TwitsMag Canada

Twitter is the best thing going for communiqués of 140 characters or less, and third-party developers have created a sea of apps to keep conversations flowing when users are away from the PC. Twitter itself has crafted apps for a variety of mobile phones, including the Apple iPhone ($199), but left a space for third parties to thrive by not developing its own Apple iPad ($829 ) app. That has all changed, however, with the introduction of Twitter for iPad. The free app isn’t just the long-awaited first-party Twitter client—it’s one of the best Twitter tools available for reading feeds, surpassing TweetDeck for iPad (Free). Creating new messages can be a bewildering due to a cluttered composition screen, but if you’re a Twitter devotee it’s worth a look.

Layout and Navigation
After downloading the app and signing in with my credentials, I was presented with two columns. The left column has rectangular sections for Timeline (the main Twitter river), Mentions, Lists, Messages, Profile, and Search. Tapping any one of these options opens information in the right column. For example, when I tapped Mentions, the left column was populated with a list of the tweets in which I was called out. Swiping downward with a finger let me scroll through the long list of mentions; I went back 88 days before I gave up swiping. This could come in handy for digging up old tweets. Twitter for iPad supports multiple accounts, which you can switch between by tapping the appropriate username, but you can’t view multiple tweeter feeds in one unified field. Twitter for iPad keeps the same layout whether you’re hold the iPad horizontally or vertically, which I like. TweetDeck for iPad has two different layouts that take navigation and usability shortcuts depending on how the iPad is held.

While the overall reading layout is easy on the eyes, the composition screen most certainly isn’t. A compose icon located in the lower-left corner of the app opens a field in which you can pen a fresh tweet. I found the layout more than a little cluttered, as Twitter for iPad tries to display too many elements at once. The actual composition box takes up approximately 25 percent of the screen and is so cramped that it scrolls downward as you type. That’s pretty sad, given that Tweets max out at 140 characters. The rest of the screen is comprised of the virtual keyboard, left navigation column, and the Twitter feed. I adjusted to the layout over time, but I still see no need for all this distraction. When I’m in the mood to send a tweet, I want to do so with ease. Third-party apps such as TweekDeck for iPad are superior in this regard. Still, I liked that I could attach photos stored on the iPad to my messages, geotag my location, and shrink URLs.

Gestures
Twitter for iPad incorporates gestures, of course. Placing two fingers on a tweet and pulling it downward lets you view other messages in a conversation, eliminating the need to hunt for each thread entry. Placing two fingers together and spreading them apart opens a window that displays an abbreviated user profile. All in all, the gestures were simple to execute and made sense in context.

Panes and Media
Twitter for iPad app expands the functionality of Twitter’s iPhone client by introducing “Panes,” or fly-out panels that offer a spacious reading experience without blocking your feed. Tapping a tweet triggers a panel to slide in from the right side of the screen (overlapping a portion of the Twitter stream) that displays a user’s most recent update, bio, Web site link, number of followers, the number of people that person follows, and other typical Twitter information. Replies, Retweets, Direct Messages, and all the familiar functions are in place.

The app also lists a handful of similar Twitter users who might be worth following. Although Panes take up a sizable portion of on-screen real estate, it’s still quite easy to follow the main Twitter feed to see when updated content rolls in. I like that you can swipe the Pane off the screen, or swipe down in the main content area, to brush the panel away.

Opened links (Web pages, photos, video) appear in-line within a Pane. Multiple opened links result in multiple Panes, which live inside a singular Pane window (the original Tweet is positioned at the over the content area, and the URL is on display at the bottom). You can switch between Panes by tapping arrow buttons on the bottom, but I would’ve liked a gesture of some kind implemented as a navigation option. Unfortunately, the switching isn’t always snappy; at times it took panes approximately 5 to 10 seconds to load. That’s not a dealbreaker by any means, but in a world of need-it-now content, it can be a tad frustrating.

I read Major Nelson’s latest blog entry within a Pane without leaving the app, but I had to scroll vertically scroll to take in everything. Viewing the page in full screen mode cut down on the scrolling a bit, but the option to view in Safari made reading even more pleasurable. If you have an Instapaper account, you can save pages for reading later, even if you’re offline.

Should you tweet with Twitter for iPad?
Once (or if) you become accustomed to Twitter for iPad’s cramped composition box design, you’ll find it hard to go back to TweetDeck for iPad or any other iPad Twitter client. It’s not perfect, but it simply feels right in both horizontal and vertical orientations. It’s obvious that Twitter spent a good amount of time in creating this app, and it was well worth the wait.

Twitter for iPad

Twitter for iPad

Article Source: PC Magazine

tweetspinner.com

Finding productivity on Twitter, especially if you are a large company or one that manages several profiles for clients, can be quite difficult. It’s especially difficult to build up a strong following. Fortunately, Tweet Spinner is here to help. Tweet Spinner is a powerful application that manages the more high level management Twitter tasks for you, from managing followers/friends to changing your profile design and then some.

Tweet Spinner features four main features. We’ll get into these in detail in the next sections.

• Direct message management.  Consider spam protection for your email inbox ported over Twitter.  Sadly, this feature has become necessary, and TweetSpinner helps you maintain anti-spam rules to weed out the junk.
• Profile design rotator. Tweet Spinner actually lets you schedule different Twitter backgrounds, bios, and profiles, so that you can see which profile types might get the most engagement.  It also can be used to tell your followers more about you (and to encourage them to check your page more often!)
• Twitter CRM. Tweet Spinner is a CRM tool too, allowing you to connect with potential followers. You can find potential customers by location, view followers of your competitors and “mimic follow” them, analyze keywords you use that elicit the most response, and more. The tool will also prevent you from following spammer accounts through a variety of tactics.
• Scheduled Tweets and DMs. For a big company account, it’s difficult to actually engage all day long (and all week long, especially if you’re a 9-5 shop).  Therefore, you have the ability to schedule messages and to personalize them too.

Direct Message Management

When it comes to direct messages, TweetSpinner understands that you probably have been inundated with messaging that you’re not interested in. And while you could keep those messages stored on Twitter’s server, it might be in your best interest to have them stored to a separate account in the event that Twitter goes down or for ease of searching. With Tweet Spinner, you get a DM archive listed in an easy-to-read page that is searchable (via Ctrl+F on your keyboard; additional search facilities would be useful for accounts with thousands of DMs). You can choose to delete spam DMs or all DMs. Personally, I think something along the lines of an exportable data set would be excellent, but I’m a digital pack rat.

Spam management is offered within Tweet Spinner as well. In Tweet Spinner, spam management can only be applied to messages in your inbox, so if you’ve already archived your DMs, there is no need to run this as it will not find anything. You can choose whether to archive spam (do you really need to wade through those “is this really you?!” messages?) or not. You can also choose a very aggressive spam filtering method that will consider any DM with a URL as spam.

Both archival and spam filtering can be scheduled. This is a subscriber-only feature and occurs every four hours. You cannot change the schedule.

A little over a month ago, Twitter acquired Tweetie. Which was not only the best Twitter client for iPhones, but maybe the best way to use Twitter, period-and an exceptionally impressive piece of software, period. The company said that Tweetie would be relaunched as Twitter for iPhone-and the first (free) version under that name is now available in Apple’s App Store. It’s not just a moniker switcheroo: Tweetie’s last version was Tweetie 2.0, and this is Twitter for iPhone 3.0.

Twitter cofounder Biz Stone’s blog post on the news made me slightly antsy. He doesn’t even mention Tweetie-as if this were a brand-new app-and spends most of his wordage emphasizing that you don’t even need to have a Twitter account to use Twitter for iPhone, and can sign up for one within the app. I was concerned that the wonderfully powerful Tweetie might have gotten dumbed down. >>>> Continue Reading

Article Source: erictric.com

Good news, crackberry addicts! Research In Motion has announced that it will begin rolling out the native Twitter application for BlackBerry smartphones next week on Wednesday, March 31. The information comes directly from the RIM/BlackBerry booth at the international Cellular Telephone Industries Association [CTIA] Wireless 2010 convention in Las Vegas. It wasn’t too long ago that RIM promised that the Twitter app was going to be released soon, and this time it appears that the Waterloo-based company kept its word.

We first learned about the native Twitter app for BlackBerry back in September of last year. Then on February 11, Research In Motion released an invite-only beta of the application to a group of selected bloggers and users.

The application looks very similar to the current native Facebook app for the BlackBerry platform. Early reviewers have mixed opinions about it. Though the most important opinion is that of the end-users. Those who use Twitter and BlackBerry smartphones will not have to wait long to give the application a try.

Erictric will let you know once the Twitter app for BlackBerry starts rolling out with the respective download information.

With the changes of the operating systems and with the increase of the devices, “blu” came out recently to help tweepers that use windows vista and windows 7 on their desktops. It actually works in a same way like any other twitter apps but, it has a more professional look added to it and more features that you need to exlore.You can keep yourself updated with unlimited tweets that keeps popping out. Tweeting from “blu” has got easier, the limit is 140 characters but how about knowing how many letters do you still have before running out of space?! “blu” app can save your conversation in a way that can show the full conversation you are having with other follower… To check out what I am talking about all you have to do is click on this link and enjoy the rest. That’s how the app looks like :

Article Source: PC World

A popular Twitter application used to measure the influence of Twitter users has been hacked and used to send spam messages.

Hackers broke into the Grader.com Twitter application Thursday and used it to spam the Twitter pages of people who enabled the service. Grader users found themselves sending a Twitter message that read “Biz Stone Promoting Twitter in 2006″ and contained a link to a newly registered Web domain that hosted a video of Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

The hackers appear to be trying to improve the search engine ranking of the domain Seonix.org, an online money-making site, which was registered on Thursday, said Rik Ferguson, a security researcher with Trend Micro who blogged about the incident.

Grader.com is a Twitter add-on that lets users measure how influential they are on the social media network.

The founder of Grader.com’s parent company, HubSpot, said his company was blocking the unauthorized messages, but he could not say how the compromise occurred.

“All indications are that security on one of the Grader.com applications (Twitter Grader) was compromised,” said Dharmesh Shah in an e-mail message. “As a result, an unauthorized third-party was able to post tweets on behalf of some of our users.”

“We have updated the system to not allow unauthorized tweets to be sent out anymore, and are working furiously to research the issue further and make changes such that it doesn’t happen again,” he said. “Security issues are never fun and we hate that this happened. Our apologies to all of our users and those that have trusted us.” The issue was “totally our fault,” he added.

Shah’s own Twitter account sent the Biz Stone spam message, as did the account used by Grader.com.

Twitter users caught a break this time because the Seonix.org Web site is not malicious, according to Ferguson. If they had wanted to, the hackers could have tried to install unauthorized software such as a Trojan horse program on the machines of anyone who clicked on the Seonix.org link.

It’s not clear how many people use the Grader.com service, but the company’s Twitter account is followed by more than 50,000 people.

The hack shows why hackers are increasingly interested in social media and the applications that work on sites such as Twitter and Facebook. “If you can pick an app that has a lot of users and find a way in, then it’s a real big bang for the buck,” Ferguson said.

Twitter Apps

Some of the best of Twitter apps just got a lot better with fresh updates—Tweetie 2.1 and Birdfeed 1.2 on the iPhone, and Twidroid 3.0 on Android. Here’s what new and awesomer:

Birdfeed 1.2
The biggest change in Birdfeed 1.2 is geolocation using the official Twitter API, which embeds the location of a tweet as metadata, unlike previous Twitter app geolocation powers, which were workarounds. It’s probably my favorite implementation since it’s the dead simplest, with a tap adding location to any tweet. Also new and excellent is support for Flickr, designed in a fairly elegant way. Of course, there’s a bunch of smaller tweaks too, and now it’s only $3, down from $5. It’s still my favorite looking/feeling Twitter app.

Tweetie 2.1
Tweetie 2.1 has a bunch of gut changes that add up to a better experience. The big things are that there’s now native support for Twitter’s new official retweets (love ‘em or hate ‘em) and Twitter lists. Also, in-app spam reporting (yay) and better geolocation using Twitter’s official API. Free update, of course.

Twidroid 3.0
Android’s most powerful Twitter app is a lot more usable now. The main thing for me is that it finally supports threaded conversations, so you can see what the hell people were replying to. In-app link and photo previews, new keyboard shortcuts, and lots of other smaller UI tweaks. For the future, plug-ins could be huge. The first one is Google Maps, which is nice to have. Oh, and it doesn’t look like ass on the Droid anymore.

Article Source: gizmodo.com

What is “Sobees“? Why to use it? What is the difference between this application and the other ones?Here’s why Sobees is the perfect desktop companion.

Sobees integrates a large number of Internet services. Sobees automatically pulls information from friends on different social networks together with news, photos, videos, and other data from the Web.

sobees offers a great level of flexibility to organize the information in a friendly and intuitive interface that allows customization and better control of content.

Read More here

sobees screenshot

TwitterBot.com

It is an automated robot that follows by keyword new friends and can stop following when others stop following you. It can update your status with your pre-made messages. It also follows back the people who follow you. It can send massive DM and can send an automated message when you get a follower. For more visit TwitterBot. Here is some Screen shots :

Screen Shot -1

Screen Shot - 2

Feedalizr.com

A free desktop application that allows you to view, rate and comment on what your friends are sharing online.

Install Button

Tweet, upload photos on twitpic and Flickr, update your facebook status, add links, watch and comment on videos and reply to friendfeed messages.

All you have to do is click the Install Button and you are all set to enjoy all social networks that you’re in…