Posts Tagged twitter

Facebook Pages and RSS – A Step-By-Step Guide

Posted by Paul Holmes in business, internet, social media on June 16, 2009

The most annoying thing about a Facebook Page is that it is called Facebook Page. A page is not the same as your Facebook Profile, it is a separate feature that allows you to build a fan base to promote your website, brand, or company within the Facebook community.

But do any search for “Facebook Page”, and I guarantee 85% of the results will relate to the Facebook profile.

Overview

This entry is how to get your blog to feed on your Facebook Page, and is a step-by-step guide. I wish I had this a month ago, but here it is for the rest of the world.

If you do not know what a blog is, or an RSS feed is, you need to go research this, then come back here later.

Process

Create a page in Facebook, or load your existing one (this is the easy part).
In your page, under your image, click on “Edit Page” (sometimes Facebook forgets what page you are on, so make sure your page image and name are correct after you click – restart your browser if it doesn’t work – this is a major source of frustration in some browsers).
Scroll down to the “Notes” application, click on the little pen icon on the right side of the screen, then select “Edit”. (Note: if “Notes” is not in the list, use “More Applications” to find it, then add it to the page.)
To the right side of the screen (left of the ads), you will see a link titled “Import a blog”. Click this. (Note: If you have an existing feed, you can delete it by clicking on “Edit import settings”, then click on the “Stop Importing” button.)
Enter your RSS feed URL in the “Web URL” box, click the consent checkbox, then click on “Start Importing”. (Note: Your RSS feed URL is different then your website address. In WordPress, for example, you typically add “/feed” to the end of your website address.)
Assuming all was done correctly, a “Preview” screen appears. You must scroll to the bottom of this, then click on “Confirm Import”.
As per item 2, go back to the “Edit Page” screen. This time, click on the pen icon next to the “Notes” application, and select “Application Settings”.
Make sure the “Box” and “Tab” are showing as “Added” (you can configure this part of the page as you wish later). Click on the “Additional Permissions” tab, and check the “Publish to streams” item, so your blog entries will appear in your fan’s streams. Click OK.
Wipe your brow, you’re done! Wasn’t that easy, and don’t you wish you had found this article a week ago?

Twitter RSS Feed

Twitter, technically speaking, has RSS feeds. Given Twitter’s highly volatile state, they are not terribly reliable, and often get rejected. (Perhaps they are also not technically correct RSS feeds, I’m not entirely sure – they don’t import into Facebook or Feedburner, so that’d be my guess.)

So, how the heck do you get your Tweets to import into your Facebook page easily?

I’m glad you asked, because we recently did this with our CanWire.ca Facebook Page, using FriendFeed.

Set up a new FriendFeed Profile (I recommend using something other than your main account, as you may want to add other stuff to your personal one.)
Import your Twitter account into FriendFeed.
Scroll to the bottom of your FriendFeed profile page, and click on the RSS icon next to “Other ways to read this feed”.
Copy the URL, and paste it in for item 5 above.

Media Overload

If you want to overwhelm your friends on Facebook, set up a FriendFeed account for yourself, and add all your social media sources, then use it’s RSS feed in Notes for your Facebook profile.

You could take this feed, too, and fire it into Feedburner, and allow people to subscribe to your social media as an RSS feed from your personal site.

Egad!

facebook, feedburner, friendfeed, pages, profile, rss, twitter

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WordPress Plugins, Widgets and Must-Dos

Posted by Paul Holmes in business, internet, social media on April 27, 2009

Now that I have so many websites running on WordPress (I count 27, but I might be missing some), and have played around with so many plug-ins, widgets and features, I figured I’d write a little article all about my experience. Maybe it will save you a headache or two in your development.

This article does not tell you how to install WordPress, the basic setup, or how to choose a template. Maybe I’ll cover these topics another day.

WordPress is a good platform for both blogs, and “traditional” websites. Many of our websites just happen to run on WordPress so people may post comments and so forth. I only have a few “blogs”, per se. Just keep in mind that different uses require different options.

Akismet
This is a comment spam filter, and it is amazing (I recently discovered 1,009 spam messages on this blog that I was completely unaware of). The only reason not to install this is if you plan on always turning off user comments. It is standard, and well worth the “hassle” of signing up for an account at WordPress.com to make it work properly.

All in One SEO Pack
If you are a hardcore SEO guru, maybe this isn’t your bag. But if you are a novice at such matters like myself, then this little SEO tool makes the process tolerable. Hopefully 1,452,822 downloaders weren’t all wrong.

Google XML Sitemaps
Another bit of gospel from the search engines is that standard sitemaps are important. Who has the time to build these stupid things? Thankfully, this sitemap building plugin does it for you!

Submit Your Blog
I guess this is also something you should do for a bit of SEO juice, or just to be found better. Here’s a list of places you could submit to: Technorati, LoadedWeb, BlogCatalog, and, well … forget the list, there are a zillion other blog directories and aggregators out there!

WP-Polls
Want to add a poll to your WordPress post? Too easy with this little tool.

WordPress iPhone Application
If you have an iPhone and a WordPress blog, this tool is not to be missed. I could not imagine writing long blog entries on my phone, but certainly updates and short entries while on the go. This application requires XML-RPC to be enabled in Settings, Writing.

RSS and Social Bookmarking
There are many different ways to add this to your site. A link directly to your feed page with an RSS image, perhaps? Hook it up to FeedBurner so you can track subscriptions? One cool utility is AddThis.

Twitter Integration
I fell in love with Tweetmeme Button because it very cleanly adds a little Tweet Counter and Retweet option to every one of your posts. One drawback is that it doesn’t promote YOUR twitter account in it, it promotes theirs. But for the novelty and convenience factor, this is A1.

I use the nifty, simple TwitterCounter Badge in a few places.

Of course, you can insert your Twitter posts nicely into your blog with a little snippet of code on the sidebar.

A good old-fashioned graphic linked to your Twitter page is still a nice touch.

PHP Code Integration
Want to run PHP code from within WordPress? You could spend 6 hours trying out a bunch of plug-ins or work-arounds (like I did), or you could download Exec-PHP which works flawlessly, and with little effort.

Make Your Blog Talk
Completely non-essential, but hours of fun. The Odiogo Listen Button plugin brings your blog to life!

Adding Community Features like Google Friend Connect
WordPress has it’s own built-in community of sorts – through comments. Is this good enough? The jury is out. Then there is Google Friend Connect, Yahoo!’s MyBlogLog, and even Twitter Remote.

I’m kind of impressed with MyBlogLog, though I cannot seem to get it working perfectly yet. Imagine that: Yahoo doing something right!

There are actually dozens of these widgets and people aggregators out there, so be sure not to put too many on, and slow your website down to a crawl!

Note: if you use the Google Friend Connect bar along the bottom of your blog, be sure to have enough space in your footer so that content doesn’t get cut off (behind the bar).

Feedback
I’m keen to keep this article updated. Did you find anything useful? Do you have anything useful that should be added? Please comment!

aggregators, iphone, plugins, rss, seo, social bookmarking, twitter, wordpress

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My Latest Twitter Applications

Posted by Paul Holmes in business, humour, internet, social media on April 10, 2009

After using Twitter for 28 days, I wrote an article about all the cool stuff I did with it. Since then, well, I went a little crazy.

For the Victoria Flower Count, we set up the website so that it would announce all the incoming counts on Twitter. This was fun, but it got a little crazy some days … next year we’ll do some sort of digest-style reporting instead.

In conjunction with our Canadian News Aggregator, CanWire.ca, we launched a wireless edition – Canada’s Mobile News Aggregator at commuter.ca. It syndicates the same breaking news, but in a much friendlier format for iPhones, BlackBerries and other mobile devices. We also tweet CanWire.ca headlines in real time. We use our own URL shortener, tweeting.ca, for the headlines.

Our Twitter-based Instant Restaurant Advisor is still going strong, of course you can find this on Twitter too.

For our web design division, we are syndicating our Twitter updates directly into the web design blog. This isn’t rocket science anymore. We Tweeted out a call for people to vote on a new design for one of our websites. We had some great feedback.

Last, and certainly least, we launched a for-fun site called Twoater. It is like Twitter, only twoats have a maximum of 20 characters, and no vowels or zeroes. Why? Hey, why not! Join the 20-character revolution! Best of all, you can Twoat to Twitter. Now say that 20 times fast!

I now have 472 “followers”, and follow even more than that – there’s just some amazing content streaming in all the time from all kinds of sources. All told, I’m now involved with (to some extent or another) 11 Twitter accounts.

Best of all, this Twitter stuff is incredibly fun!

api, twitter, web development

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Smartest Twitter Spam Ever

Posted by Paul Holmes in advertising, internet, politics, social media on March 25, 2009

We’ve all had “spam followers” on Twitter. Presumably this is done to promote websites and products. Most of it is idiotic, and the accounts get closed pretty quickly. I just discovered one, however, that impressed me greatly. Some smarter spammer out there came up with this.

At the risk of educating spammers, I have reviewed some Twitter spam to help educate ordinary folks who use Twitter. Here it is:

Where are the updates?

In detecting a spam account, the most obvious bit is no updates and following lots of people. This spammer solved this with the following update:

i just deleted my old updates. i don’t like living in the past. lol

Where is the picture and website link?

Twitter reviews pictures and website links. If you are spamming, it’s a great way to ensure your account gets manually reviewed. This spammer clearly knew this.

But lots of people follow this person.

Spammers have started to track the “auto-followers”. It wouldn’t be hard to figure it out. Follow somebody and see if they follow back 30 seconds later. In order to appear not to be “spam”, this spammer followed all the auto-followers first.

Demographics.

Most Twitter users are male (I’ve seen demographic stats all over the map, actually, so this is actually a “best guess”). Nonetheless, males are probably more likely to follow absolute strangers than women. This person chose the name “Kristen”, which implies “female” and “under 40″. Judging by the text (no capitals, poor punctuation, “lol”, they were trying to appear younger). And what red-blooded Twitter male gentleman isn’t going to want to follow a young lady named Kristen from Miami.

The Spam.

They waited about 9 hours before updates. It appears more natural than one that’s 5 seconds after the other – then none for days after that. In the second update, they put the spam. And it says nothing about the site itself, other than her “sweetheart” sent it to her.

So, how do I know this is spam?

Well, I’m guessing. I suppose it’s possible this is a real person with something interesting to say that happened to delete all her old updates. I’m just guessing it’s highly unlikely. Spam rating: 8/10.

spam, twitter

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The Real Value of Twitter: Three Predictions for 2012

Posted by Paul Holmes in advertising, internet, politics, social media on February 26, 2009

People who enjoy micro-blogging on Twitter include a group I’ve already pretty clearly identified.

Computer Geeks
Marketing Types
Egomaniacs
Social Butterflies

(I’d include myself in all 4 to varying degrees.) There’s a few others along the same lines.

Others will reluctantly sign on, because they feel they need to – for business or what not. But there are a whole lot of other people in the world who will not use “Twitter” as we know it. Not EVER.

Prediction #1 is that the actual percentage of broadband-capable, English-speaking people who actually “use” Twitter will probably land somewhere between 5% and 10% by 2012. (More may sign up, but many will not “use” it, per se.)

Here’s where things get very interesting, though.

What Twitter has done is built a giant database of all the the thoughts and interests and passtimes of hundreds of thousands of people – a giant, freaky database of humanity. Better still, they are recording history as it happens, and new data will continue to flow like a streaming river of collective human thought.

I think of the Star Trek borg “hive mind”, only in this case complete and utter chaos (as per every other aspect of humanity), instead of order and assimilation.

THIS is where Twitter gets exciting for me (not just because I love Star Trek), but because THIS is a goldmine of data, ready for churning and sifting.

And some people wonder how Twitter is going to make money. Ya, right.

Prediction #2 is that most of the 90-95% of the world that won’t be using Twitter as we use it, will be using it indirectly, accidentally or unknowingly. They will be using applications and websites that churn through the Twitter data stream of human gobbly-gook – without even knowing it. This was the sort of thing I was thinking when I wrote the Tweeteries.com website (and I’m only just scraping the surface of the possibilities).

This data stream is powerful and valuable. Twitter knows this. Most people, even Twitter “power-users” haven’t quite realized this just yet, as they go about their day Tweeting stuff. Assuming Twitter management are as smart as I think they are, the people at Twitter are not going to try making money from charging their users (like this hilarious notion that they would start charging for corporate accounts). Instead they will make money from the database they have created, and BUCKETS of it.

Prediction #3 is that whoever owns Twitter in 2012 will be making a hell of a lot more money than whoever owns FaceBook.

UPDATE: FaceBook announced twitter-style features on March 4th, 2009. This is a potential game changer and may destroy prediction number 3 in one swoop.

Disclaimer: most of my predictions about most things have been wrong. (But I still think I’m right about this stuff.)

database, egomaniac, social media, star trek, twitter

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The definitive iPhone strategy for iGoogle users

Posted by Paul Holmes in business, internet, personal on February 25, 2009

So you’re thinking about an iPhone?

I am a heavy user of iGoogle (e-mail, calendar, RSS reader, bookmarks, movies, weather, shared documents, stock market, etc.). I went out and bought an iPhone to replace my old Nokia plain-jane model. Since then, I have gone through the motions to make it more and more useful.

While I expected a life-changing transformation, I had no idea of how amazing it would be.

It is possible to truly “synch” your contacts, e-mail and calendar with Gmail, essentially in real-time. So, now if you lose your phone, you will not “lose” any data.

My old BlackBerry had it’s own little inbox/outbox, so stuff sent on the phone was only on the phone. The truly integrated iGoogle solution actually creates a sent item in your Gmail.

I have a few tips for people that I would have found helpful before I got my iPhone and had to try to figure it all out.

Step I – Gmail Cleanup

Before you get your iPhone, go clean up the contacts in Gmail. Until very recently Google added every person you e-mailed to your contact list. Thankfully they stopped doing so, making this a reasonable place to store real contacts now.

I had about 1000 contacts in my list. I started by merging a whole bunch of contacts (people’s work and home e-mails), and deleting junk entries. I got this down to about 350 contacts.

Next, I created some categories and started categorizing people. While this is useful in Gmail, it is not so useful on your iPhone. However, it has the effect of also adding people to your “My Contacts” folder, which are the ones that appear on the iPhone. (So why not kill two birds with one stone – categorize them for Gmail AND add them to your iPhone.)

LASTLY I took my old phone and added phone numbers to existing Gmail contacts (and created entries for the few people I know who have no e-mail address).

Don’t get discouraged, this is all very worthwhile! Don’t create two contact lists! Merge it, simplify your life!

Serious Twitter users should also add a contact for TwitPic to e-mail photos directly from their iPhone with a scarily simple process (if you get drunk a lot, skip this option).

Step II – Go Buy Your iPhone

Do this second, only because Step I took me about 6 hours. I crunched mine into one all-nighter, but reasonable folks like you might need to spread this out over a few days.

Step III – Update Firmware

Do this by plugging your phone into your computer and using iTunes on your computer. Don’t mess with iTunes on the phone – at least not at this point.

While you’re in there, download some applications. For Twitter, TwitterFon is the best. FaceBook and LinkedIn have applications. Serial Instant Messengers might try IM+ Lite (it’s not awesome, but it’s the best I’ve found so far). Don’t go too crazy yet.

Step IV – Connect to Home Wi-Fi

I remember reading about these phones of the future in The Economist a few years ago that would let you do everything through your home Wi-Fi. Well, we are half way there – you can do all the data functions through your LAN (in fact, you can do this stuff with the Touch). But the cellphone companies wouldn’t want to sell you a phone that doesn’t rely on their towers, so voice is not on Wi-Fi.

Go into settings and turn your Wi-Fi on. See if it works.

Hopefully it doesn’t work. If you have a protected network (which you should), you may need to add the IP to your whitelist in its configuration, or you may need to do a password, or minimally type the name of your network into your phone (because it doesn’t broadcast), depending on what security options you have enabled for Wi-Fi.

For whitelisting the MAC address on your router, go to Settings, General, About, then scroll down. They call it Wi-Fi Address.

Step V – Synch Calendar and Contacts

Google has a step-by-step example of how this is done that works perfectly, and takes about 60 seconds.

Step VI – Synch Email

See documentation here. Also takes about 60 seconds.

Step VII – Embrace Your Inner Geek

Applause.

Complaints

My two complaints are less about my iPhone and more about getting the world to conform to my iPhone.

Wi-Fi that requires a login like at Starbucks, is just a royal pain on your iPhone.

I get a nasty blue screen of death on my PC whenever I have any photos on my camera roll, so I have to e-mail photos to myself and delete them. Next computer will be a Mac!

bsod, gmail, igoogle, iphone, starbucks, twitter, wi-fi

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