Twitoaster – A twitter tool for threaded conversations

This week I have been using a tool I found called twitoaster. Basically it helps you see the threads of your conversations in one place and gives you a few statistics from your tweets.

This is how it pitches itself:

“Twitoaster threads and archives your twitter conversations, bringing you all the background, context and statistics you need. It’s all about improving & optimizing the way you communicate with your followers. It groups replies and retweets with the tweets that inspired them, displaying threaded discussions. Twitoaster provides analytics and statistics, helping you to tweet at the right time. It also archives and indexes all your conversations in a conversational search engine.”

This tool is the brainchild of Arnaud Meunier from Paris who now works for Twitter, so he must have done his job on this application pretty well. However, he made this great tool back in 2009 and is now focussed on his work with Twitter (According to the blog) so it says the application is unlikely to evolve much.

I think this is a useful little twitter application that presents your conversations easily. On the downside I think the RT statistics it presents could be a little out as the way Twitter produces these did change recently. So I think it might miss some of those, however, that said for a free application I think it is worth a play. One of my favourite elements is the graphs that tell you the best day of the week and hour of the day although for us these statistics were a little out.

What do you think of Twitoaster?

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Twitter management tools – why did they remove bulk unfollow tools?

For the last nine months I have been working on creating a Twitter management application that added value to the Twitter experience. The application, called Tweasier, is currently in beta testing and has several hundred people using it on a daily basis – I have found their feedback absolutely invaluable and I now recognise the importance of having a beta period. During these nine months I have seen a variety of Twitter applications have their services or features throttled by Twitter and I have been asking myself why?

A good example of this was Twitter Karma which allowed the average Twitter user to sort their friends by people who were following them back. It was a useful tool which meant that you could cleanse your account from time to time and keep the numbers down to a reasonable and manageable level. Sometimes people you follow, just stop using Twitter altogether, so a spring clean can be effective.

As Twitter has grown, so has the noise in an average users Twitter account. The early adopters of Twitter used to see pretty much everybody’s tweets but now, as there are so many interesting and insightful people out there to follow, you can occasionally miss an important tweet or two. For a news junkie like myself I hate to think that but that’s the way it is on Twitter these days and we have all come to accept it.

Too Many Fail Whales

Twitter has had a bit of a bad run recently launching a few new features which have stumbled and cause the network to break down on regular occasions. Sometimes I actually feel I might as well start having a relationship with the FAIL WHALE as I see him more often that my own account. However, this has prompted Twitter to reduce the limit of requests third-party-applications like Tweasier, Tweetdeck and Hootsuite can make it to its API (down to 175).

By doing this applications have become much less stable and I personally think this may well start affecting the user’s relationship and love for the network.

My Advice to Twitter

So my first bit of advice to Twitter is to sort the stability of the network out and return the trust to the users and the developers which have helped make Twitter as popular as it is toady.

My second piece of advice is to re-examine bringing back bulk unfollowing. Now don’t get me wrong I am not a spammer and I don’t believe in spamming but surely there is a better way to stop Twitter spammers than removing the usefulness of bulk unfollowing from all third-party applications.

Twitter actually changed its rules and now only allows single line unfollowing. In my opinion this is wrong, so please bring back features like bulk unfollowing, so the regular users can trim their accounts when they need trimming otherwise it makes it a far harder process to spring clean an account and people will be following dead accounts which is surely a bad thing for Twitter anyway.

My answer to stopping the spammers is simple, when a users syncs their account with an application their details are kept in the user’s profile. Why then can’t Twitter just have something that flags up when an account is growing and reducing at an alarming rate using one of these applications? Ban these guys whose accounts fluctuate and keep the users happy by giving us back a useful features.

I would love to offer Tweasier’s users the capacity to select all but the way the rules stand that won’t be the case for some time.

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TweetedBrands.com which Brands are Popular on Twitter

Hi folks, it’s nice to be back posting on Tweasier. Today, I bring you a very simple but very useful Twitter application website and it’s called TweetedBrands. TweetedBrands, shows you what brands have been mentioned the most on Twitter. You can view the information for Today, Last Week or Last Month.

Find out which 50 top brands are popular now

Not surprisingly, BP is one of the most popular brands being mentioned at the moment due to the current oil spill situation.  The usual popular suspects are in there Youtube, Twitter, Facebook. The most popular consumer brand is Apple, it was top last month with a staggering 4,006,752 Tweets, Apple has a very loyal and dedicated fan base on Twitter. I still can’t understand Apple’s reluctance to capitalise on this situation. They did launch a couple of Twitter account for iTunes, but Apple really doesn’t have a main company presence on Twitter at this time.

If you click on the hyperlinked number of Tweets, it nicely sends you to Twitter search for ‘all mentions’ of the brand or company. Pretty useful, if your analysing the conversations or sentiment around that particular brand or company.

Interesting findings

I’m finding this website fascinating, for example Today (4th of July) Zara (European clothing Retailer, popular here in the UK) has had 2,609 Tweets mentioning that brand. It is interesting to note from my own personal love of the brand that there approach to online marketing hasn’t been too effective of late. Unlike, most UK high street retail brands they have been slow on the uptake of social media and don’t even sell online. They could really be captalising on these conversations happeing around their brand, as far as I am aware they don’t have a presence on Twitter either.

Check out TweetedBrands.com for yourself, who are you suprised to see on there? Which brands haven’t made the cut and which did you think might of?

Which brands do think use social media effectively on Twitter? We’d love to hear you thoughts.

About this blog post
If you enjoyed reading this blog post, then you can take a look at Illiya’s other posts on his blog or follow him on Twitter.

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• New Twitter tool needs your feedback

New Twitter tool needs your feedback

At Tweasier we are busy finalising our Twitter application but we need your help to tell us what features you would really want from a Twitter application.

We also want to hear what you like about our current version and what you think could be improved. We will be spending the next few weeks using all of your feedback to hopefully create a Twitter application that adds real value to the Twitter experience but we simply can’t do it without your help.

I will be filming a series of walkthrough videos of the features, so here’s a 2 minute taster of our search function which is pretty useful.

If you want to join the fun and get involved in our exclusive beta programme click here and register your email.

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Twitter places launches but breaks everything else causing major outages

As you probably already know the Tweasier team has been busy rolling out the beta of our Twitter application this week. It has been a bit of a bumpy ride due to several Twitter outages over the last week or so (not the best timing) and a few speed issues which the team here are working on.  We have had some great feedback from our users and we will be sending out more invites as soon as we have fixed everything.

Well whilst we have been busy, so has Twitter, as it is currently rolling out a new feature to help meet the demand for location tagging. Unfortunately, we are lead to believe this feature has lead to a few outages of its own. Twitter has now fixed these problems so hopefully everything should be fine and we won’t be seeing the Fail Whale anytime soon.

Twitter Places was launched earlier this week and it allows users to tell their followers where exactly their tweet is coming from. It has used the example of world cup stadiums in South Africa which could be tagged to inform individuals if they are actually at the stadium.

People can click onto a Twitter Place within someone’s message to see all the other tweets that it has been used for.

The Twitter blog revealed several other features of this launch including: 

• Foursquare and Gowalla integration: Many Foursquare and Gowalla users publish check-ins to Twitter. Location is a key component of these Tweets, so we worked closely with both companies to associate a Twitter Place with Tweets generated by these services. This means that if you click on a Twitter Place, such as "Ritual Roasters," you will see standard Tweets and check-ins from Foursquare and Gowalla.
• API: We are releasing API functionality that lets developers integrate Twitter Places into their applications. 
• Support for more browsers: Now, you can add location to your Tweets from any browser—Safari and Internet Explorer, in addition to Chrome or Firefox.

You need to look out for the "add your location" box as it unveils the new addition in 65 different countries. We are pretty excited that it is set to launch another API to allow Twitter Places to be used with Twitter applications (like ours), so you may well see this feature cropping up in Tweasier soon too.

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The Tweasier Twitter Management Application launches in Beta

Well the time has finally arrived and Tweasier is entering the first stages of beta testing.

The idea for Tweasier came from an idea after I started blogging here specifically just about useful Twitter tools. The Tweasier blog started to grow in stature and popularity and I started to think that maybe a tool should be developed which has some really great features. I suppose you could say it’s because of you guys.

The application is only in beta testing (so please be gentle) but we are hoping you guys (its users) will help us find the nasty bugs so we can eradicate as many as possible before we launch this tool to the world.

The new Tweasier application is packed with helpful services, allowing Twitter users to do any of the following:

• Run, save and clone Twitter searches based on location, keywords and personal biographies so conversations can be monitored.
• Receive personalised email notifications informing the user about their activity within the Twittersphere
• Visit Tweasier’s fully equipped analytics suite – providing more than 30 different up-to-date statistics on any Twitter account. Some of the graphs and data can also be exported for use in future presentations or reports.
• Sort an account’s friends or followers by more than 20 different criteria such as: people that haven’t tweeted in the last 30 days, people that didn’t follow the user back and also prune your friends to clear an account up if necessary.
• Users can take a quick peek at Twitter conversations between two people to get both sides of the story.
• Users can read messages, tweet, direct message and even shorten long URLs using Tweasier’s dedicated Twitter client.
• Scheduled tweeting – users can write and save several tweets until later in the day
• Users can use Tweasier’s own in-house ranking system which easily shows whether a user is worth following or not

For those of you more social, you can like Tweasier on Facebook, follow us on Twitter or simply subscribe to the blog.

I hope you like Tweasier but if you have any questions, feel free to drop me or one of the team a line. If you would like an invite email me.

We will look forward to hearing what you guys think of it.

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Tweetcalories Monitor your Calories Burned on Twitter

I recently read about this fantastic Twitter app on Mashable. I wanted to take this opportunity to share this website with all the lovely readers of the Tweasier blog.

Tweetcalories, is a fun Twitter app where you can analyse your Twitter account to see how many calories you have burnt by using Twitter.

The website caculates the number of words you physically type and the number of tweets you have posted over a 24 hour period.

Go on, see how many calories you burn whilst on Twitter.

Here’s the @tweasier account for today.

I tested @chris_norton Twitter account,  our main man behind the Tweasier Twitter tool.

I have a great idea for the creators Companhia Althetica of this novelty Twitter app, Foursquare integration. If this app could calculate the distance per Tweet from your Foursquare updates posted to Twitter, you could then work out how many calcualories you’ve burnt Tweeting your Foursquare check ins. You know, I’m sure some of those Foursquare Majorships take a considerable amount of fitness to maintain.

About this blog post
If you enjoyed reading this blog post, then you can take a look at Illiya’s other posts on his blog or follow him on Twitter.

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A twitter tool that automatically sorts your Follow Friday’s out

Well it’s Friday again and what’s the one thing everyone does on Twitter on a Friday? That’s right they share some of their favourite Twitter users with their networks using the #hastag #FF or FollowFriday.

Traditionally you had to go through all of your friends yourself and pick them out yourself which can take time but now there is a clever little Twitter tool that does it for you called The Twitter Tag Project. Now this is a very simple tool but it’s also very effective this is how it describes how it works:

Type in your twitter username.

1. The engine will scan the last 200 tweets, count the dups, and return your most active friends.
2. The results will display:
   #FollowFriday @friend1 @friend2 @friend3 @friend4.

Like I said this tool is simple but effective and it certainly get’s a big thumbs up from me and the Tweasier team because it makes your life easier. Give it a whirl but don’t forget to add us in your Follow Friday’s guys .

Happy Friday!

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A twitter tool that notifies you when your domain name is released

Tweetclaims.com is a really clever little tool which I think could be really useful if you work with or for big brands. I am sure most of us have tried to get a popular domain before, only to find out that it has already been taken by someone who is doing nothing with it. This is commonly referred to as Cyber Squatting.

So i you were after a particular Twitter name and the account was suspended you simply add your details into this tool and it notifies you by email when the account has been released formerly by Twitter. This is what it says about it’s own service:

Simply create a free account with your email address and you can enter up to 10 Twitter usernames. We will check these immediately for you to see if they are available.

You can also sign up for our free monitoring service and we will notify you when they become available.

A big hat tip goes to Tweasier blogger Ben Cotton for sharing this one with me.

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Twitter on the acquisition trail and here’s why!

So there we all were scratching our heads wondering how Twitter actually made a profit? And then it decided to change its strategy by scouting the world for talent to hire for its new business team to help secure much needed revenue. Well, the announcement was made today that it has acquired Tweetie but I am not surprised at all and I am expecting a few more acquisitions yet.

Only last month we were told that an advertising platform was imminent and that is not the only area Twitter has been looking at. Over the last few months I have been liaising with Twitter’s team directly on a number of things and through my liaison I have seen several traditional Twitter third-party applications either be shutdown or kindly asked to have their USP’s removed. 

In January, Twitter changed its automation rules on its Wiki for developers using the API. Now don’t get too confused I am not just talking about autobots that follow people mindlessly. Twitter now classes automation as any bulk following or unfollowing tools – many of which most normal Twitter users actual use to trim their accounts. So Twitter management applications like Twitter Karma, Refollow and several others have had to change their services accordingly so they could continue operating and offering us a service. Twitter Karma without bulk unfollow – seems a tad pointless to me although I did like its service before.

I expect Twitter to launch an all singing, all dancing application in 2010 that has a number of automated services that only Twitter is allowed to provide. This is where it will make it’s extra much needed revenue from. What will this do to the Twitter eco-system that we all love though? Twitter has grown extensively due to the popularity of it’s third-party applications. Will a huge home grown application ruin what’s great about it or will it give control of the Twitter game back to the guys that actually invented it? Time will tell.

Cross posted on Dead Dinosaur

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