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.

Remember when we thought Twitter was going to crush all the third party Twitter applications? Hasn’t happened.

The most popular Twitter client going is UberTwitter for BlackBerry, according to a sampling of Twitter’s API done by coder Ed Finkler.

Almost 9% of Tweets sent out each day come from UberTwitter. The next most popular is Tweetdeck at 5%. Twitter for BlackBerry comes in at 4%.

It’s interesting that Twitter’s official app for BlackBerry hasn’t killed the upstart UberTwitter. And it’s also interesting that while Tweetdeck gets the majority of attention from the tech press, it’s not the most popular Twitter client.

BlackBerry Twitter clients are likely the most popular because BlackBerry is the most popular smartphone OS out there.

Article Source: sfgate.com

Do you live in Canada?  Are you visiting anytime? New to your province/area?? Do you have a twitter account???

All info for anything around you is in twitter411.ca

Follow the weather reports and roads in Toronto and in Canada!!

Update: Twitter just fixed it. Tweets now display properly or not at all.

If you’re crafty, you can now publish a tweet longer than 140 characters. It’s not a feature, but rather a bug, so don’t expect it to be possible for much longer.

We first read about the bug in the Twitter Development Talk Google Group, where forum user Chris White posted a step-by-step of how to make it happen. He wrote that you go directly to the Twitter Share URL (http://twitter.com/share?url=) in the Firefox web browser and put your tweet’s text after “url=” — for example, “http://twitter.com/share?url=This is a test of the Twitter 140 character bug.”

The result is a tweet box with a shortened http://t.co/ link (that’s Twitter’s URL shortener). Then you can just click the tweet button and the full-length tweet will go out on your account. It will display properly on Twitter ’s website, but many third-party web, desktop or mobile apps will fail to show the whole message.

Twitter user TenhoMania published a tweet that included the entire first chapter of the book of Genesis from the Hebrew Bible — not a wholly original idea at this point, but special for its 3,000+ character length, at least. That and several other lengthy tweets have been retweeted numerous times.

Twitter employee John Adams posted a thanks to Chris White on Google Groups for exposing the bug, and said, “I filed a bug with our webclient team,” so a fix is sure to come in the very near future.

Article Source: Mashable

Twitter will reportedly soon get its own external sharing tool that will help both users and publishers share content on the popular social publishing platform.

Based on internal company documents, blog Mashable on Wednesday unearthed details on the “Tweet Button” program, which centers on an embeddable sharing button. When put on third-party sites, it will allow users to share whatever content they’re looking at, while it keeps track of how many times that particular URL has been retweeted by other Twitter users.

Sound familiar? If you look at the top of this post, you’ll see that such a feature has existed for the past year and a half thanks to Tweetmeme. Beyond offering up these buttons to publishers, Tweetmeme also has a Digg-like front page of the most popular content from the sites that use it. Last month the company also launched a pro version of its service for large publishers that want to re-brand the look and feel of the dialog that comes up when you click on these buttons, as well as offering up support for integrating multiple analytics tracking tools.

Twitter’s initial offering looks to be less expansive, though that could just be the beginning of something much larger. Tweetmeme charges up to $5,000 a year for publishers to use the paid versions of its service, so something competitive from Twitter later on down the line could make for an additional revenue stream.

Mashable thinks the service could be here as early as Thursday. In the meantime, the embed code for the new Tweet Button does not work on all Twitter user accounts.

Article Source: cnet news

WASHINGTON — Twitter wants to help you build your network.

The micro-blogging service began rolling out a new feature Friday called “Suggestions for You” which directs users to other Twitter accounts they may find interesting.

“With more than a hundred million users on Twitter, there are sure to be at least dozens of accounts out there that will reflect your interests,” Twitter said on its official blog.

“The trouble is finding all of them,” it said. “Today we’re beginning to roll out a simple, but powerful new feature to help address that.”

Twitter said the “Suggestions for You” algorithms find other accounts of potential interest using various factors, including “people you follow and the people they follow.”

A Twitter user who clicks on the “Who to Follow” link on the Twitter homepage sees a list of suggested accounts to follow.

Twitter, which combines the strengths of blogs and instant messaging services, enables users to send and receive short messages of up to 140 characters on personal computers and mobile devices.

Twitter said it planned to make the suggestions feature available to developers of desktop and mobile applications for Twitter.

Social network Facebook already offers a similar feature called “People You May Know” which suggests possible new friends to members.

Article Source: AFP

Article Source: aceshowbiz

Angelina Jolie is officially joining Twitter, Us Magazine reported. However, fans have to wait a little longer to read messages posted on the account because the 35-year-old actress has locked her Twitter page and might start tweeting later this year.

On why Jolie, who has no followers and is not following anyone yet, protected her account, a source told the site, “Jolie had her people obtain the account for her so no one else could have that username.” The source further said, “There was actually someone else using @AngelinaJolie but Angelina requested the account suspended and took it over.”

The insider then mentioned that Jolie might only be active on the micro blogging site “later this year.” Though so, fans should not expect the girlfriend of Brad Pitt to dish out about her six children and romance life with the actor as the insider stated, “If she uses it, it will be for charity-related items or sharing links.”