Twittering

Ok news from my travels in the Twitter world including one observation, one lesson and one cool new app.

First An Observation-what is up with Twitter DM's?  Granted the DM (Direct Message) feature is not a prime reason for using Twitter and it is a poor substitute for email, but I do use it occasionally.  There are a few of my connections that I interact with primarily on Twitter and it is not unusual for us to DM each other.  I have noticed that after the last redesign the whole DM message screen makes no sense at all.  I cannot for the life of me figure out what the logic is in laying out the sequence of how my messages show up.  I got a message from one of the Twitter contacts today regarding a mention I made about her in an earlier tweet.  Lucky I use Hootsuite and noticed the message on there, because on the Twitter screen I would have to scroll past 5 other DM's that are anywhere from 2-9 months old before I got to her message.  There is no logic here and call me a luddite, but  I expect software to have some kind of logic when I use it.

Fell free to post a reply if you have some insight into how the Twitter message screen is supposed to work now.

Second A Lesson Learned-Did you know you can get filtered from Twitter search?  Did you know that when you do get filtered you don't show up in any hashtag (that's the little # sign) discussions?  I found this out because I got filtered.  The site says you get filtered if you tweet the same message too often, or too many tweets with links or if Twitter thinks you are spam.  All of your posts still show up on your follower's timelines, but you don't show up in any search.  Apparently this has been going on for some time, but I have not really seen anyone discussing or warning you about it.  Some unofficial blogs I have read on the topic say that in addition to the official versions you can get blocked just for re-tweeting someone that has already been flagged as a spammer.

I was actually at a book launch for a client and they had a screen following tweets about the event.  Dutifully I tweeted, and in total narcissistic fashion I went and watched the screen to see my tweets, only I never did show up.  A quick research after the event lead me to the whole filtered search issue.

If you want to know if you have been filtered, go to Twitter and in the search function type from:yourtwittername. (that's from: followed by your username without the @ in front of it)  If no tweets come up then, you have probably been filtered also.

I can't tell you how to get un-filtered, because I am still working on that one myself.  Actually I am working on why I got filtered in the first place, then it's figure how to get off the bad list.

Third A Cool App-paper.li This is a really cool little Twitter feed app.  You create a free account on Paper.li and then create a newspaper based on various Twitter feed choices.  Paper.li will go pull the Twitter feed you specify and create what looks like an online newspaper with articles based on the feed you selected.  I created a list based on several of the better accounting information sources I follow and created The Accountants Daily:

I just think this is a cool thing and I really like the look of the page it creates.  Obviously they are planning on living off the advertising revenue, but the ads seem to be relevant to the topics and are not really obtrusive to me.

I am going to play around with this one some more and may come up with a post on how to use it for your own marketing purposes.

Check out my Paper.li page and let me know what you think.