oneforty blog

17
Mar 10

App Round Up: St. Paddy’s Day!

Leprechaun sign

It’s that time of year again… parades, shamrocks, and terrible Irish accent impersonations.

Looking to capture the festivities on Twitter? We have the Twitter tools to help you out!

Getting Ready

Twibbon – What could be cooler than putting a shamrock icon on the corner of your Twitter avatar? A pot of gold? A pint o’ beer?! Whatever your fancy, Twibbon gives you the power to add visual flair to your tweets. You can create your own icon or search through a database of thousands.

Themeleon – Themeleon is a magical background generator for Twitter. We can’t confirm that it is, in fact, Irish-magic… but we’re sure that their large selection of patterns and colors will give you plenty to choose from. Perfect if you’re looking to paint your profile green for the festivities.

Getting Organized

Plancast – Organizing your own rowdy rabble has never been easier. Plancast allows you to post your future plans over a map with options to broadcast it to your social networks. Friends can see where you’re going and who’s coming along!

Foursquare, Gowalla, and BrightKite – These contenders all allow you to post your whereabouts via your trusty GPS-enabled smartphone. We suspect that the likelihood of your friends actually finding you to decrease steadily as the night goes on, dropping sharply after the third round of Jameson.

Getting Your Drink On

Foamee – Tired of trying to keep track of who owes who a drink? Foamee is a tool for tracking just that. Just send a message to @ioubeer with your friend’s Twitter handle, and Foamee will remember it for you. There’s also a version for coffee, in case you need a pick-me-up the next morning…

Twitabrew – What was the delicious, mouthwateringly obscure microbrew you tasted last week? Twitabrew allows you to keep track of any interesting beers you encounter on St. Patrick’s and beyond. Review your brews and score them on a scale of one to five using a the #twitabrew hashtag.

IDrankThis – So maybe beer isn’t always your drink of choice. Maybe you’re drinking cocktails and wine instead. IDrankThis has you covered. In addition to reviews and ratings of your favorite beverages, you can snap a photo of your drink and upload it for the world to see.

***

Despite the holiday, we’re working hard today at oneforty. But as soon as 5 o’clock hits…

beer fridge

Remember folks: Have fun but tweet responsibly!

Photo Credit: 1 2

Posted by Yifei
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08
Mar 10

SXSW Twitter Tools: Make SXSW Work For You

So you’re headed down to Austin for a whirlwind tour of panels, parties, networking, parties, music, film, and parties, huh? Everyone and their grandma knows the craziness that’s going down starting March 12.

Even if you aren’t planning to launch (or re-launch) your app like Twitter did in 2007 or Foursquare did last year, you can still make SXSW work for you. Our Staff Picks this week will help you make the most of your (expensive, but business expense) trip:

Finding Events/Parties

SitBy.Us is a very specific tool for SXSW Interactive claiming to allow you to discover panels and share where you’re sitting at with your friends and Twitter followers. It has a built-in scheduling feature so you can make sure you don’t double book yourself.

RiotVine is an event discovery tool (primarily music) that taps into your Twitter network to recommend events your friends are interested in. For SXSW, they’ve assembled a comprehensive, sortable list of the parties and shows.

ListiMonkey is a general tool that allows you to follow at specific Twitter list via email updates. You can get hourly updates of all the #sxsw tweets delivered right to your Inbox if you forget to scan the search from your iPhone or Android device.

For Organizers/Speakers

Plancast, in the words of TechCrunch is, “Foursquare for the future.” You can display a map to an upcoming event and invite your Twitter followers to join you. Useful for an impromptu tweetup perhaps?

Poll Everywhere is a simple presentation tool that allows speakers to poll their audience (or Twitter user their followers). Votes can be collected via SMS, Twitter, or the web and results are displayed in realtime.

UPDATE: Hashtag tools, since following hashtags is practically an Olympic Sport at #SXSW, don’t leave home without stocking up on #Hashtag Twitter tools. Read all about ‘em in our #Hashtag Twitter Tools App Roundup.

For Fun

Gowalla is a geo-mobile game that allows you to check-in and collect virtual “items” at locations. It’s similar to Foursquare, but the company is based in Austin and is planning a treasure hunt for invites to its party.

Twistori is a gorgeous graphical display for tweets containing the words love, hate, think, believe, feel, and wish. Considering the high volume of tweets that are going to be streaming out from SXSW, this could be an interesting way to track what people love/hate.

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Also, the entire @oneforty team will be at SXSW; we’d love to meet you – just send an e-mail to developers@oneforty.com and we’ll be sure to let you know where we’ll be. (If you’re a developer, be sure to ask us for an invite to our “secret” beer-up! Sorry everyone else, Twitter geeks only.)

NOT going to SXSW? Here are some tools to “mute” the hashtags, keywords, and most enthusiastic tweeters that would otherwise take over your tweet stream.

Posted by sachin
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05
Mar 10

Twitter Milestone: 10 Billionth Tweet

This is a guest post by Adele McAlear and originally appeared on her blog. You can follow her on Twitter @AdeleMcAlear.

Just a few days short of its 4th birthday, Twitter marked a milestone of 10 billion tweets at approximately 16:54:11 Pacific Time on Thursday, March 4, 2010.

That makes approximately 6,925,208 tweets for each of the 1,444 days since Twitter was founded on March 21, 2006. Though, we know that most of those tweets have been in the last year. In fact, was only 5 months ago that Twitter celebrated the 5 billionth tweet. Just last month Twitter reported that it was processing 50 million tweets a day. That represents 1.2 billion tweets per month and TechCrunch reported that January 2010 saw 75 million unique visitors to Twitter.

But who made the landmark 10 billionth tweet? I asked my friend @Kosso to check the Twitter API for me to find out. However, the tweet was made from a private account.

“One instance where I can say we should ignore our privacy policy: when big round numbers are involved,” proclaimed Twitter employee Doug Williams (@dougw) after the event.

And although we don’t know who made number 10 billion, congratulations will go to Brazilian Rafaela Marques (@lelamarques) on having number 9,999,999,999.

The Twitter team were excitedly watching the numbers tick over and tweeting up a storm to see if one of their own might be the one to score the 10 billionth. (Number 5 billion was made by @robinsloan, who now works at Twitter, as shown below.)

And then, when the moment came,

they celebrated (with a flurry of Macbooks).

The milestone was anticipated earlier today when TechCrunch ran a story highlighting the event and explained that GigaTweet’s measurement was not entirely accurate. Even Twitter employee Ryan King (@rk) used tweet number 9,995,692,516 to remark:

But since the start, for those of us who’ve been around Twitter for a while, and those who’ve built businesses on and around the simplicity of 140 characters, it’s a time to cheer on the evolution and success of a service that has changed the way we communicate, changed lives and brought so many of us together.

Posted by onefortyguest
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03
Mar 10

#Hashtag Twitter Tools App Round Up

Hashtags, love ‘em or hate ‘em, are an integral part of the Twitter experience. Used right, they can help you sort tweets, join real-time conversations, and find interesting content. And not surprisingly, there are dozens of Twitter apps designed to help you get the most out of your hashtags. Here’s some you should know about:

What Does #This Mean?

These tools help you decipher the oftentimes cryptic/overlapping meanings of hashtags.

Tagal.us is a user-contributed dictionary of Hashtags that’s accessible right through Twitter. Send @tagalus a message with “define” followed by a hashtag in order to receive the definition via @reply back. Also available via the web or browser bookmarklet.

What the Trend is a database of current trending topics and hashtags – containing nearly 35,000 user-defined trends. It supports filtering by location and is used by default in a variety of Twitter clients.

Analytics/Monitoring

These tools help you track specific hashtags/keywords, allowing a variety of business applications.

Trendistic is Google Trends for Twitter, allowing you to see the hourly-updated popularity of any hashtag from up to 180 days prior (60 days prior without registration). It allows for side-by-side comparisons as well as optional notifications if a topic you’re watching starts “trending.”

Twitterfall is a real-time Twitter search engine with powerful filters that range from hashtags to list to geolocation. Results are automatically queued and cascaded from the top of the screen at a customizable pace.

HashTweeps is a simple way to find the top tweeters in any given topic or hashtag. After typing a search term, HashTweeps lists all users who tweeted about the topic by the total number of tweets.

RowFeeder is an automated Twitter tracker – allowing you to aggregate mentions of any topic, user, phase, or hashtag into a Google spreadsheet. $2.49 buys you 48 hours of tracking and extended plans are available.

Chat/Grouping

These tools use hashtags to create semi-enclosed groups within Twitter, allowing for public real-time chats to take place.

TweetChat creates chatrooms inside of Twitter, organizing group convos by hashtag and filtering out everything else. It also gives the user control of the speed at which updates are displayed and the ability to feature and block any user.

Twubs also uses hashtags to group users and tweets together, but also adds in additional features such as live moderation and scheduling for conferences.

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That’s just a small sampler of the pie. For more, visit oneforty’s collection of apps tagged “hashtags”. Let us (and the developers) know which ones you liked!

Posted by Yifei
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01
Mar 10

Howdy Developers, Get Found on oneforty

I actually own a white straw Stetson for summers. I also have a black felt one for winters.

At oneforty, we want developers’ apps to be found by the users who want them. While we are continually working on new and interesting ways for apps to be found, shared, reviewed, and used, sometimes developers don’t do everything they can to make it easy for our users to find their apps.

So, developers, here’s some best practices to get your application found:

Claim your app and put some faces with the name

Users like to see that developers have claimed their apps on oneforty; it means that they know that the developer cares about the community and is listening to their users. We recommend that you register the application’s Twitter handle (example: EasyTweets) or a support Twitter handle (example: Seesmic Look) as the developer of the app, and then have the humans who built the app listed as contributors (example: RowFeeder). If there is only one developer, feel free to use your personal account to claim the app if you wish (example: Tweetie 2). You can transfer the app to another account (the other account must already be a developer account in our system) and add contributors from your claimed app’s edit page.

Pay attention to your item’s description, tags, platforms, categories, and icon

You may want to have a catchy description for your application, but most users’ first interaction with your application is on a search result page (SERP). Make sure that the first 50 or so characters of your description clearly state what the app does better than any other app. Users compare applications in search results based on their descriptions, so you want to make sure you’re convincing. We also only show the first four tags for your application in our SERPs. You can have twenty tags for your app, and they’ll all show up on the item page, but only the first four show up in search results (example: Analytics tools and the HootSuite item page). Make sure you re-order your tags so that the most distinguishing ones are first. Pick the right category(ies) and platform(s) for your app so that they show up when users browse our pages for those categories and apps. Lastly, make sure you have a nice, square icon to represent your app. User testing has found that users trust apps less when they see a skewed or “smooshed” icon.

Add good screenshots

Users loooooove to see screenshots of applications when they’re reviewing item pages. When you add screenshots, however, make sure that they aren’t so big that the lightbox is bigger than the page canvas. You should crop or resize your screenshots so that they fit inside a standard browser window’s dimensions. When in doubt, upload and test!

Get your users to rate and review your app

It’s no surprise that ratings and reviews figure heavily into our sorting mechanism in our search result pages. If you want to rise up in our rankings, tell your users to come to oneforty and leave reviews of your app. The more users an app has, the higher it ranks. The better the rating is, the higher it ranks. As your app changes and adds features, send them back – users can edit their oneforty ratings and reviews without having to write a brand new one. And make sure that they leave a star rating as well – it’s good structured data that our search engine really likes.