Tag: Twitter

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Shannon Whitley, in an open letter to Ryan Sarver of Twitter, responding to the new Twitter API strategy statements:

I understand the thinking behind this strategy, “We must control input to the system.  We need to have X in place to generate revenue using Y.”  I don’t have to tell you how wrong this thinking is, but somehow it’s moved beyond a bean counter’s dream into reality.  Somehow, everyone in the boardroom forgot about Twitter’s history of amazing innovation due to having an open API.  They forgot that Twitter is a beautiful messaging platform with unlimited potential.  Twitter has unlimited potential specifically because innovation on top of the API has been largely unlimited, until now.

What Twitter is doing right now is exactly what happens when you build your platform without a revenue strategy. Now, the strategy appears to be incompatible with the innovation that has come before.

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I Tweeted about this previously, but as Twitter sucks for having actual conversations (especially when you don’t have a desktop client running), I thought I’d re-do this as a blog post and encourage you to comment.

Here’s what I’m looking for:

  • Has to be for Mac OS.
  • Can’t use AIR.
  • Can’t use Java.
  • Can’t be ugly.

If you have or know a Twitter client that falls under these restrictions, please suggest it below. What I’ll do is find a night where I try all of them and I’ll post my reactions to them in a fuller blog post.

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UPDATED 3/16/14: I’ve closed comments on this post; most services that aren’t in this list don’t support this kind of connection. I hope you find the instructions and examples here helpful regardless.

UPDATED 3/26/11: Sharedaddy is now distributed as part of Jetpack, so I’m taking the opportunity to add some additional services to this list. Please continue to contribute if you have any other services that you’d like to see on this post.

In my previous post, I described in detail the process necessary to add a sharing service to the WordPress.com Sharing tools (also known to self-hosted WordPress users as the Sharedaddy plugin). Even if your favorite social network or sharing site isn’t available, odds are likely that you can find a method to add that service as a custom sharing button.

For the tutorial, I used Delicious as an example service because it’s a service I’ve used in the past, had a good URL structure that’s easy to demonstrate, and had nice screens that helped my instructions to be easier to follow. (It also had a nice site-provided 16×16 icon that we could use to mark the sharing service.)

This is a collection of various common sharing services that aren’t included in the Sharing tools defaults. It provides the necessary information so you can plug them in to your Sharing options. Remember, the three things you need to define a sharing service are:

  • A name for the sharing service (used for the text label)
  • The URL needed to send a link to the sharing service, which can use up to five variables, which are:
    • %post_tags%
    • %post_title%
    • %post_full_url%
    • %post_url%
    • %post_excerpt%
  • And the URL of a 16×16 icon that can be used for the service.

(If you need a refresher on how to add custom sharing services, please see the previous article.)

I’ll provide the Sharing URL format—including the variable placement—and a 16×16 button icon you can use for the service. Whenever possible, I’ve tried to pull the icon from the sharing service itself to avoid any licensing issues. This means some of the icons are ugly. If you would rather, are there a few very nice sharing service icon collections available, but you’ll have to credit the author if you use them.

Since a good number of WordPress.com blogs have used GetSocialLive in the past, I think that’s as good a place to start as any. I’m only going to include those for version one of this post; if you would like another service or you have one that should be added to this list, please leave a comment and I’ll be happy to include it in a revision. I’d like this post be be a kind of “encyclopedia” of these services for people who are using ShareDaddy.

Filling Out the GetSocialLive Services

Of the services included in the GetSocialLive tool, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Twitter are already provided for use in Sharing Settings—so you won’t have to worry about those. As for the rest:

Delicious

http://delicious.com/save?url=%post_url%&title=%post_title%

Blinklist

http://blinklist.com/blink?u=%post_url%&t=%post_title%

Technorati

http://technorati.com/faves?add=%post_url%

Yahoo! Buzz

http://buzz.yahoo.com/buzz?targetUrl=%post_url%&headline=%post_title%

Newsvine

http://newsvine.com/_wine/save?u=%post_url%&h=%post_title%

Services I Use, So They Get Preferential Treatment and Are Higher on the List

Evernote

http://www.evernote.com/clip.action?url=%post_url%&title=%post_title%

Hacker News

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%post_url%&t=%post_title%

Instapaper

http://www.instapaper.com/hello2?url=%post_full_url%&title=%post_title%

Other Services

Do melhor

http://domelhor.net/submit.php?url=%post_url%&title=%post_title%

FARK.com

http://www.fark.com/cgi/farkit.pl?u=%post_url%&h=%post_title%

Google Buzz

http://www.google.com/buzz/post?message=%post_title%&url=%post_url%

Menéame

http://meneame.net/submit.php?url=%post_url%&title=%post_title%

MySpace

http://www.myspace.com/Modules/PostTo/Pages/?u=%post_url%

Orkut

http://promote.orkut.com/preview?nt=orkut.com&du=%post_url%&tt=%post_title%

Pinboard

http://pinboard.in/add?showtags=yes&url=%post_url%&title=%post_title%

Posterous

http://posterous.com/share?linkto=%post_url%

Tumblr

http://www.tumblr.com/share?v=3&u=%post_url%&t=%post_title%

But Wait; There’s More

If you have a sharing service you either want to add to Sharedaddy’s custom option, or have added and already know how it works, please feel free to leave a comment on this post and I can get it added to this list.

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A team of creatives, tech geeks, marketers and writers gathered in an undisclosed location in Portland, Oregon yesterday and produced 87 short comedic YouTube videos about Old Spice. In real time. They leveraged Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and blogs. They dared to touch the wild beasts of 4chan and they lived to tell the tale. Even 4chan loved it. Everybody loved it; those videos and 74 more made so far today have now been viewed more than 4 million times and counting. The team worked for 11 hours yesterday to make 87 short videos, that’s just over 7 minutes per video, not accounting for any breaks taken. Then they woke up this morning and they are still making more videos right now. Here’s how it’s going down.

So far, this is one of the best advertising pushes I’ve seen on the Internet. It’s truly inspired.

(via How the Old Spice Videos Are Being Made – Read Write Web.)

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Chris Brogan on company presence management:

Let’s say you build a pretty decent stream of conversations on Facebook. Maybe it’s your junior comms person and they’re just drumming up excitement for a new product that the people want. Everything’s going great, and there’s an active group, and people feel like they’re being treated like humans. Know who comes next?

Marketing. In some companies, they come crashing down from the hills like angry Mongol raiders, set on converting people from interested community members into hot leads to purchase. They start asking to push materials down the community channel. They ask for lists. They push for opt-ins for email marketing.

Is it the right move? Not as listed above. Not if that’s not how you set the presence up to begin with. It will feel like horrid bait and switch. People will flock away pretty darned fast if you switch them over into convert mode. They’ll also hate you if you just pull up stakes and run after the product is launched. If they’ve committed to talking with you at those points of presence, they want you there for the long term.

Be wary of this. Think further out than a single campaign. If you set up the direct line, you have to be willing to answer it for more than the short term.

I don’t always agree with Brogan (or even the rest of the article), but on this I think he’s spot-on.

The most important thing for you to do with social media and interactions is to talk with your customers and to listen to them. Give them the “direct line,” as Brogan says elsewhere in the article, and then embrace that method of communications. It shouldn’t be a single point of contact for all your customers, but instead a network of people who are invested in their work who are passionate about serving people and connecting with the people on the other side of their work.

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Well, actually, Google is all about the advertising, but that’s another article.

From the Twitter blog:

We went back to the original sketch and made everything far more awesome. Currently, a small subset of Twitter users are trying this new search feature in the sidebar of their Twitter home page. When you do a search, you don’t go to another page, the relevant tweets instantly show up where you’d expect them to—right on your home page where tweets love to be.

Take a look at the whole article. It’s awesome to see the design process boiled down to a simple sketch on a legal pad. Sometimes, the best ideas have very simple beginnings.