Twitter Lists

One of the least publicised features of Twitter is Twitter Lists. Using lists you can customise your Twitter experience by organising the stream of tweets into subject specific lists. Using lists you can tune your twitter experience for specific occasions, or to just make reading twitter more manageable. Typical list subjects include sports, celebrities, actual friends etc. You can make as many lists as you like. You can even subscribe to other twitter users lists. To find the lists option on twitter.com you need to visit your own profile page and choose lists, as shown below.



For an example of a twitter list click here. Do you use twitter lists to keep your social media a little more organised? Drop us a tweet @webwarpblog!

Tweets from WWDC

As the Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) 2012 gets under way in America, it's seems theres just a few tweet's flying around on the Twittersphere!



See for yourself at Twitter.com: https://twitter.com/search/WWDC

Let's Fly - Twitter Update

Twitter are updating their UI (user interface) across the board and a preview is available now at fly.twitter.com. Twitter's blogpost has all the detailed information but essentially the new experience is broken down into 4 sections: Home, Connect, Discover and Me. These are the new symbols for these areas:

The mobile website is up and running and the main site will following in a couple of weeks. The new experience is also filtering down onto smart phone apps and is available as an update on iOS devices now (Twitter v. 4.0).



 Video Preview:


Image from blog.twitter.com

Facebook's New Features

Facebook's under going a self titled "launch season" with site changes in terms of features and content delivery happening all the time. Last week their popular smart phone app was updated to include the new version of the News Feed. Facebook's privacy settings also enjoyed a refresh, prompting the inevitable backlash as they always seems to be too disjointed and complicated for most users.

Interestingly one of the new improvements comes from a combination of privacy settings and content delivery. Many Facebook users have hundreds of friends and many of these peoples "I've had a bad day" status aren't really worth your time. Their new lists include a Close Friends list, so if one of your best mates posts, "I'm off to the pub tonight, if you fancy it, join me!" Facebook will bring this right to the top of your news feed (add a small blue triangle), so you will never miss a trick in your close circle of friends. Wait, did I just say close 'circle' of friends? Well yes... and now that I mention it it sounds exactly like Google+'s Circles feature. As imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, Google+'s engineers should be very flattered!! In addition to receiving statuses from your close friends first the activity feed will be live, just like Twitter, so you won't be waiting for updates or refreshing your profile page to check for new content.

Other new features include more integration with third party companies, such as Spotify, to put Facebook at the centre of your online social life, as if it isn't already! To compete with Twitter and Google+ all the tagging and location tagging features of these other services have been recreated too (they are spookily similar).

In a few weeks users will get a whole new profile experience: Timeline. Facebook explains all on their blog: Timeline on Facebook's Blog.

Image: Facebook

Twitter vs. Earthquake: Twitter Wins

Twitter has released a promotional video claiming to be faster than the recent earthquake which hit America's East Coast. It only takes seconds to send warning messages across the country on Twitter. Original story on Mashable.

Get your questions answered with Replyz

Replyz.com is a new twist on crowd sourcing information from the internet. It takes questions asked on Twitter and pushes them onto the Replyz website in categories. Members of the Replyz community then answer your questions. To make sure you get your tweet added to the Replyz website just add #replyz hashtag to your question!

Twitter's New Interface

Twitter has updated their web interface to include integration for pictures and video's. They have split the page in to two panes. The new website has a lot more screen space and has feature's that Twitter client users (such as Twitter for iPhone, formerly Tweetie, and TweetDeck) have been familiar for a while. The new interface can bring images from TwitPic and yfrog directly into your twitter page without opening a new page/tab. The Twitter interface also allows you to view a users profile without navigating away from your twitter stream. It's currently an opt in/opt out option but soon it will be compulsory for all Twitter users.

Twitter have rolled out their new interface to everyone, thoughts please!Sat Oct 09 12:59:01 via TweetDeckwebwarpblog
webwarpblog

Facebook Places

Facebook have launched a new version of their iPhone app, version 3.2. This add's Place's to their service in the US. The service is similar to Foursquare but (and Facebook stresses) the Facebook service is limited to your Facebook friends. In fact you have strict control over which friends or lists can see your location. Despite Facebook's tight privacy controls privacy groups are concerned that geotagging your location onto the internet is a step too far.

Version 3.2 also brings Twitter for iPhone (formerly Tweetie 2) style "Pull Down to Update", which is a neat improvement.

For more information about Places check out this article from Mashable.

EDIT: Facebook for iPhone is now version 3.2.1 following bug fixes.

Twitter's Evolution

Twitter asks the question: "What are you doing?". And so the age of microblogging and oversharers tweeting about cups of tea etc began. But in my experience Twitter has evolved. There are still users who post messages about themselves to update people who follow there account that they are enjoying the sunshine or sitting on the bus but there are several different types of accounts that have sprung up. There are RSS bots that tweet directly from RSS Feeds (such as Twittefeed). There are integrated services that allow updates to be posted to Twitter from other programs/websites/services. Services like mflow, linkedin and most websites that promote sharing.

So now on Twitter you can follow accounts or lists to bring you news, views and links. Twitter is now a way of absorbing information from the internet. Following different twitter feeds you can keep yourself up to date with news and sporting events. Twitter has moved beyond the brief of "What are you doing?". You can even follow Web Warp Blog on Twitter @webwarpblog.

How to Embed Tweets into Blogs

Step by step guide to embedding tweets into your blog.

1.) When you find a tweet that you want embed (instead of quoting or copying and pasting) click on the time associated with that tweet as described on this blog post: Click Here

2.) Then copy the unique tweet URL from the address bar and past it into the main bar on this website: Click Here. Click ‘Bake it’ and it will generate the html code that you need to copy.

3.) Paste this html code into your blog and there you have an embedded tweet, just like this:

Spotify goes social with Facebook integration http://bit.ly/9K1B3tless than a minute ago via webwebwarpblog
webwarpblog

Embed Twitter into Blogs

You can now embed twitter into blogs such as...

Test tweet for embedding...less than a minute ago via webwebwarpblog
webwarpblog

To help you achieve this yourself (assuming it works for me) I will post a guide later.

Twitter Official Mobile Apps

Edit: The Twitter app for iPhone is now available, click here. Here is the Twitter announcement and more information/screen shots, click here. The Twitter for iPhone app is one of the best iPhone applications out there, very well made.

Twitter is accessed through computers, smart phones and via text messaging, but all the smart phones applications have been made by 3rd Party Companies - until now. Twitter have acquired Tweetie, which is one of the most popular Twitter apps for the iPhone. Here is the Twitter Announcement. Tweetie 2 will be renamed 'Twitter for iPhone' and made FREE, where as it is £1.79 at the moment. They have also launched an official Twitter app for Blackberry's. Here is the info from Twitter. Both apps are really good and include all the latest Twitter features such as new style retweets.

So happy official mobile app tweeting! Feel free to follow www.webwarp.co.uk on Twitter at @webwarpblog.

Google Buzz Launched

Google have released a social networking service integrated into their popular email service, GMail. The social networking service is called Google Buzz. Twitter is currently trending tweets about Google Buzz here. Should Facebook and Twitter be scared? Rory Cellan-Jones doesn't think so on his BBC blog.

I have tried the service and it's a bit confusing? It allows public "tweets" so why not use Twitter and private "tweets" so why not use Facebook, particularly as all my facebook friends don't use Google Mail. Facebook now lets you post links/status etc to a public version of your profile anyway.

The location based element boasted by Buzz has crept into Twitter but doesn't work as well as Google Buzz which integrates with Google Maps. I'm not convinced by Google Buzz yet. I much prefer Google Wave (even though it is only a preview) and would like to see the kind of GMail integration for Wave as Buzz as been privileged to.

So the jury is well and truly out with this one - please feel free to comment below with opinions.

Here is the Google Promotional Video for Google Buzz

Facebook & Twitter on Xbox 360 Announced at E3

Xbox Live will be bring Facebook and Twitter to your TV through your Xbox 360 this autumn. This looks well though out and complements the NXE perfectly. For a video from E3 click here. Sorry it's not embedded like www.youtube.com videos are!

Why are texts limited to 160 characters?

When text messaging was invented as a cross platform standard for mobile phones and pagers it was clear that a standard limit must be enforced due to the bandwidth restrictions. This was set at 160 characters and Twitter, being based on text messaging, is capped at 140 characters. This interesting article explains more: Click Here

Twitter Explored

Twitter: A social networking revolution or a micro-blog of wasted time and effort?

I joined www.twitter.com to find out, and I have been ‘tweeting’ for a few weeks now. I really like the fact that it is mostly public, it encourages conversation with all kinds of people without you having to be facebook friends and giving away all kinds of personal identification that we spend time destroying at the shredder! To this end you can tweet with celebrities (who would not be your facebook friend!) and sometimes they reply to your comments!

I think that if you are friends with someone in the real world it is a lot better to contact them direct than use twitter, but if it’s a throw away thought about hating crowded public transport, would they really want to be bothered directly?

You can follow some really useful usernames with actually convert RSS feeds into twitter updates. These Twitter users are often referred to as Twitter bots.

On Twitter you may often come across hash tags such as #followfriday or #f1 these are used to bring items up in the search as keywords that everyone discussing a topic can use to tag there tweet. A great example of the successful promotion of a website through hash tags is #4am, the 4am project which is a photography project that involves everyone and Twitter added a lot of extra users.

I think that Twitter as earnt it’s place in the internet as a well worth visit, but who knows how long it will last. According the Twitter website about us page they aren’t making any money!



Join Twitter Here