Twitter Tools

Twitpic:
1) http://twitpic.com/
Twitpic is a website that allows users to easily post pictures to the Twitter microblogging and social media service. Twitpic is a great tool to upload and distribute pictures in near real-time as an event is taking place. Twitpic could be used independently of Twitter as well. This is in a way similar to Flickr. However several characteristics make this site a companion for Twitter. Comments to photographs are sent as a reply tweet.
According to my research, Twitpic was started in 2008 by Noah Everett.

I have always used my cellphone to take instant pictures and send off to my freinds/family. It would be nice to use twitpic to send pics with a nice and short explanation. Good thing is that the pics would be stored just like a flickr account, and I could even print them whenever I want!

2)http://www.twitzu.com
Twitzu: Promote your business, special offers, promotions and events with Twitzu.
This is a grat tool. I will absolutely use this tool when I have my own business up and running :)

3) http://www.tweetbeep.com
Twitter Alerts: Keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company and anything else, via hourly email updates.
This is again a great tool to keep track of what is being said about a person's company. I know I would want to know all the good and bad things that are being mentioned out there !!!

4) http://twtqpon.com/
twtQpon: Enhance your social media marketing by offering discount coupons to the Twitter-sphere!
This is a great tool for free advertisement. I find this very useful for future marketing.

5) http://www.tangerineworks.com/twitblocker/
TwitBlocker: If you become overwhelmed by a Twitter user’s constant tweets, you can keep them quiet with a single click of a button.

This would become necassary at some pint because too many tweets from a certain group may become a problem !This is a polite and temporay way of "blocking" them :)

Tips about how one can use Twitter with their business/organization?

I personally believe that Twitter is a great tool for companies, only if it is used for the right purposes!

Some Tips:

1) If you are in sales and want to monitor what’s being said about your customers to help them protect their brands, twitter could be a great tool for that!

2) If you want to locate certain vendors, partners, and employees for your organization, using twitter is fast and easy. You can use it as a great directory.

3) Twitter is like a free marketing tool ! It could be a great tool promote products and services for any business/organization.

4) Using the strawpoll feature, companies can create mini polls into their twitter stream. This is great for instant feedback on any surveys/polls.

5) I just realized that there is a tweetajob feature as well. Companies can get and fill current job openings with tweetajob.

Very Coool !!!!

Twitter

I did not have a twitter account, but I am so happy that this was a part of our assignment, as I hear about it EVERYWHEREEEEEEEE !!! A couple nights ago, we went to Best Buy, and I noticed that on the door, it said "follow us on twitter". Tonight, I actually opened an account and searched them, and sure enough I saw their info :)

Using Twitter was quite easy. I actually found the design to be very user-friendly.
The following were some of the interesting features of how to post and use Twitter:

- The INVITE phone number feature: It will send an SMS invite to a friend's mobile phone.

- The FOLLOW username: It allows you to start receiving notifications for a specific person on your phone.

-D username + message: It sends a person a private message that goes to their device, and saves in their web archive.

- I also found the specific standard of limiting the messages to 160 characters smart. Because if the purpose is just to provide status, then it totally makes sense to keep a limit! Since status updates are done through text messages at times, this is an absolutely great limit!

Client Server Network

One of the subjects that was discussed in class last week was the Client Server network and their relationship.
Since this whole technology field is kind of new for me, I researched more and learned that a Client Server Network is a computer network in which one centralized, powerful computer (called the server) is a hub to which many less powerful personal computers or workstations (called clients) are connected. The clients run programs and access data that are stored on the server.
When you compare the Client Server network to a peer-to-peer network, it is different. A peer-to-peer network on the other hand is a network of personal computers, each of which acts as both client and sever, so that each can exchange files and email directly with every other computer on the network. Each computer can access any of the others, although access can be restricted to those files that a computer's user chooses to make available. Peer-to-peer networks are less expensive than client/server networks but less efficient when large amounts of data need to be exchanged.

I enjoyed our guest speaker as well. All the cool things about the future of iphones is fascinating! Holding an iphone in front of a store and seeing their coupons and address appear instantly on the screen was a cool one that was discussed! Absolutely amazing!!!

Opera Software

After navigating the Opera website,I learned more about the different products that are offered through their company. According to their site, The world’s most popular mobile Web browser with over 30 million users is Opera Mini 4.2.
Opera Mini enables you to take your full Web experience to your phone. It is faster mobile internet as data is compressed before being sent to your phone...and of course Opera Mini is free to download. The Opera Browser is fast, powerful and efficient. The new Opera Presto 2.2 engine in Opera 10 is up to 40% faster on resource-intensive pages such as Gmail and Facebook. I guess those are sites that everyone would like to have fast access to :)
Opera does have Educational Resources. Opera Education is Opera Software’s outreach program for universities, schools, and other educational institutions. They do university tours and seminars, and could be an addition to computer labs at school and they have campus representatives as well.

Looking forward to seeing our guest speaker tonight and learning more about this software.

My Wikipedia Experience!

I searched on the Persian Language and wanted to update some capitalizations on the page. Initially, I wanted to update the page without becoming a member, but figured the features available as a member could make this experience better. On this note, I became a member and searched the Persian Language page and edited, saved my changes and previewed the changed page and there it was!
I thought it was an easy process. Found it interesting because I got to see the html coding and edited the page through there. Plus, seeing some familiar tags from the html trainings was fun too!
Here is the link to the updated page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_language#Varieties_and_dialects

Porter's five force Model Criticisms?

I missed last class as I had to fly out to Ohio for a family emergency. However I did ask my sister (Rita) what topics were covered in class and she mentioned a big chunk of time was dedicated to talk about Porters five forces and six forces model. So I decided to do a little research and have something on my blog in regards to this topic.

Based on my research there are criticisms out there on regards to the model. According to Stewart Neill, Kevin P. Coyne and Somu Subramaniam the three major crticisms are :

That buyers, competitors, and suppliers do not interact
It creates barriers to entry)
Low uncertainty allows participants in a market to plan and respond to competitive behavior.
Here is an interesting fact/Example I found on a website related to Porter's six force model:

"Intel Corporation is the world's largest semiconductor company and the inventor of the X86 architecture series of microprocessors, the processors found in most personal computers....
.According to most references, the sixth force is government or the public. Martyn Richard Jones, whilst consulting at Groupe Bull, developed an augmented 5 forces model in Scotland in 1993, it is based on Porter's model, and includes Government (national and regional) as well as Pressure Groups as the notional 6th force. This model was the result of work carried out as part of Group Bull's Knowledge Asset Management Organisation initiative."

W3C and Meta tag

If W3C validator did not validate the html document for no character encoding, this can be correcte by inserting a meta tag.
Meta tag? It means information about information. tags that are invisible to users but explain things to client apps
Meta elements are generally used to specify things such as keywords, author, last modified, and other metadata.
The meta tag always goes inside the head element. Search engines use meta data for example for keyword search.