Thoughtpick: A unique perspective of the Web and social media...
A unique perspective of the Web and social media...

March 17, 2010

@Anywhere with Twitter

This week, Twitter announced its ‘@anywhere’ platform for websites, which allows site visitors to Tweet and follow from sites including Digg, Amazon and eBay.

Basically, Web-masters (oh don’t you love that word?) will be able to add @Anywhere to their sites with a few lines of Javascript. This would integrate Twitter into their websites so that their users could follow and tweet without having to go to Twitter itself as well as use Twitter to sign into the site.

It could become as Internet-omnipresent as “Contact Us”

This is big. Twitter, unlike many other services, has the potential to become more like email (a tool) rather than like a service. After all, it’s a communication platform, first and foremost. The idea of Twitter revolves around short bursts of text, which people who know each other and do not know each other can use for targeted communication.

With @anywhere integration into anywhere online, brands, corporate websites, newspapers, bloggers, and every other kind of website can start communicating with its users and building communities using the leverage and power of Twitter. It’s interesting, isn’t it?

Twitter is certainly excited about the frameworks, saying in a blog postImagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo home page.”

Here’s the announcement at SXSW:

Twitter is certainly excited about the frameworks, saying in a blog post “Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo home page.”

What do you think? Does Twitter have the potential to become a tool?

February 17, 2010

10 Tips to Ensure That You’re NOT A Social Media Sucker!

Learn all you can from the mistakes of others.  You won’t have time to make them all yourself“.  ~Alfred Sheinwold

Mistake

If only we, for once, actually took the time to understand the value of this quote, most of us wouldn’t have gone through most of the crap we had to deal with, whether on a personal level or business wise! But we are humans and we are stubborn!

My mother knew better than to try to teach me from her mistakes, however, I still have faith in you, my readers, and in the fact that you will trust me enough to learn from my own experience on social media venues as to not commit the same mistakes I did!

Top 10 Tips You Should Follow When Using Social Media!

Are you ready for this? Here we go..

1. Culturize!

Being culturally aware and sensitive is very important when using one or multiple social media platforms or venues. Cultural ignorance is highly destructive in your relationships with the communities you are trying to be a part of!

2. Emphasize!

When active inside a realm as impersonal as social media, it is very important for you to be able to emphasize any point you are trying to make in order not to be misunderstood. No one can hear the tone of your voice or see your body language so your words are your weapon and your executor!

[read full article >>]

January 27, 2010

Facebook’s VitaminWater “Connect” Flavor

Social media is what we love to talk about at Thoughtpick. In a effort to allow you to better understand and grasp the right use of social media for your upcoming campaigns, we are dedicating this regular section for you tailored to analyze old, new and current campaigns in terms of audience, success, lesson learned and more so you could learn about social media by example!

Stat Box:
Brand Name: VitaminWater “Connect”
Campaign URL: Facebook Fanpage
Social Media Channels Used: Facebook & Twitter
Appeal: Cash prize, sense of belonging & quenching thirst in a healthy way!
Target Audience: Mostly US based Facebook & Twitter users, Vitamin Water consumers, both females & males of ages between 13 and 28
Date: 7 January, 2010
Campaign Duration: Mid January

“Vitamin Water has just launched a new Black Cherry-Lime Facebook flavored drink with Caffeine and 8 other nutrients. Now you can hydrate, take your vitamins and connect with thousands of others on Facebook all at the same time”.

First it was Reddit’s Bacon Soap, and now it is Facebook’s VitaminWater: “Connect”! What is going on with those social media sites and venues? Are they going nuts? Trust me, they are not; they are seeking to gain attention and loyalty and further expand their target audience!

Good move VitaminWater and consequently Facebook, although I have to stress the fact that I saw this coming and I think Twitter is on the way! [read full article >>]

November 17, 2009

For a better RT chance: Shall I tweet less or more?

I have been reading, with much enthusiasm, the blog of Dan Zarrella (@DanZarrella) which contains a lot of useful information about social media. Zarrella defines himself as a social media and viral marketing scientist. The most interesting part of his work is the research he has done around the Twitter RT (retweet) functionality. He actually studied the “science of retweets” over a period of nine months and analyzed roughly five million tweets and 40 million retweets to discover the art behind getting retweeted.

Retweet Decision Model

Zarrella had come up with a flowchart model that illustrates the steps a tweet needs to go through in order to get retweeted. The flowchart is one of those things that we all know is common sense, but then we realize that  it gives a better idea when we have it illustrated.

[read full article >>]

November 10, 2009

October 27, 2009

Tweet to Win: 15 Twitter Contests Listed – Hurry up!

Twitter has been used in many ways as an excellent platform for marketing and promotion. Twitter contests emerged to be one of the simplest and most efficient means for companies and brands to promote their products. They are usually entered with a simple tweet, one that gives the participants a chance to win a prize, from iPhones to $10 cash. Tweets serve as a viral element for the contest holder to promote his/her services, the better the prize offered the better chance for the promoter’s message to reach more people.

There are many Twitter contests out there, we did some search and brought you a list of 15 contests that offers some really cool prizes! You don’t want to miss that!

1. Win an awesome Alienware laptop and a year’s worth of free Antivirus Pro 2010 security protection!

To enter, simply follow @Panda_Security on Twitter and tweet their #PandaGiveaway tweet. Ends October 31st, 2009.

Win an Alienware laptop!

Win an Alienware laptop!

2. Win 30 guitars in 30 days via Twitter

Ends November 5th, 2009.

[read full article >>]

September 24, 2009

14 Funny Twittering Gadgets from The Future (a fun post)

tweet tweet!

tweet tweet!

It was both fun and interesting to research and write down a list of the current available twittering objects, appliances and animals. Some of them had us impressed (very impressed!), others made us laugh, while some made us wonder: how would our future be like when other objects ride the wave and carry on the trend of non-human twittering?

So, here at Thoughtpick, we decided to come together, sit down and let our wide imagination run loose  in order to come up with a list of what we think would be funny future Twitter gadgets. We urge you to keep reading this post and prepare yourself for a good laugh! Don’t forget to share with us any funny thoughts you might have :)

1. Tweeting Toilet:

Tweeting Toilet!!

Tweeting Toilet!!

It can sure be useful for medical diagnosis but it can also be fun tracking other people’s delivering *habits*! It will track duration and weight of… delivery – for the lack of a better term -

@DiaherraX  just had a 6 minute 20 seconds long dump, weighing 316 grams!

@DumpTracker (no offense @TrendTracker) would also  keep score of today’s heaviest dump!

@DumpTracker: And today’s biggest dump was by @ILoveBurgerKing at 1.2 kg

[read full article >>]

September 11, 2009

4 App Ideas to Expect When Location-Tweets Hit Mainstream

Trending Places

Trending Places

When people of Iran were enraged earlier this year, post the Iranian elections, people around the world were hooked on Twitter in order to get real-time news updates as it happened. Iranian authorities figured out the threat of Twitter, and sought after local Iranian twitterers based on their profile locations and time zone settings in order to shut them down. People around the world wanted to help those protesters, and started changing their own profiles to make it seem as if they all live in Iran in order to make Iranian authorities mission harder.

That is something from the past, 3 months have passed, today, Twitter is working on adding geo-locations to tweets which will allow us to signal the exact location of where we are tweeting from by allowing apps to attach our latitude and longitude coordinates to tweets we specifically choose to carry such information. That will sure open a whole new dimension to real-time location information.

4 applications you can expect when location-tweets hit mainstream…

What does real-time location tweets mean? and how will it affect our lives? We know that it raises privacy concerns for many legitimate reasons, but we also know that it can be the next big thing which will open the door for many useful applications to take advantage of, and thus we, here at Thoughtpick, decided to voice out what kind of applications we see hitting our doors in the near future:

[read full article >>]

September 3, 2009

21 Twittering Objects, Appliances and Animals! Ridiculous or Useful?

TwitterBirdsWhen Facebook first introduced status updates, it was interesting reading the continuous updates of people in my friends list. Different people used it in different ways; most used it to inform others about their current status, but some took it too far and were – ridiculously – reporting nearly every single action they do. Then Twitter appeared with the question “What are you doing?”, and took the obsession of status updates to a whole new level. Today, not only people report what they do, but also objects, appliances and even animals do as well!

We looked around the Web for non-human twitterers beside the commonly known news (and spam) bots and brought you the following list – some ridiculous and some useful:

1. Tweeting Plant:

You don’t have to worry – anymore – about knowing when your plant is thirsty and in need of water, it will tell you by itself! @Pothos is a tweeting plant that sends status updates to Twitter and defines a new way of communication between plants and human beings!

@pothos - The tweeting plant

@pothos - The tweeting plant

2. Tweeting Toilet:

Yes! Your toilet can post to Twitter every flush – that is if you want the world to know about it -!  Follow @hacklabtoilet for this guy’s toilet updates!

The tweeting toilet!

The tweeting toilet!

[read full article >>]

August 16, 2009

Did Your Twitter Tweet Count Suddenly Drop? Twitter Bug?

I was chatting earlier on with Beirut (@beiruta) and she was complaining that her Twitter profile shows that she has only tweeted 850 updates, while just a few days ago it was showing more than 5000 tweets. Using Google’s cached results, I confirmed that, and by that time, Beirut had a few more people complaining about the same issue.

The Twitter Number of Updates Bug - comparing current vs. Google cached profiles

The Twitter Number of Updates Bug - comparing current vs. Google cached profiles

So far, comparing cached Google results versus current results, the following Twitter users replied to @beiruta’s inquiry and are facing the same issue at the time of writing:

  1. @arleigh, dropped 21,000 tweets from a cached count (13 Aug 2009 02:38:44 GMT) of 21,819 to 1,090 tweets!
  2. @MoGeezie, had an outstanding 15,894 tweets via cached results (10 Aug 2009 10:01:52 GMT) and now showing only 3,824 tweets – a drop of 12,000 tweets!
  3. @beiruta, Beirut A.H., now showing 850 updates, while a Google cache page dated “10 Aug 2009 23:43:01 GMT” shows 5,662 tweets. A 4,812 drop.
  4. @togetherwf, Susan Smith, dropped 4,358 tweets from 4,744 tweets showing via Google cache (13 Aug 2009 03:19:08 GMT) to 386 currently showing.
  5. @memachel, Michelle Brooks, is now displaying with a count of 10,880 tweets, while the cached copy (12 Aug 2009 04:42:53 GMT) has her at 11,473 – a drop of 593 tweets.
  6. @wallybock, Wally Bock, now showing 6,322 updates, while the cached page on “13 Aug 2009 18:07:02 GMT” shows 6,721. Dropping 399 tweets.

So far @arleigh seems to have the biggest *proven* drop at 21k! Did your tweet count drop?

Is this yet another Twitter bug, just like the tweeting up to 250 characters bug?

I asked Beirut (@beiruta) why that drop made her frown, and she replied…

[read full article >>]

Filed under: Deductions and Realizations — Tags: , , , , , , , — Amer Kawar @ 9:23 am
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