Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...

Arun Gupta is a technology enthusiast, a passionate runner, and a community guy who works for Sun Microsystems.
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http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta/date/20090105 Monday January 05, 2009

TOTD #59: How to add Twitter feeds to blogs.sun.com ? + Other Twitter Tools


Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users's updates which are text-based posts upto 140 characters in length. This Tip Of The Day will show how to add Twitter feeds to your blog but first some facts about Twitter:

The State of Twittersphere Q4 2008 was released recently (generated using Tweet Grader) and shows:

  • Total of 4-5 million users
  • 70% users joined in 2008, 20% joined in past 60 days, 5-10 new accounts/day (so mostly noobies)
  • Only 5% have 250 or more followers
  • Only 0.8% have 1000 or more followers
  • 35% tweeters have 10 or fewer followers
  • 9% tweeters follow no one at all
Here are Tweet Grader statistics generated for @arungupta:



Lets add twitter feeds to your blog:
  1. Go to twitter.com/widgets and select Other as shown below:



    It allows you to create Flash and HTML widgets for any web page. Twitter feeds can be directly added to some other popular social networking websites by selecting their option.
  2. Click on "Continue" and choose between Flash or HTML widget as shown below:


  3. Click on "Continue" and feel free to customize as shown below:



    "Number of updates" is the number of tweets that will be shown and title can be changed as well.
  4. For blogs.sun.com, this obtained code fragment can be easily added to "_sideColumn" template.
Here are some other nifty tools to manage your Twitter account:
  1. Twitterfeed: Twitter your blog entries
  2. Twitterank: Page rank for Tweeters (85.01 as of this writing, live here)
  3. Twinfluence: Combined influence of twitterers and followers (as of Jan 2)
  4. TwitterCounter: Widget that shows twitterer follower
  5. TwitterFox: Firefox extension that notifies of tweets (really sweet and lots of other related plugins)
  6. SocialToo: Manage online interactions of Twitter (surveys, auto-follow/unfollow, Direct Messages to new followers)
  7. TweetStats: Trends and analysis as shown below:



    Live stats for @arungupta are available here.
  8. TweetLater: Schedule tweets for a particular time/day and some other features similar to SocialToo (auto-follow/unfollow and DM to new followers)
  9. Easy Tweets: Schedule tweets in future, automatically post RSS feeds and other similar features
There are numerous other tools available to manage your Twitter account! What is your favorite ?

Please leave suggestions on other TOTD (Tip Of The Day) that you'd like to see. An archive of all the tips is available here.

Technorati: twitter microblogging blogs bsc milestogo

Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0  |  Comments[5]

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