tweets

Webware Radar: Get free taxis from Boost Mobile

St. Patrick's Day is a popular day for "celebrations" and realizing that, Boost Mobile has those who want to party covered. According to the company, it will offer the #TAXI feature on all Boost Mobile phones free of charge on St. Patrick's Day. Upon dialing #-8-2-9-4, Boost Mobile users will be connected automatically to the first available cab company in their area. The feature will work in over 2,000 Boost Mobile network coverage areas. The service will only be free Tuesday.

Mint.com, an online personal finance service, announced Monday that it added its 1 … Read more

Twitter as a brand-builder: Three examples

Twitter is not yet completely mainstream, but several mainstream companies are using the service to communicate with customers and potential customers. Some use it to advertise products, while others use Twitter to field customer complaints.

I looked at how several companies are using Twitter, and have a few guidelines that brand managers can apply to make the nanoblog service work for them. It appears that there are some actions that companies simply must engage in if they want to take advantage of Twitter as a marketing service.

Starbucks: It's about the people Companies are not people. Consumers, for the … Read more

Twitter buzz gets a status update

Not only because a surgery conducted via Twitter made headlines the other day, Twitter is all the buzz (again). And it seems as if almost three years after its now-legendary debut at South by Southwest Interactive, the popular microblogging service has reached the second (or third) hype cycle, entering the business and media mainstream as the ultimate narrow--and broadcast--network.

As Joel Comm, CEO of InfoMedia and author of "Twitter Power," points out:

It's like the old saying, "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." People who use … Read more

How to be a better tweeter

Realizing my last round of Twitter research left my Twitter followers wondering what was wrong with me, I thought it would be a good time to perform research that they actually valued. It wasn't easy. My desire to add more followers, at all costs, consumes me.

But this time, I think I succeeded. Instead of trying to find ways to add more followers through dodgy practices, I've researched ways to add more value to Twitter and become a better tweeter.

The Sweet Retweet Although it's a relatively new practice, retweeting is an outstanding way to improve your … Read more

TwitterEyes shortens tweets before you send them

Firefox users looking to shorten their Twitter messages to fit inside the service's 140-character limit should check out TwitterEyes. This new, experimental extension takes a look at what you've written and shortens any words it can. This includes any extra spaces you might have put in, along with words like "and" which gets turned into "&" as well as "first" which becomes "1st." In future versions developer Danny Pier says he intends to add a user-controlled dictionary that would allow you to add your own words and their shorter replacements.… Read more

Report: TweetDeck raising angel round

TweetDeck is all atwitter.

According to a report in AllThingsD, the software application maker is in the process of closing a round of angel funding, led by Betaworks.

TweetDeck is looking to land angel funding somewhere under the $500,000 mark, according to the report.

The company's desktop app, currently in public beta, splits stream of tweets into specific columns based on groups or topics.

Here is Webware's take on the app:

TweetDeck: This is yet another AIR-based Twitter client, but it has one very useful feature for the polite Twitter user: you can put a collection of … Read more

CoTweet - yet another way Twitter could make money

Currently in private beta, CoTweet is designed for companies and teams that need control over their use of Twitter as a brand. One of the big challenges of using Twitter as a team is that you are forced to share one login and you can't track who posted what Tweet.

This is a great idea and one that I am sure many companies would be willing to pay for the service, likely moreso if it had come from Twitter itself, instead of a third-party.

Trying to figure out Twitter's business model is a common parlor game here in … Read more

6 services that help you find, follow friends on Twitter

Finding friends on Twitter was simple when the service was in its infancy, but today, Twitter is home to millions of users. In fact, 70 percent of the entire Twitter community is composed of people who signed up in 2008 and 5,000 to 10,000 new users sign up each day.

That's why I've compiled a list of some great solutions that have helped me find friends more efficiently than asking for their usernames.

Twitter search

Maybe this is an obvious pick, but using Twitter search to find friends on Twitter actually works quite well. The feature allows users to search for a person by name and based on that information, it will return all the Twitter users who registered under that name.

Overall, Twitter's search tool is really fast, and will find the person you're looking for without much digging. That said, it has one severe limitation: finding people with common names like John Smith will take some time, and it's only useful when searching for a specific person.

Twubble

If you haven't tried Twubble out yet, it's time you give it a spin.

Twubble is simple and requires little to help you find friends. Upon surfing to the site, you're presented with a "Find some friends!" button, which when clicked, analyzes your Twitter account and finds people who you may want to follow. I was skeptical at first, but after clicking the button, the service returned a slew of colleagues and friends that I had no idea were on Twitter. I followed many of them and tried the button again. This time, it returned many of the same people and most of the users that I had already followed were displayed. Twubble realized that, though, and delivered a disclaimer saying it may not work as well the second time around if you follow many people.

Although the same results are returned multiple times, it's the first run-through that matters. If you want to find friends and colleagues quickly, Twubble offers a fine solution for doing just that.

Mr. Tweet

Mr. Tweet is similar to Twubble in that it analyzes your Twitter account to find other people that it thinks you should follow. But what it provides that Twubble doesn't is a host of stats with information about how you may know a particular person and how active they are on Twitter.

If you want, Mr. Tweet will even auto-follow all the people it finds for you, but it requires you to hand over your username and password to the service to do it--a major security issue, if you ask me. Regardless, it works extremely well and returned a nice list of people worth following.

I chose to follow them myself, though. I don't need any help from Mr. Tweet.… Read more

Effortless tweeting on the go

Strangely, Twitter seems to take only a passive interest in its own propagation, leaving third-party developers like Orangatame Software fill the void. The free application TwitterBerry gives BlackBerry owners plenty of room to post tweets and read friends' time lines.

The default screen asks Twitter's hallmark question, "What are you doing?" If you don't feel like answering, you can press the BlackBerry's menu key to peruse your friends' time line or the public time line, sift through direct messages and replies, and search your own history of tweets. TwitterBerry isn't nearly as flashy-looking as … Read more