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The 404 275: Where Wilson Kindled himself

Wilson is off getting Kindled, so Jeff and I take the show by the horns and relate our weekend stories. I got a chance to watch the live taping of Saturday Night Live, and sat next to Kirsten Dunst (yes, I wussed out and didn't ask her to come on the show). I also checked out Comic Con on Sunday, and a big thanks to David from Comixology for hooking it up with his extra pass. Listen in to today's show for a two-man conversation about Twitter spam, child subway performers, more opinions on the Michael Phelps controversy, … Read more

Top social brands

The question which brands are the best at “socializing” with their audiences is often asked, but rarely answered. Now Vitrue, a social media advertising solutions company, has attempted to capture a snapshot by releasing a Top Social Brands of 2008 list. The ranking is based on the Social Media Index (SMI), a measurement system the company launched to help track brands' share of voice on the social web. The Top 100, which range from the iPhone, CNN, and Disney at the top of the list, to Jet Blue, Puma, and Sears at the bottom of the list, were drawn from … Read more

Facebook makes new push for more apps

Facebook is looking to unleash a new wave of applications to get its users creating and sharing more content.

The social-networking company has launched a number of APIs (application programming interfaces) that will let developers access content and methods for sharing in Facebook apps including Status, Notes, Links, and Video. According to a post on the Facebook developers blog Friday evening:

Specifically, your applications can now directly access all of a user's status, links, and notes via new methods and FQL calls. Your application will have access to any status, notes, or links from the active user or their … Read more

Congressman twitters secret trip to Iraq

Update, 2/11/09: Pentagon is "reevaluating current policy," regarding movement of congressional delegations.

For security reasons, the congressional delegation led by House Minority Leader John Boehner to Iraq today was supposed to be secret. Everything had been going fine in that regard. Even media outlets that knew of the trip, like the Congressional Quarterly, kept a lid on the news.

That was, until Rep. Peter Hoekstra twittered his arrival into Baghdad. "Just landed in Baghdad. I believe it may be first time I've had bb service in Iraq. 11th trip here," he sent from … Read more

Twitterhawk: Clever Twitter marketing, or spam?

Updated at 8:23 PM with statement from TwitterHawk creator. See end of post.

I just got a pointer to TwitterHawk, a clever bot that will monitor Twitter posts for key words and send automated and pre-programmed @ replies to them when those words pop up.

The service actually looks for more than just words. It can also scan for posts from specific locations (how it determines location is not clear to me) or for tweets that are calculated to have generally positive or negative sentiment, or for those that have links embedded in them.

The examples given on the site … Read more

Shaq's tweets are OK, but Lily Allen's are sexier

Forget Shaquille O'Neal. If I'm going to get into celeb tweets, I'd rather read singer Lily Allen's riff about sexual etiquette.

Much was made when O'Neal, the hulking basketball star, started posting comments on Twitter. Now, there's a sample of tweets from famous musicians at Pitchforkmedia.com. The music blog has listed some of the more well-known artists and a sample of their tweets.

Pitchfork also makes a guess at whether the tweets were written by artists or by some functionary.

Here's a sample allegedly from The Long Winters' John Roderick: "It'… Read more

Twittersheep tells you more about your followers

If you're wondering about the people who subscribe to your Twitter feed, there's a newish service out called Twittersheep that will tell you about them. It scours your list of followers and pulls together a tag cloud with various keywords to describe them.

If you remember Tweetclouds, the idea is similar, except instead of going through your posting history, it simply grabs its words from the profiles of those who are following you. This isn't an exact science, but it made me notice that a good majority of the people following me are work-related, be it PR … Read more

The 'Twitter Effect': Possibilities and limits

Is there a "Twitter Effect," by which the rapid spread of information through the microblogging service can crush a Web site with traffic? As I see it, the answer is yes, but it's not as simple as it might appear at first blush.

First, the background: Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore, whose Twitter postings more than 52,000 people follow, concluded his February 2 tweet mentioning that a blog post on "how to use Twitter to find your next job" took that site down with an inundation of traffic. He suggested calling the phenomenon the Mashable Effect. … 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