For whatever reason during my life online, I've had the good fortune to be something of an early adopter. I also like to build stuff online. These traits came in pretty handy over the past year or so as Twitter came on the scene.
I had occasion to have no fewer than 10 conversations with a wide range of people about what I've done with Twitter and what its potential is to reach others. I thought, after the fifth conversation, that perhaps I should get some of this down in a post. So here goes. Without further ado, are 10 ways I've used Twitter, and without even directly touching the Twitter API.
Pub Crawls
In October 2007, I learned about Twitter, and I didn't really know what to do with it, like many people who are arriving to the scene right now. I did, however, talk a bunch of trash about how I was going to build a "kickass" web site for a pub crawl that my brother-in-law and some friends had been running for more than a decade.
Thus, my first twitter account @qpc. I added my cell phone number to the device, and pre-entered each tweet as a saved draft. When we moved from bar to bar, I only had to hit send. This came in handy later on in the day, as the potential for typos rose with each subsequent bar ;-)
inaug09.com and dctrip09.com
A couple weeks before the inauguration, I heard that NPR had established the hash tags #inaug09 for people to tweet on inauguraiton day and #dctrip09 for people making the trip to DC. I also noticed the .com addresses for these tags were still available. So I bought 'em. Then I had to figure out what to do with them.
What I ended up doing was a pretty lame hack, but it was very educational.
First, I went to search.twitter.com and did a search for inaug09.
I then took the RSS feed http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=inaug09 and added it to a new pipe in Yahoo! Pipes. Because there were so many tweets coming through at once, I wanted the Pipe to pull in multiple pages of tweets, so I added http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=inaug09&page=2 http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=inaug09&page=3 and so on.
After adding several pages of tweets as separate RSS feeds, I added a filter that gave me the ability to block specific usernames, and added a loop that appended the author name to each item's title.
I then saved the pipe (viewable here), and grabbed the RSS feed.
Next, I used the FeedWordPress plugin for WordPress, and generated individual posts from my new feed. In an effort to avoid any litigious types, and because I want people to benefit from what they're tweeting, I made sure to change the settings within the plugin to link to the original post, which in this case was the person's tweet.
Lastly, because I wanted to easily access this site via a mobile device, I added the Mobile Press Plugin to render the blog as a mobile-friendly site.
To date, I've captured 4,593 tweets, which one day I will sort through and possibly put together as a nifty retrospective on a wonderful day in my native D.C.
Quoted on Twitter Widget
I've noticed a lot of people like to put their latest tweets up as a widget on their site. But there's a potential to have a lot of useless stuff in there. A better approach, I think, is to only include the tweets someone else finds useful. Think of it as crowdsourced curation. Therefore, the twitter widget I made for this blog is build by an RSS feed from the search.twitter.com results for "RT" (re-tweet) and "@chadrem"
Using Favorites ... to find favorites
The MissingManuals.com site has some wonderful blog content. One area, however, The Missing Feature, was sometimes published in fits and starts. I really love that section, and wanted to encourage more contributions to it. I also wanted to showcase the best feature requests from anyone I could find. I remembered back a few years ago, when I used to "write" a column for RagingBull.com called "Herd on the Boards." That was essentially a process where I'd mine the site's message boards, and feature the best posts of the day in an email newsletter.
Alas, at Missing Manuals, I couldn't mine a message board of obsessive posters who were writing thousands of words per day. But I did have Twitter.
I developed some fancy web pages that provided links to relevant search terms I wanted to see results for in Twitter.
But before beginning a new round of searches, I would clear out all of the "favorite" tweets in the account.
Then, as I went through all of the tweets my search yielded, I would add the best ones to my favorites.
After that, I'd go to this address http://twitter.com/favorites/USERNAME.rss and grab the rss feed of my favorites. This is password protected and you need to enter your username and password as of the time of this posting. Please let me know if I have this wrong.
If I have multiple pages of favorites, I append ?page=2 or whatever page number I need to the end of the URL.
At this point, you're left with a whole lot of XML. Fortunately, XML is pretty easy to sift through. I haven't built a cool tool for this yet, but I have been able to manually search and replace my way down to a nice comma-separated list that includes the username, the tweet itself and its URL.
I then take that csv file, and open it in Excel.
I read through each tweet, and assign categories to it in new columns to the right that go from wide subject areas to very specific ones.
Next, I sorted the spreadsheet by categories until I had wonderful clumps of tweets. I then crafted those tweets into a blog post.
After posting, I tweeted the post. Only after I had this new tweet live did I go and follow all of the people I quoted in the post. This way, they would have a better shot of seeing the latest blog post, see themselves quoted, and potentially develop an affinity for the brand.
Promote your company
I built a widget for Missing Manuals that includes the RSS feed from of a search for @missingmanuals OR Missing Manual that lives on the MissingManuals.com home page, near the bottom. It gives visitors a nice snapshot of how the product is being discussed online and could also help people your business isn't even aware of connect with other people who have only have your product in common. I find this potential for serendipitous community building to be very powerful reason to deal with the potential hassles of being so open.
Search for experts
From time to time people have a need to find experts in a particular field. It's hard to simply put out an ad on craigslist or send around emails looking for someone. However, there's a wonderful aspect to twitter that will only grow stronger as more people sign on. People who are expert at something, are often teaching it somewhere, and more and more of them are tweeting that they're teaching.
For example, let's say I was looking for an SQL expert. This search could point me in the right direction. Note, I used the word "teaching" and not "teach" in the search. This proved to be a better search query. Feel free to play with it to suit your needs.
Tweet Later @replies Part I - @replies + SMS
I love the service from Tweet Later, an online tool that allows you to schedule tweets for a later date. The thing is, there's so much more the service has to offer, and I love it despite hardly ever using the scheduler.
I currently have Tweet Later send me an hourly email that is a digest of @replies and only gets sent if I have any. I then set up a filter in my GMail (a Gilter?) that sends a text message to my phone alerting me of the digest. This way, I can, when I choose to, be a very responsive Twitterer to the people I want to engage with.
Tweet Later @replies Part II - @replies in newsletters
There's another great aspect to Tweet Later's emails. They are delivered in HTML that includes the headshot of the person twittering. A great way to utilize this would be to include it in your organization's email newsletter. The only real HTML trick is to make sure you have the alternating background color coordinated.
I posted an example below. Note that I got rid of all of the line breaks in my HTML code to prevent my blog from adding unnecessary p or br tags:
 | eesullivan http://twitpic.com/1btu7 - My husband @chadrem likes to open doors & never close them, esp cabinet doors. Wondering if this will change. Wednesday, 04 February 2009, 1:54 pm - Reply - View Tweet - Retweet - Direct Message |
 | rcherny @chadrem agreed. and rounded boxes. with drop shadows. on top of gradients. that must work in IE6. sigh. Thursday, 29 January 2009, 8:34 pm - Reply - View Tweet - Retweet - Direct Message |
 | steveouting @chadrem yellowpagesgoesgreen.org ... Now I know. Just signed up to opt out. Thanks for the tip! Saturday, 07 February 2009, 10:03 pm - Reply - View Tweet - Retweet - Direct Message |
 | jsteeleeditor @chadrem Beautiful site! Wednesday, 11 February 2009, 11:36 am - Reply - View Tweet - Retweet - Direct Message |
 | timoreilly RT @chadrem: 'Democratizing Data' author says delay in requiring XBRL standard 'Verging on criminal' http://is.gd/jt2C Friday, 13 February 2009, 5:24 pm - Reply - View Tweet - Retweet - Direct Message |
 | DavidStephenson @chadrem It was great meeting you @igniteboston Thanks for doing the interview: http://is.gd/jt2C Friday, 13 February 2009, 5:22 pm - Reply - View Tweet - Retweet - Direct Message |
 | jdlasica Working with @chadrem in Boston to develop a new TravelingGeeks site based on the Hybrid News #wordpress theme. http://is.gd/jxA3 Saturday, 14 February 2009, 3:12 pm - Reply - View Tweet - Retweet - Direct Message |
The pre-event and during-event follow
This might be the most valuable approach of them all. And the best part, it's the least technical!
Here's how it works. Let's say you know you're going to an event, like the wemedia.com conference later this month in Miami. (Disclosure: I'm working the web site for the event.)
Then let's say you find out how to see all of the known twitter accounts among the people who are attending the event, like on this page. You would be wise to follow them ahead of the event. Then, you'd know what perspective they bring to the event and you might even be able pick up in person on a conversation you started in Twitter.
You should also keep tabs on who is twittering about the event in person and remotely. It's easy to become something of a "correspondent" to the people who were not fortunate enough to attend that event and that can pay dividends in a future time and place.
"Instant" notes at conferences
I've been working for a few organizations that host conferences. And invariably there's a stretch where there are multiple, simultaneous sessions. While keynotes are great and everyone is usually in a packed (hopefully) room, the smaller sessions are your real chance to shine.
The first thing, if possible, is to set up a post on your blog. Put as much info into the post as possible ahead of time to set up your notes, such as the name of the session, and a link to its individual page (if it has one).
Next, take really comprehensive notes in an OFFLINE document. Make sure that the stuff you're typing makes you say "hmmm" or "aha" to yourself to keep it interesting to your audience. And don't worry if you don't get everything. This can make for a quicker read and some of the busy people who pick them up might actually appreciate your judiciousness.
Next, spell check. Seriously. I know we're trying to get these done fast, but reducing typos and misspellings can go a long way to giving your notes credibility, and you some authority.
Finally, post the notes to your blog. Grab the link, and shrink the URL. I use a Firefox add-on for http://is.gd but there are several out there.
Next, post your tweet with the link to your post and the hashtag for the event. (If your event doesn't have a hash tag, perhaps you could start one!)
Twitter is such an immediate medium that the people who play to that have a real advantage in getting exposure from it.
Don't believe me?
Read the following true story from just the other day:
O'Reilly's Tools of Change for Publishing conference proved a pretty good experience for me, as evidenced by the number of re-tweets I received that resulted in a rise in Twitter followers.
But even having used Twitter for going on my second year, I still had occasion to be surprised by its power.
Following Gavin Bell's session "The Long Tail Needs Community" I posted my notes and tweeted them. Ten minutes later, I happened to run into Gavin in the hallway. I introduced myself, said I enjoyed his session and that I took a bunch of notes on them and posted them on my blog.
He held up his (I think) Blackberry and replied "Yea, I'm reading them right now."
