MMMeeja

This post came about after a short Twitter exchange with DeWitt Clinton (he’s @dewitt on Twitter). He asked:

Where do you find new interesting sites/memes *before* they hit digg, popurls, techmeme, reddit, etc? The more tech flavored the better.

I answered that I have a great network on delicious.com that provides me with that kind of thing. His reply got me thinking:

I’ve been treating delicious as write-only for years

This is exactly why del.icio.us is so powerful - the data that people enter is for their own use!

Delicious Is Anti-Social Bookmarking

We delicious users all store bookmarks (and colour palettes) for our own reference. Unlike Digg, Mixx, Reddit et al we’re not adding bookmarks to send traffic or become a top user or hit the front page or stimulate discussion. There’s little SEO, marketing or self-promotional value to being a popular delicious user (the front page sends a lot of traffic but that’s not the same as being a popular user).

We are being selfish and it’s powerful.

It’s powerful because it’s also open. If can identify a thought-leader in a given and he has a delicious account, I can see which sites he thinks are important enough to save for later reference.

This is very similar to my twitter philosophy of “follow interesting people” (stolen, I think, from Robert Scoble).

How To Build Your Delicious Network

I’ve got around forty people in my network right now, each one is active and interesting so I get about thirty to fifty interesting new links sent to me every day. Here’s how I found those people:

1. Pick subjects of interest - check your top ten tags if you’re not sure
2. Find out who the thought leaders are in each area. You probably know who they are already, but you can always find more. Use tools like:
   • Google blog search
   • Twitter - search for hashtags and just ask people
   • FriendFeed
   • Academic papers
3. You’ll find that a lot of people use the same username on all their Web 2.0 sites so check if they have a delicious account
4. If their delicious username isn’t obvious, try FriendFeed. That has links to a person’s delicious account under their list of services
5. Check their blog - lots of people automatically post their bookmarks every week using a Wordpress plugin
6. Try SocialWhoIs
7. When you have found their delicious profile, click the “Add to my network” link and then click “Yes” to confirm - I always forget to confirm

Build up a good sized network and check back periodically for new links (the Delicious Firefox plugin will highlight the network icon in the status bar if you have unread links in your network).

Enjoy - if you have geeky interests you can find my delicious profile here but only add me if you find my links interesting!

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Creative Commons licensed photo by Thomas R. Stegelmann.

So you’ve given in to the online hype and the pleadings of your friends and signed up for Twitter, but it’s not the Web 2.0 utopia you were led to believe, it’s a quiet little space with no mates, no fun and little to keep you there. Before you give up and go back to Myspace, give the suggestions in here a try.

Signing Up

Signing up is pretty straightforward if you can still find a name available. If not, get creative, try to avoid using your birth year though - that’s a bit lame.

HINT: Try to pick a fairly unique name that you’ll be able to use across different websites. It really helps other people to find you if you have a consistent identity.

If you use a webmail account (like GMail or Yahoo Mail), let Twitter look through your contacts to see if it recognises anyone. The guys behind Twitter are quite trustworthy, I’ve not heard of any privacy arising from this step.

Follower Suggestions

Twitter provides a list of people that it suggests you follow, and how you answer will affect how you use it. This list is a selection of very popular people on the site, like basketball star Shaquille O’Neil, US sitcom star Ellen Degeneres, top-flight CEOs.

It will also suggest bots like CNNs breaking news feed or Gordon Brown’s moronic list of public engagements. Some of these can be really useful - others, like Brown, are wasteful noise.

Careful though. Whilst most celebrities and CEOs often do engage with others on Twitter, they can’t talk with every one of their forty thousand followers. If in doubt, don’t follow any of these suggested people - you can always find them later.

All Signed Up, What’s Next? Who Should I Follow?

Just a minute. There’s another step that will really help you to make new friends on Twitter: Fill out your profile!

Go to the “settings” link at the top-right and (at the very least) fill out the two fields labelled “One Line Bio” and “Location”.

These are important because when you follow someone, they get an email telling them that you are following. Most users will then check out your profile to see if you’re interesting enough to follow back so spend a little time thinking about your biography. You can be informative, playful, caring etc. but you’ve got to be short.

You Need A Picture Too

After completing your profile, please take the time to add a little picture to represent you. When everyone first signs up they get a drab brown picture like this:

Make yourself stand out from the crowd with a nice picture. It doesn’t have to be a photo of your face (or any other part of you) but that doesn’t hurt either. You can create a fun cartoon face with this tool, which is very popular.

Once you have the picture you want, click the “Picture” tab on your Twitter profile settings page. Then “Browse” to choose the file with your picture and “Save”.

Now Can I Follow People And Have Fun?

Yes, yes you can.

But How Do I Find People To Follow On Twitter

Good question. First, try to think of what kind of people you want to follow: artistic people, geeks, musicians, students, business people, pet lovers, parents - there are people of all kinds on Twitter, from atheists to zoologists.

Then, when you know who you are looking for, try these:

Directories

There are quite a few Twitter directories that have people divided into categories by their interests:

• Twellow
• We Follow
• Just Tweet It

HINT: Add yourself to these directories so other people can find you and follow you.

Search Twitter

It’s not obvious from the homepage (yet) but Twitter does have a search function. Try searching for phrases related to your interests and click the pictures of the people returned to see if they are interesting.

Hopefully, now you see why it was so important to fill out your profile and get a picture!

HINT: You might see words starting with a hash (#) in the search results. People use these to share tweets about a specific event or subject - try finding one related to your interests and searching for it.

Search Google

Most people on Twitter have their own website or blog and they will link to their Twitter page with the words “follow me on twitter” so try googling for that and some other words to find out more about them than will fit into their short Twitter biography.

HINT: Got a Facebook page? Add a link to your Twitter profile.

I’m Following People, What Do I Talk About?

Pretty much, whatever you want but if you want a conversation you need to be interesting and engaging. Try some of these tactics:

• Ask questions
• Answer questions
• “I’m reall excited about...”
• “This is a funny picture” (add a link to the picture)

People Aren’t Following Me Back!

They will. Give it time and keep being interesting. Eventually it all snowballs and you’ll feel really important to the internet.

More Help

This post was written as a response to a (real life, not twitter) conversation I had with @JS__78 at the weekend and I hope it inspires her to give Twitter another try - please follow her and give her a bit of support.

I’ll write a followup with some more tips for intermediate users soon (and maybe an advanced one later). In the meantime you might like one of my earlier posts of Twitter Tips.

Check out other websites for lots of Twitter tips, this is a great post by @dhollings.

Finally, if you’ve still got questions, ask away in the comments below or catch me on Twitter.

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Creative Commons licensed photo by davemelbourne.

Since Twitter stopped updating UK users via SMS about six months ago, there have been a number of third parties stepping up to offer support.

Getting SMS updates was a useful feature, but not a must have for me at least so I didn’t try any of the paid up-front services listed below:

• TwitSMS
• TweetSMS
• TwitMobile
• TweetBoxLive

I’m sure there are many others too, leave a comment if you know of one.

Free, At Last

After doing without SMS updates, a free service caught my eye. Twe2 offers advert-supported delivery of your Twitter direct messages via SMS.

I checked out the company (it’s been whitelisted by Twitter and is using the Wadja network to provide the adverts), and signed up and I've been testing the service for about a fortnight now.

First impressions are great - it does exactly what it says on the tin. You get an SMS sent to your phone for each Twitter DM you receive. The tweet gets truncated to 91 characters to make room for the advert at the end but I haven’t found this to be a problem so far.

Not Quite As Good As Twitter

Unlike the old Twitter service, you don’t get fine control over which users send direct messages to your phone - there are no equivalents to Twitter’s on and off commands - it’s all or nothing.

This is a feature that I really miss, I used to get a useful SMS when my website went down or I had to take urgent action.

Better Than Twitter

Unlike Twitter’s service, Twe2 can send SMS alerts based on searches that you configure against the full public stream. The total number of text messages you get from Twe2 is rate limited to a maximum of a hundred per hour, very useful if you set an alert for a term that goes hot!

Don’t Use Autofollow DMs

Pretty soon after I started with Twe2, I received twenty(!) copies of the same direct message from @seolman thanking me for following him.

I was pretty annoyed and immediately blocked him.

It turned out that it was due to a horrendous bug in TweetLater - a Twitter service that I use too. I unblocked seolman since he was very apologetic.

I was also unwittingly sending auto-follow DMs due to another bug in TweetLater for which I humbly apologise. I don’t think any of my followers got twenty messages but let me know if you did!

Twitter To Re-Instate UK SMS?

Hopefully, Twe2 will keep on innovating and find some way to match the Twitter functionality, but all their effort might be for nought if this interview is to be believed.

Twe2 is a good service that I recommend and it shows how innovative coders will work around the artificial restrictions put in place by short-sighted, greedy telecoms companies. Any British mobile phone operator with half a brain would have jumped at the chance to have a high-profile client like Twitter and should have offered a very deep discount.

My Twitter followers map generated a huge buzz last year, despite its shortcomings, so I resolved to improve upon it. I’m quite pleased with the results considering it’s all done with Yahoo Pipes so I hardly had to write any code.

The map shows all of the people you follow on Twitter and so it doesn’t need your Twitter password. Many people were rightly wary about handing over their twitter password to plot their followers and nobody would put the map on their blog because it needed the password to be stored in plain text. When Twitter finalises its OAuth support, I’ll release a version that uses it and shows your followers.

There are a number of other improvements too!

• It now uses Google Maps
• More than 100 people can be shown - anyone you follow with a location in the Twitter profile will show up on the map
• It can understand iPhone locations, like iPhone:-74.356,35.641
• Click on a marker to see the person’s Twitter bio, last tweet and a link to their Twitter page
• Your location is shown with a distinctive red marker
• Generate code to embed your map on your blog or website

Some Caveats

The map pushes Yahoo Pipes pretty hard and sometimes there can be timeouts or over-capacity errors. The only answer to these is just to bear with it, once your list of friends has been calculated it should be cached and everything should be fine.

Similarly, if you follow thousands of people your map is going to get really clogged up with markers and slow the web browser - so careful Stephen Fry!

Try It Out

The map has its own special landing page now, so head on over to try it out and let me know what you think in the comments.

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Funky Twitter icon by PhireDesign (CC licensed).

Delicious is the grandaddy of social bookmarking sites and it’s still going strong. If you’re not using the social aspect of the site then you’re missing out on a great way to find hidden gems of information.

I’ve done the hard work for you and discovered ten really interesting people that you should have in your del.icio.us network. Here they are, in no particular order:

Joshua Schachter - joshua

The creator of delicious itself (as well as many other useful sites), he’s left the company now but still using the service. With over 10,000 public bookmarks, he is a great guy to follow if you want to see a power user in action.

Jeremy Zawodny - jzawodn

Another ex-Yahoo employee, Jeremy is a MySql guru but bookmarks all kinds of tech and programming information. He uses delicious’s description field well, making useful notes against his 5,900 bookmarks.

Steve Rubel - steverubel

Public relations guru Steve is all over the web, but he still stores his bookmarks at delicious.com. Steve’s bookmarks have a heavy slant towards blogging and marketing but he definitely sorts the wheat from the chaff. A great addition to your network if you have a blog.

Joost Devalk - jdevalk

Joost is a WordPress coder and web designer so, as you’d imagine, his bookmarks cover a range to technical, internet-related subjects. He’s often first with links to newly released WordPress plugins but he saves lots of Javascript links too.

Chris Brogan - chrisbrogan

If there’s anyone in your network already, it’s probably social media guru Chris. He’s got loads of fans! His posts regularly hit the popular page of delicious too - this is a man that’s walking the talk.

Tamar Weinberg - tami

You probably know who Tamar Weinberg is by now - she’s truly “Internet Famous”. A social media marketer, blogger, online journalist and all-round techie, loads of interesting stuff bookmarked.

Jeff Smith - teknokool

Another Social Media guru (don’t there seem to be a lot of them on social media?). Jeff bookmarks much more technical information than most SMMs. He’s not afraid to roll up his sleaves and get into a bit of code, and his homepage is jeffisageek.net, which always makes me laugh.

Peter(?) Skomoroch - pskomoroch

I don’t know very much about pskomoroch (I’m not even sure that his first name is Peter) but I do know that he loves his data. If you need to train an AI or load a database full of test data then check out his dataset tag - there are riches there!

Louis Gray - louismg

Silicon Valley tech blogger extraordinaire Louis Gray currently threatens Robert Scoble’s position as King Of The Geeks and, unlike Scoble, he’s active on delicious. If you want the scoop on hot new startups, Louis’s bookmarks are a great place to look.

dadavidov

Finally, you know that delicious is really good for bookmarking MP3 files don’t you? Well, dadavidov has over 800 tracks bookmarked for you to enjoy.

So there we have it, ten del.icio.us power users for you to add to your network (don’t forget to add me too!)

Oh, and did you know that delicious is great for bookmarking colour palettes too? Really useful for designers.

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Creative Commons licensed p-hoto by Laughing Squid.

I’m honoured to have been chosen to take part in a round of blog tag discussing best practices for online social media. Thanks to Kim Woodbridge for the tag and to Mitch Joel for kicking off the project.

The posts so far have been focussed on remaining calm and not starting a troll-fest, with Kim recommending that we reflect, Ari Herzog saying pause before hitting the submit button and David Bradley saying we should be nice.

This is all good advice but as this is a technical blog, I will give you a technical response...

Automate!

I certainly don’t mean that you should use scripts to spam your blog into every social media service, but we responsible netizens can extend our presence by employing some clever automation.

There are, literally, thousands of on-line communities, blogs, digg-clones and forums, so we cannot keep an eye on them all without spreading our time too thinly. So I want a notification when I (or my brand) is mentioned, so I can follow up quickly.

You see, I found out that Kim had tagged me for this blog meme when an automated Google search for my name twittered that I’d been mentioned on a web page. I have similar alerts set up for a variety of keywords and can respond quickly thanks to the automated searches.

There are a surprising number of ways that automation can help you manage the firehose of information and social interaction that being an active participant in social media brings. Have you tried any of these?

• Import your blog into Facebook
• Ping Technorati whenever your blog is updated
• Read FriendFeed via RSS
• Twitter your Sphins
• Make a tumblr account and import your blog’s RSS feed

There are many, many, many more great tweaks and tips to succeeeding with social media, but mine is to automate.

Next...

I pass the baton on to the most beautiful people:

• The amazing eMom - she ROCKS a lot
• Erhan Erdogan has made FriendFeed his own

Oh, one more - Robert Scoble, c’mon baby tell us your best pratices for social media!

Jason from Twiggit dropped me an email a few days ago, asking if I’d like to review his site. He was polite and not spammy so, of course, I said yes.

What Is Twiggit?

Twiggit is a service that will automatically add your Digg submissions and votes to your Twitter stream. It is highly configurable, allowing you to choose to tweet just items you submit, or positive votes too. There are other options to change how often it checks Digg, pause operation or delete your account.

Like many Twitter applications, it requires your Twitter password to work - a limitation of the Twitter API. A lot of the Twitter community really want to see the long-promised adoption of OAuth to replace this, but there’s no sign just yet.

It doesn’t need your Digg password, thankfully, since the Digg data can be read publicly.

In Action

Twiggit produces nicely formatted tweets that use TinyURL to perform URL shortening. You can see an example of one of my twiggit tweets displayed in TwitterFox, below:

When I first signed up for the service, Twiggit picked up one of my Digg votes from the evening before, which was a bit alarming although there have been no other glitches. It seems to a be well-rounded and professional piece of software.

Who Will Benefit?

I think that Digg power-users that organise their networks via Twitter will be best served by this software. As we have seen from the latest MrBabyMan controversy, top users submit and vote on hundreds of stories every day and anything that can lighten their load will pay dividends in time savings.

For the record, I don’t think that MrBabyMan should be banned, and I don’t know if he organises his network via Twitter - or even if he has a network. I do think that Digg’s algorithm is too heavily biased in favour of existing power users but I really do not care about the rest of this spat.

You Could Make This With Yahoo Pipes And TwitterFeed

Yes you could, but why bother? Twiggit works very well and you can get it up and running in seconds. I have made good use of both Yahoo Pipes and Twitterfeed before, but Twiggit just works.

Will you be using Twiggit? Want one for Reddit? Leave a comment.

I’ve been using Feedit for Digg’s RSS feed for a while and love it, but there are other article sites that also make you click through their page before you can get to the meat of the post. Sphinn is one of them, so I whipped up a Yahoo Pipe to improve their feed.

I am a fan of Sphinn, although I am no SEO because it has a lively bunch of informed and technical users. Picking up a few hints on pleasing the Google Gods is useful too. I read the front page articles via my feed reader because I feel that it is quite redundant to vote for stories that are already hot.

I appreciate that this pipe may be controversial amongst the Sphinn community because it will reduce page-views (and maybe revenue) for the site, but I made this pipe to suit my browsing habits and if others find it useful, then so be it. The pipe adds a link to the article on Sphinn so you can easily vote once you have read the story.

The pipe takes the feed of hot stories but you could clone it and change the URL to tweak it for the upcoming ones. Personally, I prefer to use the upcoming page as I find it much easier to mark spam - something that is a big problem for Sphinn and many other Pligg powered sites.

So, here is the feed: .

What do you think, am I being irresponsible and depriving Sphinn of eyeballs? Or maybe you find it useful? Leave a comment and let me know. Oh, and don’t forget to Sphinn this post!

Problogger’s amazing social media love-in continues to drive newTwitter followers to my account (over 80 so far) and I’ve checked out the Twitter page of every single one. I found and followed some clever, interesting and funny people but there were also some really freaky and/or annoying ones that didn’t get followed.

Here’s a few tips to help you evaluate your Twitter page and make sure you don’t give the wrong impression.

By the way, if I didn’t follow you back, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I think you’re weird but you might want to read on and check anyway. All names have been changed to minimise offence to fragile egos.

The Gurus And Experts

If your username suggests that you are a design guru, why does your Twitter page have orange writing on a red background? You must have tweaked your settings to make it that way, if trichromacy is to blame then I have sympathy but you should know to be careful when choosing colours.

Does your little bio say that you marketing expert or social media guru? You might want to post a little bit more than just the titles of your latest blog posts. Social media is a conversation, try having one - most people on Twitter aren’t that scary.

The Needlesharp Niches And The Me Too Experts

So your blog niche is one-armed, Mongolian crochet knitters? That’s nice, but if you want an English geek to follow you, you need to get out of your niche for a while and add some personal colour. Twitter is interactive but we need some common ground to get the conversation started.

As for the “Me Too Experts” we all want to make millions whilst messing around on this internet thing but it takes more than just declaring yourself to be a wealth consultant or blogging facilitator. There are many people out there who make a successful living from blogging and social media and they don’t bother with fancy titles, they get out here and interact, work hard and share their knowledge.

The Newbies

I have quite a lot of sympathy here, we were all new to Twitter once and I did end up following quite a few people with only three of four tweets to their name.

Those first few tweets are very important - forget Twitter’s question of “What are you doing right now?” and introduce yourself, ask a few questions, dive in (the water’s lovely).

Avatars

I can understand newbies having the standard o_0 avatar, but a nice, easily recognised avatar is important in social media. My avatar is a grainy cell-phone picture but it can be seen all over the net and I think I look OK in the picture (I’m pretty ugly in real life though).

Oh man, some of you people are ugly don’t photograph well. If that’s the case use a cartoon style, or crop some stock photography. Two great examples of avatars are shown below, instantly recognisable and very cool-looking. Maybe Sebastian and Kristen are hideous in real life (though I doubt it) but their avatars show that everyone can be good looking on the internet.

Gender Confusion

While I’m on the subject of avatars, who knew there were so many amazing looking women on Twitter? And they all work in social media marketing too!

That one tweet along the lines of “Woot! Superbowl Saturday! Me an my bros are gonna get trashed. Wooha!” is gives you away as a liar.

Guys, if you’re going to pretend to be a woman to get attention then you can’t let the persona drop for a minute. You’ve got to lead the double life so completely that even you start believing it, which is going to leave you with some hefty therapy bills.

If English Is Your First Language Let It Show

I was lucky enough to get followed by people from all over the world with a vast array of first languages and I’m amazed at how well they can grasp the complexities of English and manage to be interesting in just 140 characters.

I’m also amazed at just how badly people from the UK & North America can mangle the mother tongue. Mr Text-Speak Dude, I’m looking at you “LOL, GTFO kthxbai!!1!”

So, a bit of a rant about some of the characters on Twitter. It’s meant in a fairly light-hearted manner and I’m not exactly perfect myself so don’t take it personally, even if you are an internet weirdo. If you found this rude or condescending then sorry, reading through a hundred Twitter pages can do that to a chap and maybe you would find Problogger’s hints more palatable, he’s too nice to call people weird.

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Creative Commons licensed photos by Amanda Benham & Mr. Wright.

Problogger (Darren Rowse) posted a call to his readers, exhorting them to share their social media profiles and what a response!

I got the 29th comment in (out of nearly 700!) with just four links to my online presences:

• Twitter
• FriendFeed
• del.icio.us
• Sphinn

The response was very impressive and shows just how much influence bloggers like Darren have. It also showed a distinct bias away from geeky networks towards the more accessible ones, so only a few new followers on sphinn and del.icio.us but loads of twitterers - that tells us a lot. I’ll let the figures speak for themselves. After 48 hours, I gained a load of followers:

Network	Followers
Twitter	30
FriendFeed	19
del.icio.us	5
Sphinn	5

I didn’t follow everyone back - some people just were not a good fit - but I did follow quite a few and also explored lots of profiles and followed people that just interested me, regardless of whether they follow me back or not.

On that note, I would declare Darren’s post a huge success - he got a load of reader interaction, links and buzz - whilst we humble readers got a load of exposure. I’m looking forward to the follow-up to this event.

Oh, and here is a cool little badge from TwitterCounter that displays the number of followers I have, you can get one for your blog too.