New Twitter: 25 Tips and Tricks for Savvy Tweeters

Twitter Keyboard Shorcuts


The reorganized and refashioned Twitter.com is a markedly different beast than it was just 48 hours ago. Now millions of users who call Twitter’s web destination home are looking for help. Perhaps just 25 soupcons of it. If so, look no further than this list of 25 new Twitter tips.

Sound off in the comments if you have other Twitter tips and tricks to share.


Use These 22 Keyboard Shortcuts


Twitter’s keyboard shortcuts got an update during Twitter’s design overhaul on Dec 8. In the image above, you’ll see the new key strokes. Below is a quick how-to guide to clear up any immediate confusion.

Actions for tweets:

  • Click “f” to favorite a tweet (must have an individual tweet open; test it here)
  • Click “r” to reply to a tweet (must have an individual tweet open; test it here)
  • Click “t” to retweet (must have an individual tweet open; test it here)
  • Click “m” to send a direct message (must have an individual tweet open; test it here)
  • Click “n” to create a new tweet (can do this on anywhere on Twitter)
  • Click “Enter” to see tweet details (must use navigation shortcut “j” first to make this one work; test it here)
  • Click “l” to close all open tweets (open a few tweets using the “Enter” shortcut and then try closing them)

Navigation:

  • Click “Shift” and “?” for a list of all keyboard shortcuts
  • Click “j” to go to the next tweet (can do on homepage or your timeline)
  • Click “k” to go to the previous tweet (can do on homepage or your timeline)
  • Click the space bar to page down
  • Click “/” to search
  • Click / to jump to the search box
  • Click “.” to load new tweets

Timelines

  • Click “g” then “h” to go home
  • Click “g” then “c” to go to the Connect page
  • Click “g” then “m” to go to your direct messages
  • Click “g” then “d” to go to the Discover page
  • Click “g” then “p” to go to your profile
  • Click “g” then “f” to go to your favorites
  • Click “g” then “m” to go to your direct messages
  • Click “g” then “u” to search for any user’s timeline

Move Your Direct Messages and Lists Front and Center


Your Messages tab and Lists pull-down menu are no longer on your homepage. They’ve both been moved to the main pull-down menu next to the blue “Compose new Tweet” button. To avoid having to click twice to get to your direct messages and lists, you can create bookmarks for both and place them on your bookmarks bar.


Embed Tweets Onto Your Website


Developers and bloggers no longer have to take screenshots of tweets to include them on their websites. Now, they can embed interactive tweets that give visitors the ability to reply, retweet and favorite without leaving the page. Below is an sample embedded tweet. Click on the link to learn how to plop one on your own site.

Woot! I just embedded a tweet into my story about Twitter’s new embeddable tweets. MATRIX? Check it out! ► on.mash.to/v8okeh

— Brian A. Hernandez (@BAHjournalist) December8, 2011


Discover New Topics and People to Follow


Use Twitter’s Discover tab to find new ways to explore topics and find users. Remember, you can employ a keyboard shortcut (click “g” then “d”) to navigate to the Discover page.

  • Stories: This tab sorts stories and trends based on your connections, location and language.
  • Activity: The Activity Stream, which was introduced in August, shows you what the people you follow are doing besides tweeting.
  • Who to Follow: This tab lists recommendations of who to follow “based on who you follow and more.”
  • Find Friends: Go here to search your Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail (and Messenger) and AOL contact lists.
  • Browse Categories (pictured above): Click on a topic such as “technology,” “sports” or “funny” to discover people within those content areas to follow.

Bonus: How New Twitter Looks


Don’t have the New Twitter yet? We’ve got you covered. Watch this video and check out the gallery below. Click here for everything you need to know about Twitter’s recent redesign.



Home Page


Your profile information, suggested followers and trends are now on the left rather than the right.

Click here to view this gallery.

More About: New Twitter, Social Media, tips, Twitter, web design

For more Social Media coverage:

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2011/12/09/new-twitter-tricks-tips/?utm_source=feedburner...

New Startup Accelerator Coming to Cambridge with $2.5 Million in Funding From Knight Foundation

There aren’t many entrepreneurs in public media, but Jake Shapiro is one to watch.

His Cambrigdge-based non-profit, PRX, announced its Public Media Accelerator this week, a project which will provide funding and expertise to teams with innovative ideas for increasing the impact of public service media. The program is supported by a $2.5 million grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Modeled on startup incubators from TechStars to Y Combi to RockHealth, the idea is to stimulate innovation and disruption in a space known for a remarkable lack of it.  The project will invest in both nonprofit and for-profit ventures building apps, services and media products.

Winning technologists and journalists will come to Camrbidge for a 12 week development program, culminating in a demo day and the chance to win additional funding. The program will officially launch at the upcoming SXSW Interactive festival in the spring, applications will also be accepted.

“Through funding more than 200 community information experiments, we’ve found that the models with the best success are nurtured through outside advice and expertise,” said Michael Maness, Knight Foundation’s vice president for journalism and media innovation. “We hope the Public Media Accelerator will bring public media’s quality journalism into more people’s lives, by using technology to expand its reach.”

Writing in PBS’s Media Shift Blog recently, Shapiro talked about the problems legacy media continue to have with adapting digital technology.

“These days the competition for talent in media technology is fierce, from new ventures to mature enterprises. Public media should be the go-to place for aspiring and experienced technologists who believe in a public service mission, want to collaborate to build products, services and content for millions of people, and seek an alternative from the rapidly commercializing web. There should be natural alliances with open-source software communities, with leading nonprofit web giants Mozilla and Wikipedia, the growing number of web-based local news organizations, and the open/civic data movement.”

Congratulations PRX. We’d love to get involved and help.

 

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2011/12/09/new-startup-accelerator-coming-to-cambridge-wi...

4 Ways the New Twitter Is Taking on Facebook


Twitter’s native video- and photo-sharing features may have hinted at its desire to go after Facebook, but the redesign it launched on Thursday stated them loud and clear.

Twitter now looks a lot more like the world’s largest social network, with features that focus on social interaction and brand pages.

Twitter once differentiated itself as an “information network” while Facebook defined itself as the “social graph.” But just as Facebook added real-time features that make it look more like Twitter, Twitter has inched into its competitor’s turf.

In June, Twitter’s video and photo-sharing tools positioned the network to increase engagement by breaking the mold of its 140-character tweets. Meanwhile, a new “Activity Feed” was added in August to keep track of followers’ interactions with other Twitter users, and later that month it added photo galleries to every user’s profiles — it’s first step toward establishing profile pages that are more than just an aggregation of tweets.

The new public-facing Twitter profile page is not another step toward that goal, it’s a giant leap. In the company’s own communications-department-approved words, the new profile “puts you and your interests front and center.” It wants to be “your opportunity to introduce yourself to the world” and “stay close to everything you care about.” All of these objectives encroach upon Facebook’s territory.

These four new features in particular challenge Facebook’s reign as the default social site for managing online identity, keeping up with friend-recommended (and created) content and serving as brands’ social media hub.


1. Brand Pages


Most brands have a presence on both Facebook and Twitter, but until Thursday, a brand’s Twitter page was a place to push content to their followers’ streams and respond to customer service requests. It was not a destination in itself, and there was no differentiation between brand accounts and user accounts.

Now Twitter will give brands a home. The new pages allow marketers to customize their headers in a way that makes their logos and taglines more prominent. They can also choose a tweet to stay at the top of their page, and that tweet will be automatically expand — even if the visitor doesn’t click on it — to show a photo or video.

Launch partners for the pages include American Express, Best Buy, Bing, Chevrolet, Coca-Cola, Dell, Disney, General Electric, Hewlitt-Packard, Intel, JetBlue, Kia, McDonald’s, Nike, PepsiCo, Staples, Verizon Wireless, NYSE Euronext, Heineken, Subway and Paramount Pictures.


2. Profile Pages


Twitter profiles now look more like Facebook and Google+ profiles. User information such as favorites, lists, and images have been moved to the upper left-hand side of the page — the web reader’s focus sweet spot.


3. In-Line Conversations, Images and Videos


In the Facebook News Feed, it’s easy to ease drop on conversations between friends because comments on status updates pile up directly beneath them. It’s easy to browse videos and photos because they appear in-line with other information.

Twitter has taken another step closer to News Feed’s design. It already had allowed users to view media and conversations associated with tweets in the sidebar. But now one click inserts that same content directly to the feed. Once you open up a tweet to view this additional information, it stays open in your feed.


4. Discovery Through Connections


Facebook tells you when your friends become friends with other people, join groups and share links. Now Twitter tells you what connections are retweeting, following and favoriting. The feature originally launched as an “activity stream” in August. In the new design, it lives under the “Discover” tab.

More About: Facebook, Top Stories, Twitter

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2011/12/08/new-twitter-facebook/?utm_source=feedburner&ut...

TV Industry Preparing for Voice Recognition Interfaces in 2012


Apple iScreen concept by Ciccarese Design

Businessweek reports on the movement towards voice-activated TV remotes in the coming year. The move seems triggered by Apple's plans to enter the TV market in the near future. Steve Jobs said that he had finally "cracked it", referring to the TV user interface. Most believe that this revelation relates to Apple's Siri voice recognition system, and the industry is on the move:
Whether the rumors are true that Apple is planning to release a TV set by 2013, Siri-like voice recognition is headed for the living room. Microsoft (MSFT) is already there, via its Xbox 360 game console, and Comcast (CMCSA), Samsung Electronics (SHCAY), LG, and Sharp are working on voice-enabled features for TV sets, set-top boxes, and related products.
Businessweek suggests an voice command as simple as "Record the next episode of Modern Family" as a much needed improvement over the current solution. Jakob Nielsen of Nielsen Norman Group goes on to say "Anything would be better than what we have now."

Upcoming remote devices are said to look more like iPhones than traditional remotes, with possibly a single physical button to activate the microphone. Others are working to simply embed microphones around the living room and eliminating a physical remote altogether. Nuance suggests that 5% of TVs could be voice controlled by Christmas 2012.

We've previously reported about competitors "scrambling" to identify what an Apple television set might look like. The lead up is reminiscent to the large number of tablet plans from competitors in the months leading up to the original iPad launch.


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from MacRumors: Mac News and Rumors - Front Page http://www.macrumors.com/2011/12/08/tv-industry-preparing-for-voice-recogniti...

New York Times Hits the Campaign Trail With Election 2012 App

new york times election 2012 app


The New York Times released its 2012 Election App for iPhone and iPod touch Thursday, which it calls a one-stop resource for political coverage and campaign news. The app integrates Web content with Times editorial coverage.

Curated by a Times editor, the app’s news feed (its central feature) includes articles, blog posts, videos and tweets from external sources. The company says its syndicated political Op-Eds, editorials and blogs, such as The Caucus and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, will make the app an essential mobile destination for politics buffs.

Election 2012 is free to download, but only Times digital subscribers have access to all the app’s content, such as the Election Guide. As a non-digital subscriber, you can just see the top six stories. You can also access the app’s content from a desktop browser, here.

“Our goal is for the Election 2012 App to be the destination for people turning to their phones to stay on top of the most important campaign stories of the moment,” Fiona Spruill, New York Times editor of emerging platforms, said in a statement. “There is a mountain of political news and information out there. We’re trying to make it easier for people by pairing The Times’s distinguished political coverage with a curated take on the best stories from around the Web and the social-media universe.”

Like the “highlighted stories first” feature of Facebook‘s News Feed, users see the most important stories since their last visit when they open the app.

The app, which requires iOS 4.0 or later, also features an Election Guide, a database of candidate profiles, poll results, tweets, state profiles, past primary results, delegate rules and a primary calendar. On primary nights, it will provide live updates of race results.

Does this app sound like a good mobile politics resource? Do you use any other election apps?

More About: election 2012, new york times, Politics

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2011/12/08/new-york-times-election-app/?utm_source=feedbu...

Kit-A-Day Giveaway – ProtoSnap Pro Mini

We’re giving away amazing kits from our new Make: Ultimate Kit Guide EVERY DAY — thousands of dollars worth of merchandise, including MakerBots!

To celebrate the release of our latest publication, the Make: Ultimate Kit Guide 2012 (and its companion website), we’re giving away at least one of the cool kits reviewed in the issue each day during the holiday season.

Today’s giveaway is for a ProtoSnap Pro Mini Arduino development board. Here is MAKE Engineering Intern Tyler Moskowite’s review from the issue:

The ProtoSnap Pro Mini is one of the more interesting Arduino kits. Manufactured on a single PCB, it includes a preassembled Arduino Pro Mini (0.7″×1.3″) and snap-off accessory boards like an FTDI Basic Breakout board, buzzer, RGB LED, light sensor, pushbutton, and a general-purpose
protoboard for wiring up your own custom components. Snap off each piece, and you’ll see there are holes to solder pins, wires, or however it needs to connect. Then you can load your project’s sketch onto the Pro Mini immediately to start testing. Finally, the documentation is concise, for those just getting started with Arduino, and even enjoyable to read. This is a great kit for Arduino lovers of all experience levels.

To be eligible for today’s giveaway, all you have to do is leave a comment below in this post. The entry period for today’s prize will be until 11:59pm PST tonight. We’ll choose one person at random, you’ll be notified by email, and you’ll have 48 hours to respond. The Winners List is kept on the Giveaway landing page. That’s it! No purchase necessary or anything else to do. Please leave only one comment per post. You can enter as many giveaways as you like until you win. This giveaway is for US residents only. You also must be 18 years old to enter (Kids: Ask your parents to enter). See the Kit-A-Day Giveaway landing page for full sweepstakes details and Official Rules.

Important Note: If you enter this drawing, when it’s over, please check the place where you registered to comment (eg. Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter). Some people are winning these kits and then not responding when we send them a message using the available means of contacting them. We want to make sure you get your giveaway!

from MAKE http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/12/kit-a-day-giveaway-%e2%80%93-protosn...

Library of Congress To Receive Entire Twitter Archive

An anonymous reader writes "The Library of Congress and Twitter have signed an agreement that will see an archive of every public Tweet ever sent handed over to the library's repository of historical documents. 'We have an agreement with Twitter where they have a bunch of servers with their historic archive of tweets, everything that was sent out and declared to be public,' said Bill Lefurgy, the digital initiatives program manager at the library's national digital information infrastructure and preservation program. Researchers will be able to look at the Twitter archive as a complete set of data, which they could then data-mine for interesting information."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

from Slashdot http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/12/07/2034200/library-of-congress-to-receiv...

Help Predict the Future!

One of the hallmarks of humanity is our predilection for philosophical thought: wondering just what we are, why we're here, and what's going to happen next is one of the biggest markers that separates us from simpler animals. And despite the massive pile of predictions for the future that have all missed the mark entirely, every once in awhile one is right or close enough to right that we go ahead and count it; and the fact is, it's just fun to prognosticate. And it's in that spirit that the New York Times is asking readers to compile a future timeline of human achievements and world events, starting next year...

 

Screen shot 2011-12-07 at 10.40.57 AM
Of course you might want to refresh yourself on human history, first.

 

Simply mouse-over the events (categorized as advances in Computation, Artificial Intelligence, Transportation & Lifestyle, and Communication) to read a quick blurb explaining what titles like "A.I. Government" or "Robot Wars" mean, see the year people predict it will happen, and then with the click of a button move the prediction forward or backward in time a few years.

 

Screen shot 2011-12-07 at 10.41.22 AM
Notice there's no entry for "You finally meet someone who loves you."


You can even make your own prediction, and while we certainly couldn't in good conscience ask you to spam their calendar with things like "Woot Becomes Largest Global Retailer" or "SmartPost Delivers First Package in Timely Fashion" or "Mortimer & Monte Dolls Become Self Aware, Thousands Dead," we don't know of any way they could stop you.

And speaking of Woot future events, take to the comments and give us YOUR predictions for the future of Woot. Tell us a year, an event, and if you're so inclined a brief explanation of your future-gibberish.

 

from Woot! - One Day, One Deal http://www.woot.com/Blog/ViewEntry.aspx?Id=20711

How Much Does a Twitter Follower Cost?


An email from Twitter sales to prospective advertisers today revealed what brands have been paying for followers on the platform. The memo included cost-per-follower (CPF) rates for Promoted Accounts and cost-per-engagement (CPE) for Promoted Tweets.

The CPF runs between $2.50 and $4, while the listed CPE rates come in from $0.75 to $2.50. For CPE, “engagement” refers to clicks, favorites, retweets and “@Replies.”

As has been the case for a while, Twitter advertisers must commit to three months at a minimum spend of $15,000.

The email pitches advertisers on the benefits of targeting Twitter users who do not currently follow their brand accounts. It says that Twitter is “already seeing well over 15x the impression volume of Promoted Tweets targeted in search, with the same stellar engagement rates.”

Here’s the full sales letter:


Hello, ‬
Thanks for reaching out to us to inquire about Twitter’s Advertising Products. We are happy to inform you that Twitter is preparing to roll out our next phase of beta testing, and we’d like to invite you to join us.

Please review the details of the program at the bottom of this email and reply to this email by COB (close of business), Thursday, 12/8 if your company meets the following qualifications and is interested in learning more. Once I have received your reply, I will follow up with you to set up a call and discuss next steps.

In the interim. I definitely recommend that you follow the @TwitterAds account and check out Twitter’s Advertising Blog here: http://advertising.twitter.com/.>

Also wanted to take a moment to highlight that for the FIRST time in the history of Twitter advertisers are able to reach highly-relevant and targeted users on Twitter who are not currently following your account, with engaging and timely messages about your brand. At this time, the product is rolled out to only 25% of users on Twitter, and we’re already seeing well over 15x the impression volumeof Promoted Tweets targeted in search, with the same stellar engagement rates.

Why advertise with Twitter?

  • 100+ million active users, over 250+ million tweets per day
  • Strong engagement rate for all Promoted Products
  • Access to Analytics Dashboards with tweet-level performance data
  • Verification of your company’s Twitter account

Promoted Products:

  • Promoted Accounts: (PAc)Build a critical mass of loyal followers
  • Target based on keywords, interest, and country
  • Cost Per Follower (CPF) Auction
  • Competitive CPF = $2.50-4
  • Promoted Tweets: (PTw)Amplify your message beyond your core followership
  • Cost Per Engagement (CPE) Auction
  • Engagement = (Clicks + Favorites + Retweets + @Replies) / Impressions
  • Competitive CPE = $0.75- $2.50
  • Qualifications:

  • 3-month commitment, $15k – $25k commitment
  • Established Twitter presence; at least 50 tweets per account • Previous experience running SEM, Adwords, or Facebook campaigns
  • Willingness to provide lots of feedback
  • Twitter’s IO, Ts&Cs
  • Expectations:

  • Beta test: Please remember that this program is still in a testing phase. We are looking forpartners who are tolerant, flexible, and committed to helping us perfect our offerings.
  • Account Management and Support: Expect live on boarding and training at initial launch, followed by an online help center and automated support throughout the program.
  • Christopher Heine, ClickZ

    More About: Promoted Tweet, Twitter

    from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2011/12/06/cost-of-twitter-follower/?utm_source=feedburne...