds of stuff posted at my blog, so keep checking back. You’ll find a lot of information related to social networking, Facebook, Twitter, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), just cool internet tools and technologies.
Bio:
Name: Steve Hart
Job: Interactive Development Director for a large media communications company.
Interest: Everything Social Networks, SEO, Blogs, and Media Publishing.
Free 16 Page Printed Photo Book of Your Facebook Photos
Hot Prints is a new site and Facebook application that will create a photo ablum of you and your friends for FREE! Select up to 16 pages of photos, and Hot Prints will print and ship you the album for free.
What’s the catch? They will insert removable ads in between the album pages. Also, there is a 1 album a month limit.
Try out there Facebook App: http://apps.facebook.com/hotprints/entry.htm
You will get one FREE photo book per month (including shipping) sponsored by Hot Prints select advertising partners. You can also buy your book for $2.99 with no advertisements.
Dont worry the advertisement will be a removable insert and will NOT share the page with any of your photos. (offer subject to change)
Picasa 3.5 Released with Facial Recognition
From the Picasa site…Picasa 3.5 now has name tags, based on the same technology that powers name tags on Picasa Web Albums. With name tags, you can organize your photos based on what matters most: the people in them. In this new version, you can also more easily geotag photos using Google Maps, plus import photos from your camera and upload them to Picasa Web Albums in one step. Get started by downloading Picasa 3.5 for PC or Mac at picasa.google.com
People
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Add name tags – Picasa 3.5 scans all the photos in your collection, identifies the ones with faces, and groups photos with similar faces together. It’s easy to add name tags to dozens of photos at once by clicking “Add a name” below a photo and typing the person’s name. Once you’ve tagged some pictures, you can make a face collage with one click, easily find all your pictures with the same two people in them, or upload your name tags to Picasa Web Albums. Learn more. |
Other Improvements
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Geotag your photos with Google Maps – Quickly add geotags using new integrated Google Maps by clicking the Places button in Picasa 3.5, and dragging your photos to the location where you took them. Of course you can stil use Google Earth to tag or view photos if you prefer. Learn more. |
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Import, upload, and share, all at once – We’ve improved the import process so that you can star your favorites, upload to Picasa Web Albums and share with Google contact groups at the same time. Learn more. |
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Tags — Better bulk tagging, quick tags & tag counts – We’ve also improved the tagging experience. Just click the new Tags button on the right side of the Photo tray to add Quick tags  , see tag counts for groups of images, and manage tags more easily. Learn more. |
Cool Tool – Fast Dial for IE, IE7Pro
If your a Firefox browser convert because to cool features and add-ons, you probably use the Fast Dial. Fast Dial is a visual bookmarking tool…but it’s only for Firefox.
But what about us Internet Explorer (IE) users?
Check out IE7Pro.com. IE7Pro is an add-on for Internet Explorer which adds a lot of features and extras which make your Browsing faster,More Responsive and Sleek.
I like the ‘Easy Homepage’ feature. You can configure IE7Pro to create new tabs with grid of selected sites you frequently use. This solves the problem of having 9+ tabs open every time you launch IE.
I use this tool by having 3 IE tabs for my cores sites I use continuously. Then I set up a 4th tab that displays IE7Pro’s ‘Easy Homepage’ configured with a 4X3 grid of other key sites. When I need to go to one of these sites, I click the ‘Easy Homepage’ tab and launch the site without having to type out the site URL.
Get IE7Pro here
Google Voice – Get Invited!
It’s not new news, but it’s good news. Google has come out with another great application. After reserving 1 million phone numbers, Google Voice is ready to use. Google Voice is like having your own personal PBX…and its free!
Check out the key features:
One number for all your calls and SMS
Voicemail as easy as email, with transcripts
More cool things you can do with Google Voice
The voicemail transcription and sending via email or SMS (text) is possibly the best feature. I use the caller screening which is great for unknown numbers. It asks the caller to state their name. You can send a call to voicemail then secretly listen in.
Then call forwarding…I set my office phone to forward to my new Google Voice number, from their I have Google Voice forward to my cell phone. In doing so, I able to use all the Google Voice tools on calls to my office phone number through my cell phone.
Get an Invite. Don’t get discouraged, it took about two weeks to get my invite. You’ll be glad you did. After you’re invited, you be able to pick your own phone number form their possible 1 million numbers.
I bought a domain name, now what?
So, you’ve bought, or registered, a domain name – Now What?
You have few basic options
1) Purchase a hosting service and create a website. There are lots of hosting services out there. Most are pretty inexpensive to get started. I’m using www.godaddy.com, but do a google search for “website hosting solution”. You’ll find sites like www.BlueHost.com, www.MediaTemple.com, www.hostgator.com and more.
2) Use one of the many sites out there that will create a site for you. www.wordpress.com, www.ning.com, www.yola.com. Most of these site will charge you a small monthly fee to use your newly purchased domain. Also try Google site builder for free.
3) ‘Park’ your domain. Parking a domain is basically using a service to serve ads on your domain. In doing so, you can make a few pennies while you figure out what you want to do. Most hosting services provide these services for a fee, but you can use Goolge’s Adesnse for Domains for free. Check out www.skimboards4sale.com or www.rallycheer.com, they are both provided by Google Adsense. They took less than 15 minutes to set up.
4) Set up an custom gmail email account with your new domain.
If you have a suggestion, I like to hear from you. Leave a comment below.
Twitter Backgounds Made Easy
Mashable posted this great article about Twitter backgounds. Here are a few excerts from Mashables article on Twitter backgounds.
Here are a couple reasons for why you might want to build your own:
1. Personalization and expression
2. Enahnced Contact info
3. Personal branding:
4. Artistic creativity
What would a Twitter resource guide be without some useful Twitter apps? Not only do many of these tools provide pre-designed backgrounds, but many can also automatically update your background, provide detailed information and FAQs, and even fully-functional image editors. Here are a few of the best:
1. MyTweetSpace: MyTweetSpace is one of the simplest ways to create a Twitter background with minimal effort. It allows users to create badges, add graphics, play with text, and more to create elegant backgrounds and left-hand text columns. You can even log in with Twitter and MyTweetSpace will automatically update your background.
2. TwitterBacks: This website provides a set of templates perfect for creating your ideal Twitter background. The templates come in PSD (Photoshop) form. In fact, my Twitter account utilizes a TwitterBack template as the basis for my design. Can you guess which one?
3. TweetStyle: TweetStyle offers free background templates, custom Twitter backgrounds, and a few useful blog posts on the subject of the backdrop.
4. Free Twitter Designer: This handy little app provides an easy-to-use image editor to help you create a professional-looking theme.
5. TwitBacksTwitbacks: This is another tool for creating backgrounds. This one specializes in left-hand column-based backgrounds.
6. TwitterGallery: TwitterGallery is a directory of themes based on color and category. You can even click the “install” button under any theme, log into Twitter, and poof!…your background is ready.
7. Peekr: If you stumble across a great Twitter background and want to take a quick look at it in its pure form, the Peekr bookmarklet is the way to go. Click on the bookmarklet once to show only the background, and press it again to bring everything back to normal.
Tags: backgounds, Twitter
Can’t Get Enough of Twitter, Try this Outlook Plugin
Here’s an interesting tool for you twitter fanatics. What if you can tweet and retweet while in MS Outlook at work? If this sounds great, then www.TwInboc.com is for you.
TwInbox is an MS Outlook plugin that allow you to:
- Update your Twitter status directly from Outlook.
- Receive your friend updates in Outlook.
- Archive, manage, group and search your tweets the
same way you manage your email (details). - Search, track keywords. TwInbox will automatically download ALL tweets matching the keywords you specify, even if you are not following the tweet sender. This feature is perfect for keeping up to date with the Twitter buzz on your name, brand, interests, etc.
- Group tweets by sender, topic, etc using the Search feature.
- Upload and post picture files and Outlook email attachments.
- See new tweets at a glance (details).
- Assign custom folder and categories to new messages.
- Use Outlook’s “Reply” and “ReplyAll” commands to send twitter direct messages and @replies.
- Automatically sort new tweets into per-sender folders.
- Shorten URLs with tinyurl.
- See graphs of your Twitter usage statistics.
- Tweets sent to you (@replies and direct) are marked with high importance, so you can see them at a glance.
From www.Twinbox.com
“If you are a Microsoft ® Outlook ®user, you probably have it open all the time. Now you can have a fully-featured, powerful Twitter client at your fingertips without having to open any other applications. TwInbox seamlessly integrates Twitter into Outlook. It is a perfect Twitter client for any Outlook user, from a Twitter newbie to a business professional.”
Just what you need, your company email tool tracking all you wasteful Twitter time.
Publish Tweets as a WordPress Blog Post
I’m not sure the value of doing this, but April left a comment on my Migrating to WordPress.org post.
Here’s how you do it….
Alex king wrote a plug in called Twitter Tools. This plug-in integrates your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.
Steps to auto-publish your Twitter tweets as a WordPress post
1. Create a new category in in your WordPress installation – call it????… ‘My Tweets’
2. Install the Twitter Tools plug-in.
3. Activate the plug-in.
4. Go to Twitter Tools under the Settings section in your WP admin panel.
5. Enter your Twitter account, set the option to create a blog post from each of your tweets to ‘yes’. you can also set it to create a daily digest blog post of your tweets.
6. Set the category for you tweet postings (see step 1)
7. Save your setting and your ready to go.
Related posts:
How To Tweet Your Facebook Status
How to update your Facebook status with your Twitter tweets (opposite of the above)
Twitter Follower Auto-Responding Email Message
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Topsy – Twitter Search Engine
With 30 million Twitter users, there’s a lot of tweets contianing relevant content and links; thats where Topsy.com comes in.
Per topsy’s webiste, when you search for something on Topsy, such as “free music“, it finds snippets of conversations that match what you’re looking for. Topsy results are the things people link to, when they’re talking about your search terms. Topsy ranks results based on how well they match your search terms, and the influence of the people talking about them.
-Steve Hart
Copyright © 2008