My Twitter saga - Password loss on twitter side?

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One morning I came into work after a 3 day weekend and started up Hootsuite and received this message:

"The supplied Twitter profile credentials are not valid. If you have changed your Twitter password recently, you may need to update it in HootSuite.Update Now »"

It was displayed in my personal account's Home stream, Mentions Stream, and Direct Messages Stream. I have 2 other accounts I take care of and they were fine. I fired up Seesmic Desktop client (both the AIR app and the .NET app) to no avail. I then went to the twitter website. I couldn't log in to the website either! I got the message that my credentials didn't match. At this point I was afraid my account had been compromised. I wanted to be sure so I went to search.twitter.com and searched for tweets from myself for the past few days. There was nothing out of the ordinary. I have some RSS feeds set up through Feedburner and twitterfeed and they were working fine - go figure. At least there weren't any rogue tweets that I hadn't sanctioned. (I couldn't see the DMs, so there was always the possibility that someone had found a way around my rather complicated/obtuse password and was using my account for SPAM)

I use Cotweet to tweet my company account sometimes to I logged in there and was able to tweet from my personal account as well! I even test tweeted first just to make sure. After a little questioning to the cotweet support group it turns out I used oauth to register there and so was not locked out of my account.

I tried the reset password form on the twitter site, but never received the email. I tried it 5, yes FIVE, times to no avail. I filled out their support form as well. After I had sent in this support form 4 times I finally got an answer to my alternate email address. Twitter support said that all the email that were supposed to go out the previous week did not for some reason and I should try again. If that did not work to respond to the email they sent and a support person would take care of me.

I retried the password reset and did not receive an email, so I responded to the email they send from support and have not received an answer :-(

I'm getting tired of using cotweet for everything. It's a good tool, but not for my everyday tweeting. If I could only reset my password I'd be a happy camper ...

Twitter - Startup #11 - Other resources

There are many other twitter resources users should be aware of. Many of these I have used in putting together the previous 10 blog entries on twitter. Here are just a few of them:

MakeUseOf Guide to Twitter
My Delicious.com Twittertools bookmarks
Twitter for Business, Twitter for Friends , by Mark Murnahan (@murnahan)
Presentation on Starting to use twitter
Just about anything on Bitrebels.com about twitter

Thanks to Ahad Bokhari (@featureblend) for suggesting this series to me.

Twitter - Startup #9 - Twitter Clients

Everyone will tell you something different when it comes to what the best way to access twitter is. A lot depends on your personal tastes, the platform you are using (operating system) and what you want to do. Here are a couple of things I came up with to decide what twitter client to use:

• The way in which the organization has decided to use twitter
• Who is going to be tweeting, which includes how many people will tweet on the same account
• How the tweeting will be done
• The time investment which you want to put in or can put in

CoTweet (cotweet.com)

• the twitter client that is the choice of many businesses
• Web based client
• best for use when more than one person is tweeting the same account
• can schedule tweets
• uses "CoTags" to identify person tweeting (^TZ) for Tom Zucker-Scharff
• Integrates bit.ly URL shortener
• can have multiple twitter accounts
  

TweetDeck

• Stand alone Adobe Air client
• Can have multiple accounts
• Can NOT schedule tweets
• does not lend itself to multiple users
• has iphone app that syncs with it
  

Seesmic Desktop

• Stand alone Adobe Air client
• Manages multiple accounts
• Does not lend itself to multiple users
• More Media friendly
• There is a web version of the client called Seesmic Web

Twitter website (twitter.com)

• The way a majority of tweeters use twitter
• must have a browser to use in this manner
• Fewer capabilities than the stand alone apps
• While stand alones access twitter through the site's API which will work many times when the site itself isn't working, if you are using the website it must be working for you to do anything.

Peoplebrowser (peoplebrowsr.com)

• Can be either a stand alone Adobe Air app or a web app
• does many of the things other apps do

• 
  

Twitter - Startup #8 - Backup

Once you have all this information and setup online, what happens if you have to recreate it all? As with everything else computer related, three words say it all - Backup, backup, backup! But since this primarily exists on the internet this could be a problem. Luckily there are at least four tools that will help.

• Tweecious - (tweecious.com) provides a service that will put all your tweets with l
  
  Image via Wikipedia
  
  inks in them into your delicious account. Delicious.com is a social bookmarking site.
  
• Backupify - although only in it's infancy, backupify.com provides an extremely useful service. The free online acccount let's you backup as many twitter accounts as you like (as long as you have the credentials for them) into xml files. Although I haven't tried this myself, the website does boast the ability to restore your account from these files. The pay account lets you backup your other online information.
• Tweetake - (tweetake.com) This website also lets you backup your twitter account for free. While backupify creates xml files, tweetake creates and downloads a comma delimeted file (csv) importable to excel. The only downside is currently there is no way to restore the data via the file.
• TweetBackup - (tweetbackup.com) provides backup for your twitter accounts (I backed three up to test it). The interface is easy to use and there is even a restore tab (untested by me). This looks to be an excellent service.

So far none of these services have included the lists, but that is probably only a matter of time.

Twitter - Startup #7 - Searches

Once you start using twitter you won't feel the full power until you try some searches. You can use searches, either within a client, or outside of twitter, to find out almost anything about what is being said about you or your institution. It doesn't matter whether you are on twitter or not - your business will still be spoken about and wouldn't you rather be there to answer questions?

Here are just a few of the powerful search tools that will let you keep an "eye in the sky":

• searches within your twitter client
• search.twitter.com
• google blog search
• tweepsearch
• tweetalerts
• geo search
  

Twitter - Startup #5 - URL Shorteners

Image via CrunchBase

Because twitter limits the length of any post to 140 characters, a plethora of URL shorteners have popped up. This allows you to shorten a really long URL to something relatively short like http://tweepml.org/NCI-designated-Cancer-Center-on-Twitter/ to http://bit.ly/NCI_CC_List (because I made this one a vanity URL, it's a little longer than it would normally be). This is handy when you are trying to conserve every character.

One of the better URL shorteners, IMO, is http://bit.ly. If you have an account on bit.ly you can track the number of people who have clicked on your link since you tweeted it (click-throughs), where they are from (identifies generally geographic areas / countries) and when they clicked on your link. It's a great tool.

Next: Using Feeds

Twitter - Startup #4 - Creating a Biography

Now you've created a name, an avatar and a background. It's time to create a brief biography that many twitter clients and twitter users use to check you out.

• Other users use this to decide if you are worth their time
• About 160 character limit
• Remember that the bio is searched for relevant terms when people are looking for various services or type s of tweeters

You may wish to add something to the effect that you opinions are your own or they do not reflect your employers opinions - it's up to you.

Twitter - Startup #2 - Making an Avatar

Image by Torley via Flickr

Previously I spoke just about choosing a name on twitter. In this post I'll address choosing an avatar.

An avatar is a picture you choose to represent you online. It can be of you (most often) or of anything else. The avatar I use on twitter is a picture of me put through a photoshop like website (befunky.com).

When choosing an avatar there are a couple of things to keep in mind.

• Branding - if this is a company account you want to remember to make an avatar that is not only recognizable, but is consistent with your company brand / logo. If this is a personal account, remember that a personal brand is just as important as a corporate one. Make it yours.
• Recognizability - this may be slightly redundant, but it is important enough that it deserves to be its own point. Your avatar is how people will first see you and recognize you afterwards. They look at your name as well, but that's the second thing most tweeters look at.
• Do not Change lightly - this is a whole blog by itself (it's already been written by someone else - Diana Adams @ bitrebels.com), but to put it succinctly, once you establish yourself on twitter changing your avatar, will confuse people.
• Remember that your avatar determines the first impression other tweeters will get of you.
  

Next: Making a Background

Twitter - Startup #1 - picking a name

Image via CrunchBase

I was asked to put together a presentation about getting started on twitter. So after culling it all together, it was suggested I might blog it as well. Here goes ...

First things first. Getting started on twitter you need to pick an appropriate name. I don't say this lightly. Depending on why you are tweeting and for who, depends on how you handle this. If you are tweeting for your company this may be handled in one of two ways. Either your name will reflect the company - it will be a company account, or it will be a persaonal account that tweets for the company. sometimes there is a combination thereof. A classic example is how Dell decided to handle twitter names.

If your first name is Charles and you work at Dell, then your twitter name is @CharlesAtDell.

What has to be kept in mind is that one's following / reputation stays with the name. Hence if some establishes a good rapport with your customers but then moves to another company - their followers (your customers) go with them. So many companies will go for the company name accompanied by an appropriate logo.

Next, when choosing / crafting a name, keep length in mind. On twitter you only have 140 characters to say what you want and add a link. One of the ways you are recognized on twitter is by the amount you are retweeted (your content is shared by others to their followers). You will be retweeted more if your name is shorter. Retweeting adds 4 (RT @) + the length of your name - known as the "My number" rule. If your name is 8 characters long, when someone retweets you they are adding at least 12 characters to your original tweet (8+4). That means if you want to get retweeted you should leave AT LEAST that amount of characters available (140-mynumber), preferably leave double your number.

Next: Creating an avatar