I read in Popular Science an article about how you can get people to donate to your charities, or if you want to make online contributions to charities you can leverage TipJoy, I decided to sign up and see what the service was all about. The service works with paypal to allow you to send payments to people as “tips”. You can pay people’s twitter accounts and tweet them the payment, or pay them to their email.

In leveraging the service for a website it works very similar to PayPal’s “Donate” functionality in my mind, I am surprised that PayPal doesn’t yet have a platform yet for sending and receiving payments on twitter, as other companies have already made headway into this space.

What I do like is the tipjoy buttons, and that you can set really tiny requested amounts, as it may encourage people to leave just a little bit. To test this I will be installing some TipJoy buttons at the end of some of my poems to see if this encourages people to donate 25 cents to my poetry game.

I will follow up to see if anyone actually notices the tipjoy button and uses it once its implemented, I will offer it as a passive thing on my blog, but I don’t panhandle. I don’t think it appropriate to send out tweet’s requesting tips/donations unless you are raising money for a charity or a cause.

-Dragon Blogger

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Submit To:

In reviewing Twitter applications I delved into a few Twitter Pyramid sites, mostly on accident not realizing what I was joining, but I should have known better.

TwitterTrain.info and Tweeterfollow.com and tweeteradder.com are all examples of Pyramid Sites, where you join and follow a bunch of people and each person subsequently joins and follows the train. You cannot attract quality followers this way, and whats worse, these sites hijack your twitter account and password. Instead of registering as an application you can remove from Twitter connections directly, these programs save your account/password and post tweets to your followers automatically promoting their site.

This type of spam message can lose you followers you had before, so when I tried to figure out how to remove Tweeterfollow.com, I went to the Contact us link and they post the following disclaimer:

Contact:

* IF YOU WANT TO STOP US FROM PROMOTING ON YOUR ACCOUNT PLEASE LOGIN THE SITE AND AT THE BOTTOM HIT CLOSE ACCOUNT. PLEASE DONT EMAIL US ABOUT THIS ISSUE. ONCE YOU LOGIN AT THE BOTTOM YOU WILL SEE CLOSE ACCOUNT AND YOU WONT GET THE MESSAGES AGAIN. IF THAT DONT WORK JUST CHANGE PASSWORD AND NEXT TIME READ THE RULES ON THE SITE BEFORE YOU SIGN IN AGAIN.
* CONTACT US AT CONTACT@TWEETERFOLLOW.COM

This type of disclaimer clearly means many people signed up, joined without reading the fine lines, and wanted out. I closed my account, but not thinking it sufficient enough I changed my twitter password as well.

Be warned some sites don’t even provide the ability to remove your account, or have you sign in again with your twitter ID/password to remove the account, but don’t actually remove you. There are only 2 ways to recover your account if you are sucked into some of these sites:

#1 – Go to your Twitter Profile Settings, click on Connections and revoke any applications that you don’t know
#2 – Change your twitter password to something different & secure (use alpha, number and special characters in your password) something like B0bc@t would be a good password. (don’t use that one)

This should prevent other apps which had your old password from using your account, but they may still make attempts which can cause your twitter account to get locked out, I have not figured out how to resolve this part yet.

Let this be a lesson to everyone, don’t try to join Twitter trains, mass follower sites, or anything promoting getting mass followers, it is like one big Twitter Ponzi Scheme.

-Dragon Blogger

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Submit To:

The Twittley team contacted me and mentioned that you should claim your domain with Twittley if you use the plug-in for wordpress and the benefits it provide are:
Once you’re the verified owner of that domain, any link posted to that domain on Twittley will contain a Follow this Webmaster link that a user can click to automatically follow you on Twitter.

To claim your domain you need to do the following:

• Submit your post via Twittley, then after you click submit, click on the “Claim Domain” link

• Then you asked to create a file on your web server at the root level, and input the URL and Twitter account that claims the domain.

• So you log into your server, create the file and update the application:

• And then your domain is claimed.

Some other tips to follow from the Twittley team are:

• Always submit your post to twittley the 1st time, since the first submitter sets the tags, description and category and nobody knows the content like the author, this also means that people who click the “tweet” button won’t be redirected off of your page to fill out this information.

• Make the button stand out in a prominent portion of your web page, the top is good, but bottom can work too for long articles where you want the reader to see the button when they are done reading.

• To make the button stand out more, minimize the amount of large buttons you use on a post, I see some blogs with Tweetmeme and Twittley buttons which do the same thing, and I think it really gums up a blog post to have multiple buttons that do the same thing on the same post.

-Dragon Blogger

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Submit To:

My fellow technology blogger Tycoon Blogger did an excellent article explaining why Twittley is better than Tweetmeme as a twitter social button for your blog posts, and I encourage all of my readers to read it.

He went on to explain that because Twittley puts weighs the value of the person who retweets based on the number of followers, it accuratlely prioritizes which articles make the top of the list. This can be somewhat true in the fact that with Tweetmeme you could create dozens of small accounts and tweetmeme a single post into a very high retweet ratio.

I also like the style of the button better, and the default message it sends isn’t as obnoxious as tweetmeme. So thanks to Tycoon Blogger, I have replaced the Tweetmeme button on all of my blog posts with the Twittley button. Lets hope it works as well, anyone want to test my new Twittley button for me?

You can download the Twittley Plugin from Wordpress.org and easily install on your blog.

-Dragon Blogger

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Submit To:

I have known several people who have lost primary twitter accounts and to work toward rebuilding a new twitter profile. A tool to make this much easier is Tweetbackup which will is supposed to back up your full follower list as well as your last 3200 tweets, you can then leverage this backup to restore and rebuild a new twitter account, or even an existing account that was deleted and recreated.

I logged into the service and was presented with my home tab, I clicked on the view posts tab to see what is listed, and I liked the presentation of all of your outbound tweets.

So I decided to backup my account, I was really hoping that you can backup your entire follower listing so you can import them into a new account, but alas, this feature is not yet supported.

I also learned that there is no restore feature yet, so this site is only useful for backing up what you have said on twitter.

In Review, apart from backing up everything you said on twitter so you can easily see what was said on which date/time and keep a log of everything you tweeted with your accounts, this site has no functionality to restore your profile.

Summary:

I would like to see this service be able to back up an entire twitter profile including followers and allow you to import that into another profile to perhaps build a replacement account should your primary account be ruined.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Submit To: