Tweetbot 1.5: Muting Is Forever
Cody Fink about the new mute feature available in version 1.5 of my favorite Twitter client for iPhone:
So how does muting work? It works pretty similarly to reporting someone as spam: you hold down on that person’s avatar (or alternatively visit their profile and hit the gear button), and select the mute option. If you want to see everything you’ve muted, there’s a new button in the tab bar so you can manage everything and everyone. What about hashtags? Just hold on the hashtag, and mute that bad-boy too. Anyone who tweets with that annoying #hastag will be filtered from your timeline.
You can mute someone or a hashtag for 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, or forever. Instead of muting forever, which basically means unfollow, I’d have preferred a mute for 1 hour—caffeine effects disappear after 1 hour, conference sessions are usually 1 hour long, etc.
How is Google Reader any better than Facebook or Twitter?
Google have zero interest in your being able to read the news anywhere other than on their servers, where they can know everything you read, every website you follow and every action you take. That is why there is no RSS reader built into Google Chrome. Without knowledge Google is powerless and a native RSS reader gives them no knowledge of you.
By the same Kroc Camen.
Twitter Shortcuts
Twitter page is using a lot of accesskeys and this is very cool if you love staying on your keyboard. Basically you can do a lot of actions in the Twitter homepage without leaving your keyboard. Here’s a list of the ones I’ve identified:
- h: Home
- p: Profile
- =: Find people
- s: Settings
- ?: Help
- u: go to the Tweet input area (nb doesn’t seem to work for me though)
- n: display new tweets without updating the page
- m: @replies
- d: direct messages
- i: received direct messages
- o: direct messages sent
- f: favorites
- r: retweets
- /: search
Follows Back Twitter Bookmarklet
Use the following bookmarklet on your Following page to display if the people you are following are following back:
$('tr.direct-messageable').each(function(idx,elem){
$(elem).find('td.user-actions-outer').append(
"<p>following%20back</p>");
})
You can drag the link to your bookmark bar: Follows back?
What makes a Tweet Relevant?
That’s the question that both Microsoft and Google are trying to answer since they signed deals with Twitter, Facebook, etc. to have these small “snippets of knowledge” included in their search results.
Couple of days ago, Google has announced that they are starting to push out results from Twitter and Facebook (this hasn’t reached all accounts yet though), so you’d expect that they came out with an approach for measuring the relevance. And I have found the following slide (thanks to ☞ TechCrunch):
In case you cannot read it from the low quality picture, here are the 10 metrics, which are pretty cryptic though,
- Language model (?)
- Tweet quality (?)
- Author quality (?)
- Probability of relevance
- Semantics
- Real-time URL resolution (my comment: probably somehow similar to the old PageRank but reversed: the quality of the tweet is determined by the quality of the links included)
- Query registration (?)
- Query hotness
- Query volume fluctuations
- Topicality (my comment: isn’t this more or less the same with the above Semantics?)
Right now, I cannot read between the lines of this algorithm, but there seems to be 3 dimensions that are considered: the author, the tweet and the included links, the query. I guess we will have to wait a bit longer to find out more about it and to see if it works or not.
The Journey of a tweet
Awesome! (via dataviz). I hope the next ones will be the journey of a spam tweet and then the journey of an ad tweet.
Tumblr iPhone app announced with my 5000 tweet
Looks like my 5000th tweet was the Tumblr iPhone app announcement. That makes me hope that my wishes will become true.
Update: The new version has become available in the AppStore on Nov.20th, 2009 and I have already published a review of the new features.
Confused about iPhone Twitter Apps?
I don’t know about you, but I still haven’t decided what Twitter iPhone app I should be using, so I currently have 6 (six) different apps installed: 2 feature-rich apps, 2 elegant apps and 2 basic ones. I know this may sound a bit crazy, but so far I couldn’t figure out which one is THE Twitter iPhone app, plus I have found a specific scenario for each of them
- feature-rich:
- TwitBird Pro: got this during a free promotion, as it is offering group support and seems to perform a bit better than TweetDeck
- TweetDeck: got this one too, as its bigger (desktop) brother is probably the best advanced Twitter client
- elegant:
- Twitterrific: its desktop brother was probably the first Twitter app I’ve used
- Echofon (previously known as TwitterFon):
- basic:
- TwitAndRun: probably the simplest interface to post a tweet (and believe me it is even simpler then Twitter mobile website)
- JustUpdate: still a simple interface for posting only, but with support for friend list access
Now to make things a bit more confusing, DaringFireball is praising ☞ the new upcoming version of the iPhone elegant app Tweetie:
but the persistence is the one that means the most to me. The effect is that you can leave Tweetie at any point, use another app, then go back to Tweetie, and it’s almost as though you never left. Feels like switching, rather than quitting/relaunching.
While other very useful iPhone apps are running some promotions, Tweetie is maintaining its €2.79/$2.99 list price. Anyways, stay assured that if there will be any promotions that I’ll try to catch that and let you know about it.
If you love your iPhone, make sure you are not missing any of the app reviews and categories covered in the iPhone apps for geeks series.
One in Five Tweets Are Free Brand Advertising
With 1 in 5 tweets mentioning a brand, Twitter can become either an extremely powerful tool for finding out things about brands or an enormous spam stream.
Research from Penn State found that a full twenty percent of tweets mention specific brand names or products. Out of half a million tweets examined during the study, one fifth were essentially free brand advertising.
I hope Twitter people will get involved and make sure that the ‘wrong marketers’ are not transforming Twitter into an 1-way useless communication channel.
The Twitter potential!
Twitter has the potential to become on of the largest spam channels. If the team behind will not start to fight this war now, by the time they will figure spam is a problem it will be way too late.
