For all the press that FriendFeed got
last week for allowing people to post replies directly to
Twitter, it was still 65th on our list and registered barely a fraction of
total tweeting activity. Some
analysts think FriendFeed is a threat to Twitter's existence, but remember
that 56% of users still interact with Twitter on the main site, and Twitter
makes up 44%
of activity on FriendFeed. So which service is really more reliant on the
other?
There are a ton of Twitter clients out there. We saw 142 different ways
to interact with Twitter in just 24 hours of monitoring the site's public feed.
That's an amazing amount of activity on their API, and their application
ecosystem is growing every day. Clearly, Twitter has struck a nerve with
developers and users alike.
Track, discover and explore activity in your city or across the globe. To get started, sign in with your Twitter account or simply close this dialog and find something interesting near you.
Eddy is a media aggregation platform built for the public display of up-to-the-minute activity on realtime services like Twitter. It offers three primary features: rapid collection and curation of what people are saying about an event, moderation of acceptable material, and speedy, reliable republishing of these conversational streams. Setup of the application is fast and easy, and made specifically for use by interactive media designers.
Tag and filter your peeps to organize them; add notes and full contact details; export custom lists to Twitter and vCard; receive a weekly report of your Twitter activity...everything you need to stay organized.
This site pulls profile pictures from current Twitter activity
You're seeing one-pixel line representations of the images scroll down the screen Future iterations will do more, better.
The Twitalyzer is a unique tool to evaluate the activity of any Twitter user and report on relative influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout, and other useful measures of success in social media.
The winner of our impromptu contest for best visualization of the Tools of Change (TOC) Conference Twitter activity is Stephen Smith for his Wordle tag clouds and stats over at toctweet.com
Seattle developer Damon Cortesi has written a great little perl script that will generate your Twitter Stats which you can be make into some cool graphs of using the Numbers app. Here are my current Twitter Stats.
You will need to know how to access a terminal and navigate the OS X filesystem, but after that it just takes one command to run. Mine took a couple of minutes to finnish since it needed to parse 93 pages of Twitter data, which I then just cut-and-past into the Numbers template that Damon provided.
The One Word Brand game is a Massive Tag Cloud Formation Activity (MTCFA) on Twitter in which you can "personal brand" yourself and each of your friends in one word. It's fun, it's viral, and it's easy!
Although there are many definitions of student engagement, we see it as the time and energy students devote to educationally purposeful activities and the extent to which the university encourages students to participate in activities that lead to their academic success.
With Twitter, as with all social-networking tools, the value of the experience hinges on three things: (1) who you are connected to and with; (2) how frequently you participate; and (3) how conscientious you are about contributing value to the community. Therefore, to establish relevance and to make sure students got off to a good start, we took the following steps:
"Because social-networking tools are forums for personalized, socially focused conversations, the communities that spring from these tools are person/people-centered. As Porter explained, this person/people-centeredness results in the value of participation being opaque for anyone who is not participating. To address this problem, we made sure that students who chose not to participate (because the value of participation is opaque for them) had access to our tweets by incorporating an RSS feed-like Twitter widget in our LMS. (See Figure 5.) Many widgets like these can be found online, although we should note that this particular widget has limitations. As seen in the example in Figure 5, the widget only displays Joni's posts, not the back-and-forth exchanges between her and members of her network. Students might incorrectly assume that the interaction is one-sided and less than dynamic. Besides keeping students apprised of the resources we shared via Twitter, however, this widget allowed them to vicariously discover Twitter's value. Some students later chose to join us in Twitter because they had a better understanding of what they were getting into because its value was less opaque. Ultimately, we found that Twitter helped us achieve our student-engagement objective, but we also quickly discovered that students' Twitter participation led to other notable instructional outcomes."
After weeks of discussion in the blogosphere over whether what happened in Tunisia was a "Twitter revolution," and whether social media also helped trigger the current anti-government uprising in Egypt, author Malcolm Gladwell says "Surely the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another. Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along."