First thing’s first

Twitter’s a micro-blogging site. Which means that instead of maintaining a full blog as I’m doing at the moment, with full articles, posts with detailed content or unedited ramblings, you’re limited to a scant 140 characters to express yourself. If the stuff you tweet (which is what we call these 140 char posts) is interesting or fun, people will follow you to keep on reading what it is you have to say. Similarly you may follow other people who interest you and read whatever it is they have to say. Pretty simple concept, and not too impressive when described so plainly, but it’s become a veritable force of nature.

Why it’s cool

The recent hype has revolved around celebrities twittering their every move basically skipping over the paparazzi and letting the public scrutinize their lives straight from the horse’s mouth. If you’re into celebrity gossip well that’s pretty much where twitter begins and ends for you. For those of us looking for something more, the involvement needs to go a bit deeper. See, the one thing newbies don’t get about twitter is that if you don’t tweet and don’t follow anyone, you have a site full of nothing. So if following celebs isn’t your thing it might be a bit harder to find good people to follow, but once you do you will have opened a door into the collective hive mind: Developers with new techniques, advertisers sharing research, industry experts talking about their “secrets”, and in general excellent people putting up amazing content that most of us would have probably not found otherwise.
It’s also the absolute best place to get breaking news. Michael Jackson’s death might be the most recent example, wherein those of us on twitter had gotten the news about 2 hours earlier than everywhere else, but it can be much more practical.
Since I’m followed by a lot of locals, and most people with a smart phone and a twitter account use a mobile app to tweet from the road, I’ve found myself asking my followers for traffic reports, for the state of a line at the movies, for reviews on all sorts of things, and many times I’ve gotten an answer, sometimes with pictures, seldom with live video.
Further it’s a fantastic place to meet like minded individuals. I follow clients, suppliers, competition, friends, and people I don’t know and will probably never meet. It’s been a particularly useful tool for organizing the local web industry. What started as a bunch of tweets amongst a group of pros very impressed with each other, is now coalescing into the Web Professionals Group of Puerto Rico, including various development, design, and e-marketing firms in the island.

Who should I follow?

First forget about hoarding followers. Too many businesses and individuals come to twitter with a half-baked idea involving a million followers and some harebrained advertising scheme. The best way to get eyes is by generating good content. This is truer on twitter than it is anywhere on the internet as most of the time you’ll be expected to converse casually with both your followers and those you follow. Also a lot people will follow you for following them as a common courtesy.  If you or your company (or your client) is looking to become a productive member of the twitter community instead of looking for followers (they’ll come in time) focus on following good interesting people. A good place to start might be twitter’s own search. Write in a word or phrase and you’ll instantly find hundreds (if not thousands) of individuals tackling that particular topic. Find a couple of twitterers who say something interesting about said topic and follow them, odds are they’ll keep saying interesting stuff. You can also follow people you actually know, just ask around and you’ll find out a couple of your friends or contacts tweet as well. Once you have a decent base you can look at the people they’re following and cherry-pick those you like best. Finally, every Friday is Follow Friday. This fun little trend started a long while back and has become a staple of the Twitter community. Every friday people send out recommendations on who to follow from the list of people they themselves follow. Just look for the #followfriday  tag and you’ll find a lot of good ones as well as some bad ones but you can always unfollow if someone gets too annoying.

Final tips

Congrats! You should now be a productive twitterer. If you’ve no idea what to write about just take a sec to think about what you’re doing and write about that, odds are someone somewhere will find it interesting. Also there’s some lingo you’ll need to know to fit in here’s a decent primer straight from twitter. You’ll probably also want to use a good url shortener. Since you only have 140 characters to write your thoughts you don’t want to waste most of them on a long dynamically generated URL. So if for example you wanted to link to a beautiful 3 bedroom home on ClasificadosMejores.com, the best classifieds site on the web, you’d be better off using this URL:http://bit.ly/2m6R3A than this URL: http://www.clasificadosmejores.com/bienes-raices-clasificados-470.html.
My favorite shortener is http://bit.ly as it’s the least amount of characters allowed for a domain and it’s really easy to type and remember.
Also there’s ways to tweet without going to twitter.com, tweetdeck is my favorite solution for the desktop with tiny twitter on my phone for keeping everyone up to date from the road.
Finally here’s a list of great twitterers to follow so you can get started:
@pabloiv, @torlanco, @alantaveras, @robetoell, @albizu, @gcollazo, @jpadilla_, @fritzo, @redod, @mercedesnegron, @kolapse, @dhowell, @garyvee, @jasoncalacanis, @wiltonv, @lbenitez

If you already twitter and would like to leave some suggestions put them right there in the comments.

As time went by, the site suffered from a very well documented “twit-vil war”. After all hell broke loose and personalities were irreparably tainted, a new blog emerged yosoyapple.com this blog post hopes to organize the mayhem for users that really liked the content from macuserboricua.com before the chaos and offer a review on the new site.

Review for yosoyapple.com

Yo Soy Apple Screenshot

The site design is fun and glossy, the posts are diligently frequent and the content is the best you might find on the topic for the local blogosphere, it might be time however to get rid of the bright red of the revolution. As a PC user that just recently made his first hackintosh

OSX Leopard on a Compaq Presario

, I regularly visit the site for guidance and suggest others to subscribe to its RSS feed.

The writers are very willing to help their users with any apple related information and at times design information as well. They now can do so to a broader audience; upon launch they started a new web channel of the sorts, it is really a livestream version of a local radio show and some added micro channels from the writer’s qik accounts. It’d be really cool to see this grow into an official podcast.

On the negative side, the site is slooow; made by designers and in a godaddy server, getting your content will take a couple of seconds on a broadband connection. But that is the only downside we have found for now.

The writers are the usual suspects, you will find them in twitter as @tane883, @coreanomac, @hrodriguezpr I suggest you follow them to get an insight on mac news from a local perspective.

More Content on the Subject

Best resource for iPhone tinkering

You might notice that not all writers from the former site have gone into the new one but you can still reach them at their personal projects. Some are still being brewed like @WrSantiago ‘s WebDevelopr but you can certainly find @esmandau ‘s iPhone page with his usual up to date information and now with a very complete design.

iPhonefanatic.net is the best resource for iPhone users out there looking to get a bit more action from their device. I am looking forward to blog about both of them, in the meantime please post any comments you might have regarding these sites. Many things have been left unsaid regarding the new offerings from each, but what has been published shows a very bright future.

Similarly, I was reading this post from a local web blog; the author explains that, upon explaining blogs to her aunt, her aunt sarcastically replied she would make a blog about her cat and dog. Hey! This author makes a blog about raising her child! I am sure many, specifically parents to be, benefit from her experiences and teachings; besides, people read blogs about cats and dogs all the time.

To emphasize on my point, and tackle it from a business perspective, I visited the previous author’s husband’s blog (that’s a mouthful)… and voila! I found this: IBM Makes Money Off My Blog; You want numbers? try $250k (estimated from that sale). And guess what, he makes money from IBM too. This second author is a ‘Social Software Evangelist’ the first, is an Engineer on Information Technologies; they know what they’re talking about.

If you’re too busy for updates on a business blog, try a newsletter, we can help you with that. If you’re super busy and still want to be part of the revolution, use Twitter; it is the simplest way to maintain others informed about your business. Our newsletter and blog often get us out of tight spots in the current economy. I’m sure having one can help your business as well.

Can’t afford to hire a web developer right now? you can make your own blog with Blogger and people won’t think any less of you. Try testing the waters first, there are many more blogs from people in your area, sites like Puerto Blogs aggregate feeds near me (in this case Puerto Rico).

So if you need help on blogs, contact us and we’ll tell you more about them. You can see our company’s design and development portfolio here.

Setup

As soon as I launched the program it asked me if I already had a blog or if I was interested in creating a new one. I said I already had one and it went on to ask me the platform, credentials and URL. different from

the other 2 it asked me the home url and inferred everything else. I wonder what it would have done if my installation had been modified in any serious from from the base WordPress install. I’ll note that I was pleasantly surprised to find it had imported the CSS stylesheet from the site and my writing area now featured the same background, width, fonts and colors as would be displayed in the final post. This was a very nice step forward.

Posting

As I mentioned above this program is a custom built full solution specifically developed for blogging. I found it peculiar that Redmond developed this stand alone tool for free; independent of the add-ons to Word. Nevertheless the writing process is simple and comfortable. All the necessary editing tools are there and it feels like writing on a very basic word processor. It’s the extras that really shine. The fact that I am writing in the same context as my post will finally be presented is not a negligible gain.  This fact alone helps one as a writer, to contextualize the content in the same way that the end-user will experience it.

As with Word, spell checking is included and the dictionary seems made specifically to correct blogs. For example, it corrected WordPress for WordPress when I miswrote it above. One significant difference between Live Writer and the other 2 are the 4 different views. I realize that it might not feel as much but you can switch on the fly, between:

• Normal; Black text over white background
• Web Layout; Text with site’s CSS applied
• Web Preview; full preview in final site context but not editable.
• HTML code; fully editable as well.

For testing purposes I wrote the previous table with <ul> and <li> tags through the HTML editor and it came out exactly as I expected it to. This is by far the most complete until now when it comes to a full blog solution.

Media

The media content options are ample and well made. I added the above image at an original resolution of 1024×768 I reduced its size to the one you see above and I expect it will resample and upload it with the White frame I added in the program’s effects pane. Edit: It did exactly as I expected

Amongst other media options available are maps and video. The maps are a simple integration with Microsoft’s Live Local service, which works well and is easy to use. The video just requires the video’s URL and it will refer to it without need of an embed code. As far as I can tell it only works with Flash driven video and not Quicktime or even WMA through windows media center.

Conclusion

Live Writer has been the best all around solution yet. I’m sure there is bound to be something better out there but until now this is the best I have found.

Related posts, Don’t miss our other blog client reviews

• Blog Client Test2- Word 2007
• Blog Client Test1- moBlog