Twitter Applications

As everyone knows, twitter applications are appearing to cater to the different needs of tweeples. As everyone knows, there are:

• TweetMeme
• TweetDeck
• Tweetie 2
• HootSuite
• Brizzly
• Seesmic
• Twitterfeed
• Twitterrific

I am sure you have tried at least two or three of these applications before.

Could you share with me out of all these Twitter Applications, which do you like the most and the reason for it? Just interested to know how people feel about Twitter Applications so I know which Application would be the best for me! Please comment at the bottom. Thanks a lot.

The wise use of Twitter coming from a not-so-wise person

Twitter

What the reason that you started tweeting?

For networking? Because everyone is on twitter?

With the evolution of technology, social media plays an important part in your life.  No matter for work (business), entertainment or just to connect with your friends.  Social media has become essential in daily life and is a tool used to market yourself.

My reason for tweeting:

Initially, the reason was it would be graded into my course requirement. When I started out, I was clueless about what twitter was used for. I had this concept that tweetples would tweet incessantly about mundane happenings in their life.

This was my thoughts till Stephie Tan -fashion nation blogger (@stephietan), guest lecturer for one of our NCT (New Communication Technologies) lecture shared with us about her experience in social media. Why her? As she is a frequent user of Twitter, established writer of fashion nation which lead to freelance writing on various magazine and she owns her own online shop.

stephie tan (not my image-not our lecture too)

She told us “Everything that is shared on the social media can be tracked upon” so nothing is safe online.  So you need to be careful of what you post. Also she shared with us how she gets followers, “the topics that you talk about interests the followers” Therefore you must find your interest, then people would be enticed to follow your tweets.

With her sharing, I felt more inspired about the direction for my tweets and I began to understand more about twitter and the reason for tweeting.

Hence, my reasons for tweeting became:

1. To connect with friends or family members or people with my same interest
2. Sharing information with others

Hence the tweetples actually knows information faster than a person who reads the daily news. As information is being retweeted to their followers, it is being spread throughout twitter community.

And how should you go about tweeting? This is the simple way of what I learn:

1. Plan your tweets:

What you want to tweet about and what is your purpose for tweeting. It could be because you wanted to share the information, or you want an opinion about something.

2. Execute your tweets:

Considering what time would be the perfect time to get all your followers to read it and the way you want to phrase your tweets to make it interesting. You should also take into consideration whether you should retweet what you have tweeted (in order for better reach and frequency)

3. Learning from your tweets

It is very important to learn from your tweets in order to improve your tweets. Take notice of what interests your followers. Learn from how others write their tweets, how they manage to spark others’ interest.

4. Optimising your tweets

After learning, you have to measure whether it reaches out to your followers. Or else tweak the way you tweet about things – giving a different angle.

No matter what, you must always dare to try on the social media.

Podcasting and Social Machine

Podcasting

A medium/tool on the social media which your voice can be heard, you cannot forget podcasting! First you need to download the software, I recommend Audacity! Furthermore, you can download it for FREE!

I had to lead the class in this topic: Podcast. I love listening to podcast, especially MrBrown’s podcasts. I find it relevant to me as it talks about current affairs. Especially “your mother’s army”, check this out! The podcast is about the parents that pamper their child so much that they do not want their child to be negatively influenced by army’s language. I would like to see that in a real battlefield, I bet that this mother’s army would be in hiding, who knows if ‘your mother’s army’ might get killed trying to play the peacemaker. ^^

podcast

What I shared with the class:

Podcasting is the method of distributing multimedia files, such as audio programs or music videos over the Internet for playback on mobile devices and personal computers.

The distribution format of a podcast uses a form of the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) format.

The term podcast, like “radio”, can mean both the content and the method of delivery.

Three main reasons/purpose of podcast: Education, Business/Commercial and Entertainment.

 

Steps to coming up with a podcast:

Step 1: Storyline (Topic)

Step 2: Come up with the script, along with the sound effects needed

Step 3: Recording with voice talents

Step 4: Editing with Audacity

Step 5: Sharing through social media

Podcasting is really fun and entertaining method to express yourself. However it takes a lot of effort to come up with a good podcast. If you heard of any good podcast, please share the link with me! Share the podcast love!

RSS (Really Simple Syndication)

It is a tool that I noticed every website has, but I have never tried it before. RSS is a button at the right hand side of your url address.

RSS feed

If you are a daily reader for sports, the RSS Feed informs you when there is a new update about certain sports. This is convenient as you do not need to check the whole newspaper just to find the sports section. RSS Feed also ensures that you do not miss out any news of your interest. So now that you know about this button, remember to use it wisely!

Google Reader

Google Reader

The best website to manage your RSS Feed is Google Reader. It is really simple to use, first you must have a Google account in order to have access. Then you have to add subscriptions from the various websites that you are interested in:

add subscription

There. Saves lots of time finding for your news from various websites, you can see them all in one website, Google Reader. One advice: Do not add too many subcriptions! It might flood your inbox.

Voice over Internet Protocol

For his week’s NCT tutorials we learnt to use different media tools that everyone commonly uses. Social tools that we must have basic knowledge of. Like Skype use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP),the cost is apparently cheaper than using regular telephone calls. So this is a really good way to save money!

What’s  more, the costs of VoIP are lower because it is billed per megabyte (MB) whereas telephone calls are billed by the minute or second. I find this information interesting as it shows the difference between technologies now and in the past. Imagine the cost to calls overseas, but now you don’t have to take it into consideration as the cost is so cheap!

I can totally imagine that in the near future our phones will change to use VoIP, as the costs are SO much cheaper. However in emergencies, the phone cannot use VoIP so it will have to be merge of what the phone has now.

Singapore needs to keep wireless@sg, so people can use VoIP. But as you know it, wireless@SG is not stable, sometimes you can go on or off. Of course, the phone bills would have to go down, but there would be challenge between the three TelCos as to how low they would go!

Here is a video to tell you more about VoIP:

I love wikipedia because it is convenient to find all your needed information in one place. Here is more about VoIP. Benefits of VoIP is obviously its operational costs and its flexibility. The disadvantages about using VoIP is it is susceptible to power failure and it cannot be used in emergency calls. So handphone are useful in such situation!

Steps to being a professional ’stalker’

Patricia Law from Ogilvy PR was our distinguished guest lecturer for this week! Follow/ “stalk” her at @patlaw!

She shared with us her daily schedule on social media as a profession. She has to do media monitoring for her clients, which makes her read up to 400 Google Alerts per day. Astonishing fact.

She also gave us websites which she visits to track what is being said about a topic. This is important as we need to know what others are talking/complaining about us (brand/product), it is free feedback for us to further improve ourselves to satisfy others.

I shall list all the websites down at the bottom as it would be great to share the love with others as well!

Social Machines

cute social icons

Social Machines is the terms used for connecting everyone through the internet to express ourselves. Handphones, Laptops and iTouch allows you access to internet easily and is portable.

Hence we have websites like Digg, Delicious, Flickr and StumbleUpon.

Digg.com

digg.com

This website use the wisdom of crowds when you like the story you will digg it so others can see it, if you do not like it you can bury it. ^^

The best is this button:

digg me button

Delicious

delicious social bookmarking

You can store your URLs, personal comments and descriptive tags in order to identify the web page that you want to find later. This is especially good for research. As when you research, you tend to forget which web page has which information. Wished that I learnt it earlier, it would have made my life easier.

delicious bookmarks

Flickr

Flickr

This is a photo-sharing site that allows you to add descriptive words, or ‘tag’ to photographs to make it easier to find for later.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon website

I will find it fun when I am bored, because you never know what type of website is next. Hence the excitement for using this. ^^

As promised:

Interesting websites to check out:

Daily updates about a topic, should try these: PBWIKI, Netvibes, Google Reader (love this), Google Alerts, Alltop, Technorati,

Social bookmarking (one that I highly recommend to use): Delicious

Topics that bloggers talk about: Google Blogsearch, Icerocket, Ping, Blogarama

The one-stop-shop(s) for specific words: Daymix, Whostalkin, Social Mention (recommended!), Monitorthis, BoardTracker, Omgili

Tracking topics on Twitter: Wefollow, Tweetizen, MrTweet, Twellow, Muck Rack, Media on Twitter, Twitterfall

Evaluating An Influencer: Tweetica, Twitalyzer, Twitter Grader, Alexa, URLFan, Compete, Popuri.us

Facebook and its uses

For this week’s tutorial, we learnt about the uses of Facebook. Other than the common use of posting your photos, links and videos. For me, I use to Facebook to kill time by playing a few out of hundreds of games they offer.

Facebook has pages and groups which has different uses for different purposes. Pages is meant for big organizations, brands, bands, movies or celebrities who wants to interact with their fans or customers without a personal account. My friend’s brother actually set up a page for his band and I have to say that it is really annoying to get the messages from them. As you see it in your Facebook account as well as your personal email address. And honestly I am joining out of politeness.

This is one of the reasons why you should never spam your wall or your twitter account. People get annoyed after awhile and would eventually turn off the information that you are sending. Exception is if the information is interesting. Something that has substance – as @stephietan says.

Whereas Groups are great for organizing on a personal level and for smaller scale interaction around a cause. Like what we did for our anti cyber-bullying campaign. “Online Attack, Offline Impact” – what you do online would impact others in reality. Click here to see our group and join it if you like!

The Wisdom of the Lazy One.

Wisdom of Crowds

The topic for the day was an interesting one, Wisdom of Crowd. It created quite a “hoohaa” in our class as everyone was amazed by such a theory that is proven.

For the Wisdom of a Crowd, the interesting fact is the crowd’s answer has a high percentage of 91% getting the correct answer. Surprised right? I guess this is the reason why in “Who wants to be a millionaire?” there is the audience option. Because they have 91% chance of getting the correct answer.

What is the Wisdom of Crowd? Well, Wisdom of the Crowd is the answers of many individual, by getting the average of all the answers, you will find the crowds’ answer to be closer to the right answer as compared to having an individuals’ answer. Hence, the theory of this is you will be able to learn a lot by gaining small piece of information from everyone.

I find the theory realistic as there is this saying “two heads are better than one”, which is the reason why we rely on each other for information. Right?

In fact, do you know that Wikipedia use Wisdom of Crowd? As Wikipedia is a website that people can edit information, hence everyone is contributing to the pool of information. This is the reason why Wikipedia a powerful source of information.

Do you know that actually an individual has only 64% of getting the correct answer. With the Wisdom of Crowds, it makes us seem smarter as our knowledge is pooled together. Don’t you agree?

Is Google making us STUPID? No, LAZY is more like it.

My class had a discussion whether Search Engine, Google was making us STUPID as we are reliant on Google for easy access to information.

I have come to realise that Google does not make us stupid, but lazy instead. As you know when you search for information, you want the information to come out as quick as possible. Hence when you go into a website, you will start scanning through the website right? But you won’t really read the details, because we think that Google would help us pick the website that has the information that we want and need.

If you do not believe this, you can try it out by yourself by reading a long paragraph.  See if you really read all the information. Personally, I don’t. ^^

Guest lecturer – Stephie Tan!

The first thing I heard when I reached the lecture theater was that there was a guest lecturer coming in at 10am. Well, surprise surprise. It shocked me to know that it was stephie tan, who is a fashion nation blogger. Check her out here. Or add her at twitter: @stephietan.

I really love the style of her writing, as seen in fashionation and her own blog called stephiesays. Because of her writing, she managed to get a lot of freelancing writing jobs without asking for it. What’s more is she can do the things she likes and yet get paid! The kind of life I would love.

Have to say I was shocked that she would specially take time out to share with us how she uses social media to her advantage. She may not be as famous as Xiaxue but she is humble and is willing to take time to share with us her success.

I liked her points that she mentioned in lecture, that you might not know who is following you so you should not offend the person. After you don’t know if your parents are stalking you online. I am totally safe in that area, my mum doesn’t use the computer, she doesn’t know ANYTHING about social media. Except for facebook account which my cousin showed to her. But she doesn’t know how to login on her own.

Also you need to talk about things with substance, the topic must be interesting to sustain your reader’s interest. This makes me think about my interest and how this might help me in my near future.

I have to say that I was greatly inspired by what she says and I will put in more effort to do well in my social media, though it is still quite mind-boggling with the amount of research done to back up your information. Social media allow you to reach/communicate with your friends as well as people that you do not know. Also it is networking and understanding people’s interest. Though to utilize it fully to your potential, you will need to be known for something.

This gives me a lot to think about already. Pondering.

Professional Preparation Class

our rep, andris!

The one with the ‘leopard’ prints, though it looks more like black  with white spots. But hey, more points for being so fashionable right? LOL. Her hair had the rubber band style, the idea is London from American’s Next Top Model Cycle 12.

London

If you watched ANTM (American Next Top Model) you would have seen her. I liked her out of all the other models in this season because I believe she has potential to make it to the top three! ^^

Anyway, Andrea did a spoof of Ris Low, the ‘Miss Singapore’ of the way she spoke. It was really classic! ^^

BOOMZ EVERYONE.

Here’s the video that is going to make everyone laugh…

And what I found what was our famous Phua Chu Kang doing a spoof on her:

Which do you like better? The spoof or the original? ^^ I really can’t decide. HAHA!

Just updated: 4th November!

I also just spotted a spoof of ris low on the mrbrown show that is a vodcast using “So Hot” from WonderGirls.

Have fun viewing all the videos!

Technology in the future

Have you have imagined how technology would have evolved in future? With the speed of technology and massive use of social media, is it far-fetched to imagine that everyone will not have to lift a finger to get things done?

Well, let your imagination run wild especially when you get a sneak peek of the future through ‘minority report’. The ridiculous things like a police department called precrime division, where people are caught for murder that they were going to commit.

I love how computer would be in the future, all you need is to wave your hands and it would listen to you. I also love the big screens they use, compared to my pathetic small screen.

I also love the use of the holograms, I do believe this would be the latest technology to takeover 3G. So you actually see the person before your eyes instead on the phone.

Actually I find it similar to a book that I have read, a few years back, called ‘Uglies’ series by Scott Westerfeld. Link for the storyline is found here.

Though the future is unpredictable, the concept of the future has been clear that there will be no such things as private life. Everything done will be out in the open for everyone to see. Imagine how feelings would have developed due to the change in technology.

So I am glad that I was born in this century and not the next. Though I believe it would be interesting to own such high-technology gadgets as your toys. I would certainly want to own some of them now!