Do we really need a book on Twitter? ... Actually it's a good read

I stumbled upon a book called simply “The Twitter Book” at the Kern County Library, and kinda winced. A Twitter book? Seriously?

I picked it up and saw that the respected Tim O’Reilly was one of the two authors, so took a deep breath and opened it up.

It's actually good stuff.

The Twitter Book is a breezy read with lots of great tipsThe book -- slightly larger than pocket-sized -- is a breezy read with visual examples on the left page and tips on the right, for 230+ pages. Not saying seasoned Tweeters need to buy it, but it’s worth checking out from the library.

(Safari Books offers a free sample of the first chapter, but that chapter really doesn't capture the value of the bullet point tips and examples).

For me, I’ve been using Twitter since shortly after it launched, althoPages alternate between visual examples on the left and tips and detail on the right-hand page. This page isn't representative of most pages, which are full of bullet items.ugh sporadically at times. I’m by no means a power user and found some of these tips valuable.

Here are some highlights I found interesting:

• Twitturly and Tweetmeme capture and rank urls being posted in Twitter.
• The Favorites feature on Twitter.com, which for some reason I’ve never used, allows you to bookmark good stuff to read later (will be of great help to me, because I tend to read Tweets in spurts, which results in me opening up interesting links in multiple windows, which start eating up processing power if I don’t read them quickly enough).
• Mr. Tweet and Who Should I Follow? analyze your Twitter activity and network, and ID others you might be interested in following.
• Retweeting, or reposting other Tweets, is a sign of worthiness and value in the Twittersphere. Retweetist and Retweet Radar are sites that collect the most-retweeted posts.
• Twittersheep shows what your followers are interested in.
• This is a Twittersheep tag cloud of my Twitter followers' interests.You can preschedule postings at Tweetlater.
• Automating posting of some Tweets onto your Facebook page makes sense. But, c’mon, do you want every Tweet on Facebook. Facebook has an app that allows you to pick and choose which Tweets to resend along to your Facebook faithful.
• Create mini-bios on profile pages if you have multiple people posting to a single Twitter address.
• The authors cited @Comcastcares as the benchmark for using Twitter for customer service.
• “@replies are usually seen only by people following both parties to the conversation. So if you want your reply to be seen by all your followers, don’t put the @ at the begging of the tweet.” 
• If you’re a business, post personal updates to reveal the human side of your organization. Don’t just push official company messages.
• Twist (apparently now known as Trendistic) is among business apps that provide insight onto gauging the popularity of one Twitter topic over another (their example was “American Idol” vs. “Lost”).

Finally, loved the acknowledgements page, which listed people by Twitter address. Cool.

As you might expect, the authors are continuing the conversation on Twitter at #TwitterBook. I also encourage you to follow the authors @timoreilly and @sarahm's @TweetReport.

Testing new Twitter tool

I got an alpha invite for a new Twitter app called Tweetboard that does a couple of things:

1. It surfaces my Twitter feed onto my personal site. To date, I haven't found a clean way to pull in Twitter feeds into my platform so this is a half-step in that direction. The Tweetboard window sits to the left side of my site, hidden under a "tweets" tab. Click on the tab and it opens up an adjustible screen. Click on the tab again and you close the screen. Voila!Tweetboard is an app that's simple to install and use
2. It also introduces the ability to host nested Twitter discussions within my site. I don't get enough traffic or comments yet to probably justify that feature but we'll give it a try anyway.

The Tweetboard tool itself was simple to install: Just had to slap some javascript onto my templates and tweak a few things. Took all of a few minutes.

The video above is a review of Tweetboard. It's kinda over the top, but highlights the general features.

Lemme know what you think, or better yet, toss a few posts in there to see what happens.

Diving into the Android world

I'm in the market for a new smartphone. My Helio Ocean was killer when it first came out two years ago and I still use it all the time. I'm a Swiss-Army knife kinda mobile user so voice is secondary to my uses, which include lots of SMS, mobile web, camera/video, GPS, notes and calendar.Helio Ocean was revolutionary when it first launched

But since Virgin Mobile bought Helio awhile back, service has been spotty and I've had to send back two malfunctioning devices. And while the Ocean was revolutionary when it first dropped (it had GPS long before Apple led you believe they invented it), the iPhone/iTouch has raised the bar when it comes to mobile devices and content expectations.

So, what to buy? I like my iTouch but can't stand the thought of signing on with AT&T, which has an iPhone exclusive. I've thought about the Palm Pre, which Walt Mossberg says is an iPhone rival, but didn't like the keyboard. And I've looked at other models, but none rock my socks.

That takes me to Google's Android mobile OS, which is now available on two three phones in the U.S., with promises of up to 10 more by year's end. It's like being a kid in a candy store, not knowing what treats are around the corner.

Sprint's HTC Hero is loaded with cool appsI really like what I hear and read about the HTC Hero, which Sprint put sale this week. It's got all the core stuff important to me, plus a big customizable screen, a 5-meg camera (!?!?), augmented reality tools, feed readers and open-source apps to come (Google has 8,000 Android apps so far). It's been getting good reviews, and again Mossberg gives it a thumb's up as an iPhone rival. And you can't beat Sprint's data pricing, which keeps mobile bills affordable.

Hero's big downside for me, though, is its virtual keyboard. I do a lot of texting, and my fingers have never gotten used to virtual keyboards like thoSprint's Samsung Momentse on the iTouch. So, I'll keep an eye on Sprint's Samsung Moment, an Android-powered device with slide-out hard keyboard. 

In the meantime, I'll be camped out on gadget sites like Endgadget and Gizmodo looking for anything better that might come along. Ultimately, though, you just have to dive in to the fray, two-year service plans or not.

Update on Monday, November 9, 2009 at 9:39 AM by Logan Molen

Interesting MocoNews story today on how the opennesss and infancy of Google's Android platform is creating "fragmentation" in the platform:

"The problem with fragmentation is that developers will have a difficult time developing applications that could run smoothly on each platform. Besides hardware differences, like screen sizes, there will be software differences, too. Some phones will support multi-touch, and others won’t. Not to mention, each manufacturer is building their own user interface on top of the platform that offers a host of other features.

All of the problems could be solved if the older devices were upgraded to the latest software, but that’s not likely going to happen, reports IDG News Service. The Motorola Cliq runs version 1.5; the Motorola Droid runs 2.0 and most others run Android 1.6."

Hang on for a wild ride.