location, location

2009-02-14T14:30:00.000-08:00

stoutpirate has moved to my domain http://blog.harrisonpowers.com

cream of the twitter tool crop

2009-02-11T18:32:00.000-08:00

I'm going to suggest you sign up for twitter regardless of your understanding of it. Import your address book, search for your favorite celebs: @elimanning, @Michael_Phelps, @LukeWilson, @algore, @MCHammer, @THE_REAL_SHAQ, @lancearmstrong, @snoopdogg, etc.. build from there.

If you don't know how to use twitter, google 'how do i use twitter' to have your wildest dreams come alive.

After a few weeks I had close to 200 followers, now at week 4 I have 800. I'd like to say my following is growing exponentially, or at some growing rate, but we'll see in weeks. I'm not going to keep count of who follows me and when, that's what twittercounter is for. twittercounter keeps track of your follow history and graphs them on a nice interactive chart.

They also provide statistics And a badge

Next up is Mr. Tweet. All you need to do is follow @MrTweet and he will contact you once he's collected enough information about your extended network. Mr. Tweet will serve you recommended people to follow, based on interests and popularity. Mr. Tweet also keeps stats on you to show other people using the service. Every other week I get this direct message:

Hi! Your suggestions and profile stats were just refreshed (done biweekly) Have fun! http://mrtweet.net/home/harrisonpowers

To quickly check who you are following that isn't following you back, and vice versa, check out friendorfollow. Just enter your twitter name and get a nice picture collage of everyone you're (dis)connected to.

For statistics on your tweeting with regards to how influential you are, we pull out the Twitter Influence Calculator. This service lets you know how often you are being referenced and retweeted, as well as indicating your signal-to-noise ratio.

Now for the last of the web apps, but probably the most important. socialtoo is a great asset to your twitter account. socialtoo sends you an email every morning with a list of everyone that followed you and everyone that stopped following you. You can also set up socialtoo to automatically reciprocate follows, and it can send an automatic Direct Message to your new followers. This feature I feel is annoying, and thankfully you can turn it off receiving them in your socialtoo settings.

Now I would like to move on to the desktop apps for twitter. The first being the most popular and robust. I would also like to point out that a major revision of it is being released tomorrow, Marshall Kirkpatrick from Read/WriteWeb lays out the new features of TweetDeck:

Language translation, Stocktwits, Hashtag Support, User Search, One Column View [...] easier group management to email forwarding of tweets to some API access improvements.

The app is popular because of it's interface, which is split into customizable columns.
I use (All Tweets)|(Replies)|(Group:Friends)|(Search: opensource)|etc.. you can tailor it to your needs.

Another great twitter client is DestroyTwitter, my current favorite, which has a tabbed interface. And great colors. It also rarely goes over my Twitter API limit unlike TweetDeck.

Both apps are built on the Adobe AIR development platform. The apps work very well, but they crash occasionally. It's not a serious problem though, as all the information is stored remotely.

If you've made it this far, you're interested in twitter. And you might have noticed a lack of screencast in this post, for which I apologize. Please take these tips with you:

Follow people that get linked in your twitterstream. This is the classic way of expanding your network.
Link, link, link - Personal information is interesting at times, but unless wrapped in some well thought-out humor gets pretty dry. Share links to things you find interesting, and make sure to shorten them with a service like is.gd (built into the twitter apps mentioned)
Track those links - If you are curious how many people are clicking your links you can use a url-shortener with extended capabilities like adjix.
Retweet your favorite tweets.

Oh yeah, and follow me. I'll be sure to follow you.

iphone <-> google is official

2009-02-09T10:40:00.000-08:00

Google made it official, push synchronization support for the iPhone. You can now synchronize your contacts and calendars between the iPhone and Google. This was possible before using a third-party microsoft exchange server, but now it's official.

Props to Marcus Foster, Product Manager @ Google

going full-screen on a mac

2009-02-08T16:12:00.000-08:00

Most popular web browsers for macs cannot go full-screen. This is a feature I used regularly before my recent switch to mac (which, by the way, has been fantastic). Now I am happy to say that once again Google Reader is full-screened and I am loving life :) All thanks to this handy app Plainview. The menubar autohides and the app supports shortcuts that feel intuitive to me: command+L brings up the location bar, command+T toggles your full-screened windows.

Props to Creative Applications for this screencast.

Plainview [Mac] // CreativeApplications.Net // Vimeo.

rss and google reader

2009-02-07T23:48:00.000-08:00

watch in HD // harrisonpowers // vimeo.

ahoy

2009-02-04T12:11:00.000-08:00

This here blog will be a vine of the internet, ever growing and changing. What it has set to accomplish at this point in its life is teaching you something. Hopefully you'll learn to respect the vine and grow to appreciate its wisdom.

The internet is a vast sea of treachery and deceit, but with the correct guidance one can find bountiful treasures. I have sailed to the far corners of the dark web and have survived to tell some tales. Add me to your feed reader and I shall reward you with jewels of knowledge. What's that? You don't know what a feed reader is? Well onto our first lesson then..