Courtesy: flickr echo_1123

On the tail of my recommendations for desktop twitter clients I thought I’d tell you about my experience with iPhone twitter clients.  I’ve tried half a dozen or so but in this space I think there is a really clear winner.  Unlike the desktop applications (that are all free) the iPhone applications are going to cost a cup of coffee.

Tweetie 2

Website: www.atebits.com/tweetie-iphone/

Tweetie is by far my favorite iPhone twitter application.  In the past tweetie lived as a version 1 application and broke the mold a little on the iTunes app store by choosing to charge people to buy the new version of the app – in all honesty though it’s worth it.

• API Support – Tweetie has extensive support of all of the functions you would expect to find on the twitter website including following and unfollowing people, searches, list management and favorites.
• 3rd Party Apps – I haven’t seen another application come close in it’s support of 3rd party twitter services.  To name just a few: bit.ly, instapaper, yfrog, Follow cost and Tweet blocker.  It even has the ability to configure your own providers for things like image sharing and link sharing, I did this successfully with ejnr.com – my own link sharing web service.  I love the integration to instapaper!
• Local Tweets – The app has great integration to finding tweets in your vicinity with a cool little radar animation while it searches for people tweeting around you.
• Saved Searches – This let’s you save a search you might do regularly and then re-run it at a later time.
• Swipe shortcuts – There are a bunch of swipe based quick tasks in the app – like the ability to swipe a tweet that has a link and then rapidly send the link to instaper for later consumption.

The app is AUD$3.99 and well worth the investment, if you’re looking for a quick win then look no further.

Hootsuite

Website: www.hootsuite.com/iphone

A recent entrant into the iPhone app market, this is a port of the popular web based twitter client to the iPhone.  The main advantage to using this app would be if you are already wedded to hootsuite on the desktop.  It synchronises your configurations from the web to the iPhone which can be a great timesaver, however I’ve found that with the introduction of twitter lists this sort of synch’ing is only of marginal value.

The app is free however – so if you’re looking at price then this would be my choise.

Tweetdeck

Website: www.tweetdeck.com/iphone

Tweetdeck could have been a contender is this race however I think the developers attempted to perhaps bring too much of the ‘column style’ approach to the platform.  The iPhone screen real estate just isn’t well suited to this, and in attempting this mamoth task unfortunately created a very heavy application that doesn’t perform well.  Additionally they also ported the colour scheme across – which I know is only a small issue (and you can no doubt change it) but the black is just really heavy on the small screen.

The winner is by far Tweetie 2.

Courtesy flickr: novecentino

I’ve tried quite a few different twitter clients – and most of the time I talk about Hootsuite as my client of choice.  It made sense to talk about how I got to this point (and to be honest there are still a few things about Hootstuite I don’t like).

Tweetdeck

Platform: Adobe Air ∴ Windows, Mac, Linux
Website: www.tweetdeck.com

Tweetdeck was one of the first twitter clients and I believe led the way for what is now a very crowded market.  It provides a columnar style interface allowing you to create different columns for searches, users, lists, mentions & direct messages.  It’s initial color scheme is a little off-putting for some, it’s primarily black and yellow, however it can be easily changed.  I find myself visiting a color scheme generating site to find a good mix of colors to re-skin the interface.

Tweetdeck offer good integration to all the features of the twitter service include list management and retweeting.  Additionally it also provides preview functionality for links and images.

My personal experience with tweetdeck is that I found it very useful however also found it a little unreliable.  There were time when columns that I had added like mentions or searches simply weren’t populating.  There were a couple of other reports of people having similar problems – with no real resolution.   In all fairness I haven’t tried tweetdeck for a little while and so this issue may well be rectified by now.

Pros: Multiple twitter accounts (plus Facebook, LinkedIn), Broad Functionality

Cons: Download/Install required, Not very intuitive (subjective)

Mixero

Platform: Adobe Air ∴ Windows, Mac
Website: www.mixero.com

At one point in the past I was an avid Mixero user – in retrospect I wonder if it was only because I had a beta login to it.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good tool, but the learning curve is very steep.  Mixero takes a different approach to other twitter clients, rather than a column based approach it lets you build ‘contexts’ that represent different combinations of users/searchs/lists.  So you could for example build a context that lists 15 specific twitter users combined with a search for ‘iPhone’.  This provides a very powerful environment if you are will to put in the hours to figure it out.

A nice feature that I haven’t found in too many other clients is the ability to configure filters – so you can easily remove tweets based on a rule set you define.  It also provides previews of images and links in the same way tweetdeck does.

Pros: Very functional, filtering of tweets, ‘different’ to the rest

Cons:Download/Install required, steep learning curve

Hootsuite

Platform: Web based – I use Firefox
Website: www.hootsuite.com

Hootsuite is a web based twitter client which is a benefit if you are in a locked down environment where you need these tools.  Some IT departments (rightly) choose to deny you the ability to install software, hence this is a great alternative.

Hootsuite uses a columnar approach to twitter management, integrates to Facebook and LinkedIn and allows you to send one update to many accounts and services at once.  The color scheme is a little harsh sometimes with the blue and green – but you can look past that.

Hootsuite provide a business friendly function which allows you to have a number of different people managing the one twitter account – which I think is a huge benefit for many organisations starting in this space.  Additionally hootsuite includes it’s own URL shortening service (ow.ly) which works fine and integrates the statistics well however also presents an in-browser toolbar at the top of the viewed page which some people don’t like.  It does sometimes make it hard to grab the actual URL of the page and additionally doesn’t seem to work so well with tools like instapaper.

Hootsuite is only missing one or two elements to make it perfect (for me anyway).  I’d like the ability to add in my own URL shortenning service and additionally would like it to support the true twitter retweet functionality as opposed to the current “tweet with quote” approach.  However right now it’s my twitter client of choice.

Pros: Nothing to install, Multi-user support, good stats on your links

Cons: Minor functional deficiencies, Only one URL shortenner supported (it’s own)

There are dozens of other clients out there – let me know which one you use (and why).

Sorting (courtesy flickr: CC BY-ND 2.0)

Last year Twitter introduced a new feature called ‘Lists’ that I think a few people are still not sure about.  To be honest – using lists on the twitter website is a bit wasted, the real value of lists is when you combine a dedicated twitter client with a mobile twitter client.

Keeping in Sync

For some time most of the dedicated twitter clients for your desktop computer have had the ability to organise tweets into columns.  One column for your main feed, another for your replies and mentions, another for your ‘favorite tweeters’ and another for ‘clients’ (as an example of course).  Similar functionality crept into mobile tools also, however the problem was that there was no way to synchronize your columns between your desktop client and your mobile client.  So in simple terms – if I added you to my favorites column in hootsuite, then I would have to do the same on tweetdeck on my iPhone.  Crud!

Twitter lists solve this problem.  If I add you to a specific column (or list) on my desktop then you are automatically added everywhere.  Next time I look at that list on my phone then I see your tweets there also.

Many Interests

If you’re anything like me you also have many different interests however want to stick to one twitter account.  Twitter lists also provide you the ability to organise and sort your twitter friends into different groups based on those interests.  As an example I have a twitter list called “Know in real life” which is a list that I add people to once I have actually met them. I have another list for people that talk about social media, and yet another for participants of my seminars.  This makes it easy for me to see tweets based on what I’m trying to achieve, if it’s work time then I’ll watch the social media list – if it’s weekend time I’ll watch the people I know in real life.

A New Number Game

For many people twitter is unfortunately about getting as many followers as possible, and I can’t help thinking that twitter lists may fall into the same category.  I’m expecting someone at some point to exclaim how many lists they are on on twitter and hope people are impressed.  Twitter makes it easy to see if a user is on a list (anyone’s list) and also allows you to see which lists a user is on.

List Subscriptions

The final element of lists on twitter is that as a twitter user you have the capacity to follow someone’s list, which is altogether different to following an individual twitter user.  When you choose to follow a list – you get to see tweets from everyone in that list (even people you may have blocked).  It also means that if the list creator adds and removes people from the list then that also affects the tweets you see.  This is good and bad – in that you may follow a list and start to like tweets from a few individuals on the list (good) but then the list owner may remove those users and you no longer see that valuable information (bad).

Finally… right now you can only create 20 lists – but 20 is plenty.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/striatic/

I feel I’ve spent the last 12 years of life, my career, trying to help people do things better.  Helping them make better systems, better experiences, better websites.  And I would expect that there are other people like me doing similar things for similar organisations.

But still I see so many organisations just getting it wrong, and I think I’ve figured out why.  Fundementally these organisations (I’m going to just say ‘people’ from now on) are making flawed business process decisions.  The decisions they are making about what to do on their website are being made with the concept being “how can I make this easier for me”.  Wrong!

It’s not about you – it should never be about you.

So what do I mean by ‘you’ – who is ‘you’?  You is the organisation you work for.  ‘You’ is the one making decisions about your business, your products and services, your communications and strategy.  ‘You’ might be the CEO, it might be the IT department, the marketing department, the membership team, or perhaps the worst offender – the accounting/finance department.

When you make decisions with ‘you’ in mind what you are doing is leaving out the customer altogether.  You are forgetting about their experience with your organisation and forgetting that without ‘them’ there would be a ‘you’ in the first place.

It’s the internet – and it’s instant

Put your hand up if your website has a ‘contact us’ form of some sort, perhaps something like the one used by the Zoom Teeth Whitening Centre right here in Melbourne.  My goal was simple – get an appointment.  If only the process was simple.

Firstly I found this organisation by doing a google search for teeth whitening melbourne, and at the top of the results was an advertisement for these guys.  Now I know a little about advertising on the web (in fact I know alot about it) and I know that anything that has a customer value of $495 is a highly competitive keyword search market.  Suffice to say that this organisation would be paying considerably for each and every click on that advert.  And to be honest it’s being waisted right now.

After taking a few seconds to look around their site I decided to hit the contact us form.  Alot of information requested but hey – if they’re asking for it then it must be important right?  And if you take a second to actually look at the form – it even asks when I’d like to have my appointment, day and time.  Hit the go button and sit back.

And then you wait.

And you wait some more.

And nothing happens.  Days go by and nothing happens.  Weeks go by and still nothing.

I don’t think my expectations are too high here – I think if I take the time to fill in your online form – provide all the appropriate information and follow the rules – then it’s common courtesy that you would take the time to respond to it.  I’d be happy to wait perhaps an hour, perhaps two, and reluctantly wait a day.  Anything more is just wasted time, effort, and dollars.  Not my dollars, yours.

Shouldn’t the response be instant?  Shouldn’t the receptionist be getting an email or an alert that says “someone did something you need to pay attention to?”  If I chose to pick up the phone then they would get an alert – a black box on their desk would ring.  Why is it so different with web forms?

I’d love to hear your experiences, good and bad.

This just has to stop.  At some point organisations operating like this need to realise that the thousands of dollars they spent building their website, optimising it for google and paying for the click through adverts is completely wasted if they aren’t taking the customer experience into account.  It’s not about ‘you’, it’s about ‘me’.

Exchange makes working with outlook easy because all the core information (emails, calendar, contacts etc) are all stored in one place on the server and then exchange takes care of pushing the right information down to Oulook as and when it’s needed.

But what if you don’t have outlook (like my friend).  What if you only have outlook installed on both your desktop computer and your notebook computer and you want to keep them in Sync?

Google to the rescue!

Google have a suite of Sync product to help with these sort of things, however there is one catch.  To do it properly you need to manage your email through Google which will just fine if you have either a POP3 email account or a IMAP email account.

One thing to consider – It’s probably a good idea to backup of your existing emails and calendar in Outlook before starting just to make sure you don’t lose anything.

Step 1

Create a Google account, it’s free and takes just a few minutes.  This will also give you a gmail email address however if you choose not use it then that’s fine also.  Start here.  If you already have a gmail address or a Google account then on to step 2.

Step 2

Tell Gmail to manage your email.  In this step you are going to give Gmail your normal email address account details.  Login to Gmail and then go into the “Settings” and then “Accounts and Imports”.  Click on the “Add POP3 Email Account” button and then follow the steps.  Gmail will now check your email for you and put all your email into the Gmail account.

Step 3

Turn on IMAP support in Gmail.  On the “Settings” page in Gmail, go to the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” page and click on “Enable IMAP”.  Follow the instructions to setup up Outlook on both your desktop computer AND your notebook computer in the same way.  IMAP is a special email system that keeps things sync’d between a server computer (Gmail) and one or more client computers (Outlook).  If you wanted to you could point your iPhone at Gmail as well and keep in Sync while mobile.

Step 4

Sync your calendar with Google Calendar.  Install this application on both your desktop and notebook computer and set it up to Sync with your Google calendar.

It sounds like a bit of work but it should only take you about 20 mins to get it all setup.

Let me know how you go.

flickr: steve_brace (CC BY 2.0)

- Do you have a real avatar? A real picture, not a logo and definetly not the default Twitter avatar.
- Are more people following you than you are following? This is typically a good indication of interesting posts.
- What’s your tweet to friends ratio? If you are following 600 people but have only tweeted 6 updates then I’m not going to follow you.
- Do you pimp Twitter or engage in conversations? If your last 20 updates or so are exclusively outbound tweets with no retweets or replies then I’m probably not going to follow you.
- Are you here to sell? If every tweet includes a bit.ly link and a vague post like “you have to read this” then I’m not going to follow you.
- Where do you do your tweeting? if every update is from ‘web’ then I’m probably not going to follow you. The Twitter website is not well designed to allow you to engage in conversation, rather it’s built for simple updates.

So… would I follow you?

The problem with twitter (I think anyway) is the twitter website, it’s just not well designed for having conversations with people.  I use twitter without EVER VISITING THE TWITTER WEBSITE! I use it from my phone and from other software that I have installed.

So what’s tweetdeck all about?  Tweetdeck (available from www.tweetdeck.com) presents information in columns on your screen with each column showing different types of tweets (updates).  You can re-arrange the columns to suit, however the default is that:

• The first column shows tweets from all the people you are following, in date and time order.  It normally only shows the last 50 tweets or so.

• The second column shows tweets that are replies to you or contain your twitter username.  This allows you to see who has responded to your tweets and further see if people have re-tweeted your tweets.

• The third column shows direct messages to you, kind of like your email inbox.

Here’s the cool part, from any column you click on small icon to reply or re-tweet messages and also at the top of the screen is a big box to add your own updates to twitter.  To me this made twitter ‘make sense’, I could finally see all that was happening and specifically could see those interested in having a conversation about what I was tweeting about.

• http://bit.ly/pZixT
• http://tr.im/tYd7

Most recently the use of twitter has started to highlight these URL shortening services due to the fact that twitter only allows 140 characters in posts.  So with 140 characters people needed ways to take a long website address and compress it down into something much much shorter.

The solution was some specific websites set up just for that purpose, and now there are dozens if not hundreds of these services. So instead of sending a link to something that looks like this:

http://www.jaymccormack.com/index.php/2009/07/25/a-cheat-sheet-for-twitter/

You can instead send this:

http://bit.ly/pZixT

Creating your own short urls

You’ll first need to pick one of the many services available that offer this, my preference is a site called bit.ly.  They offer services just like many other services however it’s a fairly popular service which also means that they integrated into many different tools and websites to make it really easy to use.  So feel free to do some research but if you just want to get started then bit.ly is the one to use.

The next step is to actually use the service.  There are primarily two ways:

1. Manually by copying and pasting.  Find the website address you want to shorten, copy it onto your clipboard then goto to bit.ly and paste the website address into the box on the home page.  Click on ‘Shorten’ and then you will be given the short URL to use.  The beauty of this is that you don’t need to register to use the service and it’s free.
2. Integrated.  If you are a Firefox user then you can add an Add-on to firefox to make using bit.ly really easy.  Install the add-on Shareaholic from this page.  Once installed you can then turn on the bit.ly service in the configuration.  To create a short URL all you need to do is click on the Shareaholic icon in your Firefox address bar and choose bit.ly.  Within moments you’ll have a short URL ready for sharing.