Infinite Twitter Capabilities: What’s More?
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Do you remember which concept Twitter actually started with? That’s right, “What are you doing?” The rate at how quickly and dramatically the concept evolved into “micro-blogging” concept is the great example of how incontrollable social media can be. There is no point in trying to set any rules and standards as it already exists in numerous forms and its full potential is yet to be explored.
Yes, watching this evolution is enjoyable. How people discover new and new Twitter uses makes you wonder where it can bring us. So let’s see how Twitter can be used in various spheres of life and for multiple purposes and try to imagine what else it can evolve into.
Government 2.0
FoodSafety maintained by Food Safety Information Center “provides food safety information to educators, industry, researchers and the general public”.
Twitterfeed of U.S. Senate votes is another great example how US government 2.0 is implemented.
FCIC Pueblo is the Twitterfeed by Federal Citizen Information Center that provides the answers to questions about the Federal Government and everyday consumer issues. It alerts followers of scams, pitfalls, safety tips, etc.
Other Twitterfeeds supported by US government: USArmy, US Office of Personal Management, U.S. Joint Forces Command, Peace Corps, National Science Fdn, NASA
UK government: twitter channel for the Prime Minister’s Office
Ann Smarty
Ann Smarty is a guest blogging addict and the proud owner of MyBlogGuest.com which is a free community of guest bloggers. feel free to follow here on Twitter @SEOSmarty.com
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15 WordPress Plugins That I Can’t Live Without
I’m obviously not the first person to write a list of WordPress plugins. However, I use some pretty interesting plugins (specifically a couple that I have not really noticed on other lists), so I thought it would be fun to take a little time to talk about fifteen of the best WordPress plugins I use. Hopefully, you will find a couple that you haven’t checked out before!
Photo Dropper: I really appreciate all of the great photography that is available on Flickr, and because I want to see it continue to grow, I always try to play by all of their rules. Fortunately for me, Photo Dropper is an awesome plugin that makes it easy to search for a Creative Commons photo on Flickr, add it to my post and have the appropriate credit links appear directly under the photo.
Platinum SEO Pack: I know everyone talks about the All-in-One SEO Pack , and while that used to be my SEO plugin of choice, once I tried the Platinum SEO Pack, I never looked back! If you want to make sure that all of your on-page SEO is taken care of for your WordPress blog, you can’t go wrong with this pack.
Referrer Detector: As I have learned throughout my journey into social media, one of the best things you can do is create a personalized experience for the people you are trying to interact with. It’s for this exact reason that I’m a big fan of Referrer Detector. When I’m bringing in visitors to my blog from a social site like Reddit, this plugin makes sure that they are greeted with a personalized welcome message and a nice reminder that positive votes are always appreciated.
Gerald Weber
I founded Search Engine Marketing Group in December 2005. More recently I co-founded viralcontentbuzz.com. which is the free platform that helps bloggers generate REAL "social buzz" on their best content.
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10 MORE Examples of Creative Twitter Uses
photo credit: arvindgrover
In December, I wrote a post talking about the 10 most creative Twitter uses I had seen. Based on the plethora of comments with more suggestions for the list, I could see I had barely scratched the surface of creative Twitter uses. For this reason, I bring you 10 MORE examples of creative Twitter uses. Some of these are user-submitted while others are accounts I’ve recently come across. Enjoy.
- TwittMinder- To me, this is about as cool as it gets. TwittMinder is a service that Tweets you to remind you of important events. All you have to do is email them the event info (date/time/etc) and they will send you a Tweet when the time comes to remind you of it. Sure, you could just set an alert on your phone or calendar, but this is pretty darn cool if you ask me.
- WaffleTruck- This was recommended to me by one of our readers, Simon. This company serves up waffles from their truck throughout the streets of New York. They Tweet updates regularly to let their customers know exactly where they are. Mmm. Waffles.
- ImagineChurch- Regardless of what your religious preferences are, you have to admit ImagineChurch is pretty creative. For those who don’t have time to go to church, they’ll Tweet a live play by play of their Sunday service. Church via text message. Who woulda thunk it?!
- CookBook- What’s for dinner tonight? If you don’t know, maybe you should visit this Twitter account. CookBook offers recipes that serve 3-4 people in just 140 characters or less. Throw out the old cookbooks, and get into the 21st century!
- SATWordoftheDay- I remember years back when I had to prep for the SAT. It was a nightmare. Huge prep books and boring classes made it less than exciting. Thankfully, I performed well, but I could have done better if this Twitter service was around. Lear a new SAT vocabulary word each day!
Eric Brantner
Eric Brantner is a copywriter who is obsessed with getting conversions. His services are used by small and mid-sized businesses from a range of industries.
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5 Reasons Why Google Should Fear (or Buy) Twitter
Ever since Google began to gain momentum in the early years of the 21st century (and then went public in 2004), people have assumed that Google is unstoppable. Although other search engines have fought and clawed in an attempt to take back share of the search market from Google, they have all failed (yes Yahoo and Microsoft, I’m talking about you).
Because of Google’s dominance over these other large corporations, it’s easy to see why most people would assume that no company could come up with enough money to come close to competing with Google.
However, over the last couple of months, one company has emerged that could present a real threat to Google. While many people could not grasp why they had been able to raise over fifty-five million dollars in funding, people within the tech industry were still obsessed with the concept of Twitter for over a year. However, it was only recently when everyone started to realize that Twitter could actually pose a direct threat to Google (hence their ability to raise so much venture capital).
Without further ado, here’s the list of five reasons why Google should fear (or more likely, buy) Twitter:
It’s Personalized: If Google is a vast library with only one librarian to guide you around (who can be hard of hearing depending on how complicated the information is that you are looking for), then Twitter is the same library but with all of your friends (and other individuals who you trust) standing around different areas of the library to point out the information that you should actually care about.
It’s Flexible: While it’s true that you can use Google on different platforms (such as your desktop or your mobile phone), Google can’t come close to offering the wide variety of flexible experiences that Twitter can. Whether you are using IceRocket Twitter Search to search and reply in real-time, Twitpic to share pictures with your followers, Tweetdeck to keep up with your stream of Twitter activity, Tweetie to use Twitter on the iPhone or BackTweets to monitor who is tweeting about your blog or web site, it’s easy to see that the ways to adapt Twitter to your own preferences are almost endless.
It Can Be Customized: Although it’s true that Google allows you to create a personalized homepage, Google simply can’t offer the same level of customization as Twitter. For example, Twitter has mentioned the possibility of serving local news to individuals who are interested in this topic. While this may not seem that significant, the reason that it’s a big deal is because Twitter is able to inject this topic (or any other topic for that matter) directly into your Twitter stream (which means that you don’t have to worry about anything except for absorbing the information).
It’s User Generated: This obviously ties in with the first point, but it’s an important point to note in itself. While Google is dependant upon it’s crawlers to go out and find the material for its index (which then must be organized by its algorithm), Twitter doesn’t have to worry about collecting a single drop of information. Instead, it let’s its extremely active participants collect and share all of this information on their own.
It’s Fresh: Although the first four reasons on this list are all important and should be enough to make Google pay close attention to Twitter (which they already are), the most direct threat to Google is because of Twitter’s ability to deliver fresh and relevant information the minute it becomes available.
In fact, it’s this exact reason why Twitter began to gain so much attention back in October of 2007. When wildfires broke out in California, many people turned to Twitter to get up to the date information about the progress of the wildfires. While a search of Google yielded a couple of news results and a bunch of information that was not relevant at the time (since people didn’t want to know about the history of wildfires, but what was happening at the moment), Twitter was giving people the exact, fresh information that they needed.
While Google has been doing their best to deliver relevant content that is fresh (by taking steps such as creating their Query Deserves Freshness model), so far Twitter has proved that once again, human contributions simply cannot be matched by an algorithm.
Please share your thoughts in the comments section below
Gerald Weber
I founded Search Engine Marketing Group in December 2005. More recently I co-founded viralcontentbuzz.com. which is the free platform that helps bloggers generate REAL "social buzz" on their best content.
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