I’ve been waiting for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 ever since I completed the original Modern Warfare well over a year ago. Developed by Infinity Ward, Modern Warfare took the success and evolution of the previous Call of Duty games set in World War II and gave gamers an updated, more polished experience that put more modern weaponry, strategy and tactics in our hands.
Now Infinity Ward is using social media to solicit feedback for Modern Warfare 2. Robert Bowling has setup a Twitter feed where you can reply with your suggestions and requests for the game. Activision has said that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 will be released near the end of this year so go on over and let Robert know what you want for Christmas! I’ve already asked for a bigger sniper rifle with an even longer kill shot mission.
One of the challenges when dealing with Twitter is finding people to follow (and who will hopefully follow you) who are relevant to you and your interests. You can use Twitter’s search and spend hours looking through the masses only to find just a few people you find interesting.
Mr. Tweet changes all that by analyzing your tweets and network of people you follow and making suggestions for people you might want to check out and follow. It will also recommend you to others that might want to follow you as well.
If you’re having trouble finding valuable people to add to your fellow tweeters then check out Mr. Tweet. Do you know of any other tools for finding people on Twitter that will be relevant and interesting to you?
Bookmarking and sharing to social media sites has become a content management standard nowadays. Each story you post should allow your users to email it to their friends or post it to such sites as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, del.icio.us, reddit, digg and a host of others.
As you can see, I have the obligatory bookmarking and sharing underneath this post, but I often wonder if it would be more user friendly to have individual icons listed right below the post instead of the dropdown widget from AddThis that I use today.
I haven’t seen a real best practice for this, and viewing sites ranging from huge news outlets to small blog sites (like this one!) use a variety of approaches.
What do you think? Should icons be listed out for ease of use? Or does that sometimes cause services you use to be excluded by the authors of the site? Vote now!
If you spend a lot of time on sites like Twitter, you have seen how URL compression is used to shorten very long URLs into smaller, more user-friendly URLs. I had been using a few web sites to shorten URLs, and it dawned on me that I really needed a slick Mac widget. That’s so much more convenient than going to a web page.
I did a quick look around and found the tr.im.it widget from Andrew Hedges. This widget uses the tr.im API to shorten URLs. It can even grab the URL from your active browser window and make the shortened URL available on your clipboard immediately after you submit.
If you’re looking for a great widget to compress URLs, check out tr.im.it and tell Andrew that Trey sent you. (I’m just kidding. Andrew has no clue who I am.)
I’m not sure “unfollowing” is a real world – or “unfollow” for that matter. Scrabble anyone?
Anyway, I’ve noticed one of the major PITA tasks you have to do in Twitter is to constantly go through the list of people that you’re following and unfollow those that are no longer following you. That happens for various reasons, and I’ve found the two most common to be:
They were unsuccessful in selling you whatever they were hawking on Twitter.
You simply had nothing in common with them, and they figured it out and took action before you.
As the list of people I follow grew, I really needed to find something to help me automate this process. As a result, I found SocialToo. You can register for free on socialtoo.com and setup unfollowing preferences for your Twitter account.
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Another great feature are the email alerts you can receive each day. These detail all your new followers and everyone who unfollowed you and come in very handy as another way from preventing you from having to wade through your followers list every day.
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So if you’re looking to make your Twitterverse a bit more manageable, check out SocialToo. Remember – automation is sweet. Manual tasks are lame.
I’m relatively new on Twitter, and so far it’s been a lot of fun watching people interact with each other, getting answers to questions, seeing updates and new information that I wouldn’t hear about till days later, and in general keeping up with friends and their activities. Unfortunately that seems to comprise about 10% of the micro-babble I witness. The other 90% is made up of people who I’m convinced don’t have real jobs and walk around in a bath robe all day.
For the first month, it was funny to see people – seemingly out of nowhere – shout things like “make love not war!” or “find your inner peace and project it to the world”. I even had passing thoughts that it was kinda cool to see positive declarations from complete strangers. Kind of like that Dave Matthews video for “Everyday” where Judah Friedlander walks around and simply gives hugs out to random people that he meets on the street. If you don’t have a warm fuzzy feeling at the end of that video then go see a therapist because you have some issues and you should work through them with a professional.
After about a month the constant flow of positive and uplifting projectiles fired at the Twitterverse became downright annoying. I had to start sifting through the massive amount of verbal refuse that was hitting my twitter client every minute like clockwork. Then curiosity got the best of me, and I started really digging in to the profiles of those folks sending these verbal gems. I started to see a pattern in their bios as terms like these kept jumping out at me:
self improvement consultant
life coach
success guru
spiritual wellness advisor
relationship expert
provoker of brilliance (people, I can’t make this shit up)
And what’s more, clicking to the web site they listed in their bio usually takes me to a place on the web that ranks right up there with pyramid schemes and $8 cups of coffee. They’re rip-offs.
I should say that I don’t feel as though every person on Twitter that spouts positive and uplifting messages is full of shit. Some appear to genuinely care and pay attention to their followers and what they’re going through. One such person is @MimiFeelGood. Just this week I announced I was shutting down 360matches.com. MimiFeelGood immediately replied and asked if I was OK – probably because she assumed I was another victim of the economic times we’re living in. I explained that it was simply a personal site that I no longer had time to run due to my new daughter and the demands of my real job. She laughingly replied, and it was nice to know that someone seemingly cared.
But believe me when I say people like MimiFeelGood are a drop of goodness in a sea of disingenious, late-night infomercial style bad acting. Only by constantly looking at those you initially choose to follow and weeding out this kind of junk, will you ever find any real value in Twitter.
Twitter is great, but if you’re not using a client that works for you it becomes a major time hog – especially as your list of fellow twitters grows.
In order to sanely manage my life in Twitterville, I have been using Tweetdeck. The only problem is that it’s still at beta version 0.21, and it crashes about around 30 minutes on my MacBook Pro which causes me to spend valuable time relaunching it. The instability sucks the joy right out of the application which is a shame.
I finally give up and have switched to Twhirl. So far this is working much better. It’s stable, and I LOVE the way it shows new tweets briefly when I have it running in the background. It reminds me of Mail.appetizer. That simple feature allows me to be so much more productive because I’m not constantly switching away from what I’m doing to find out what someone just said. Now I can glance and read and be right back in the mix of my current ask.
Wired reports that an 18 year old kid hacked Twitter and gained access to multiple accounts including Britney Spears and Barack Obama. Not only did he do it, but he described how he did it and even made a video about it!
T-minus 1.5 hours to one of the greatest games of the college football season. I’m sitting here eagerly anticipating the kickoff and praying that Notre Dame doesn’t get killed. I’m really hoping the Irish can take some of their fourth quarter momentum from last week’s game against San Diego State and carry that over into this game against the Wolverines. I’ll be twittering throughout the game here.
I have no idea how useful or fun this is going to be, but I finally broke down and joined Twitter – basically for the helluvit. If I’m being honest, I may have joined simply so I’d have an excuse to use another application on my iPhone. In this case, I use Twitterfic to easily post “tweets” to my Twitter account. I can’t promise it’s going to be as exciting as reality TV, but you’re welcome to go on over and follow me if that’s what you’re in to.
One of the challenges when dealing with Twitter is finding people to follow (and who will hopefully follow you) who are relevant to you and your interests. You can use Twitter’s search and spend hours looking through the masses only to find just a few people you find interesting.
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I’m relatively new on Twitter, and so far it’s been a lot of fun watching people interact with each other, getting answers to questions, seeing updates and new information that I wouldn’t hear about till days later, and in general keeping up with friends and their activities. Unfortunately that seems to comprise about 10% of the micro-babble I witness. The other 90% is made up of people who I’m convinced don’t have real jobs and walk around in a bath robe all day.
