You can use tweet cloud to get an idea of what you’re talking about on a regular basis. You just visit the website, let it authorize your twitter account using the twitter authorization procedures and it will surf through your past tweets and create a tag cloud of the words you’ve used most often.

You can decide how far back you want the tweet cloud to go through and get an idea of what exactly you’ve been saying.

I did a quick look through my own tweets for the past year and came up with the following tweet cloud.

Looking through what I talk about over the past year all makes sense to me. I can even think about some of the tweets that I’ve written that generated those keywords on a general basis.

What are you saying on twitter? You can use this tweet cloud tool to confirm what you think, or maybe even open your eyes to what you’d never realize.

Now we just need a tool to see if you’re really being helpful and expanding the dialogue, or just being a noise in the twitter channel.

Post from: EveryJoe

Twitter Cloud – What Are You Tweeting About

I’ve found quite a few great people to follow through this weekly twitter ritual. It’s an interesting phenomenon because the recommendations are usually right on. My own preferences and twitter habits mean that I pretty much only follow someone that I’m truly interested in hearing from and trust for a variety of reasons.

The challenge for me is to think about who I should recommend to my other followers as my own #followfriday recommendations. That’s where the Auto Follow Friday tool comes in.

Auto Follow Friday is very straight-forward. You enter your Twitter username, there’s no need for your password, and based on your twittering habits, the application will recommend a handful of other twitterers that you tweet most based on your previous 100 tweets.

What better recommendation than those people I’ve talked with most recently? I think to expand the tool it would be interesting to select different people based on different criteria on successive weeks.

Find some new folks to follow and dialogue with on twitter with Auto Follow Friday.

Post from: EveryJoe

Twitter Auto-Follow Friday Tool

Here are three problems all twitter users are likely to face on Twitter:

Phishing: Twittersphere is abuzz with tweets about phishing, which prompted me to make this post. There is a phishing attack spreading across Twitter at this moment. It began with what is being called “DM Deception”. User A receives a direct message from User B asking them to check out some URL. You know what happens next. I didn’t face this yet, but I have seen compromised accounts among my followers tweeting messages like, “Check out this cute pic of yours, LOL…” with another URL.

If you suspect that you may have become a victim to a phishing attack, change your password immediately. If it is beyond salvation, bite the bullet and report the user as malicious. Twitter has so far been quick at suspending suspicious users.

Shortening URLs: I am not complaining but I expected this to be more rampant than what it is now. More URL shorteners like TinyURL, Tr.im, Snurl are crowding because of the growth of Twitter. A long URL is shortened to take fewer characters so that it can be shared through tweets. The trouble is that you have no idea about what you are clicking at. It could very well be some link spreading malware. What makes this worse is that these shortened URLs are too similar to be distinguished or remembered; you could click on the same bad link twice on your bad day.

A solution is to enable the preview feature. Tinyurl, e.g., provides a cool preview feature which when enabled shows what the URL redirects to (the original URL that was shortened) and then asks you whether you want to proceed to that site. I wish that all URL shorteners implement the feature.

Twitter Apps: Hundreds of apps are being developed around Twitter. Take a look at this list of Twitter Clients being used and you will know. All these expect your Twitter username and password to login. You might come across a new app that asks you to enter your Twitter username and password to be able to use it, and what if it steals your username and password? This might seem far-fetched but I don’t see why it can’t be done.

I tend to give any new app a day or so before using it, and I keep my ears open to listen to the grapevine until then. When my work depends on trying such apps I try it with a secondary account first.

As of now, I believe that the elite Twitter users are more prone to these attacks and have more to lose. That said, having started using Twitter only a couple of months ago, I find it immensely useful and would like to be prepared to face all possible annoyances. So what other problems do you think we might face?

Post from: EveryJoe

3 Problems We Will Face on Twitter