Tag Archives: Twitter Tools

by Michelle Lentz

We’ve got eVite and MyPunchbowl, among others, to invite our friends to official gatherings. But what about Tweetups? One of my girlfriends organized a tweetup recently, tweeted it dozens of times, and still had no idea how many people were attending.

Twtvite is eVite for your Tweetups. You can actually have people respond and manage the responses / RSVPs. Twtvite is basically a simple event planner for use on Twitter. You can create a tweetup, invite your twitter followers, and manage RSVPs. There’s even an embeddable widget and the ability to share via Facebook and even share via the old standby of email.

Twtvite is the brainchild of twtapps, run by  Felipe Coimbra. Felipe has created all sorts of fun, and even useful, Twitter apps, including TwtTrip, twtpoll, the rather nifty twtQpon, and many more little apps.

Simple but effective – it’s the best kind of Twitter app.

__

Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel, Blogs: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net

Nominee for City Beat’s Best of the City: Vote for My Wine Education under Public Eye > Blog:
http://www.bestofcincinnati.com/

by Michelle Lentz

It’s not unusual for me to turn to Twitter for technical support. When Parallels on my Mac wasn’t working correctly, I was able to troubleshoot using Twitter. When I was trying to get my Mac and my PCs to “speak” to each other, I got it working with aid from my Twitter friends. Non-technical? When I needed to write my first press release, I recieved tons of tips via Twitter, and several kind folks even edited the document for me.

So Lazy Tweet seems like a brilliant idea to me. In it’s own way, it’s a combination of Metafilter and Yahoo! Answers. If you have a question, you can tweet it to your own followers and friends. Use lazytweet or lazyweb (with or without hashtags or @) and the tweet will be picked up by @lazytweet and display on the Lazy Tweet page. You can watch for your answer,subscribe to their feed, or they’ll @ reply your answer to you on Twitter.

The advantage to Lazy Tweet is two-fold: your question is exposed to a wider audience than your immediate friends and followers, and you can play “expert” by answering questions to which you might know the answer.

__
Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.

by Michelle Lentz

Tweetake was launched a few days ago by Alfred Armstrong and Nikki Pilkington. The concept behind Tweetake is that you might want to back up your Twitter data. This includes your friends, followers, favorites, and even your Tweets.

Enter your Twitter user name and password into fields and select what you want to back up. It quickly downloads everything and creates a CSV file. I did notice that my Tweets only went back to June 20 on this account and July 16 on my slightly more verbose personal account. I’m not sure what limits they have, or how far back Twitter retains our Tweets. (I just noticed I no longer have Twitter favorites before May on twitter.com.)

You may notice the note regarding Tweetdeck. Due to the process in which Twitter limits calls, there is an odd little conflict with Tweetake and Tweetdeck and similar apps (explained here). The workaround is easy. Shut down Tweetdeck, wait a minute or so, and then run Tweetake. I had no problem at all running Tweetake with Twhirl running as well.

This is a nifty tool. If you want to retain your Twitter data ,just run Tweetake once every other month or so and you should be fine.

__
Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.

by Michelle Lentz

I read a disturbing post today on Stay n Alive in which Jesse Stay commented on a trend he sees of developers leaving Twitter for other positions. Basically, Twitter needs their developers to stay or needs them to be replaced by other developers. All the venture capital in the world can’t save you if you don’t have people to make things work.

In a semi-related post, Louis Gray commented on twitAbit. This is an interesting little app and I can’t decide if I want it to be the face of things to come or not. twitAbit basically lets you go ahead and tweet your heart out when Twitter is down. The app saves your tweets and sends them out to Twitter once the system is back online. Yes, twitAbit was created just for when Twitter is down.

In all fairness, I haven’t had many issues with Twitter this month (knock on wood). May, however, wasn’t exactly a shining example of stability. Here’s hoping they’ve fixed their issues and more services like twitAbit won’t be needed.

What are your thoughts on services like this popping up? Would you rather just move to Pownce/Friendfeed/Plurk, or have you invested too much time in building your Twitter community?

Cheers!
__
Events, news, apps, and more – let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, via Twitter, or via Pownce.