Twitter: Attribution

I should probably rename this blog.  I seem to mostly blog when I want to rant about something.  My latest peeve is attribution on Twitter.  I personally feel that I need to give credit where credit is due.  So if I see something interesting that I think my followers and I would be interested in, I retweet it with full attribution.  Sometimes I'll go to read the article linked in the tweet and loose the tweet altogether in my timeline.  I feel more comfortable going back and and finding that tweet and RTing it instead of using the RT button on the page.

One of the things that really disturbs me is when you see people tweet something they should have seen in their timeline, not necessarily from me, but from tweeps we both follow, yet they are tweeting it as if they found it themselves.  I feel this is just lazy. (I can hear the stormy comments coming)

I admit to being lazy sometimes, but I make a real effort not to be.  Lately I've been using a really neat tool called Storify (storify.com).  Part of what it does is allow you to search on a topic of interest and pull out all the tweets related to that topic.  While doing this, I see an ENORMOUS amount of tweets that are exactly the same or point to the same exact article (you can exclude retweets - which I do).  If people are really interested in say data breaches, or computer security, there are many lists out there which follow the leaders in the field on twitter.  It looks to my unpracticed eye like peeps are following these lists and instead of retweeting the original post, tweeting anew, which not only diminishes the power of the RT, but also junks up the twitter stream on that issue.

So what am I getting at?  When you see a tweet you are interested in, do what I do, in Hootsuite I click the RT button which sets up the tweet to be RT'd, but don't click the Send button.  First read the story, if you still want to RT go back to hootsuite (Either on your other screen or minimized) and click the Send button.  Now you've RT'd properly with attribution.

Related articles

• Decoding the Language of Twitter Part 1: Twitter Terms (conversify.wordpress.com)
• What's a Twitter reply? Mention? Retweet? (debsanswers.wordpress.com)
• What does MT mean on Twitter? (stwem.com)

Seesmic vs Hootsuite for Twitter

For a long time I've been enamored of Seesmic's offerings of Twitter clients. I started out by using the Air application, Seesmic Desktop. I moved on to their .NET based application, Seesmic Desktop for Windows. The reason I changed was mostly because of the resources that the AIR application took up. The .NET application is much faster and takes up a lot less resources. I found Seesmic desktop for Windows a really nice app and used it for some time (it's still on my computer). But the one thing that made me switch is the portability of Hootsuite.

Hootsuite is web based, so whether I'm in my regular location, at home or on the go, my settings are EXACTLY the same.  With Seesmic I had to transport a settings file with me and install the software on each machine I was going to use it on.  With Hootsuite, since it's web based there is no need for that.  Yes I know, other apps including Seesmic have a web based client.  But Hootsuite has done a really nice job on theirs.  You can have multiple accounts, as well as multiple people tweeting with different access depending on what you want them to do.  It's like combining the best web twitter clients with something like cotweet.com.

In Hootsuite I have multiple accounts setup for twitter as well as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Foursquare.  I have many columns in each twitter account which includes lists I follow and searches.  Searches are a problem I found with Seesmic, they weren't updating correctly.  I also found that Seesmic lists didn't update correctly in their .NET client.  I reported both these problems to Seesmic, and although their team is very good, it seems they were concentrating more on mobile applications than the desktop clients.

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Lazyfeed: An easy way to discover information

Image via CrunchBase

I have many information sources set up to either alert me or send me email when they get hits on certain searches (check out alltop.com). But recently my son (@chronotope) introduced me to a different way to get updates and discover stuff you would never have seen besides.

The service is called lazyfeed and is located at lazyfeed.com. The process is easy. You signup for free at the website. Your account is prepopulated with generic feeds. I kept one of these feeds - movies. There is an "Add a topic" button and you just type in an area of interest (e.g. "malware news" or "Twitter Clients"). Lazyfeed creates a feed window in your browser with a summary of that feed. the feed constantly updates and if you want to look at one of the summaries more closely just click on the box and it fills your browser window.

You can now click on any of the feeds in that window to see the blog and you are given buttons to automatically setup shares (tweets/facebook update/email). Clicking on one of the twitter share links generates this tweet: 9 Simple Steps to Getting Started in Social Media http://j.mp/9Mpotk (via http://lazyfeed.com). All I need to do is click the tweet button on my twitter homepage.

What makes this tool miles better than anything else I've tried is that you may suggest certain topics and they will show up in lazyfeed as your constantly updating feeds, but as you use the tool it sees relationships between certain feeds and will suggest other feeds you may be interested in. Also the general topics you pick bring up blogs/items that you would never see any other way without a lot of searching.

Here is what my lazyfeed setup looks like:

Twitter - Startup #3 - Making a background

Image by EMMEALCUBO via Flickr

Once you've created your name and avatar, it's now time to create a background.

Look around at other backgrounds before creating your own. Your background, rightly or wrongly, will influence whether people follow you or not.

• Branding - As with other attributes of your twitter profile, your background should be consistent with what you perceive your brand to be and how you want others to see you.
• Be careful of the width - as the browser gets smaller in width the center area of tweets (white area with tweets in it in picture) will move to the right. If you have information you want people to see, it might get obscured. This is also true of height since your background will NOT scroll you need to check it looks okay when you upload it.
• Your background is generally the second impression a person looking to follow you gets. There is a lot of room to make it a great one.
• When creating your background be innovative, creative and impressive

Next: Creating a Bio

Another way to do Followfriday

So I found this great site that will allow me to make lists of people I would recommend on Follow friday on Twitter. It is called TweepML.org. I can easily make a list of say all the Social Media tweeps I follow then post that list on twitter as a link.


The only problem is that the peeps you are recommending are not mentioned explicityly in your tweet. This means that anyone who wants to see your recommendations has to click on the link in your tweet:
The nice thing is that you can follow all my recommendations with one click. It also gives an abbreviated description from the user's twitter account.


One the best part is you can actually see how many people have follows from this link:

The downside to this site is that the people you are recommending may have no idea because their twitter names are not being mentioned in the tweet.