How to go back to Old Twitter

"Anybody knows how I can revert to old twitter?" was a tweet from one of the friends. Frankly I find New twitter very good and helpful as I get a lot of details right along the tweet. SO I was wondering why she wants to Go back to old twitter and that exactly what I asked her. "Its slow" Came the answer. So I thought of investigating if more people want to revert to old twitter? and if yes why? Well sure enough there are more people and the reason is same "Its bit slow". So for those who tried New twitter but find old interface better here is how you can revert to you familiar interface. A simple 3 step process.



1. Locate your name at the top right corner of your Twitter home page. Guess that should not be difficult. Who misses his or her name?
2. Click it so you see the more options open.
3. Choose “Leave Preview”.


You are done. Wow it was simple. Worrying if you will ever be able to use New Twitter. Don't. Its always there whenever you wish to. For more on Twitter just follow the TAG.

US equipments don't work in India

I guess its been an something which every one has experienced, somebody gifted you a gadget but you have not been able to use it because of electrical incompatibility. Few months back I received a gift from US, a Hair Dryer (works on 110V 60Hz Type 2 socket along) but since that day Its in my cupboard. To use it I need 2 things a socket adapter and voltage converter to connect with our Indian power supply (India works in European Voltage standard that is 220V/50 Hz where as US works on 110-120V/60 Hz). It looks so silly that if you buy an appliance in India you might not be able to use it in US or vice versa.

Now I can bear if I can’t use my gift, because of the different voltage ranges and AC frequencies used through out the world. But the worst thing is that there are further divisions into various sockets types. Do you know American Standard use Socket type A and B where as others, with European standard use Socket type C to M. When countries have adopted only 2 standards for voltage and frequency, then literally why they use a whole bunch of standards for Electrical Sockets. Frustrated I decided to write about this menace and searched internet.

Not in every country, but at least 13 different types of electrical sockets are used internationally. America and Japan use 2 flat vertical input Type A (w/o grounding pole) and Type B(with grounding pole) sockets. Europe, The Middle East and much of Africa use Type C socket able to handle a no of different voltage and this feature makes it Standard Socket in Europe, popularly known as Europlug. Type D used almost in India and Nepal. And these series further going upto Type M are used by different countries like Australia, New Zealand, UK, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong kong etc.

Electricity around the world provides comprehensive details on Electrical sockets. Once you go through the lookup table in above link you will definitely come to know the reason why we are now stuck with no less than 13 different styles of plugs and wall outlets, is because many countries preferred to develop a plug of their own which doesn’t make a proper sense, instead of adopting any standard for all. If you venture out in the market to find an extension chord for your latest gadget you come across ones with various different type of sockets. Though Type D is a standard socket type other socket types are aplenty in the market. One of the reasons could be the rising imports from countries like China, Singapore and Hong Kong where type L and Type G sockets are the norms. So now I have a hairdryer which has Type A (or sometimes Type C) plugs but a Socket with Type G. Result is loose hanging sockets and ultimately the sparking. Now do I need to mention that this not only destroys your Hairdryer but can also cause a fire. Hey does anyone have data on how many fire have Electrical sparking as the cause? My wish, if only the socket types are standardized or at least some guidelines are issued for the exporters regarding what types of Sockets should be imported. The other solution could be levy a higher import duties on certain type of sockets which do not comply to Indian Standards of Electrical sockets.

22 Twitter tools you should always have

A lot of time people ask me what twitter tools to use for this or that. SO I thought I create a list for this purpose only. Here I have compiled the list of twitter tools which I have found worth using. This list contains the tools for doing specific tasks on twitter. If you are looking for the complete twitter clients I have mentioned 3 here. For more you can read my earlier post How to choose the right Twitter client for you

Know the tweeps

TwitDir is a Twitter Directory. Search for Twitter users by Name, username, location and even text in their description.

Mr. Tweet recommends you the users to follow by comparing social graphs. It helps you choose the right people those you can follow by going through their bio, the number of people they follow and how many followers they have along with statistics and information like How frequently They tweet/Retweet, % of Conversation they have, Links they share e.t.c.

Who Follows Whom

Whofollowswhom is a small little application to find what it says “Who Follows Whom” Pick up to 5 tweeters to see who they follow and are followed by in common.

UnTweeps lets you go on diet, unfollow the tweeps who have not tweeted since X number of days. You can choose number of days. Define The White-list for people who don't tweet very often, but you still want to follow them. Upto 3 times a month it’s a free service. If you long for more than 3 times a month, purchase an UnTweeps Pro account.

FriendOrFollow is a Twitter followers management application that shows the user who they are following that is not following them back and vice versa. Simply as the site homepage says Who's not following you back on Twitter? Who are you not following back? Who are your mutual friends? Find out!

Refollow helps you discover, manage, and protect your Twitter social circle. A real value add in your tools. You can find Who is Following/Not Following you, Whom You are Following/not Following, Previously Followed, Never Followed along with many other filters including the keywords included/excluded in Bio, Tweet, Website and much more.

My Tweeple: People follow you and unfollow you on Twitter. If you want to see the latest changes from Twitter, My Tweeple is a great way to manage all your Twitter people in one place. A mut have tool.

What is the buzz around?

Twitscoop allows you to search what's buzzing on twitter in real-time. It is good place to keep you on top of twitter sphere and that is the USP of this web tool.

Monitter is a web-based tool that allows you to monitor Tweets in your vecinity for mentions of any words or phrases they choose.

Convo Monitor is a dashboard view that allows you to track your brand on Twitter. You also can track Twitter conversations about any topic, word, phrase, idea, or person.

Adding Video/Backgrounds

Twiddeo is a powerful but simple service that lets you updates twitter with Video. Upload from the web, your cameraphone and record from your webcam.

TwitBacks is a place where you can create your own Twitter background with your branding - Free. The site has background collection which gives you a wide selection under various categories.

Find your Influence

Tweerank helps you find how influential you are in your tweeter sphere. It measures your "engagement score" out of 100, considering various parameters such as No. of followers/Friends, RT you receive, @ replies and more.

Twitaholic, a web based utility tracks most popular users from twitter based on their followers. You can check the top Tweeps globally or in your geographic region. You can also check where you stand globally and in your geographic area. It is a good place if you want to start following few influential people or simply if you want to boast about your influence in twitter sphere.

Retweetrank tells you how interesting & useful content are you producing? Retweets are great indication of influence and the audience’s interest in your tweets. Retweetrank is a webtool to find just that based on the number of retweets you get. With the rank, latest retweets of the user are shown along with RSS feed.

Scheduling tweets

FutureTweets, as its name suggests is a free service that lets you schedule your Twitter messages. Send it at a specific time in the future or send a reoccuring Tweet daily, weekly, monthly or yearly! You'll never forget the birthdays of your beloved Twitter friends again!

Complete Twitter Client

Twitiq (earlier TwitHive) is one of the first twitter clients I had used. On the first look at it looks somewhat like Twitter web but the Top bar makes it little more valuable. You can create and Check channels, get analytics of your tweets. Other enhancement it offers over twitter web is Automatic Expansion of Shortened URLs, Inline Image and Video Previews, Channels Syndication. These things make you a power user.

HootSuite (earlier BrightKit) is one twitter client that has really impressed me. It is available for web as well for download on your phone. If you want almost everything for twitter including analytics, Tweet scheduling, CRM, Team management HootSuite is your best bet. It will not offer few things though saved tweets to reply FAQ, is one of them.

CoTweet is a cleanly designed twitter CRM tool which lets you assign tweets to specific member of your team whom you want to deal with the specific tweet. You can add notes on Twitter users that your team can see.

Miscellaneous

GroupTweet is a service that works behind the scenes with Twitter to allow users to form groups and communicate within those groups. It enhances the direct message feature to work for multiple users with one single DM. Create your group and share the information only with your group. Do not forget to protect your tweets.

Twittonary provides explanations of various Twitter related words. You can search the entire Twitter Dictionary or by single word using the alphabet it start with.

AddTweets is a service that allows you to add your latest tweets to your blog or website. Just join AddTweets and you will get a small piece of JavaScript code. Add this code to your site/Blog and your tweets will start appearing on your site/blog. Its free the only thing you need to know is that you will be on their mailing list (Hey there is nothing called free lunch).

Why you should not connect with a Person’s Official Email ID

An email is meant to communicate and to keep in touch with someone. But connecting with someone via his/her official mail id calls for something to be kept in mind that he/she is working for a company and provided an email id on company domain that prohibits them from using the email id for personal use. Although our action may or may not be reprehensive but they do represent a bad professional image of us. Thank HR for not reprimanding you on this.

Moreover a person’s official id may not connect you to him/her forever. As soon as he changes his company/Organization he works for, you may loose communication with him.

What’s more sometimes you forward mails to all your friends without noticing that it is his/her official id. I remember when a friend complained that how another friend of his sends him forward mails, some of them containing naughty things (you know how it happens), on his official ID and how it has put him in embracing situations on few occasions. Besides this consider for example, a day you are sitting doing your official work and a forward mail comes telling you to send it to 10 people you love. It is just so irritating that you are interrupted in the middle of the workflow with an email that has nothing to do with work.

Although you may see no harm in getting your official ID into contact list of the of the other person but unfortunately many people disclose their own email id and password to social networking sites and that site uses the APIs to get all email addresses from the contact list which they use to send invitations like be a part of the organizational campaign, to all the ids (unfortunately your official id was added in their contact list). By this way, your official id can go to the spammers.

So be professionally aware and moderately govern your actions before you communicate with someone’s Official ID.

Mixero: A promissing twitter Client that needsto mature fast

Its when my colleague Meenu (@bmeenu) suggested I tried Mixero. It is a desktop client for Twitter and I tried every feature it has. It sure looks a promising application. The application with no doubt presents itself very nicely. It has two version : The Desktop version and iPhone Version (I havent tried iPhone version though).

The mixero says reduce signal to noise ratio using the Active List, Context and Filters. It really does reduce the noise ratio, the Active List enables you to aggregates information on a number of elements (like new User, List/Group, Channel) which are of your interest. Your ActiveList shows only the elements included in the it, so no important information is missed. Context is a saved ActiveList with a name given by you. You can switch between various contexts in Mixero. Filtering in mixero is not only the positive filtering, it has negative filter too. Positive filter provides you the tweets/content that you want to see while negative filter removes the tweets/content that you do not want presence of. Filter also does the work of blocking. Another thing that I liked in it is its style, the appearance it really is cool.

I know it must be sounding interesting to you but while using Mixero I wondered how to use a lot of stuff. Yes the features are there but when it comes to using them as a naive user, you will struggle a lot. There is help but its not easily trackable. Once tracked where the help is, you will be unsatisfied with the help. Lets take an example of context. It took me 2 days to get what it is. The site provides context help, where they are just talking about what context is, there's no explanation of how to use it.

The mixero looked attractive to me coz of its multiple Twitter & Facebook (FB) account management. Which appeared as a yet to refine feature. Mixero with Twitter is good but with FB it struggles in connecting. And if you have enabled your auto login mode then just keep waiting for the application to start, it just stucks. Another point to note is after logging in FB a display issue that arises. You get a dialog box notifying you about the sharing of Home & wall updates but, its accept/deny button is not visible on the dialogue box. Actually the accept button is present below the window of dialogue box which can be discovered if you use the tab button of your keyboard.

Once I have logged in (with both FB & twitter account) I see now is the mixero cool screen. The left panel has all my tweets organized as per @ replies, my timeline, DMs etc. The right panel has my lists/groups, chats, twitter trends etc. between the two panels I can see my twitter and FB mini profile. Its quite messed up with the display of DM, @ replies, Update icon & counters. A major issue with mixero is updation of tweets. At one moment your tweet is visible on time line and at very next momemt it vanishes. Another tiny issue is closing the application. You can close it only through the Task bar's tray icon.

As I said I tried all the things mixero got, my context R&D made me realise that @mixeroteam (the mixero twitter account) is really a lazy one to reply. Over all I would say Its an application which shows some promiss but I would still stick to Hootsuite till the time its matures enough. It is still my favorite of all twitter clients I have tried till date.

How to choose the right Twitter client for you

Ok you joined today's in thing, the micro blogging site called Twitter and started posting your daily tidbits. So far so good. But then comes a time when your friends and follower base increase. Your needs for Twitter start changing and you wish, if only I could use twitter according to you specific needs. Twitter website today (despite adding a lot of functionalities) leaves a lot to be desired. The solution to this is (or rather solutions are) Twitter clients or twitter apps. There are different twitter clients for these specific requirements.

Twitter desktop clients

The choice of the twitter clients those suite your requirements depend on many factors. If you are indulging in twitter for your pleasure and using it only from your home (or office) PC, the suggestion for you would be to download a desktop client. TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop

are two top of the table twitter desktop clients.

TweetDeck lets you use Multiple accounts of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn etc. Option to customise it for columns, groups(to separate your personal and professional contacts) and saved searches, uploading photos (and videos), URL shortner (through bit.ly) and timeline filter by name or the text, make it easy to handle your updates.

I used Seesmic Desktop (and its other product twhirl) sometime back. You can view Home, Replies(Mentions), Direct Messages(DMs) and Sent columns for multiple twitter accounts. Columns can be created for saved searches and lists. It also has built-in support for Twitpic and a webcam function. Digsby is also a client which combine the Mail, IM and Social media interfaces together.

Twitter Web Apps
For the people who wish to tweet from multiple locations Web based Twitter clients are the best. Seesmic Web is one Twitter web client that comes to my mind. Seesmic Web is real-time Twitter web application which offers a clean interface and can be used in "list view" (looks like your webmail's inbox) or the "column view". You have separate columns for Sent, Favorite, Mentions, DM, Retweets (Mine/ by me/ by Others), Search, Lists and even the trending topics. But one thing that is missing is the media sharing (Pictures/ Videos etc) option. You can also try PeopleBrowsr and TwitHive as to web client options.

Twitter Mobile Apps
But if you are tech geek and wish to update your twitter account on the move you would have to look for the Mobile twitter clients. These small sit on your phone and make it easier to update your status from virtually anywhere. MobiScape is a good Twitter mobile application . With MobiScape besides checking your Timeline you can find Mentions, DMs (To you or By you) & Search (Keywords & Users). ReTweets/Replies are easier to make. Options to check particular user's info (Following, Followers, Tweets), current trends are some handy features.

With increasing penetration of iPhone and BlackBerry it gets imperative to talk about the clients for these platforms. Echofon is one iPhone Twitter client(it has Mac and Firefox versions too) that provide the option to easily view user’s profile, timeline, favorites, followers etc. Multiple Twitter accounts in Echofon is good. you can switch between accounts easily. The Background notification for mentions and messages help you using other apps while. Tweets having photos, videos, location, conversations etc. are tagged with smart little icons. If you use Mac desktop your unread tweets stay in sync in both desktop and iPhone. Mobile Twitter is another iphone client that I have used extensively and which can be downloaded from Apple Store. It offers a clean interface and separate the timelines and the messages (mentions & DMs).

UberTwitter is one good BlackBerry Twitter application. According to TwitStat, UberTwitter is used by 1.63 percent of Twitter users. You can attach your location, photos, vedios and UberTwitter add links leading to your photos (or location) using its own URL shortener. Tweet shrinking and twitter lists among others are some handy tools.

Twitter Collaboration Apps

For users tweeting for the official/client projects there is a requirement for applications which can be utilized by the team. HootSuite and CoTweet are two web based Twitter colaboration applications which can come handy.

Through HootSuite one can manage multiple social networks, multiple users over various social network accounts. It also provide the People button at the bottom which allows you to check who's following you and who you're following, see their Klout score and manage your Lists. The option of RSS/Atom feeds to publish to social networks, tweet scheduler, link stats visualizations, clickable hashtags, custom link parameters and recently added choice of URL shortner (Ow.ly / Ht.ly). Make it ideal tweet collaboration tool.

Cotweet is another collaboration tool for the twitter. It besides all the features of other collaboration tools, can be seen as workflow system built for CRM. It lets you manage up to five Twitter accounts through a single login. It works on assigned updates. You can assign an @ reply to a person responcible in your company for specific types of tweets. Once assigned tweets to go off your screen to "archive".

There are many more clients but I have covered the ones I have worked with. Hope this post is of good use to you all. Please feel free to add your comments and suggestions.

Criticism with responsibility

First of all I want to confess that only a master craftsman can create the piece that's just the way it was required. I am saying this because some time back I wrote a post A hard to please customer equals A Moron. It was about the people who are self proclaimed critics (at many instances even I behave like this). Now these critics are always looking on the dark side of the things. They feel something is wrong because it is not the way they felt it should be. While writing this I found myself at the loss of words. This word loss produced a post which I myself found a bit harsh (I really hate to write harsh things). Now yesterday while I was watching Ratatouille a Brad Bird directed English Animation. And then I realized that what is a truly superb writing written by a true craftsman. Here is one dialogue from the movie which talks about the issue of Critics and their responsibilities. Its actually the way I thought I'll write the post and it goes like this

"In many ways the work of us as a critic is very easy. We risk very little. Yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that in a grand scheme of things the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so."

How beautifully written and conveyed the message in just the way it should be.

Twitter provides the trending topics closer your home

Yesterday night after returning from office I switched on my computer and logged on to my twitter account. A new message blob was waiting for me there which was pointing towards the trending topics list, only this time it read "Trending: Worldwide". There was an option to go local also. Twitter added the new Local Trends feature to the site.

As Twitter blog says "Last week we began to slowly roll out a new feature called Local Trends to expose what people are talking about on the state and city level, and today we've fully launched". The feature is designed to keep Twitter users up to date with the hottest topics being tweeted.

Excited I clicked to opt for my city (of course Delhi) But Right now, there aren't many options. One can choose from only 15 cities and 6 countries. The official blog says "We’ll be improving this feature over time to provide more locations". But exact rollout is not known.

This move will definitely provide roughly 15 million active tweeters, a closer look into the hot topics people in their vicinity. Also you will be able to discover even more relevant topics that might matter to you.