Tag: Twitter

Tweet To Email, Share Your Tweets With Your Friends Via Email

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Tweet to EmailTweet to Email is a service that was recently launched from the UAE, that aims to make it easy for twitter users to share tweets of their choice directly with groups of their friends, who aren’t on twitter yet, through one of the oldest and most established sharing mediums online: email.

The concept is very simple and the tool is as simple and easy to use; the user signs up to Tweet to Email, inputting their twitter username while doing it, and then they get to create groups in which they can add their friends and contacts who they want to share with.

They get to choose a hash tag for each group they create (currently pre-defined and limited to five options), and when tweeting they can use that hash tag in their tweets if they want it sent to the people in that group, directly to their email inboxes.

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Zoofs, The Most Talked About YouTube Videos On Twitter

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ZoofsZoofs is a new simple and pretty fun service, offering users a destination where they can start to discover the YouTube videos that are proving popular with people on Twitter. So basically what the service does is scour twitter to find the most tweeted videos, ranks them according to popularity, and serves them up for users to enjoy.

The project is yet a new offering from TootCorp, the Jordan based company that brought us the video-sharing portal Ikbis and micro-blogging service Watwet in the past.

Visitors to the site can browse through videos by category, and also filter videos to show only the freshest (ones that were uploaded to YouTube in the past 72 hours only). The Zoofs team also mark some of the videos they really like as “Zoofs Picks” to highlight them for users.

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TwitVid Launches Real-Time Video Search, Virtual Gifts & Analytics

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twitvidTwitVid, the service that enables people to easily and quickly post their videos for sharing on Twitter, and that was previously reviewed here, just recently announced the launch of a number of new interesting features.

The new set of announced features is as follows:

Real-time video search: Over the past period, with the continuing accelerated pace at which news and content is shared online, a lot of focus has been going to services that can keep up and offer real-time access to that information and the possibility to search through it. TwitVid attempts to crack that for video, by offering the ability to search through video content posted on Twitter through it in real-time.

Virtual gifts: Virtual goods have emerged as a very effective means of monetization for online games and services. Just a look at some of the companies selling virtual goods through their applications and games on Facebook, and the deals that have been happening around them recently, show how hot that space currently is.
TwitVid debuted its gifting service in November, through which they enable users to buy and send gifts to one another.

Analytics reports: In a bid to offer more value to people who tweet many videos, and who would like more insight on how well their videos are doing, TwitVid has launched a new analytics feature that shows the number of views for a video, its top linkers, the evolution of traffic over time, as well as where the traffic is coming from. Traffic can also be displayed by geographic location and internet domain.

TwitVid has found a lot of success as a platform of choice for video uploaders on Twitter, even attracting a number of high profile and celebrity users along the way.

TwitVid is a product of EatLime, a Sunnyvale based company, founded by Mohammad Al Adham from Jordan and Adil Lalani from Pakistan. The company previously secured a round of funding from investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Amidzad Partners, and XG Ventures.

LiveTweeting, Real-Time Event Coverage With Crowdsourced Translation

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LiveTweetingLiveTweeting is a new real-time interactive web application that was launched as a tool for multi-language live coverage of events around the world, based around the popular micro blogging service twitter.

The way it works is that a group of people present at a certain event would tweet their updates covering the event as it happens, while on the other hand a number of multi-lingual twitter users would simultaneously translate and tweet the updates in another language. Both versions, the original and the translation, are aggregated on the LiveTweeting site.

People following the live coverage of the event (both original and translation) on the service are able to vote on the tweets they like by starring them. No user registration is currently required to follow an event’s coverage or to vote on the updates for it.

LiveTweeting

LiveTweeting was officially launched earlier today (Dec 9th 2009), just in time to be able to cover the Le Web 2009 conference in English and have its translation crowdsourced into Arabic.

The idea behind the service was conceived by Samer Karam (Lebanon), developed by Beshr Kayali (Syria) and designed by Maya Zankoul (Lebanon). Everything was put together over the span of one week.

# LiveTweeting

Twestival Local 2009 Events Around The Arab World

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Twestival LocalA number of Arab cities will be hosting Twestival Local events in the coming days, part of the 200 Twestival Local events taking place in leading cities around the world between the 10th and 13th of September 2009, based around the social media service Twitter, and using its power to support local causes.

Twestival is run 100% by volunteers and independently from any not-for-profit; although the organizing teams do work closely to outline an achievable and measurable fundraising target.

Here’s a list of the Twestival Local events taking place around the Arab world, with details about when and where they’ll be held as well as the local causes they’re supporting:

Dubai Twestival Local:
When: Saturday, September 12th 2009 at 8pm
Where: The Jam Jar Gallery in Al Quoz, Dubai, UAE
Supported local cause: Dubai Autism Center
Twitter: @DubaiTwestival
Site: http://dubai.twestival.com

Abu Dhabi Twestival Local:
When: Sunday, September 13th 2009 at 8pm
Where: Ramadan tent of Le Royal Meridien hotel in Abu Dhabi, UAE
Supported local cause: Future Centre for Special Needs
Twitter: @ADTwestival
Site: http://abudhabi.twestival.com

Beirut Twestival Local:
When: Sunday, September 13th 2009 at 4pm
Where: Rawda/Chatila Cafe in Beirut, Lebanon
Supported local cause: IndyAct
Twitter: @TwestivalBeirut
Site: http://beirut.twestival.com

Amman Twestival Local:
When: Sunday, September 13th 2009 at 9pm
Where: Al Hashemeyyen Theater, Royal Scientific Society in Amman, Jordan
Supported local cause: Al-Aman Fund for the Future of the Orphans
Twitter: @AmmanTwestival
Site: http://amman.twestival.com

Twestival Local is a great opportunity for people to connect with other members of the community, and give them a chance to feel they are contributing to a larger social initiative on top of it all.

MENA Twitter Habits Survey Results Released By Spot On PR

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Spot On PRA survey of Twitter users has shown the microblogging social media platform not only continues to attract new users throughout the Middle East and North Africa but is also starting to affect the way that brands are perceived.

According to the Middle East & North Africa Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey, published by Spot On PR, over 90% of users in the region say they have found out about a new product or service through Twitter and over 60% have had their perceptions of a brand changed by Twitter.

Carrington Malin, managing director of Spot On Public Relations, said: “Twitter’s fast growth, coupled with the high level of activity amongst the region’s users, is making a number of key regional organisations sit up and take notice. We hope that this survey of MENA Twitter demographics and user habits will provide marketers with a baseline from which to further explore the opportunities that Twitter is opening up.”

While some 70% of users surveyed said they had formed a positive perception of a brand through their interactions over Twitter, over 50% had also formed negative perceptions of a brand. A small but influential crowd of opinion leaders, many Middle East Twitter users were closely linked with the advertising, marketing, public relations and media industries, some 35% of respondents in all.

59% of respondents said they interacted frequently with journalists, some 76% interacted frequently with bloggers and over 65% actually being contributors to a blog themselves.

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Dubai Twestival Local 2009, Jam Jar Gallery, September 12th ’09

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Dubai Twestival Local 2009Dubai will be hosting Dubai Twestival Local on this coming Saturday, one of the 200 Twestival Local events taking place in leading cities around the world, based around the social media service Twitter, using its power to support local causes.

Dubai Twestival Local (@dubaitwestival) aims to raise money and awareness for Dubai Autism Center, a non-profit organisation Founded in November 2001, set-up to help integrate children with autism into the community and raise social awareness for autism.

Dubai Twitter users, or ‘tweeps’ as they call themselves, will converge on The Jam Jar gallery in Al Quoz on Saturday 12 September 2009 to meet other members of the Twitter community and support Dubai Autism Center (@dubaiautism) at an informal networking event sponsored by Nokia (@nokconv), ShopandShip.com (powered by Aramex, @shopnship) and Nahel.com (@naheldotcom).

“We’re delighted to have been able to organise Dubai Twestival Local during the holy month of Ramadan, since giving is at the core of the Twestival concept and is the reason that the event has been given such fantastic support from volunteers and sponsors,” said Prashant K. Gulati (@pkgulati), one of the co-organisers of the Dubai Twestival. “We’re proud to support Dubai Autism Centre, since, sadly, recognition for autism and understanding those that suffer from the condition and their families is still very low worldwide. We hope that the Twestival will make a worthwhile contribution to autism awareness in the Emirates.”

The Emirates’ Twitter community has grown rapidly since the service was unblocked by the UAE’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) last year and about 6,000 are currently estimated to use the service in the Emirates, up from just 500 Twitter users at the time of the first Dubai Twestival in February of this year! Global usage of Twitter grew by 1,460 percent over the past year and the micro-blogging platform now boasts 44.5 million users (according to Comscore, June 2009).

The Twestival is organized 100% by volunteers and 100% of the money raised by these events goes directly to charities. Twestival events are also being organised around the Middle East, with events taking place in Abu Dhabi, UAE; Amman, Jordan; Doha, Qatar; and Beirut, Lebanon.

Hopes are that Dubai Twestival Local will build on the success of February’s Twestival Global networking event which helped both raise awareness for Twitter in the UAE and for Charity: Water.

Twitter users who wish to attend Dubai Twestival Local should follow @dubaitwestival for daily updates on the event, and can register to attend at the official site: Dubai Twestival Local.

Twtlens: An Easy Way To Create Your Own Twitter Aggregator

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twtlensTwtlens is a new service that allows you to create your own twitter aggregator (or lens as they call it) around any group or community of users that have something in common (location, work, interests, passions, etc.), as a means to have direct access to the community pulse, and tap into what’s on their minds at any given moment.

twtlens is built on the same platform powering UAE Tweets, that was previously reviewed here, enabling you to create similar views of Twitter for your own groups and communities; customizing it with your own logo, color scheme and background image.

To create a lens of your own all you’ll have to do is have a twitter account that follows everyone within the community you want to aggregate tweets from, and then go through the quick sign up process on twtlens.

Each created lens will then aggregate all tweets from the community in one interface, make those tweets searchable, extract trending topics (words and #hashtags) from the tweets, extract the most popular shared links by the community, and list the new links that are being shared by them.
Search results and trends can be made available through RSS feeds too.

twtlens

Twtlens which was developed by Dubai-based CloudAppers, is still in Alpha (with limited testing slots open at this moment), and the team are working on adding more features in the form of widgets that twtlens creators can add or remove at will.

This service is currently available for free, but according to CloudAppers, a paid model is in the works and should be unveiled soon.

TweetShell, A Web Based Shell Interface For Twitter

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TweetShellTweetShell is a fun, in a geeky kind of way, new Twitter web application that provides a command line interface for users who are more comfortable working in the shell environment.

The site’s idea is to provide a way to use everyday shell commands to interact with twitter. So for starters, users might want to run a man command to discover the available commands and how they work within the twitter context.

TweetShell is still in early alpha and doesn’t cover all Twitter functionalities yet, but it very nicely covers the most basic ones, enabling the viewing of user timelines (using directory commands like cd and ls), tweeting (using wall), logging in to your Twitter account (using the ssh command) and more.

TweetShell

The site’s tag line is quite a fun one as well: “You know, in linux they say everything is a file. In TweetShell everything is a tweet!!”

Tweetshell is a creation of Monther AbuShaikh from Jordan, who is also CTO at Ikbis, the popular video and photo sharing service.

Tweepi, A Set Of Tools To Help Manage Your Twitter Account

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TweepiTweepi is another project that has popped up from the Arab world to cater to the ever-growing group of Twitter users around the world, presenting a set of simple tools to help users manage their following and followers lists.

The site has started off with four different tools:

Geeky Follow: This tool helps you find users who share the same interests as you and whom you might be interested in following. The way it works is that it asks for the handle of a Twitter user that you like, and it goes and gets a list of people who follow that user too, with their details, so you can see who of them you’d like to follow too.

Geeky Flush: This is for the more sensitive Twitter users who don’t like it when they follow someone and they don’t follow them back. So this tool simply enables you to unfollow people who aren’t following you back.

Geeky Reciprocate: This is the flip side to the previous tool, allowing users to find users who are following them but that they’re not following back, so that they can start following them quickly.

Geeky Cleanup: This tool enables you to go through the list of users you are following to identify users you might want to unfollow, like spammers, inactive users or the likes.

Tweepi screenshot

The tools come with Preset Target filters that help you filter the list of users to better identify the users you want to follow or unfollow, depending on the tool. They also show you a number of different indicators for each user like how many tweets they’ve sent within the last week, how many RTs they’ve gotten, how many replies and RTs they’ve sent themselves, …etc. It’s possible to customize and choose which of these indicators are shown as columns in the result set.

The site uses oAuth to link with your Twitter account and be able to perform the different actions it needs to do following your choices on the system.

Tweepi was built by ThoughtPick from Jordan, and is still in its beta version.