Abra Technologies

Micro-Blogging - Do You Twitter ?

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1. Twitter

Twitter is a micro blogging service that has been around for quite some time. Updates on Twitter, also called tweets are an answer to the question “What are you doing?” the word count for the posts are limited to 140 words. However, in a day, you can upload as many times as you want. There are no ads, and the service is free.

What makes Twitter and such micro-blogging tools cool is the incorporation of social networking features. You can configure Twitter to follow the updates of your friends as they follow your own updates. Not only friends, but you can follow the updates of virtually anybody as long as you know their e-mail ID and they don’t block you. Consider the applications of this feature – in a corporate environment, where several people are working as a team-such updates let all the team members know what is being done by whom.

Now that you know how Twitter can be used, here’s how to set it up. Go to www.twitter.com and sign up. You will receive a unique URL – http://www.twitter.com/abraworldwide/. Log in using your username and password and search e-mail services like Gmail, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL for your contacts. All those who are twitter members will show up in the list and you will be able to add them to your follow list. There is an option to invite other people by using their e-mail addresses. Once you have found the people who you like to follow and have added them, sit back and follow their updates. Privacy options include the feature to block a particular person from following your updates and to keep your posts out of public viewing. You can send private messages to others on your list by clicking on their names. Similarly, you can also get private messages from others.

Twitter can be tied in with IM and SMS facilities to provide great functionality. Go to Settings > Phone & IM and enter your IM screen name and phone number. In both cases you will be given a confirmation code. After following the instructions given, you can keep an eye out for updates from people on your list. In case of phones, you need to verify your number by messaging the code to a specified number. Once that is done you can post and receive tweets via your mobile.

One of Twitter’s greatest advantages is the proliferation of Twitter widgets. These widgets increase the available functionality, making it more user-friendly and following updates a lot less complicated. For an exhaustive list of such applications go to http://twitter.com/downloads and check out the wide variety of downloadable Twitter widgets made by third party developers.

You can choose from downloadable widgets for computers and mobiles, Firefox extensions and Google gadgets. Most of these let you tweet without logging in to the Twitter home page.

For twitter aficionados, also referred to as code jockeys, custom made Twitter widgets can be created by using the free Twitter API. If you love Twitter and Facebook, then there is an FB application for Twitter that brings the best of both together.

2. Pownce

Just launched out of private beta, Pownce is another micro-blogging tool that has been making waves for its easy functionality and feture rich interface. Inspired by Twitter, it adds more functionality to the micro-blogging phenomenon and lets you do more than just announcing what you are feeling or doing! Get a feel of it at www.pownce.com

After signing up, log in to various social networks and e-mail services to find friends and contacts that are already there on Pownce. Some of thes services are Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Flickr. You can do the usual job of sending out invites to friends.

The tagline of Pownce is “Send stuff to your friends”. Pownce lets you share messages, links, files and events with other people. Items can be shared publicly, privately or among groups. There are two-versions – free and pro. The free version lets you upload files of up to 10 MB and is ad-supported. The Pro version costs $20 a year and lets you share up to 100 MB. A download, available from http://pownce.com/download/ lets you do everything that can be done on the website. The software is cross platform and works on both Windows and Mac, with Linux support coming soon. However, to run this application you need to have Adobe Air installed on your system. The application has latency issues and it has been reported that even on faster machines with broadband connection, the Ajax interface is painfully slow.

Pownce is not very difference to Twitter. When trying to share files, sharing multiple files made the application go crazy. You have to zip the files and send the zipped archive as well. Like Twitter, Pownce also provides badges, a widget which can be put on any Website to display your updates. Nothing new or notable here. Pownce looks like a me-too service and attempts to be a micro-blogging tool. A file sharing utility with a messaging service, it’s literally the jack of all trades and master of none!

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