DIIA Blog

Yesterday I gave a small overview of Twitter to a small group on campus as the first part of the Fall Semester iDIIA Talks. The link below takes you to the PDF of the handout that I gave out. It has lots of resources, links, tips and suggestions for using Twitter. Enjoy!

Download the handout here: http://drop.io/diia_talk_twitter

Keene

New Media Manager

Late yesterday and this morning, the blogosphere and twittersphere have been abuzz at Twitter’s announcement that it will incorporate geospatial capabilities into the next iteration of the Twitter API to be released soon. This will give developers an opportunity to incorporate lat-log data into user’s tweets to see specific locations of where the tweets are being posted. While this will be an optional feature for privacy reasons, having this capability will open up the doors for some very interesting use of Twitter for real time events such as natural disasters, breaking news, and whole host of other uses. Students and teachers in the field can use this to their advantage as well for fieldwork and data gathering adding an entirely new context to real time microblogging. Remember, its all about location, location, location…

Read the official announcement at the Twitter Blog.

Keene

How many ways can one write something in 140 characters or less? It seems more and more these days. As Twitter flits into the lives of just about everyone online, the challenge has been how to manage, organize and keep track of all the short attention span chatter. Initially, there was really just your plain vanilla browser and the Twitter.com website. You created an account, you logged in and you began posting snippets about whatever you could in 140 characters or less. People followed and you followed others. It all quickly became something like managing your email InBox without a lot of order. But this has changed and now Twitter users have many options to manage the micro-blogging tool. These tools give you the ability to better visualize the tweets, search, flag favorites, retweet something, send direct tweets etc.

So here is a brief rundown of a few Twitter applications that you might want to check out. Many of them are Mac apps but this is the platform I compute on so there is a bias here. Still, there are a few cross platform options. Please let me know if there are others I have missed or more options on Windows.

TweetDeck (Mac/PC) - This is the poster child Twitter app that was created with Adobe Air so its a cross platform offering. This app offers configurable multi-pane view of Twitter activity which you can see your friends, create and see groups, see search results, see twitter trends and even load up 12 second videos via 12seconds.tv. It also integrates into your Facebook page for status update monitoring.

TweetDeck for the iPhone - Quickly becoming the favorite Twitter app on the iPhone. Its unique in that it brings the multi column feature to the hand held device which is a nice touch (sorry for the pun).

Seesmic Desktop (Mac/PC) - Another Adobe Air app that is cross platform. Seesmic used to be a poster child for video sharing and posting but it is moving away from this to focus on its Twitter application which as become a favorite. It supports multiple twitter accounts and can hook into Facebook updates. It also supports multiple columns. Still, I find the Adobe Air app interface a little sterile but it works.

Twhirl (Mac/PC) - Another Adobe AIR app that can support multiple Twitter accounts and taps into other social networking sites. I have not experimented too much with Twhirl but it does support multiple accounts and supports various other social networking services. It appears Twhril is also developed by Seesmic.

Tweetie - This was the de facto standard on the iPhone but its losing some ground to the excellent TweetDeck iphone version. In addition, there is a desktop version of Tweetie which is nice, but it can’t display multiple columns of data the way some of the other apps can but it has a slick, modern interface.

Twitterific (Mac) - This was one of the first Mac Twitter apps and its still very good. There is a desktop and iPhone version. Its very minimal (sort of like Twitter!) but people like it because it got a minimal interface and does not distract you (as much).

Nambu (Mac) - This is a nice desktop app that lets you access your multiple Twitter accounts and configure things in one view with multiple columns, including popular posts, Favorites, etc. Nicely done. Early versions had bad memory leaks, but the developer seems to be actively patching these and issuing regular updates.

Beak (Mac) - Beak is fairly new to the Twitter app arena. It has some promise. I have not played around with it too much. The interface is very Mac modern, but it seems to lack some features of the other apps (but it looks nice!).

Twittelator Pro - This is a full featured iphone/ipod Touch only Twitter app that is well polished. If find it a little slower than other Twitter clients, but its got a lot of nice features. Its developed by Stone Design, an experienced and long developer who began developing for the NeXT platform.

Eventbox - EventBox is a great app for managing several different social networking applications such as FaceBook, RSS feeds, Reddit news, Diig, Flickr feeds and more. I like this app and use it fairly often. Its got good potential. The downfall again is that because it taps into multiple services, it does not really shine for any particular one. But if you use multiple services in addition to Twitter, it might work for you.

If I had to go and choose one app for Twitter, I would go with Nambu because its got a Mac like interface, supports multi-column views and multiple accounts. A close second is TweetDeck, but I am still getting used to the Adobe Air interface. I also like Tweetie and it might be included to use it more if it supported multi-column views.

Honorable Mention - Monitter is not a Twitter app but it is a great way to monitor (get it?) multiple Twitter searches. This is a great tool for researching trends on Twitter and covering breaking news or other time sensitive topics. Check it out. Its pretty interesting.

Double Honorable Mention- Twitter is not the only 140 character micro-blogging solution out there. Identi.ca is rapidly gaining some traction and many of the apps above support Identi.ca accounts now. You can go to their website for more info, but its basically similar to Twitter, with one big exception. Its open source unlike Twitter. Also, there is Yammer, a micro-blogging service like Twitter but aimed at the corporate business world.

This should be more than enough to get one Twittering away. And now back to old school blogging… ahh that oh so early 21st century technology equivalent of the chalkboard.

Keene

Pat Ramsey, Principal, slash25.com. What’s your definition of social media? From participants: 1) where content is user-generated, 2) forums, 3) e-mail groups, listservs, 4) online space where people can communicate and collaborate, 5) any space that allows you to build community, 6) media away from the Web. From traditional media sources, on-line communities–broad term.

Define: Social Media (Wikipedia, Bottle PR, Search Engine Watch). Ramsey defines as the online equivalient to “The Kitchen At A Party.” Increasing number of social media sites, some are beginning to fold, being compared to the .com bubble.

Social Media succeeds: 1) people come together with little regard to geographic barriers, 2) allows the crowd of humanity to reach information otherwise unattainable, 3) sparks creativity and imagination.

SMS is the only tool for much of sub-saharan Africa. Convert text to e-mail messages and send.

Hash tags on Twiter.

Social Media steps in it: 1) when there is no method of skipping repetitive content (skip-naves, skip links), 2) when there are not text equivalents (alts) for images–social media sites tend to lean towards the heavy-image category of sites, 3) when there are little to no means of identifying the purposes of inputs, controls, and text areas.

Facebook–automatically generated link names that go on forever, have no clue what it is. Other problems: form labels. No title attributes–no way of knowing what to put where. Has no area for alts for photos. Twitter does alts on thumbnails in timeline, automatically generated by user name, so can link to other users.

Competitive market causes folks to rush stuff out without planning in accessibility. User-generated, and users are not educated about accessibility. Ex.: YouTube. Even developers don’t know–lack of awareness, certainly no testing.

Text alternative problems: thumbnails in discussion threads, images in user photo galleries, avatars in forums. CAPTCHAS–alt attributes can be problematic for CAPTCHAS as their purpose it to reduce accessibility for computer programs (robots), but maintain accessibility for ONLY normal sighted humans.

Audio CAPTCHAs offer greater flexibility, but still pose challenges to user. Difficult to understand. Possible solution: validating questions (”What color is the sky?”). When you make it difficult for users to interact, you’re not serviing your folks. CAPTCHAs have already been broken. Better to rely on your e-mail spam functions. If commercial products offer solutions, most likely Black Hat hackers already broke them two years ago.

Information, relationships, and labels are problematic. Labels must be properly associated with a field via the “for” and “id” attributes. Jaws sees title attributes used in fields.

Looked at how three social media sites do 3 major functions.  Facebook minuses: form fields unlabeled, no title attributes; audio CAPTCHAs difficult to hear; lack of alts on images. Facebook pluses: help page available regarding accessibility. Works better on mobile site: m.facebook.com. text/xhtml+xml means it works with IE, simpler version of site, easier to use for most things, faster loading, *login and other form fields still unlabeled, much easier for screen reader use.

Twitter: “What are you doing” textarea properly labeled. Images conveying information have appropriate alt attributes. Skip nav present. “Following,” “followers,” “updates” links start with number value rather than object–maybe invert them. Greasemonkey scripts (Firefox add-on, can write them yourself) available to enhance accessibility. Third-party accessible alternative. Hover function that shows links isn’t readable by screen reader.

Twitter Mobile: application/xhtml+xml will load in Firefox, not IE. No images, stripped down text, no sidebar, etc.

New solution for Twitter w/Jaws: “Jawter.” Allows you to get updates, with audial alert. SXSWi broke AT&T’s network, killed Twitter. SMS worked, however! Don’t activate “all text messages” or will kill your phone.

WordPress (.org, not .com): 2 areas of concern–accessibility of published content, accessibility of the administrative interface. Function of their CMS system. Make sure headings are correct, forms labeled properly, colors aren’t out of whack–test with the same steps you do for any Web page. Templates then build pages, propagating accessibility code throughout all pages.

Administrative interface: can be edited just as theme templates, but edits will be lost when you upgrade. Post title input has no label or title attrib, no skip nav, Visual Editor uses ifram with HTML page for textarea–body of the post. Good: alt-z jumps straight to the body of the post, however, this should be made known to users, using a heading or label that’s positioned offscreen. A few other keyboard shortcuts, but the code doesn’t tell the screen reader.

Developers know that things can be better. The developer community is making strides–distributed, back-channel development: TPG-notifier. WAI-ARIA.

Iterate: find the accessibility hooks in your social media app of choice; share your findings so others don’t slog through unnecessarily–you may find people have written workarounds and fixes. Communicate with developers, submit patches if possible.

As the education world begins to get its head around Twitter and the concept of microblogging, a potentially useful way to use this is to look at keywords that are tied to location. Such a tool exists and is quite interesting, almost mesmerising, to watch. But it can also be a quick way for teachers and students to get a snapshot of Twitter posts for a given location. The website Monitter allows one to key in a location and up to three key words and it will then pull Twitter feeds onto the screen. Recording a screencast of the results could be useful in a number of academic areas such as journalism, communications and new media. Plus its just plain fun. So even if you are not Twittering, you can at least play the bystander role and watch others. Along the same lines, Google’s hot trends at its zeitgeist website is also interesting to peruse.