Behind the veil of Colorado’s premier Interactive Agency
On the train ride into Indigio, I read an interesting story on CNN. A Grad Student used twitter to free himself from an Egyptian jail.
If you have not heard about this story it is worth a read.
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Check out TweetWords. It is a great game that combines the fun of word play games like Scrabble and your addiction of Twitter. However, you do not have to be on Twitter or a tweeter to play.
For those unfamiliar with Twitter it is a micro-blogging site that I compare to instant messaging to hundreds or thousands of people all at once.
For those of you unfamiliar with Scrabble, where the hell have you been? You know how to find this blog, but never heard of Scrabble - really? Please stop reading and go to Target and find the game Scrabble. You need to start at square one. The game TweetWords is too advanced for you, sorry. 
So back to TweetWords. The basic premise of the game is that each week you are given a challenge to create words. It may be nouns or in the case of this week, it is creating the longest word. Using the basic per letter scoring similar to Scrabble, where each letter has a point value you try to create your five best words each day.
It sounds easy right? Well, the part with Twitter comes in that makes it more challenging. The more popular your word is in the Twitter public time line, the more bonus points you receive. So the more often other people are tweeting a word you enter, the higher your score. For example, “twitter” itself is always a popular word in the Twitter public time line so that would not give a lot of points for the length of a word or the value of each letter, but would give points based on popularity. However, a word like “zygodactylous” would score huge for length and the value of each letter with a “Z” and two “Ys”, but would not be something people commonly tweet about, so it would not score much there.
So who is the mastermind behind this fun game? That is the best part, it was created by our own Ryan Hadley, who is a Systems Administrator/IT Specialist in Indigio’s IT Department. He did the whole thing in his spare time based on his love of games and fascination with Twitter. Please do Ryan a solid and check it out. If you like it, play it and share the love by passing it along to your friends.
First, I found Twitter, thanks to co-workers here at Indigio. I quickly became addicted once I mixed Twitter with my BlackBerry.
Then, I found the Twitter API. I HAD to do something with it. So, one night I started to pull down the twitter public timeline, break each post up by words, and insert each word in to a MySQL Database. I fooled with this data for a while trying to get an idea. Pulled the top users @replied to in 24 hours, tried pulling the top websites posted in 24 hours. None of it was too interesting.
Another night, while drinking, I thought of fantasy sports games. And how horrible I am at them because the only sport I like is foosball. So why not bet on words used per day, instead of who hit the most touchdowns at the Detroit Red Wings game?
This is a great posting that shows solid, practical ways to use Twitter to promote your brand and blog. It was written by Darren Rowe at ProBlogger. This posting shows how Twitter is evolving past chatter to become an amazing tool.
If you do not read ProBlogger.net by Darren Rowe, you should. I even follow him on Twitter. He is brilliant and what I like best of all, provides real examples of ways to improve any blog.
Okay, I love all things Twitter. I just wish I could get my friends (or dare I say it Dale) more into the social media world, as it would be so much easier to keep touch with each other if they tweeted. I continue to try to lead by example and I read a great post on SocialMediaToday by Dave Fleet about how to find people to follow that I thought I would share. It does a good job of explaining Twitter as more than a micro-blog, but rather more like instant messaging to groups. I like his description and post. As with most social media, we do follow by taking our friends lead, so come on - give Twitter a try. Drink the kool-aid. It is delicious.
The question, “How do I break-up on Twitter?” was asked this weekend by my friend and co-worker Sara. No, she was not looking to break up with a boyfriend using Twitter. Instead, she was talking about the concept of following in Twitter and whether it looks bad to stop following someone.
For those of you unfamiliar, Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows you to send updates or tweets to the Twitter website in 140 character less that answers the question, “What are you doing?” I personally am a twitter addict and find it somewhat interesting to know what my friends; co-workers and even Barack Obama are doing throughout their day or thinking.
In Twitter, you can follow the tweets of others and others can follow your tweets. Sara’s question surrounded the thought, what if she has realized someone she has followed for months, is not someone she really wants to follow anymore. Will it offend them if they notice she is no longer interested in their random thoughts or updates? Will they think she is breaking up with them and ending their “Twitter” relationship?
This got me thinking. Is rejection the same in the social networking world as it is in the real world? If someone takes me off their friend list in Facebook would I be hurt? Would I question whether or not I consider myself interesting, if people stopped following my tweets in Twitter? If my blog dropped from 50 visitors a day to 5, would I start to wonder what I did or didn’t do? Probably. No, I would not fall into a deep depression or give it a thought for more than a few minutes, but I would probably question why. Why did they no longer want to be in my social network?
I guess rejection is rejection, whether in real life or via the web. I know before I de-friend someone or stop following someone, I will think about it a bit first.
If you are addicted to Twitter this may be perfect for you. Check out Kristen Nicole’s blog posting on Mashable - Social Networking News about Twittpool.
Twittpoll is the latest to take advantage of the mobilizing and speedy capabilities of Twitter, this time for polls (hence, the name). From Twittpoll’s updates you can vote for one option or another by clicking on the tiny URLs that appear in the updates. If you follow Twittpoll through your actual Twitter account, then this is even easier to do, as the poll is right there in your updates. Otherwise you can check out all the Twittpoll updates on its website, and vote from there as well.
So in terms of a company using the economy of Twitter for its own purposes, this is a fairly interesting manifestation of leveraging another service for mobile and instant gratification purposes. The polls last for only 24 hours, and you’ll also be updated on the results. Unless you’re really into polling, especially in a slightly unorthodox manner, Twittpoll won’t be much more than a fun and somewhat quirky thing you can do in order to interact more with Twitter tools, if you happen to catch the Twittpoll update.
As users have no input (other than emailing in suggestions to the company) for polls that are offered on Twittpoll, this is a pretty passive interaction that you’ll have with the service. Ever since the entrant of Woot onto Twitter, I’ve been interested in the use of Twitter for its commerce and economy potential, so Twittpoll is another interesting use for Twitter.
If you are interested in the Presidential Primaries, a very interesting site has popped up called Politweets. It searches the public timeline from Twitter and shows posts containing names of the Presidential Candidates.
It is a very interesting use of social media to gain insight into which candidates are generating the biggest buzz. You can see last night that Clinton & McCain’s wins in New Hampshire generated a lot of tweets with their names. It is a very interesting way to look at how American’s feel about the candidates and how micro-blogging like Twitter is generating a lot of mash-ups.
Today Laura, Henry’s evil doppleganger Michael and I returned from Web Design World Boston. Here are a few things I’m feeling compelled to share:
Lastly, and most importantly, don’t wear Rockies apparel in Boston. It’s just not a good idea. Trust me.
Yes, I am addicted to Twitter. I admit it and that is the first step toward recovery, right? If so, then step two is finding new ways to extend my addiction and that has happened with my discovery of Twittervision and Twitterment. These two sites take Twitter to a whole new world.
Twittervision takes the public timeline for Twitter and places it real-time on a map of the world. As the tweets are entered for other users, they pop-up with a push pin on the map with the twitter’s name and pic. You are probably thinking, who cares what people you have never meant are saying in 140 character of less? It is not necessarily the messages I find interesting, but how many people are tweeting all over the world at the same time. You see a tweet from Tokoyo, Japan and one from Philadelphia, PA just seconds apart. The next is in Idaho and the next Chile. You suddenly start to realize how small our world has become and how connected we all actually can be. It is amazing to watch.
Twitterment is a search engine that searches public twitter messages and return results based on relevance. Again, a very interesting concept to me because you can now search terms to see how many tweets contain that keyword. For example, enter Beowulf and you see a ton of tweets of people telling what they thought of the movie (apparently people who use Twitter, loved Beowulf). This is another interesting way of how social networking can change our behavior. Would someone be less likely if the majority of tweets were negative to see this movie? Perhaps.
So if you do not Twitter yet, give the micro-blogging site a try. Once you are addicted, come drink the punch and try sites such as Twitterment, Twittervision and the dozens of other cropping up each day.
