What are Twitter Lists and Why Don’t you Have Them Yet?

Twitter is currently beta testing LISTS. It is a way for you to be able to separate your time lines by sorting out people you follow.  So you could make lists for:

• Friends
• News
• Sports
• Shopping
• Family

Only a small group of Twitter users have lists right now and during the beta testing, the lists are actually going away for people that have already made lists.  I hope when they come back Twitter will have saved all of the lists becasue it is time consuming to make up.

Once you have lists you can also see what other Twitter users have lists and then you can also copy or follow their whole lists with one click.  That is pretty convenient.

Soon everyone will have them, so don’t worry just be patient.

Want to know if you are on a list?

Type this in to your toolbar but replace “yournamehere” with your twitter name.

http://twitter.com/yournamehere/lists/memberships

This link will only work if you are in the beta group.

Tweetgrid is my new favorite Twitter application where you can track multiple topics on Twitter.

Tweetgrid shows you real-time results and allows you to respond quickly by auto including your hashtag.  It works especially well if you are following an event such as #gno (a popular Tuesday evening ‘girls night out’ on Twitter).

It’s very easy, you just log in and select how many topics you want to follow and sit back and start reading and responding.  If you are new to Twitter, I would recommend starting off with no more than two topics.  Otherwise you may get overwhelmed and never try it again.

Tracking high traffic topics and responding to them is also a way for you to gain more followers and more trust on Twitter.

The pound sign (#) on Twitter is actually called a hashtag.

In a sense it’s a way to sort of create a group of tweets for people to follow.  In the example above #twiistup is an event that this person wants other folks following this event to read.  #holla is just like say “hey” for more people using #holla as a hashtag.  It’s kind of like using a meta tag on a website.  It’s a tag for people to find your tweet.

hashtags.org shows real-time use of Twitter hashtags.You can also follow @hashtags to have your hashtags tracked.  You can also track multiple hashtags using applications such as Tweetgrid.  I’ve used that to track up to six and it shows you real-time results.

In most cases hashtags are used for big events such as the Iran Election (#iranelection), death of Michael Jackson (#mj or #michaeljackson), Presidential elections (#election), etc.

For more on hashtags check out the Twitter fan wiki.

Twittorati is a place where you can get tweets from the top blogs in the blogosphere.  The benefit to this is that there is alot of trash on Twitter.  Lot’s of spammers and mediocre news sources are out there trying to get you to follow them.  Following @twittoratinews will streamline your Twitter feeds with more reliable news sources.

Some of the blogs they feed from are the Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Engadget and many more.

When you register for Twitter there is an option for you to “protect” your account.

What that means is that people will have to send a request to follow you and you will have to approve them.  This is great if you are planning on devulging secret information or detailed personal stories or locations that you don’t want anyone to have access to.

If you are using Twitter for business purposes I would not suggest locking your account, but rather creating a personal one if you feel you need to seperate the two.

Check out this great post on the topic of protecting your tweets.

A picture says a thousand words. On Twitter, you only have 140 characters, so to share a picture you have to use on outside source like Twitpic.  If you have a Twitter account then you automatically have a Twitpic account.  All you need to do is go to Twitpic and sign in.  You will then be given an email address.  That email address is your road to tweeting images.

When you take an image on your phone, just select the option to email it and send it to the twitpic email address.  It will be some sort of version with your username.number@twitpic.com.  Whatever you want to say about the image can be put in the subject box of your email message and will come out in the tweet.

You can’t use the email address to get emals, so don’t share it with anyone.

Yes. Celebrities are tweeting. In many cases it’s not really the celebrity themselves, but probably their assistant. None the less, they are on there.

Since June 2009 Twitter has added the “Verified Accounts” certification to high profile Twitter users.  This is an attempt to derail the celebrity squatters (people who steal your name). Although if you are a celeb and not on Twitter you are really failing IMO.

In recent news Ashton Kutcher reached 1 million followers.  He tweets a lot about politics too if you are in to that.  My favorite is Shaq.

Here’s one reason why.

To find out which celebrities are tweeting go to Celebrity Tweet.

twe2 is a free service that allows you to receive @replies, direct messages via SMS in other countries. They do add an advertisement to the bottom of your message, but it’s a great service. You’d be paying for each text with any phone carrier. You will still have to pay to send your text messages, unless you reply through a Twitter client in which case you would pay for the data transfer.

They will need your username and password, but they swear it is safe.

The short answer is you can simply go to search.twitter.com and type in a word to see who is talking about it.

Depending on the word or phrase you type in, you may have to refine your query to get the results you are looking for and not be bombarded with new search results every second.

Here’s an example. You’ll notice in this search result for the term “tweetup” we get results for tweetups from all over, even Edinburgh.

What I’m really looking for is a tweetup I can go to in Los Angeles, so after refining my query I get this.

You can search Twitter for anything. The biggest use of search Twitter often is by people searching for their name or a brand monitoring their reputation online. Many businesses tweet so they monitor what people are saying about them so they can respond appropriately.

There are many apps such as, Twitt(url)y and TweetBeep, that help you track tweets with the terms you are looking for.