Twitter uses

I have posted earlier on Twitter as well, but this time, its for a more practical purpose. It is on how to use this web tool to market your site online, to get those readers/customers to your portal. Social media is a powerful thing, and using it to promote your product/service online at minimal cost is even better :-)

So here are a few ways you can use twitter to tweet your way to more hits.

  1. Have an RSS Feed on your site, if it is content based, eg. Crazy Engineers, put that RSS in Twitterfeed, and push out regular updates through twitter! Similar updates can then be sent to your twitter of your blog/corporate blog as well.
  2. Once you have your twitter account setup and your tweets are flowing a-go-go, then you can have your social networking accounts like Facebook, to display the same tweet.
  3. Take care not to over do the feeds, since your followers can get bugged with you. I know a few friends who have complained of me tweeting of what songs I am listening to and all that jazz, so keep a filter on those feeds.
  4. It also helps if you are tweeting every once in a while by yourself, so you get a more human face. For eg. Zappos’ CEO, Tony Hsieh is there on twitter, and he actively tweets about his daily routine. How cool is that, direct access to a firms CEO, can you be more customer-centric?
  5. Use twitter for simple market surveys, qualitative and quantitative as well. For eg. You can tweet, “What do you think is going to happen to the Indian economy?”, the answers would be more than enough to put forth a blog post. Later, you can tweet that post url, and there is a likely chance that people who participated in your twitisurvey would also read your post
  6. This latest in: Use twitter to resign!!

Try it out, give twitter a twhirl!!

Plagiarism

iris_elements elements

Ever since we have discovered the internet, we have found this unending source of pirated software .. be it the latest games, operating systems, software, graphics packages, movies, music, what not. We simply download and use. Have we thought about how it is affecting the creator of that content? Not just financially, but rather, the thought of knowing that there exists a Prasad Ajinkya in the world who is knowingly using content/media created by that particular artiste/programmer. No, I have not thought so in the past, and certainly would not have thought about it in the future had it not happened to one of my close friends.

Today I was just browsing through Digit Magazine’s August DVD (the one that’s free). In it were different wallpapers that they had shared for everyone’s use. One of the wallpapers was this … Now take a look at IRIS-2005 flash intro, it has been painstakingly made by my classmates – Amit, Jhasketan and Sanchit. Jhasketan had drawn those figurines on a tablet, it was then imported into Photoshop, colors and effects were added, and then it was imported into flash. I saw the entire creation process right in front of me … these three guys put in days and nights on this. Try juggling that with a day full of lectures and quizzes, and it becomes a handful.

Now after 3 years, I see it being ripped-off, straight out. There are no acknowledgements mentioned, so that the thousands of Digit subscribers can unknowingly use the same wallpaper on their desktop without even saying a simple Kudos! to the three artistes.

Life is not fair. Shame on you Digit.

PS – Can you tell which is the original?

Digg Suxx

I am a Digg fan … or rather, I was one. Since the past month or so, I am reading about Sarah Palin. Finally curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to click on one of the links. Read her wikipedia entry, you might get some insight into her. Anyway, that’s not the point.

Today, I am going through Digg, to find out six articles about Sarah Palin doing the rounds on the same Digg page … blehhh!! There have been rumours that Digg is rigged, now its just confirmed. The stories are made popular only by a select few and their followers. Is web2.0 a collaborative content management system always going to be plagued by a few leaders and a throng of their followers? If that’s the case, then I see Digg as nothing but a PR tool. Sad really.

Pipes, Twits and Feeds

No people I am not referring to a new plumbing assignment or for that matter a new categorization of idiots!

Recently, I wrote a small post on Twitter, and how its micro-blogging utility is taking India by rage. The rabbit hole goes deeper as Alice (by analogy, that’s me!!) decides to plunge and find out where this world leads to. After Twitter, I came across a new web service + social networking utility that helps you keep in touch with what your friends are doing … a small friend feed of sorts. FriendFeed helps you keep track of your friends online digital imprints. A social engineer’s dream come true :-)

But what really got my goose (or is it gander?) is that Friendfeed managed to coalesce a lot of my activities in one feed (Last.fm, LinkedIn, Picasa, GTalk, Blogger, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, et al). Thats one mouthful to say the least.

The coup de grĂ¢ce is delivered in the form of Yahoo! Pipes … its a web platform where you can fetch content in the form of feeds, RSS, et al and manipulate it. I have yet to come to terms with how to go about setting up a pipe, the moment I do that, youll be the first to know!