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Twitter Tuesday - Chirp Changed Everything edition
Well, the Chirp conference is over, and the Twitter world will never be the same! See what's changed, plus new apps and fresh Twitter news, in this week's Twitter Tuesday.
Here we go!
Been wanting a Twitter username that someone else is just squatting on? Tired of checking back to see that nobody's posted from that account in a year? Rumor has it that Twitter is about to release a whole ton of usernames back into circulation for people who might actually use them. They're starting with deleted names, and then deciding what to do with inactive names, which are defined as accounts that haven't been used in six months. If you've been waiting to claim a particular username, don't give up hope yet.
Although Twitter is making moves to release official mobile clients, third-party apps aren't dead yet. In fact, Seesmic for Android just got a big new update, which includes a home screen widget, support for Twitter's official retweet format, and geotagging. Neat!
One of the biggest things to come out of last week's Chirp conference was Twitter Annotations, which allow you to attach machine-readable metadata to tweets. You can already attach locations, with the geotagging feature, but Annotations will expand your options to include things like links, weather, and even ISBN numbers. Marshall Kirkpatrick speculates about the possibilities over at ReadWriteWeb.
Still not clear on how Twitter's new ad system, Promoted Tweets, is going to work? Well, the Twitter business team has made a video that makes it really easy to understand, along with a pretty good FAQ. This should clear things up for you.
Think carefully about what you post on Twitter, because it's now being archived by the Library of Congress. That's right, the U.S. Government is archiving every tweet as part of national history. I bet you never thought what you had for lunch would be so historic!
In Twitter services news, there's a new way to find out who's unfollowing you: TwittaQuitta. I don't really recommend doing this, as it only leads to a cycle of hurt feelings, criticism, heavy drinking and chocolate consumption. Not that I would know from experience, or anything.
There's also a jokey new service that analyzes @replies to decide which celebrities have the stupidest followers. It's called StupidFight, and you can use it to compare any two Twitter accounts, as long they both have high follower counts. It's not very scientific or definitive, but it's pretty funny to see that Conan's fans are smarter than Leno's.
Aaaand, that's your Twitter news for this week. Tune back in next week for more exciting, uh, words about the bird? Oh god ... there's my first stupid Twitter pun. Well, at least I held out for a dozen columns. See you next Tuesday!
