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I’ve enjoyed writing Twitter Hacks for the last year or so. I still very much love following the developments surrounding Twitter and all the cool apps, hacks and other tools that people come up with. But I’m also interested in covering more than just Twitter in the whole micro blogging realm, including talking about phones, wifi, apis, and everything related to cutting the cords and being truly mobile.

With that in mind, I’ve moved all the old Twitter Hacks content to this new site, Mobility Hacks. I’m still working on the design, but for now we can get back to the business of blogging and covering more topics.

Old urls, feed links etc. will all continue to work as they are redirected here, though I encourage you to update your bookmarks and feed subscriptions.

One thing people love about Pownce is the ability to share videos, pics and other files. They make it pretty painless and is something I think Twitter could use. I don’t think it’s mandatory to make or break the service because Twitter is used more on mobile devices and various clients, but it certainly could enhance the experience for those using the web interface at Twitter.com. Enter Twixxer, a greasemonkey script making it drop dead simple to share media via twitter. It even automagically used TinyURL, which any good program for Twitter should use due to the 140 character limit. Give Twixxer a spin and let me know what you think. I’m digging it so far.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitter Hacks, Twixxer, Video, Photos

I know I’m late posting this, but if you haven’t noticed Twitter has a new way to reply to tweets: just click on the swoosh. Every message in your timeline now has a little swoosh icon at the end, just click it to automatically insert the correct @username for the reply. This is excellent as sometimes the display name and username are different. I mainly use the web (or snitter) for Twittering adn this is a very welcome new feature.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitter Hacks

Nicole writes:

Is Twitter going to set up a credit based system for sending / receiving messages? A screen I saw the other day suggests so. It was from my mobile, so I did not react in time to make a copy, but it basically said to me: “Not enough credits to send message”. via Twitter to monetize by credit based system?

Twitter has yet to show signs of how they plan to make money, but I doubt it’ll be on a per message rate. This goes back to the debate on paying to send emails. If that every happens it’ll only hurt casual users and help business users as they’ll get bulk discounts and defeat the purpose anyway. If Twitter was to charge users at all, I imagine it’ll be for premium packages similar to how Google lets you buy a business version of their free email (gmail). Twitter could charge users based on how many messages they think they’ll need per month instead of per message and/or for increased reliability. Flickr follows the same model. Everyone can use the service for free, but if you want unlimited you’ve got to pay for a pro account. I know a lot of twitter folks who would be happy to pay for a Twitter pro account.

We already get nickel and dimed to death as it is, if Twitter was to charge per message I think it would kill the service instantly and put Pownce and other competitors in the perfect position to take the lead.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitter Hacks, Twitter Business Model

Geeks seem to be very DIY kind of folks. I think it’s because we like to write our own code and do just about everything ourselves. There also seems to be a huge swing back towards doing things yourself, like doing your own home repairs, working on your car, building your own electronics, etc and I love it. I’ve always been drawn to tearing things apart and putting them back together again. I remember trying to build a radio to talk to astronauts when I was 8 or 9 years old. I failed miserably, but I think that’s because I used toys (Simon Says) as major components. That, and I have no idea how in the world to do any that sort of thing. The fine folks over at MAKE magazine have taken up the void left by shop teachers and every issue teaches you how to make something, so maybe one day I’ll be able to make that radio after all. In the mean time though, they’ve got a kick ass project that’s sold me on subscribing to the magazine: HOW TO - Make plants talk! They’ll Twitter you when they need to be watered (and more). I wonder what other wicked things we could adapt this kind of project for. Monitor the temperature in my house, monitor food temperature, fire or carbon monoxide detectors, man, the list could go on.

via Nicki

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitter Hacks, MAKE, DIY, Plants

Twittershare lets mac users and web users upload files and share them via Twitter. While html links have worked for some time now, other features like emebedding video, sending files and other media have been limited. Third party apps like this one make it possible. These features are common among Twitter’s competitors like Pownce, but they lack the robust SMS capabilities that Twitter has. I don’t use the SMS that much and most of the updates I see are from pc/mac clients or the web. Sure, during events its nice to have the SMS, but would the advanced features make Twitter more useful for what people are using it for: sharing things they find on the web? Regardless, there’s not shortage of cool little helper apps like Twittershare, which looks like one of the best.

via ReadWritWeb

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitter Hacks, TwitterShare, Twitter Tools

Everyone knows how horrible traffic gets during the daily commute. Compounding the issue is the lag time between updates from the radio stations who spend most of the air time playing 2-3 songs between sets of 10 commercials in a row. Not any more. At least not for us Twitter fans. Nicki has stumbled upon what is perhaps the coolest usage of Twitter I’ve seen yet: Commuter Feed. The service lets commuters like you and me keep up with traffic happenings in your metro area via twitter and you can also share what’s up with others in you’re area. It works just like most bots where you subscribe to their twitter account and then you just send it messages with the locale and traffic problem. Simple yet fantastic. Kudos! Now I just have to spread the word to people in my area about the service so that it’ll be useful to me!

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitter Hacks, Commuter Feed

There’s already plenty of sites snarfing down twitter feeds and providing search and other interested tools, but I think Twemes my be the first I’ve seen that tracks and organizes Tweets by topic, tag and meme. This could come in very handy when I’m looking for quotes or interesting bits on a subject I’m interested (most likely for blogging).

via Nicki

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitter Hacks, Twemes

You may remember a previous post about Twitter Stats where I highlighted Damon’s excellent script (and variations) that let you parse your Twitter Stats. One of the popular requests seemed to be a web based version, which Damon has now released. I took it for a spin and it worked great and I was surprised by the trends it produced.

Check out TweetStats for yourself. I’ve bookmarked it in my “twitter tools” collection.

via Damon

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitter Hacks, Twitter Stats, Twitter Graphs, Twitter Tools

Marshall at Read/Write Web posted Seesmic Transcends Comparisons With Twitter where he discusses both products after conversations held at DEMO. While they products share a common idea at the core, Marshall does a great job of relating how they are both alike and different and I’m not talking just the fact that Seesmic is video and Twitter is text.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitter Hacks, DEMO, Seesmic