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In the video I walk you through where to check what applications have access to your Twitter account and what access rights you have given.

“View favorites, follows, retweets and more by people you follow”

I see this as a direct comparison to the Ticker that Facebook launched and has driven many people crazy.  Here is a screenshot of the location if it has not appeared for you yet by some chance:

I can see value in the idea, but this makes keeping up even more overwhelming for many.  Being able to see those I follow who then follow could lead me to a new person of interest, but who has time to click and hover each time with the volume of changes going on.  Favorites are of limited value as I presume I will see the person retweet it and if it has a link, something like Flipboard will catch it.

Gina Trapani made a great suggestion while I was writing this post:

I really want to see the people my friends UNfollow in the Activity tab.

Humorously this adds value, mainly if multiple of your friends have even unfollowed this same account.  One other side note as I scrolled though the new interface was seeing exactly the types of accounts people do add.  From tv and movie stars, to wrestlers and even a few funny yet sketchy accounts does bring light to a bit more of the individual personalities across Twitter.

So are you using the feature with success?  Activity streams are a whole other post coming and the ability to filter them will be key.

I found a few UI issues along the way, but nothing to call a show stopper. Plus this is still a beta product with room to grow and take over what was a space for Gist before they were bought by Research In Motion (BlackBerry).  The service includes seeing:

• inline updates
• it’s own menu on the left navigation
• reminders
• a global address book feature
• new contact alerts

I am eager to see how they evolve and add new social services into the product.  Their feature request list in the FAQ listed Skype and even Google Voice on the wishlist.  So give them a shot and see what you think.  Did I mention it is free?

Related posts

• Gist for BlackBerry review
• Rim buys Gist and deletes all my data?
• Rim buys Gist – thoughts

This small, yet incredibly useful, book covers 21 tips and accompanying code for mining Twitter data.  There is no fluff in this 60 page book with page 1 diving right into OAuth access.

Each of the tips (recipes) start with the problem , a brief solution and then the lengthy solution and code samples to bring the two together.  Everything in the book is written in Python with much of it being made accessible via easy_install.

While the majority of this book is code, it is an incredible companion to get you moving in pulling data, trends or just about anything from Twitter.  Creating and analyzing graphs becomes easier, discovering friendships and cliques, pulling geo-data and even finding a retweet’s source.

Much of the metadata we produce via Twitter gets lost instantly, since no one digs and mines the underlying data. This book can help you build some product or service you want around Twitter and hands you basic code to get you started. The book  21 Recipes for Mining Twitter is a great resource.

Disclosure: The links above are Amazon affiliate.

This was a nice one I captured

I went ahead and grabbed one of the nicer ones.  Filtering is a key component.  You could set it to only approved people and remove the worries.  Making it easy to hold someone accountable and remove them.  This might eliminate someone from participating.

You could have a protected and filtered stream with someone watching a public stream and moving tweets in.  Some Twitter services do this.  We have profiled them on EverythingTwitter.

Either way, if you are investing in an upcoming event and wish to utilize Twitter to collect and show off the chatter, look into strong filtering.

Cisco^® SocialMiner is a social media customer care solution that enables your company to proactively respond to customers and prospects communicating through public social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook or other public forum or blogging sites. By providing social media monitoring, queuing, and workflow to organize customer posts on social media networks and deliver them to your customer care team, your company can respond to customers in real time through the same social network they are using to communicate

It is a good play when larger companies invest heavily one a select number of vendors.  Offering a wider array of services, like Cisco is doing here, gives them leverage into installing and hooking into existing enterprise deployments at a rapid rate.  If you already run the call center servers, phone systems, VOIP and even network hardware from Cisco, then extending it with hooks into the social networks makes more sense then staff installing and managing an entirely new set that may not integrate at all.

IBM has done the same with their Customer Experience push and the upcoming Project Northstar (see my Part 1 and Part 2 launch coverage).  Aggregation, metering and deriving value from communication is a key driver in this world of scream out your concerns for many to read.  BOth require you to purchase more of their hardware and services, but that would be exptected.

Cisco is launching light with support for RSS and only Twitter and Facebook.  Mining into the social datra goes much further.  I trhink the investment in any of these enterprise solutions needs to be weighed heavily against the costs and capabilities of the free or smaller company deceloped products until more meaningful interactions can be derived.

• 39% block access to Facebook
• 30% block access to Twitter
• 27% block video sharing sites
  

  Image courtesy: Geek.com

Amazingly 21% give employees the right to view such sites before work and during their lunch hour.  Let’s be honest.  With the amount of third party tools, websitesand options for Twitter (see EverythingTwitter), you aren’t stopping employees.  Blocking access via a string on the URL or even traffic isn’t the solution.  Implementing the proper policies and controls around usage and expectations goes much further.

Most companies have an Internet usage policy, but rarely list individual sites, tools or social networks.  With the mass amounts of mobile devices in play, bothy personal and business, the tools and hooks to the sites are built in.  Native clients from Twitter for Android, Blackberry and iPhone permeate all the devices.  Facebook interfacing blurs the lines between business and personal contacts.  Heck, many have coworkers and bosses as friends on Facebook.  They are whom you spend much of your time with in the first place.

The study goes on with the concerns over data leakage, malware infections and more.  This is inherent to email and every other tool you have.  So is the site the issue and problem or is it the way the sites are used?  Have you implemented a social network usage policy?  Are there strict guidelines and governance in place?  Do employees sign off and get training on how they will represent themselves and/or company on these networks?

My guess is the companies in the survey missed the point but creates the fear.

Courtesy of: Business Insider

clients such as Tweetdeck, Seesmic, Mixero and more write code to remove these from paid versions of the apps to make themselves money?  All while satisfying users of Twitter at the same time?

Third party client developers are already under fire (see previous posting on the ecosystem) with Twitter now running their own clients across mobile platforms, with the web as the preferred desktop interface.  Even with Twitter as a free product, are the consumers and users of it prepared for advertising in what was once a clean stream of information?

I know I tolerate some ads with Ubertwitter on the Blackberry for all of the advanced functionality.  I could buy a paid version to remove the ads, but they are far and few between.  But with Twitter now inputting their own, will I want to see a percentage of the stream in that format?  My guess is no and I will invest a few dollars.  I only hope that when I pay to have the ads removed from those products they can filter Twitter sponsored tweets as well.  Or will that invalidate some license agreement?

• setup
• account management
• options
• the interface

and more in this less than 8 minutes.  Learn what I think and if it is worth you switching your existing client to.

Remember, you can find me as IdoNotes across all the networks

Courtesy of Sean Rasmussen

Twitter has made some major changes that have taken a huge bite out of the third party developer ecosystem for tools, add-ons and clients.

1. Twitter started (rightfully) buying/building their own official Twitter clients for multiple platforms.  This was needed as no one knew quite where to turn outside of the web interface (that had clients built to make that better) and SMS via a cellphone.  Any other application written to interact was from third parties hoping to capitalize and productize a consumers interaction with Twitter.  Guess what?  If it isn’t free they were really buying.  Sure, some of them made sales, but in the grand scheme of how may users there are, you would think someone could emerge as a winner.  No one could when the service itself is free and companies developed for the fun of it.
2. Twitter forced all the tools to begin using oAuth, or get off the network, in the last 10 days.  As some of you may know, if you not you now will, I am one of the founders of EverythingTwitter.  The largest review catalog of tool, add-ons, sites, and whatever else we found that revolved around Twitter.  It is all categorized and searchable, which made finding point #2 easier.  Approximately 15% of the tools listed had oAuth implemented at the time we wrote the review and cataloged the tool/site.  This means that many of these tools just got knocked off the network and unusable until updates are done to their authentication.

So what does this mean to the average user?  Nothing.  They use the web, SMS and some built in clients that come with phones.  Some go on a search for the best tool for their particular device and stop there.  The masses?  Nothing.  Effectively burying the usage of these alternate tools.

Building a business around a social media site that is free is tough work.  Building a business that has consumers wanting to pay for a tool to interact with a tool they use free is even tougher.

Our daily hits on EverythingTwitter remain about the same, even with the fewer tools we list each week.  People are searching but seem to be coming back to the same results.  Twitter has official clients for two of the top mobile operating systems that their users utilize, iPhone and Android.

I wish much luck to those still building new tools and clients around Twitter that do not have an established name already.  (I can see the stats that show what names get the most traffic with us).  I also hope those tools we highlighted over time reconfigure to enable oAuth as soon as they can before they are forgotten.