In my previous post, I discussed about the first things that we could do to follow people on Twitter.  In this second part of the series, I would like to touch on how we could follow people on Twitter by Recommendation.

Recommendation is probably the best way to follow people on Twitter, especially when we trust the source of this recommendation, which could be from your friend, a reputable user or a leading website.

To make this a bit easier to digest I am going to divide these recommendations into two types.  One is what I would call Passive Recommendation, and the other one is, yes you’ve guessed it, Active Recommendation.

What I mean by Passive Recommendation is when we don’t need to do some pro-active work, i.e. no need to go out there and find people to follow ourselves. Instead, the list are provided for us, delivered via several channels. It’s the Lazy Route :)

Here are some examples of these so-called recommendation channels:

Friends Recommendation
Remember those friends I mentioned above? The ones who successfully managed to ‘drag’ you to join this ‘party’? Well, they must have some people that they are following. And more often than not, they will gladly recommend you some of these people. But even if they won’t recommend anbody, you could just go to their Twitter Page, and follow whoever they are following :)

Twitter Recommendation (a.k.a Suggested Users)
This is a list of users that Twitter thinks we would be interested to follow. It is presented to new users during the registration process. And if you’ve missed it the first time, or if you want to find more users, you can go to Find People section on your Twitter page, and choose the Suggested Users tab. Of course, there is no obligation what so ever to follow these people, but nevertheless there is no harm to check it out from time to time, even if it’s just for fun :)

List of Recommended People to Follow on Twitter
Once in a while, someone would  write a blog post, sharing a list of people that he/she thinks worth to follow.
You can just go and check one of these and follow the user on that list. For some examples of these type of recommendation, go ahead and check out my “Ultimate List of People to Follow on Twitter” post.

- #FollowFriday
Sometimes it’s not easy to explain what #FollowFriday is, especially if somebody is new to the concept of Hashtag or just a plain tagging.
But the idea of #FollowFriday is basically the same as the idea of writing down the recommended list that I’ve mentioned above, except that with #FollowFriday, you list the Twitter Usernames on your tweet, and that you should do it only on Fridays, and every tweet must have #FollowFriday hashtag.
Micah Baldwin was the guy who invented Follow Friday, and you can read the history of #FollowFriday on his blog post. #FollowFriday has become a major meme in Twitterverse and some people do it religiously every Friday. And as usual, the developers didn’t want to miss the opportunity to build a myriad of 3rd Party apps which were built just to serve this purpose. Brian Cray has a list of tools that you can use to monitor FollowFriday stream.

- Recommendation Service

The recent Twitter Boom, which resulting in a massive increase in Twitter Sign-ups in a very short time, has produced a horde of newbies who were eager to join the party but know no one, or even given direction in to how to find people to follow. Sure the Twitter suggested list could give them a jump start, and the barrage of #FollowFridays that comes every Friday might give them hints on whom to follow. But even this has caused more confusion than clarity (with people sending endless #FollowFriday Tweets). There was a common feeling that we were missing something, that we were lacking a central repository where anybody can create, manage and share their recommendations in one place. Sure enough, the developers swiftly followed this by creating, shall I say, List Repositories.
Two of the most used of these so called repositories are TweepML and Lunch.

The problem with lists that individual people were making (like the examples on my previous post) are that first of all people were writing it in any form they pleased, and second of all it’s a real pain to try to follow each person in that list (you have to click to the individual Twitter page, and follow the person there). It’s just not practical and it’s wasting a lot of time.
TweepML is trying to solve this problem. First of all, it’s a centralized repository of lists, which means you can find all lists that had been created in one place. Moreover these lists are tagged by keywords, and they are searchable. Secondly, for every list, you are able to follow ‘all‘ or ‘some‘ of the people that are on that list in one click of a button :) And lastly, and this probably a little bit geeky, TweepML tried to set a standard, in term of data exchange format, to represent this list. This means that the list would be portable and ‘machine’ readable, i.e. any application that support this standard would be able to read and use the same list format.
Lunch is a similar service where you can put together your own list. Unlike TweepML, it lacks the one-button follow functionality. You can read a nice review about Lunch at this blog post.

By now most of you would have already gotten the new Twitter List functionality integrated to your Twitter account. In one way, this new functionality could be a big blow to the 3rd party services which offer similar functionality, like TweepML and Lunch above. But as TweepML had posted on one of its blog post, these 3rd party services would have to adapt (or die). Indeed TweepML is doing just this by allowing you to import any Twitter List to TweepML very easily.
As for the Twitter List itself, although it is quite a powerful feature, it doesn’t come without limitation. So, there is always room for improvement, which can only be provided by 3rd party services.

The last service that I would like to recommend is what I called the Recommendation Bot.  Basically, you use this service by registering yourself, and it will go away for a couple of days, presumably doing a lot of calculation on your following and followers, and come back with some recommendation of people whom it thinks you should follow.  This recommendation could be based on the fact that the person had been retweeted a couple of times by one or more of your followers, and/or because some of your followers had written testimonials on this recommended person.

One recommendation bot that I’ve used is Mr. Tweet.  After login into Mr.Tweet, the bot will go away and calculate your profile and come back in a few days later via DM saying that your recommended list is ready for viewing.  Meanwhile you can check some recommendations based on your followers. It will regularly DM you from time to time with updated recommended list.

Those are some of examples of Passive Recommendation. I hope they can help you to find more followers :)

On the next post, I will go through examples for the Active Recommendation.

You can see how important Twitter is to our Internet Community when its inventor, founder and chairman, @Jack Dorsey had his own session (the first one of the event) and participated in the last session of recently held LeWeb 2009.  And being young and inexperience (in term of being web celebrity), he’s obviously prone to make some mistakes, especially when he had to sit on the Gillmore Gang, along with other ‘dignitaries‘ :)  So when Andrew Keen asked him if the rumor about Google buying Twitter was true, Jack quickly said (probably too quickly) that “There hasn’t been any announcement” :)  Unfortunately the other gang members wouldn’t let this go so easily, and Jack was forced to defend himself to fix the situation. “What do you mean there hasn’t been any announcement?”

Watch the following video starting on 31 minutes mark, and you will see this yourself.

It’s very easy to forget that the almost ubiquitous Twitter that we are fond and love started from a very simple idea (but then again most great products came from the simplest idea anyway).  Indeed most new users (post @aplusk and @oprah) probably think that Twitter has always been like this.  Well, the reality couldn’t be more different.
My Twitter ID is 3148, so I joined Twitter quite early in the days when Twitter just a simple geeky web-app to broadcast ‘what you were doing at that time‘ to your followers and that’s it.  And just like many others, I didn’t find the tool very useful, and to be honest a little bit boring (especially when all your friends were somewhere else).  Hence I left my account dormant, only visiting it once in a while, for about 6 months or so.  Until one day I found a small circle of friends with whom I could having conversation.  This changed everything, it changed Twitter as a broadcast medium into a conversation tool (more akin to Instant Messenger Apps), a place where I can chate with my friends and buildng relationship.  The rest is history.

How Twitter Was Invented

At this ‘Fireside‘ chat with @loic, @Jack Dorsey the inventor and founder of Twitter told the LeWeb 2009 audiences a little bit of the history how Twitter came about, which I think it is good for us to learn :) [Video below]

The SQUARE

In this occassion, Jack were also demoing his new Startup called Square :)  Square aims to enable people (ordinary people, not just businesses) to accept Card Payment easily without having to go through the long and difficult process of application and expensive hardware purchase which usually come before one can take payment by Card.  With Square you don’t need any contracts or mothly fees, and you can even get the ‘square‘ for FREE!

This device works like a Card Swiper, which you can attach to any mobile device that has a regulare audia input jack, like the one in your mobile phone, for example.  When you want to take (or make) payment with your card, you swipe it through this tiny device, which then reads the data and converts it into an audio signal. The microphone picks up the audio, sends it through the processors and then is routed to Square’s software application on the mobile device, and then the encrypted data is transmitted using either Wi-Fi or 3G Internet connection to back-end severs, which in turn communicate with the payment networks to complete the transactions.
The device is currently being tested by a selected shops, and if it goes well, Square will starts beta testing on early 2010.

If you’ve been living in London for a while and experienced the ‘joy‘ of taking the public transport, you would’ve already spotted the pattern, especially for the Bus Service. It’s not rare when you have to wait for a very long time for them to come to the Bus Stop (although it says on the timetable, 10 mins interval), and when they come, they come not just one, but sometimes 2 or 3 at the same time!!! It’s just so absurd that I have now stopped asking why.

Ok, enough for the rant.  How does this remotely relate to Twitter Retweet?  Well, unless you are one of the Top Linkers, your Retweet rate, i.e. the number of your own Tweet being Retweeted by others, would be minimal to none.

But sometimes, just sometimes, you hit a jackpot, like I had yesterday.
The particular Tweet was about a screenshot of a computer desktop of one designer who quit from his job and left a note on his/her desktop.  Of course this might not be true, and the screenshot might be just somebody’s photoshop work, but that’s not the point :)

Looking at my bit.ly stats, the link has been clicked for more than 1500, while the aggregate is more than 7000 clicks.  You can also see from the screenshot, that this particular tweet has been Retweeted more than 100 times, and shared via Facebook about 500+ times.  This kind of stats, at least for me, don’t come everyday.

So, what can we learn from this?  Here are my thoughts:

1. Naturally Viral Content
Not every Tweet content/link is meant to be viral.  What I meant by viral here is, something that is able to make people think “This is SO Awesome, I just HAVE TO share it with my friends!”.  In my case, it is the following screenshot :)

2. The Right People, Influential People
Influential Twitter Users are those ones who not only have lots of followers, but who also ‘engage‘ with them on daily basis.  One tweet from these influentials more often than not generate many many Retweets from their followers, which in turn will be Retweeted by followers of these followers, and so on and so on, hence creating a domino effect.
So, one way to generate a mass Retweets is by befriending with one of these influentials, and get them to Retweet yours.  You can start by following these excellent people on my Top Linkerz List.

3. The Right Timing
It’s all good to have a good viral content, and to have influential friends, but if your timing is poor, you will not get the same effect that you want it.
So, when is a good time to Tweet?  To maximise Retweetability, I think it’s safe to say that the best time to Tweet is when a lot of other people are online Tweeting, in particular, these influentials I mentioned above :)
How do we find out the time when someone is out and about Tweeting?  Fortunately, someone has already made an app for this specific purpose :)

Check out Tweetoclock :)  I featured Tweetoclock a way back, on an interview with Caleb Mingle (@dentafrice) who created Tweetoclock.
Give Tweetoclock a Twitter Username and it will tell you when it’s the best time to Tweet him/her, i.e. which is the time when he/she is mostly active tweeting.  You can also change the Timezone to suit where you are (which is quite useful). For example, here is mine:

And here is for @cheth (one of the Top Retweeter on my List)

Do you have more tips on what makes a Tweet Retweetable? Share them with us here!

Twitter is on a roll this month!  As a matter of fact it has scored a Hat-Trick on new features.  First with the Twitter List , and then with the new Retweet, and the third by enabling Geotagging.

If you haven’t noticed yet, open your Twitter settings and you can find geotagging under Account -> Location section.

At the moment, this setting only affects the API, which means you won’t see any changes on Twitter.com.  But some 3rd party applications are already supporting it, including Seesmic Web, Foursquare, and a few others.

This location info, if turned on, will help a lot in segregating Tweets by geo-location.  For example, Twitter was already planning to use this to filter trending topics by user’s locality.  Third party apps could use this to show users who tweet near to your location, which is good for finding new followings.  Other example would be an online game based on location.  The possibilities are endless.

However, one important thing that you must consider before you tick that ‘Enable geotagging‘ box is, what implications would affect you and your tweeting by turning on this feature.  You know where I’m going, don’t you?  I’m talking about privacy.

You must again remember that, unless you make your account private, your Tweet, and all information that go with it, will be visible to everybody!  Indeed Twitter has updated its Privacy Policy to emphasis this important yet sometimes forgotten fact.

If you are not careful, this feature could become the Ultimate Stalker tool, not to mention a robber’s radar arsenal.  As a matter of fact, if you’re good in API programming (or have money to hire a programmer), you can built an application that all it does is monitoring people whereabouts and map it to Google Map.
That is quite scarry, and definitelyworth to ponder upon.

The thing is, I don’t really want to miss-out on the (geotagging) fun, but I also don’t want some stranger invading my house and stealing my stash when I’m not around (not that I have any valuables laying around mind. Well maybe my Star Wars novel collection).

What we really need, and this is my suggestion to Twitter, is an ad-hoc switch which we can turn on and off as we please whereever we are, without the need to go the setting on the web to change it.
What about a Tweet command code, i.e. if we tweet this special code, Twitter will change the setting for us automatically?
Or, maybe that’s just too complicated for Twitter to do.  Never say never.

Anyway, be sensible and be safe everybody!

Are you confused with Twitter’s new Retweet feature? Don’t worry, many people do.  I was.  Or maybe you are one of the people who got upset when the new functionality was finally rolled out (albeit only to a limited number of people) ?  No worry, I did too.
People say that it’s always hard for us to accept change, especially when we’ve already gotten very accustomed to and felt comfortable with the old way of doing things.  It certainly is not different this time with the new Retweet.
What is different though, as Techcrunch wrote in this post, is that this time the change is pretty significant that it changes Twitter’s fundamental functionality.
So significant this change was, that Evan Williams (Twitter CEO) himself felt compelled to write a blog post (apparently he hardly ever writes), specially to explain the reasoning behind their decision when they designed this new feature.
I wrote on earlier post, that things were getting clearer everyday when I was using the new Retweet.  But just when I thought I’ve known everything that I needed to know, I was quite surprised that I found a new thing that I didn’t notice before after I read EV’s post, which is arguably the most important change in this new way of Retweeting :)
So, I thought I would share it with you, just in case you haven’t noticed, or for you that hasn’t got it yet, something to keep in mind (just in case you think your Twitter is broken).  I also want to summarize, in my own word, what EV is explaining in his blog post.

EV started his post by describing the problems that we are facing with the old way of Retweeting, which are:

1. Attribution Confusion
In short, we just don’t know (for sure) who is the original Tweeter who write the Retweeted Tweet.  Yes, most of the time we try to include the originator’s username when we Retweet, but often when there are already multiple Retweeters, we just don’t know from whom the Tweet originally came.
On the other hand, it’s so easy (if you want) to pretend that a Tweet comes from somebody (fake Retweet), simply by writing ‘RT @nickname …‘, while in truth it doesn’t.  This could be seen as very cynical and devious, but shit happens.  In this particular case we have a problem of accountability and reliability.  We just can’t be sure if a Tweet really comes from the person written on that Tweet.

2. Redundancy and Duplicates
How many times have you seen the same Tweet is being Retweeted many times by your followings?  Whilst most of the time I don’t mind about it, sometimes it could be just plain annoying.  But most importantly it adds unnecessary noise in your already crowded timeline, and when you have a couple thousand followings, it does become very noisy very quickly.
Then there is the problem with duplication.  There is no way we could prevent somebody to Retweet the same Tweet, over and over again (Spam everyone?).

3. Trackability
Some people would like to know how many times their Tweet has been Retweeted.  This is especially true for social media, marketing, PR, and business people who need to know how far (in term of numbers) their message has reached their audiences.  But even for the rest us, I think it would bring a nice feeling when we know that people appreciate our Tweet.
Of course, as usual, third party developers have tried to cater for this by creating websites that counts and ranks Retweets and Retweeters (e.g. RetweeterRadar, Retweetist, RetweetRank).  But by nature of problem no.1 described above alone, we know that this calculation would only be an approximation.  We could guess the number, but we won’t know for sure exactly.  It’s just plain unreliable.

The new way of Retweeting, Twitter hopes, will solve the above problems.  This is reflected in the new design:

1. Additional Metadata
Every Tweet that’s Retweeted (using the new way of course) will internally have additional metadata embedded in it.  In addition to the existing “who’s the Tweet belongs to” metadata, it will also includes a list of users who Retweets it.

The consequences of this are:

• We will know for sure who is the originator of the Retweeted Tweet (No confusion of Attribution and No Faker/Spammer).
• We will be able to count exactly how many people has Retweeted the Tweet (Certainty on the Retweet counts).
• You can’t Retweet a Tweet more than once (No cheating).
• Only one instance of Retweeted Tweet will be shown in your Timeline (No duplicate Retweets).
• Lastly, you cannot Retweet your own Tweet :)

2. Suppress Retweet Stream from Individual User
Personally I don’t see the problem on having my timeline full of my following’s Retweets.  If you don’t like somebody’s too much Retweeting, you can always unfollow him/her :)  Moreover, if you are serious with your Tweeting, you should use a 3rd party app (like Seesmic or Tweetdeck) to manage your Tweets more effectively.
But, obviously I’m in the minority here because Twitter thinks that it’s useful to add a functionality so the user can turn on or off Retweet stream from a user you are following (without unfollowing him/her).  This basically will include/exclude the person’s Retweets from your timeline.

3.  Serendipitous Encounter is Back :)
This is the one I’ve said above, i.e. the most important change done to our timeline that I didn’t notice before.

Before the new Retweet feature is activated, the only Tweets that we would see in our timeline are the ones that come from our followings.
Now, after you’ve got the Retweet activated, you will start to see Tweets from people that you don’t follow appearing in your timeline, simply because it has been Retweeted by your following!

This arguably is breaking Twitter core functionality, and indeed for some people (like poor Justine Bateman) who didn’t realize this, it’s understandable why they would think that Twitter is broken and that he/she has been targeted by spammers.
I, for one, welcome this ‘feature‘.  For me this is yet another way to meet new (follow-worthy) people.  If my followings think that this person is worth Retweeting, then ‘maybe’ I should follow him/her too.
Twitter did think about this though, which is why you will get notification (at least initially) to make you accustom to this (big) change.

4.  No annotation or commenting on Retweet
I’ve already touched this dilemma already, but here is a quote from EV on this issue:

What about those cases where you really want to add a comment when RTing something? Keep in mind, there’s nothing stopping you from simply quoting another tweet if that’s what you want to do. Also, old-school retweets are still allowed, as well. We had to prioritize some use cases over others in this release. But just as Twitter didn’t have this functionality at all before, people can still work around and do whatever they want. This just gives another option.

I applaud EV for coming out of his shell and really making an effort to explain Twitter’s decision.  Personally, apart from the ability to annotate, this won’t affect me much, at least until the 3rd party developers come up with the best solution for their apps.  As soon as they do (please hurry), I’m sure I will be Retweeting again with confidence.

Do you think Twitter decision is reasonable? Are you OK with these changes? Or you just don’t care?

Leave your comment and let me know what’s on your mind?

Remember those feelings you had when you were invited to a party, but when you got there you realised that everybody seemed to know everybody, except you?

That’s probably the same feeling you had as you were staring at your blank Twitter timeline, just right after you sent your first Tweet, when it became apparent to you that basically you didn’t know anybody … anybody at all!
It’s one of those ‘Now What?’ moment.

One of the common reason (for some, the only reason) why people join Twitter is to follow other users (with hope that they would follow back), and to read what they are tweeting about.

Yes, to fill in that blank timeline, you will need to get acquainted with other Twitter users.
These other people could be virtually ‘anybody‘, they could be your ‘real-life‘ friends (probably the ones who dragged you to join at the first place, kicking and screaming), or they could be some complete strangers whom you’ve never known/met before.
As a matter of fact, of all the people I follow, only a handful of them whom I knew personally or met physically before I joined Twitter.
So how on earth that we are going to find more people to follow if you we don’t know practically no one?!

Luckily, unlike those parties, Twitter (and many other services) has some means that will help you with this problem. No need for awkward introduction, or cheesy pick-up lines or party tricks (although you still can do those things if you want to).

In my view, there are 3 major ways in which we can follow people on Twitter Effectively.

The first one, which I’m going to explain below, is by User Details, i.e. the user’s real name, nickname and/or email address.

The second one is by Recommendation, and the third one is by Similarities or Keywords.

The last two categories will be written on separate posts. Here is the first one.

This is the simplest and easiest way to find people to follow, provided that you’ve already known the person details.
Twitter makes this very easy to do too.  Just go to ‘Find People‘ section of your Twitter Page and you will be presented with several options to start your search.
The first one (on the first tab) is the Name search. Here you can find Twitter Account by Username, First Name or Last Name.

On the second tab, you have Other Networks search.  In this page, Twitter will help you to find your friends whom you’ve already been in contact on other services, in this case Twitter will go through your Address Books and check if the Email Address being listed in those address books has a Twitter Account.  You just need to fill in your email address (Gmail, Yahoo and/or AOL) and your email password and Twitter will do the rest.  Then when the result comes back, you will have a choice to follow the people on the list or not.
If you are just starting, this is a good starting point to build up your followings, especially if you’ve known many people that are Twitter User.

These basic and rather passive following will be enough to jump-start new users to start filling in their timeline, and to learn about how Twitter works.

Next post will be about how we could follow people in Twitter Effectively by Recommendation.

As Twitter Team is rolling out the new Retweet functionality to a selected group, things are getting clearer everyday in terms of what the deal we are getting with this new system of Retweeting.
MediaSosial managed to be included in this beta roll-out, so I had a chance to try it early.

After having been playing around for a day or two, I have to say that Twitter has integrated the new functionality with the rest of the user interface quite nicely.

First of all, you can actually turn on or off Retweet Updates from a specific user (just in case this user does a lot of Retweets) just by toggling the (new) Retweet icon from the user’s Twitter page.

Retweeting is as simple as clicking on the Retweet link on an individual Tweet on your Timeline (or on the actual Tweet Page), though you have to confirm by clicking YES button whether you really want to Retweet that Tweet.

After a Tweet has been Retweeted, the Retweet link will change to Retweeted, follows by a link to the Undo option (I presume this is to retract your Retweet, though how it is going to work practically I’m not too sure).  The Retweeted Tweet will also be marked by a description that it has been Retweeted by you.

To spot a Tweet that has been Retweeted by one your following, Twitter gives indication by marking the Tweet with the Retweet icon, and also (at least for now) pointing it with a notification box.

Of course, then you can Retweet this too :)

Another addition is the Retweets menu, which you can locate in the sidebar under Favorites.  Clicking on this menu will show you the Retweets page.  In this page you see 3 type of lists represented by 3 tabs. Each of these tabs will show you, in turn, ‘Retweets by others‘, ‘Retweets by you‘, and ‘Your tweets, retweeted‘.  Pretty self-explanatory I think.

I did some experiment on how this page would look like when people are Retweeting a lot. Here is what I’ve got at the moment.  One of the Tweet is showing how many people Retweeted it as well as a list of Avatars ( I wonder how many Avatars will fit on that row).

These are all Twexcellent! BUT … my (big) problem is, I don’t really use the web interface that much!  And I’m sure many of you would have the same problem.  Many of us use 3rd Party App to access Twitter extensively, and for some of us exclusively.

So, the big question is, what are the 3rd Party App Developers going to do about it?

Already some people said that they would not use the new Retweet function if it’s not integrated properly into their beloved 3rd Party App.

The ‘real‘ problem is, as you probably could see from the screenshot earlier, that Twitter’s own implementation of Retweeting prevents the Retweeter to ‘add‘ additional comment, or ‘change‘ the actual text on the Retweeted Tweet itself, i.e. it’s going to Retweet it Verbatim, whilst the current implementation would allow us to add or change the text.

Now, I admit that I was also one of the people who were religiously against this new implementation, because I always like to add my own comment on the Retweet, or just trimming the text so that it would fit the 140 characters restriction.

This was until one day I found my Timeline was full of users who were using Retweet to Reply to their followers!  At first I thought they were new users who just joined and needed a bit of education, but alas these are a bunch of Zealots who thought they knew better and didn’t want to accept the truth :)  They are just a lost cause, which was why I thought that this new implementation of Retweet was a great invention that would finally stop them to do what they are currently doing, or at least making it more difficult to do it (when they press Retweet, and realize that they can’t add a reply to it, that would teach them something).
In truth, I really hope that the 3rd Party App developers would integrate the new Retweet functionality into the existing one, but also retain the old one, so whoever still wants to do add comments or change the text still can do it.
Indeed from what I heard and read in this blog post, at least one of the 3rd Party App (Tweetie) would do just that.  They will use Retweet for the new implementation, and for the old one they will call it ‘Quote Tweet‘.
I’m still waiting for answers from other 3rd Party Apps.

QT vs RT, I think that’s a nice idea.

UPDATE:
I’ve got an answer from Seesmic:

Join the conversation and tell me what you think about this new Retweet on the comment below.

Seesmic Desktop has been my main Twitter Desktop app since it was still in beta, and it’s ‘Release Early, Release Often‘ method really struck accord with me, especially because with every release it continues to give to the customer ‘what they need‘ (and not what the money-owner wants).

This new version 0.3 is also the same.  This one is a Release Candidate version, hence it is only available for registered users and not yet downloadable from the main website.  The idea is to give the registered users a taste of what to come and at the same time to get user feedback on the new features before it goes live.  It’s a great strategy, because in this case everybody wins :)

Usually with every release, the registered users would get email explaining what are the new features or if there is any bug that they’ve fixed.  For this version, they’ve done not only an email notification but also a YouTube video explaining the new feature (hosted by @loic himself).  Very Cool!

For the benefit of the ‘Just give me the download link‘ peeps, here is the direct link for the v 0.3 – rc1.  As with the rest you, read on :)

Before I let Loic explaining the new version, here are a summary of what are in it (from the email):

Multi-Account Posting with Smart Account Enabling:
We’ve upgraded the user interface to select which accounts to send posts to, saving you the time and effort it takes to post to each account separately. We’ve also added an option for Smart Account Enabling. With this feature turned on, this will allow Seesmic Desktop to change accounts when messaging your friends based on whom you are replying or direct messaging to. Seesmic will not change the accounts if you do not enable Smart Account.

Authenticated bit. ly Integration:
You can now use your own bit. ly account when using bit. ly as a shortener for Seesmic Desktop. By simply entering your bit. ly API key, you can now keep track of your URL clicks when sharing your links with your friends and followers.

New Services Panel:
Along with bit. ly, we have set a foundation for managing your accounts for sending images, and be able to set them in our new Services Panel. The Additional Integrated Account Services panel currently includes image services such as Pikchur (where you can set your own account), Posterous, TwitPic, Twitgoo & yfrog (which is currently using your twitter account). More importantly, this allows us to give you more options for integrated accounts with other services that will be coming soon.

And some other enhancements:

• Minimizing the message panel until you start entering messages to send
• Enabling replies in your Facebook friends’ avatar to quickly add comments
• Inline reminders of what account you are posting from
• An added “Cancel” button to erase your messages in the message panel
• Updated scrolling arrows for enhanced browsing
• Ensuring all replies appear in your integrated timeline

And here is the video:

My favorite Twitter Desktop App just released a new version.  The new version has a few additional features, mainly integration with 3rd party app, some enhancement with the Profile, and for Mac OS X users (that’s me), a welcome improvement on idle CPU usage (Awesome!).

You can grab the new version directly here.

Below is a screenshot of some of the new enhancements to the profile.  Noticed the ‘Report Spam’ and ‘Block User’ menu items, and the four buttons on the profile (reply, DM, follow, and unfollow).  These were not in v2.0.

Here are the change list from the release email:

Improvements since Ver 0.2

* Ability to view and enter comments into Facebook
* Added spellcheck feature with the ability to enable and disable
* Now supporting pikchur and yfrog to share images on Twitter
* Added spam reporting feature to help send spam warnings to Twitter’s @spam account
* Ability to block users who are following you on Twitter
* Ability to use Tweetshrink before sending messages (see http://tweetshrink.com/about)
* Access to view favorites within your Twitter account timeline
* Improved profile enhancements (added follow/unfollow within a profile along with the ability to reply and direct message)
* Option to start Seesmic Desktop at login
* Verification dialog box upon deletions of Userlists, Searches
* For OSX: Added standard buttons for OSX and improved idle CPU usage
* Displayed version information in update tab

Bug fixes

* Fix posting to Facebook with non-US characters
* Issues with same usernames showing multiple times – solved
* Issues with not removing messages when account is removed – solved

And on these notes, I would like to thank Team Seesmic for their hard-work to keep improving our Twitter experience.

Keep up the good work guys!

Technorati Profile