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A couple of days ago I blogged about Qwitter, a service which informs you when someone quit following you on Twitter.
In the last week I received five emails, where Qwitter informed me about people no more following me.
You know what? All of them started “following” me just not long ago, maybe “waiting” for me to follow them back. Since this hasn’t happened, they unfollowed me. The point is that their only aim was to increse their followers’ number, without really caring of my tweets. Their only aim was to catch my attention and to make me follow them back.
Unfortunately, as stated many times, I follow people I really care about. If you follow me but I don’t think I can be interested in what you write on twitter (with all my respect, of course) I will never follow you back. At the same time, if I follow you it’s because: 1) we know each other personally (well, in that case I would appreciate if you follow me as well) - 2) I care about your thoughts and I don’t care if you follow me back.
It’s great how Qwittergives me a confirmation about this bad behavior by “marketing-only” twitter accounts. Here is an example for all, Mr iphone reviews unfollowed me after just a couple of days he started (on October 21st) following me, “much interested” in my thoughts and opinions:
Twinfluence is a service which lets you measure your Twitter influence and see who are the twitter users with more influence.
It basically puts together a couple of parameters from which it calculates your “reach“, “velocity” and “social capital“. Here is adescription of these attributes, taken from their website:
Reach is a measurement of potential audience and listeners, a best estimate of the number of people that a given Twitterer could quickly get a message to.
Velocity merely averages the number of first- and second-order followers attracted per day since the Twitterer first established their account. The larger the number is, the faster that Twitterer has accumulated their influence.
Social Capital: It’s essentially a measure of how influential are a twitterer’s followers. A high value indicates that most of that Twitterer’s followers have a lot of followers themselves.
The last one in particular, Social Capital, could potentially be a very interesting way to measure if someone’s followers are just, let’s say, unknown Twitterers with a couple of followers or “important” influencers and opinion leader themselves. Unfortunately, at first sight, it’s not working very well because some users on top of the list looks like anonymous and not certainly “famous” twitterers.
In the Top 5- Reach we found some well known names:
Other famous bloggers / internet opinion leaders can be easily found in the Top 50, like Loic Le Meur (7), Robert Scoble (10), Mashable (11), Kevin Rose (14), Jeff Pulver (20). There are many others, you can take a look by yourself at this link.
Ok, what about me (I don’t consider myself a heavy Twitter user) ?
A few days ago I met Stuart Henshall, one of the minds behind Phweet, a service I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. I don’t want to repeat what I already wrote about Phweet, but I only wanted to share some interesting ideas Stuart showcased to me, in particular the concept of “smart call”.
What is a smart call? A smart call is basically a call where both caller and called party “agree” about the call itself. How many times you are bothered by others who try to reach you on the phone while you are busy? Sometimes those calls could be important but you can’t know unless you take that call, loosing precious time.
A smart call is basically a call where you receive a “message” in advance of the call. Examples of content of this message could be the following:
Example1
Caller: John
Reason: That client signed the deal
Availability: now (CLICK HERE) or in 30 Minutes (CLICK THERE)
Example2
Caller: Girlfriend
Reason: I miss you
Availability: now (CLICK HERE)
Example3
Caller: Boss
Reason: Fired
Availability: now (CLICK HERE) next year (CLICK HERE)
Those above are just some examples and could be either SMS, IMs, Twitter messages or… name one! If you click the correspondent link, a call will be made/scheduled and the system will, for example, call both people and connect the call. You can also have a dial-in number that is automatically called when you click there, according to the device you chose to receive/make calls. From the caller perspective, there could be many different ways to “generate” a smart call, IM, SMS, Twitter… again different methods.
Is it smart? Oh yes, it is. Think of how much time you might save and how you can improve your productivity. Moreover, the recipients of those messages can be more than one so that a conference call is setup. Stuart & David’s service does this already, through Twitter, but this way to look at Phweet make it clear that there are tons of potential applications that could be built on top of it.
In conclusion, I strongly believe this concept would lead to a wide number of value added applications which bring telephony, web, unified messaging together, letting you improve your productivity and make a better usage of your time.
I don’t usually get excited so quickly for a new service I try, expecially if, at first sight, it seems a “me too“. Well, I have to say that Feedly is the exception and it’s pretty unique. After having used it for about one hour, I’m already addicted to it and can’t wait to share it with my readers.
Feedly is a Firefox extension which provides you with a whole new experience to the way you consume news from Google Reader. Google Reader is great but Feedly offers so many improvements that you’ll never miss it in terms of user interface.
First of all we have to say that Feedly relies completely on Google Reader and it is synchronized with it. That said, any action you perform on Feedly is automatically translated into the correspondent in Google Reader.
Secondly, sharing news on Twitter or Friendfeed has never been easier. You can also “like” an article or post to Friendfeed/Twitter directly from within Feedly.
The other great fact about Feedly is the way it brings the news to you. There are many different views available and many filters so that you can make sure only the most relevant news are highlighted and shown to you and when you have many hundred RSS subscriptions, this feature becomes particularly useful.
Another great option is the list of the top readers of certain blogs your read. For example, when I click on any specific Google Reader tag, i can see a box on the right with the top readers of the news which are tagged that way.
Feedly also provides you with a great way to perform a “springcleaning” of your feeds, highlighting the feeds where there is less activity or that you read less….
… but it also recommends new sources you could be interested in according to what currently read.
There is much more with Feedly (like The Wall, the annotation tool, APIs… ) and I highly recommend to check it out. For eager consumers of news and people addicted to social media, Feedly is a must have.
My guess? I wouldn’t be surprised to see Feedly as part of Google very soon, too.
Writing a blog post from a portable mobile device has always been challenging to me. There are many solutions, but one of the main problems I experienced is getting a user experience as close as you can to that you are used to by writing through a blogging tool on your computer.
I blogged from my Nokia N95 a couple of times, mainly to publish to my blog a photo together with a comment. The overall experience has not that great, mainly due to the small screen and to the lack of a keyboard.
Now, with the iPhone, the number of options bloggers have to write and publish a blog post while on the go has really increased. The purpose of this post today is putting together a couple of solutions which make blogging from your iPhone a very easy activity.
Wordpress
This is a must-have for any blogger who run a blog on Wordpress (like me). They just released version 1.1 and it looks like very well designed and providing a user experience very close to the web version (even if with less features). You can also embed photos on your blog post and upload them to your blog, whether you have a self-hosted Wordpress blog or hosted by Wordpress.com.
The following video, provided by Automattic (the company behind Wordpress), offers an overview of the main functionalities.
As soon as I get a 3G iPhone, this is definitely going to be one of the first apps I will install.
BlogPress
Blogpress is a multi-platform blogging software for the iPhone, a great choice if you run multiple blogs on different platforms.
Currently the following blogging services are supported: Blogger, Wordpress, Movable Type, TypePad and MSN Live Space. You can easily upload your photos to Picasa Web Albums or to a self hosted BlogPress Public Album.
An interesting feature is the ability to post the same content at the same time to multiple blogs. In the screenshot below the author is publishing a photo to Blogger as well as to MSN Live Space.
BlogIt by SixApart
Unlike the applications above, BlogIt is a web applications that you can use from your iPhone’s Safari browser. It’s much more than a blogging tool which works for TypePad, MovableType, Vox, Blogger and LiveJournal, but it also lets you update your status on various social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr, Friendfeed and Pownce.
SixApart also announced a native blogging application for TypePad available for free on the App Store already, but it doesn’t seem to be as much complete and full-featured as BlogIt. Even if web based, I would definitely choose BlogIt over the native one.
Tumble
If you are a Tumblr user this is the application for you. Tumble is a native iPhone application which lets you easily post photos and text to your Tumblr blog. You can download it from here.
LifeCast
LifeCast is an iPhone blogging application for Blogger and Tumblr. The focus of this application is to help users to create a timeline of their life and post it to their blog. Unfortunately not many blogging platforms are available and some options, like the ability to post photos, are available for Tumblr only.
Here is a list of feature this application provides:
Create multiple LifeCast timelines : one for work, one for home, another for a special event or maybe a vacation tour.
Optionally connect each LifeCast with a blog. You can have a different blog set up for each LifeCast.
Enter text entries with a title and body text
Take a photo, or choose one from your library, and give it a title
Fix the location of any text or photo entry. View the locations of past entries using the Maps application.
Post your entries to your blog* Choose which entries to post and which to keep to yourself.
I find some of them very innovative, even if traditional bloggers will find this app a little bit confusing (at least, this was the first impression I had by watching their screenshots, even if I have’t tried it yet).
VirtueSoft Blogwriter
BlogWriter is a very clean and usable blogging application which supports Wordpress blogs as well as MSN Live Spaces. It’s not a free app, but the $3.99 they ask for doesn’t seem to be that much even if I bet no bloggers who run a Wordpress blog would never choose this over the native WP app for iPhone. The good thing is that a RSS reader is included, so that you can read your favorite news from within this app.
Shozu is definitely the most complete application in this list. It’s much more than a blogging editor, it actually provides users with a powerful posting and sharing tool to various blogging and social networks as well as photo sharing services like Flickr.
I’ve been using Shozu for a while on my Nokia phones and I have to say it really rocks. I also used it to post photos on my blog some time ago and it worked really well. These premises lead me to think that the iPhone version is even better and surely more usable.
The video below shows you ShoZu in action on the iPhone. Really cool.
Shozu for the iphone can be downloaded from this link.
CellSpin
CellSpin is another application that is much more than a blogging editor only. With CellSpin you can easily post various types of content (text, audio, video or photos) to different sites, blogs as well as social networks or photo sharing services. The number of available sites is impressive. For each of them, all types of content are admitted, except for those specifically designed for photo sharing.
The iPhone and iPod touch are just a very small subset of supported devices, whose list is really impressive. One of the differences with the other softwares is that CellSpin is rather a service than an app only. After you sign up, you also have other options to post your contents, such as SMS, MMS and email. CellSpin was also awarded with the Top Mobile Application 2008. The video below, taken during DEMO 2008, shows CellSpin at work:
Conclusion
Even if many of the applications listed above are designed for specific blogging platforms and only a few of them give users a wide set of options, I have to say that they still don’t provide all the features you are used to find in many desktop applications like MarsEdit or Ecto. In addition, the latest version of the Wordpress web based posting tool provides you with so many great features that, together with some plugins like Zemanta, makes that user experience definitely unbeatable.
All that said, if you are a eager blogger and don’t want to miss the opportunity to post to your blog while you are on the go, these applications are for you (and your iPhone). I look forward to trying the Wordpress app on the iphone, as soon as I get a new one (I have a 1st gen version, but had to give it to my wife because my SIM is for 3G phones only…).
Do you know other apps not listed here? Please leave them in the comment section.
I just came across TwittAd, a new service aimed to help you to monetize your twitter page by showing ads on it.
My first thought was: is it a joke? There are many elements which lead me to think that this service will likely fail. Firstly, unless you have many (I mean many, many, many) thousand followers, your page will never be attractive for advertisers. It means “normal” Twitter users like me (almost 620 followers) are kept out from the game (99% of Twitters?). Secondly, do you know anyone who pays attention to your twitter page? I rarely open the twitter page of someone I follow, but I rather prefer to get my friends’ twits on my favorite Twitter client.
On the contrary, approaches like that adopted by Twitterrific, the popular Twitter client for Mac, are more effective IMHO. They basically shot an advertisement tweet among the other tweets, highlighting it so that users can easily see it and hopefully click on it.
TwittAd, so what? If anyone can help me to understand this service better, please leave a comment to this post.
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