Automated list generated by your mentions

So if you've been on twitter at all in the last few months you will by now be familiar with the lists function.  Lists are great in that they allow you to create a list of people (who you don't need to be following) with like interests.  Then more recently I found a great service called listwatcher.  If you follow @listwatcher you will be alerted by DM (Direct Message) of any changes to lists that have you as a member - rename of the list, drop from the list, if you are added to any list.

I have found listwatcher to be helpful in that it monitors the lists I'm on or put on for me.  Hence when I was informed that I had been put on a list called "hotnsassy" I immediately checked it out and found to my relief that it was a list that consisted of social media types.

More recently, I was informed that I had been removed from a list called "conversationlist" (the misspelling is on purpose) maintained by a tweep I frequently converse with @yonitdm.  So I checked it out and found that the list was auto generated by something called conversationlist.com.  The list is regenerated depending on your settings and interactions everyday.  Here is what they say on their website:

To be a little more specific, a "conversationlist" is a Twitter list of the people that you talk to (and about) on Twitter. The list is automatically updated daily, so that it always reflects the people that you are paying attention to right now. If you @reply (or @mention) someone, they're added to your list. If you stop talking to that person, they drop off your list.

I created one of these myself, or actually the website did it for me, based on the settings I am still tweaking.  So if you are anything like me and have a toolbox of twitter related stuff, here's another tool to add.

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 #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
  

Friendfeed and the Tweecious plugin - users beware

I was pointed to a great tool for twitter. It is called tweecious. Tweecious combines twitter and delicious by searching your tweets and saving all the links you have tweeted to your delicious account. This seemed like a really good idea to me, but there was a catch. It works very well and when you first set it up it searches your last 1000 tweets. The problem was that I have friendfeed set up to autotweet anything I bookmark using delicious. This is usually a handy thing to do, but in this case, it was a disaster.

I finished setting everything up and suddenly my twitter stream was deluged with posts from my friendfeed account! Anyone who was following me must have been baffled as to what was going on. I tweeted the problem and stopped it after 30 or 40 tweets.

Here is what you need to do if you have friendfeed set up to autotweet and would like to use tweecious.

1. go to your friendfeed account
2. click on the settings link right next to your avatar
3. click on "Twitter publishing preferences"
4. You should be on a screen that says "Advanced Twitter Settings"
5. Under "Post Entries From:" UNCHECK delicious
6. Click "Save Changes"
   

Now you can set up tweecious. Follow the instructions on the tweecious site and you should be fine. For good measure you should probably leave that setting unchecked for 24 hours, then go back and recheck the delicious setting in friendfeed.

CORRECTION: I thought this was how it worked, but when I rechecked the delicious box in friendfeed after a long delay my twitter stream was once again bombarded with posts I had already made - only the posts with links. So if you use tweecious, you can't in all good conscience check the delicious box in friendfeeds twitter prefs.

The take away: You'll need to tweet the bookmarks you tag with delicious manually.

Using an aggregator in twitter

I'm not a fan of bots on twitter. As a matter of fact I generally try to stay away from them. It can be rather annoying to get 20 tweets from some bot that takes up your stream so you can't see anything else that's going on. That said there are things that I do like about bots. For instance I follow @alfie6 an artificial Intelligence Agent. It constantly crawls the web looking for bioscience related news, which are published on Life Sciences Blogs. Since I work in bioscience this information is relevant to me and it is not like following @snakelicious which may send 10 tweets at a time.

I thought about the work account I manage. If I set up some basic filters it would make that so much easier. I started out by setting up a aggregator of RSS feeds with filters using Yahoo! pipes.



After clicking save, to save your pipe, a new button appears at the top of the screen

When you click "Run pipe" the results are shown and next to those results are a couple of choices.

If you click "Get as RSS" it generates an RSS feed page for the search.

Copy the URL for this page. Next I went to feedburner pasted the URL in there and followed the prompts. I copied the URL of the feed from feedburner and then created an account on twitterfeed.com. I went to twitterfeed and created a new feed there. If you follow the steps it is fairly easy.

On the first page you have to allow access to your twitter account. Next give the Feed a name and paste the URL from either feedburner (better) or directly from yahoo pipes' get as RSS page. Click "Test RSS feed" to make sure it works. Next click "Advanced Settings":

Here you set the frequency and how many updates at a time, what is included in the post, shortening URL info (if you have a bit.ly account put the info in here - see below), sorting, if you want to put something before or after a post (like a hastag), and finally if you want to use keyword filtering.

The final screen, when you are done, should look something like this:

As I mentioned, if you open a bit.ly account you can integrate the shortened URLS into your feed and track them. Otherwise you can still track them but you can't easily see all the shortened URL's in one place.


Twitterfeed feeds your twitter account tweets that you captured with the pipe and then filtered. So all the information I want to capture about cancer from my work site and the NCI site, I feed to my work twitter account. I do this a little bit with my personal account, but not nearly as much. I let twitterfeed tweet things that I would normally tweet anyway.

Seesmic Desktop, an excellent multi-account twitter app

I've used a number of different applications to manage my twitter streams. I started out using Tweetdeck, but at the time it couldn't accommodate multiple accounts. It also had some other issues, which I know annoyed me at the time but seem inconsequential now. I tried a few different twitter clients including the web application of peoplebrowser. This had a lot of potential and I went on to try the air application of peoplebrowser.

For one reason or another I kept going back to Tweetdeck. Then one day I discovered Seesmic Desktop, another air application. At first I didn't like Seesmic because it lacked a bunch of things I liked about Tweetdeck. As I used Seesmic more and more I liked it more.

1. The user lists are great. Put users into a list to track them in a separate stream.
2. The searches are saved and you can have them appear in your home stream or not.
3. Multiple accounts are easy to manipulate and use with Seesmic (I currently am managing 3 twitter accounts and a facebook acct from the client)
4. Your streams get color coded so you can easily see what messages are replies, DMs, or messages posted by you.
5. You can set the application to notify you with a sound when a reply comes in (you can notify with sounds for other posts but then my computer would be beeping of the hook!)
6. Seesmic now has integrated bit.ly account information. This way you can enter the pertinent information into your setting and anytime you shorten a link it automatically sends it to your bitly account. This type of integration is true for 5 other services as well.
7. The new Beta also has autocomplete of user names - an excellent addition.

On the down side I really, really miss 4 things about tweetdeck.
1. I really liked being able to tell which tweets I had read and which I hadn't. This is not available in Seesmic unless you empty each stream once the tweets are read (you can't mark them as read) (this is available in the new version of Seesmic web)
2. The ability to click on a twitpic link and have it show up in a popup window was really nice. Seesmic opens a browser window. (inline viewing of pics and movies available in seesmic web app)
3. The way you could click on a person to get their profile was implemented better in Tweetdeck.
4. The way in which you create groups and add members to groups is nicely done in Seesmic, but the checklist method implemented in Tweetdeck is better.

If Seesmic implements the ability to check and work with following/followers lists, then I would never have to use the twitter website again.