Hijinks Inc.

Category: Twitter

  • Twitter is Down – Employees less productive than normal

    Twitter is fail whaling left and right, but I doubt that’s causing workers to become more productive. In fact, I would argue that those Twitter obsessed members of your staff are spending more time refreshing their browser/client/mobile app to get back to their social media life line than they would normally lose by Tweeting.

    Just a thought.



    Update: 16 minute outage or so, not terrible. Unless you’re a social media website with millions of users.

  • Get Your ThinkUp On

    Get Your ThinkUp On

    What is ThinkUp? Techinally it’s the new face of Twitalytic by Gina Trapani. ThinkUp bills itself as an “open source social media insights engine”. Rather fancy sounding.

    In plain English and 140 characters or less (according to their Twitter bio)…

    ThinkUp captures and organizes replies to your status updates on Twitter, Facebook and beyond.

    Focus on the beyond portion of that statement, because ThinkUp does a lot more than just organize replies to your updates. Think of it as a kind of account statement for your social media.

    Here’s a quick look at the features of ThinkUp.

    • Show you all of your replies to a message, across both Twitter and Facebook.
    • Show you a chart of your number of followers over time.
    • Display a stream of all photos your friends have posted, or a list of all the links they’ve tweeted, and ThinkUp automatically expands shortened URLs!
    • Sort replies to your tweets or Facebook status updates by the location of your friends who respond.
    • Automatically archive your status updates (tweets) for all of your Twitter accounts — you can let your friends sign in to archive their messages, too.
    • Find out insights about your followers and friends, like who’s most popular or who updates least often.
    • Archive all of your data in your own database. That makes it easy to export your status updates, follower lists, or any other data in the future.
    • Get detailed statistics about your activity, such as your average replies per day, or how often you update.
    • Publish a presentable list of replies to one of your questions, including integration with blogging tools like WordPress.
    • Whatever else our developer community and plugin authors can dream up

    Currently ThinkUp is available in, I believe, an alpha stage to the public. You can download the latest build from their GitHub page.

    The install isn’t too complicated, you do have to be running your own server of course. First create your MySQL database, then upload the contents of the ZIP you downloaded from the GitHub page and run the install. The most complex part of the installation process is registering your ThinkUp install as an application on Twitter.com, and really, that’s pretty straight forward.

    Don’t have access to your own server? You’re in luck, first two people to email aaron@hijinksinc.com will get access to their own installation of ThinkUp on our servers.

  • Top 10: People To Follow On Twitter, And Why

    I’ve had a number of responses when I told people I use Twitter:

    • What, why do you do that?
    • You hardly ever post on there, why bother?
    • What’s Twitter?
    • How do you know who to follow?

    While it’s true that I’m not the most active of all twitter-ers (twits? tweeters? tweeties?) as far as posting goes, I use Twitter like many other people, to stay connected to people and things I find interesting. Twitter has become one of the fastest and best ways to stay in touch with any sort of news you deem to be important. If you don’t know who to follow, I’ve made some lists of the people that I follow, feel free to click here and check them out if you’d like. But if you’d just like a few pointers on who to follow, click through and I’ll give you my Top 10, and why I follow them. (more…)

  • Android App Review: Tweetdeck Beta

    Publisher: Tweetdeck.com
    Platform: Android (2.0 or higher)
    Cost: Free!
    [Signup Link]
    Release Date: August 12, 2010
    Version Reviewed: 0.9.3

    With great fanfare, Tweetdeck announced the release of the public beta for their Tweetdeck Android app.  Tweetdeck has been working on the application for several months, and promised to “push the boundaries” of the Android app experience.  Have they delivered?  Read on to find out. (more…)

  • National De-Lurking Day!

    They say that 87% of all statistics are made up on the spot, and 63% of all those crazy holidays you hear about completely don’t exist. It may not actually be National De-Lurking Day, but we here at Hijinks Inc. are choosing to celebrate it today.

    I ran across an article on this website and thought that we ought to have a day to de-lurk and get to know some of you who frequent our website, not only to make us feel better about ourselves, but because we’d like to continue to write about the stuff that interests you.

    So here’s what we’d like you to do, we’d appreciate it if you would take some time and leave us a comment or two. We’d love it if you’d look over a few of our articles and comment on all of them. In fact, over the course of the next 30 days, each comment you leave (worthwhile comments only, don’t break a single comment into 2 or 3 just to up your total) will qualify you to win a $25 iTunes gift card. The more comments you leave, the more you’ll be qualified to win!

    If you choose to add a comment below, don’t think of it as a favor to me but as a favor to everyone else. See, as much as I enjoy reading a comment, I can assure you many comments are added just because other comments preceded them.

    In this vein, if you choose to de-lurk and leave a comment, here’s what to do:

    1. Whether you are reading this in a feed reader, an email message, or a syndicated blog post somewhere, click here to visit the actual post.
    2. Scroll to the bottom of the page and follow the directions to add a comment, or jump straight to this page to register for an account.
    3. Type in your email address so I can email you privately, thanking you for de-lurking.
    4. Type in your blog address, or your corporate website, or maybe your Facebook page. Somewhere where I and others can click your name (your web link will be linked to your name) and read more about you.
    5. Want to take a step further? Become our fan on Facebook for an extra shot at winning.

    Please don’t be shy. Care to de-lurk now?