Do you let LinkedIn post your tweets automatically as your LinkedIn updates? Here is a reason why that might be a bad idea: If you tweet too much, I may just hide your status updates in LinkedIn completely – not just your tweets, all your status updates!

In my opinion, when LinkedIn tried to get on the Twitter band wagon, they made a big mistake: When you connect a Twitter account to a LinkedIn account, you have a choice of either automatically posting every tweet to your LinkedIn status, or just the ones that are tagged with the #in or #li hash tag:

For the latter case, a Twitter user who tweets something that might be appropriate for LinkedIn can tag the tweet with #in and have it show up on LinkedIn automatically. That’s not a bad idea, and I’m fine with that. It gives the user control over what gets shared, and what not. Twitter and LinkedIn (or in general, all the social media platforms one uses) serve a different purpose, and in general it’s not a good idea to post the same message to all these platforms -but sometimes, there is something that should be shared across all services. The hash tag approach gives the user that control.

The “annoy all my LinkedIn connections with my most trivial Twitter drivel” option however really annoys me. One of the most attractive features of Twitter is that tweets have a limited life time. When they don’t show up in the small window of the Twitter timeline that I’m looking at, they don’t exist – unless I’m using search. I don’t have to read them, I don’t have to deal with them, I can safely ignore them. And I do! When they show up in my LinkedIn status updates however, I can no longer ignore them, and even more annoyingly, they push real status updates off the end of that page.

I wish LinkedIn would give me an option to hide all Tweets (or at least those that don’t have #in or #li in them). Because I don’t have that control, I do the next best thing: If your tweets on LinkedIn annoy me, I will hide your status updates.

So, you’ve read my previous post and were bummed that the outlined procedure only worked for a Mac? I have good news for you. Here is an Adobe AIR application that can import your TweetDeck Groups into Twitter as lists:

TwitterListImporter.air [Update: See the note at the end of this post]

Download the application and install it. Because you already have TweetDeck (why else would you run this app‽‽‽) it’s not necessary to install the AIR runtime system. Once you start the application, you need to provide the path to the TweetDeck database file. The application will open the directory where you can then manually select the correct directory. In the directory that’s shown, locate a directory that starts with “TweetDeckFast” followed by a string of letters and numbers. Make sure you pick the directory, on the Mac there is also a plist file with the same name in that directory.

Once you’ve double-clicked on that directory, you will see a directory called “Local Store”, in which you will find the actual database file. It will start with “td_”, will contain your Twitter username and will end with “.db”. Select that file.

After specifying your Twitter username and password, just click on the “Convert” button and watch the show. After the application is done, you should have new Twitter lists with the members of your TweetDeck groups.

If you want to make any groups private, you need to do that on the Twitter web site.

Update – Note: When you download the file to a Windows system, the file may be named TwitterListImporter.zip instead of TwitterListImporter.air. Just rename the file. Windows is changing the extension – as far as I know, for no good reason.

Getting your Groups out of TweetDeck… Again!

If you are a regular on Twitter, you’ve probably heard about the new feature that is currently getting rolled out to more and more users: Lists. On the surface, they look pretty much like the TweetDeck groups, but once you start digging a bit deeper, there are a number of things that you can do with lists that are not possible with groups.

Even though the TweetDeck folks have indicated that lists will be added to TweetDeck soon, I did not want to wait, to get my TweetDeck groups into Twitter lists.

I’ve written a number of posts before that explained how to extract group information from TweetDeck and other Twitter applications, we can use these techniques to extract the group members and use the Twitter API to create new list and fill these lists with users.

This time, I will do this using the Mac version of TweetDeck – mainly because every Mac comes with all the parts that are necessary to accomplish this task (Perl, sqlite3), but also because I needed it for the Mac, and just did not have time to look at a Windows based solution yet.

Getting Our Hands Dirty

Download this Perl script, copy it to your Mac and rename it to TD2TL.pl:

• TD2TL

Then edit the file and provide your Twitter username and password – potentially you also need to modify the path to the TweetDeck database file. I’ve only tried this on a few TweetDeck installations, and it seems to work, but if things go wrong, find that file and modify that path as well.

The next step is easy: Just run the program from the command line by either making it executable, or by calling Perl with the program file on the command line:

chmod 755 ./TD2TL.pl
./TD2TL.pl

perl ./TD2TL.pl

While the script is running, it will report what it’s doing (e.g. creating a list, or adding users to a list). Once it’s done, you will have these groups available as Twitter lists – without the hassle to go through all your 1000 followed Tweeters and manually assign them to lists.

Update: If you are running the new Nambu 1.2 and are fed up with all the bugs, the SQL commands you need are slightly different. I’ll list them at the end. We now return to our regularly scheduled program…

A while ago I switched from TweetDeck to Nambu (via a few other stops in between). At fist I loved it, then I got used to it’s quirks, and now I’d like to move to something that actually works most of the time… Why is it so hard to write a good Twitter client?!?

Sorry, that rant wasn’t planned, it just happened… Let’s get back on track: As you may remember, a few days ago I posted instructions about how to extract group information from TweetDeck. Now that I’m considering ditching Nambu, I need a way to do the same with that application.

Background

After a little poking around the filesystem, I discovered that Nambu is also using the SQLite database system, even though it’s not an Adobe AIR application. The reason my be that it’s just using the database system comes with Mac OS X…

So, I dumped the database, and tried to find where the users and groups are stored in that database, and came up with a SQL command to extract that data the same way as with TweetDeck. Because Nambu is a Mac-only application, that makes these instructions Mac-only too. If you’ve already read my TweetDeck instructions, you will find a few things that I’m duplicating here for the benefit of new readers.

Extracting the Data

The process requires a little bit of post procesing (e.g. in a spread sheet application like Numbers, OpenOffice.org or Excel), but once you are done, you will have access to the group and user data.

On the Mac, the sqlite3 application actually comes with the operating system, and you can start it’s interface in a terminal window by typing the following command:

sqlite3

You get out of the application by using the .quit command (the dot is important).

The Nambu database file is stored in ~/Library/Application Support/Nambu and the file is called Nambu.db

Now start the Termainal application and change to the directory that contains the Nambu.db file. In that directory create a new text file named sql.txt with the following content (if you followed my TweetDeck instructions, you will notice that the structure is the same, just the table and field names are different):

We are almost there…

Now go back to the command tool and run the following command

cat sql.txt | sqlite3 Nambu.db

This will print all the users who are in groups – you probably want that in a file so that you can import it into Excel:

cat sql.txt | sqlite3 Nambu.db > group_data.txt

That’s it. Import it into a spread sheet program (make sure that you select “|” as field delimiter character) and do whatever you want to do with your group data.

Update: When you upgrade to Nambu 1.2, the database gets updated too, and some of the tables and fields now have new names. For Nambu 1.2, you need to use the following SQL sequence instead:

SELECT ZTWITTERGROUP.ZNAME, ZTWITTERUSER.ZNAME, ZTWITTERUSER.ZSCREENNAME
FROM ZTWITTERUSER
JOIN Z_24USERS ON ZTWITTERUSER.Z_PK = Z_24USERS.Z_26USERS
JOIN ZTWITTERGROUP ON ZTWITTERGROUP.Z_PK = Z_24USERS.Z_24GROUP
GROUP BY ZTWITTERUSER.ZSCREENNAME
ORDER BY ZTWITTERGROUP.ZNAME;

Have you heard about Radaroo.com? It’s a dating service on Twitter. They’ve been on Twitter for almost two months now, so it’s time to check how successful they are. Unfortunately they don’t offer any statistics about how many first dates/relationships/breakups/marriages they’ve “caused”, but at least we know that currently 144 singles are signed up – that’s world wide.

I guess the chances that you will find a compatible date on Twitter are pretty slim, at least if you are using Radaroo.

The idea is pretty straight forward: You post a short description of yourself, including what you are looking for and ideas for the first date. Remember, we are on Twitter, so this all has to happen within 140 characters. What a relief for people who struggle to fill out a Match.com profile. And then you wait… Or, you look for singles in your geographic area. Again, we have 144 singles world wide, so if you don’t live in a large city, your odds of finding somebody are pretty low – and we are not even talking about finding somebody who’s ideas of a first date are compatible with yours.

But what if you already have somebody in mind, and you need to find out if that person is single? You no longer have to hide in the trees in front of your target’s living room to find out if they are in a relationship, Radaroo can help there too: You can ask Radaroo to send an anonymous inquiry to the Twitter account in question. They use @kevinrose as an example on their “stalk this user” page. I wonder how many of these requests Kevin receives on an average day…

Amazingly, people actually reply to these requests, as shown in this screenshot:

So, we still don’t know if it works… I guess I have to put my investigative journalism hat on and post:

I’ll keep you updated…

No, I don’t want to get groups removed from TweetDeck, I want to extract the group information so that I can use it otherwise. By extracting group information, I mean to create a list of groups and users belonging to those groups.

You may want to do that just so that you have a backup outside of TweetDeck, or to configure another Twitter client with the same groups, or just because you can

Background

Fortunately we already have a theory of how TweetDeck stores data: It’s an Adobe AIR application, and any AIR application can store data in a SQLite database. So the assumption is that all configuration data (users, groups, searches) is stored in such a SQLite DB. We can easily verify that by looking (I’m using a Mac for that, if you are on a Windows system, I’ll get to that soon) in the TweetDeck preferences directory – on a Mac that is “Library/Preferences/TweetDeckFast.[random letter and numbers]/Local Store”. In that directory we find a file named td_26_[username].db – Bingo! That’s our database file, and a quick check with the “file” command actually confirms that:

file td_26_user.db
td_26_user.db: SQLite database (Version 3)

The following command will dump the complete content of the database (in form of SQL statements) to the terminal:

echo .dump | sqlite3 ./td_26_user.db

Extracting the Data

Because most of my audience probably is not trying to do this on a Mac, I will now switch my instructions to Windows. If you need more information about how to do this on a Mac, please let me know in the comments.

The process requires a little bit of post procesing (e.g. in Excel), but once you are done, you will have access to the data.

On the Mac, the sqlite3 application actually comes with the operating system, for a Windows environment however, you need to download this file:

http://www.sqlite.org/sqlite-3_6_14_1.zip

Unzip the file and put the sqlite3.exe executable somewhere you can easily access it (e.g. I have a c:\temp directory, the path is short, easy to remember and easy to type. If you want to use this tool more often, you may want to store in in a directory where the operating system looks for executables.

Now you have to find out where the TweetDeck config files are stored. On my Windows system (I’m still running XP) it’s “C:\Documents and Settings\[user]\Application Data\TweetDeckFast.[random string]\Local Store”

You should find a file that starts with td_26 in that directory – that’s the TweetDeck database.

Now start a command tool and change to the directory that contains the td_26… file. In that directory create a new text file named sql.txt with the following content:

We are almost there…

Now go back to the command tool and run the following command

type sql.txt | c:\temp\sqlite3.exe td_26*.db

cat sql.txt | sqlite3 td26*.db

type sql.txt | c:\temp\sqlite3.exe td_26*.db > group_data.txt

Update (06/06/2009): Kathy Gill over at WiredPen.com has collected some information about where and how to get access to the TweetDeck database file on different systems. On Windows, you have to do a few more things to find the file:
How To: Back Up TweetDeck Groups and Preferences

OK, easy enough… Just looking at your profile… Oh, wait a minute… What the heck… No!

Do you want to spare me that experience again? Then please read the following:

Let me explain my “rules” to follow somebody back.

1. You are following 2000 people, and have only 9 followers. Because you are following me, I can probably assume that you are not a celebrity but somebody who’s trying to get as many followers as possible by maxing out on how many people you can follow and then just waiting to see who follows back and un-follow the others. Wash, rinse, repeat… Sorry, but you don’t get Twitter, I’d rather follow somebody who actually understands what Twitter is about. When you provide good content, you will get your followers, but that takes time. There are no shortcuts.
2. You are following 600 people, but you have 0 updates. Sorry, but I want to see first what you will provide to the Twitter community and to me before I decide to follow you back. Let me see what you are about, then follow me, and then I might just follow you back.
3. You are trying to sell me snake oil – even though you call it SEO, it’s still snake oil. I don’t want snake oil, I don’t need snake oil, and I just don’t want to deal with snake ail salesmen… Oh, and if somebody is actually looking for an SEO expert, take a look at this Google document (PDF). It explains everything you need to know to optimize your search engine rating. Really. That’s it. No secrets. At least not unless you are trying to cheat the system.
4. Your update stream only contains links to your own blog. Get a room! I mean, get an RSS feed! Twitter is not a replacement for a good RSS feed, and I’d rather explore your new blog posts via my RSS aggregator than via Twitter. I don’t have a problem with you posting a link to your latest blog post on Twitter, but give me some other stuff too, engage with other Twitter users, post links to things that are not on your own blog. And if you don’t know what RSS is, please google it.
5. All your updates are ads for your products. You don’t get social media. There is no way I will follow you. Twitter is not radio or TV. You don’t blast your ads all over the place. If you want new business, help your existing customers. The new customers will then come automatically. They won’t come because of all your ads. Trust me.
6. You don’t have a profile picture, no bio, no link and no home town. Who are you? Unless I get a better idea about who you are, don’t expect me to become one of your followers. I want to know who I’m dealing with, just like in real life.
7. I may actually follow you, but then you send me a DM (I guess automatically) – trying to sell me something. That gets punished by an immediate un-follow.
8. You’ve been on Twitter for seven days and already have 1500 updates posted. That’s too much. I don’t have time to read all that. Get off Twitter every now and then. Get a life!
9. The last time you followed me, I did not follow you back. You un-followed me because of that. Now you are following me again. What makes you think that you got so much more attractive within the last two days? And, if you do that a third time, I will block you. View khkremer’s tweet
10. Your updates are protected. I cant even find out who you are. Don’t expect to hear from me anytime soon.
11. Your first @reply to me is spam. By now you should know that I have a problem with that.View khkremer’s tweet

Twitter is not a game to show that you can get the most followers in the least amount of time. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand Twitter.

There may be other reasons why I won’t follow you back, but in general, the key to win me as a follower is pretty easy:

• Provide good content
• Interact with others
• Provide something interesting about yourself in your profile

If you do that, I will follow you. I promise.

I’ve been on Twitter for a while now, and over time I used a lot of different tools to make working with the twitterverse a bit easier. This post is not about the tools I’ve written, but the tools I use.

3rd Party Clients

Once you get past a handful of people you follow, taming the flood of tweets in your timeline becomes a fulltime job… or a 24/7 time waster. Very early on, I realized that I would need a Twitter client that allows me to create groups. This means that I divide the people I follow up into at least three groups:

• friends and family – the people I don’t want to miss a single tweet from
• the 2nd line of friends and people who have interesting things to say – but I wont panic if I miss a couple of tweets from them
• the “others” – these are the tweets I resort to when I’m really bored…

I first looked at Tweetdeck, and for a while that seemed like the right solution, but I’ve been running into more and more problems with it. It’s a memory and performance hog. Also, when I have to restart it, I lose important tweets.

Then Seesmic Desktop came along. It’s – just like Tweetdeck – an Adobe AIR application, but is bit more gentle with your system’s memory. However, I don’t like the way I need to configure groups. It’s one user at a time.

I really like Tweetie for the Mac – if it just would support groups, that would be my number one 3rd party Twitter client. No other client makes it as simple to see an ongoing conversation – just double-click on a tweet, and Tweetie will display it.

Right now I’m using Nambu. It’s not perfect, but until Tweetie comes with group support, I’ll probably stick with it.

When I’m using the Twitter web interface, I use Firefox with Greasemonkey installed – that allows me to use “Troys Twitter Script“. It does a lot of things that makes the web interface much more usable:

• show a conversation
• expand short URLs
• rudimentary group support
• embedded images and YouTube videos
• name completion
• …

Twitter On The Go

I use the original Tweetie – the one for the iPhone when I’m not at my “big” computer.

Web-based Twitter Tools

When you google “Twitter Tools”, you find list of the best 10 or 100 or 1000 tools… I’ve tried a few, and most of them have some entertainment potential (hey, who does not want to know their Twitter Grade?!? But how often to you need to really check if your grade went up or down a bit. Ask your followers about how good a tweeter you are.

I use a couple of tools that I think are valuable.

Topify makes it easy to follow or block new followers, and to send and receive DM’s via email. Go to their web site and watch the video, it’s good stuff. To make things easier, new-follower emails from Topify contain the MrTweet information about a user. This allows me to usually make a quick decision about following somebody back, or not.

Even though Topify helps me to follow back interesting users, I still have a bunch of older followers to take care of. Tweepler helps me to just go down a list of followers, and, based on data – like number of followers, following and how many tweets per day – I can then decide if I want to follow back.

If you want to export your followers or followees, use FriendOrFollow – it can export all the important information about users in a CSV file that can be imported into Excel, and then you can sort it by whatever criteria you find useful.

I’ve already mentioned MrTweet as part of the Topify follower emails. I also use it occasionally to get a better idea of who somebody is on Twitter. MrTweet can also recommend a user based on recommendations by others. If you like my tweets, recommend me on MrTweet…

So, that’s it. If you have any tools you want to share, please do so in the comments.

I’ve been using Twitter more over the last few weeks – this is pretty obvious when you take a look at the graph from TwitterCounter.com:

Once I started to tweet more, my follower count went up.

While playing around with different Twitter tools, I came across MyTweet16.com, which allows you to display the first 16 tweets of any Twitter user. I of course was curious about what I had to say when I first signed up for my account.

What I found was pretty interesting: For my very first tweet, I did not use any of the “normal” ways to use Twitter: It was not the web interface or any of the established Twitter clients – instead, I used a program that I wrote myself. I completely forgot about that. Who else can say that they tweeted first with something they created (besides Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey, the founders of Twitter)?

I used the book Creating Mashups with Adobe Flex and AIR (Friends of Ed Abobe Learning Library) to get some exposure to Flex, and the first few examples in the book are about using the Twitter API.

So, without any further ado, here is my first tweet (copy&pasted from MyTweet16.com:

Playing with Flex for the first time (that's how I twittered this). 12:33 PM Jun 3rd 2008

Please follow me on Twitter.