You are here: Home / Archives for twitter

Seesmic for Windows – Installation Issues Solved

11th January 2010 By Leave a Comment
seesmic.png

I generally use the Seesmic web app to access Twitter on my Macs, but as I’ve been using my netbook more frequently I was keen to try Seesmic for Windows. Unfortunately it didn’t go as smoothly as I would have liked.

When running the setup file I was faced with an error because the installer was trying, but failing, to connect to http://d.seesmic.com/swin/SWin.application. After a fruitless search on the Seesmic Web site and across Google in general, I finally found a solution myself by trial and error. I’m posting this here in the hope that anyone else searching for a solution is able to find it.

My searching suggested that this problem mainly affects users of Windows 7 and some users of Vista, although advice that this may be related to an inability to connect via a proxy weren’t relevant in my case.

The solution was remarkably simple; right click on setup.exe, select Troubleshoot Compatibility and accept the recommended options, which in my case was to run as compatible with Windows XP SP3. I clicked on run, the installer did its job and the app runs without issues (so far at least).

I’ll post more about the app once I’ve had time to use it, but in the meantime I hope this post helps some people who are having issues installing it.

Image source seesmic.com

Filed Under: General, Windows Tagged With: , ,

Is Twitter Really Not Right For Business?

11th November 2009 By 2 Comments

Earlier this week, The Times ran a story titled “Twitter may not be right for business“.

Despite the title, the article seems to be more about the shortcomings of companies, and why that makes them unsuitable as users of microblogging. To quote the article “Nevertheless, I think there are several fundamental reasons why companies are unsuited to microblogging,…”.

The article goes on to list 5 reasons why companies are not suitable;

  1. Companies are incapable of dealing with things in real time
  2. Companies are incapable of brevity
  3. Companies are not open
  4. Companies are neither altruistic or reciprocal
  5. Companies do not have distinct voices or personalities

I don’t think I’m alone in being relieved I don’t work in a company that behaves as described in the article. One which is probably not fit to deal with its customers, is certainly not fit to manage and develop its employees and is unlikely to have a very bright (or long) future.

The biggest problem with the article, is of course that all five of the statements are wrong. Many companies are very good at dealing with things in real time, and can be both brief and open. Altruism and reciprocity are not unknown qualities in the world of business. Virgin, Disney and Nike are just a few examples of companies with a distinct voice and personality.

If you actually read the story, you’ll find the tone is clearly tongue in cheek, but that won’t stop some people attempting to use this as evidence that Twitter has no place in business.

Filed Under: elearning, Learning, Social Media Tagged With: , ,

Twitter and RSS

27th January 2009 By 4 Comments

twitter and rss logos

Twitter has had a great deal of media coverage this month, from worldwide news stories like the Hudson River crash and Obama’s inauguration through to its discussion by Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross (@stephenfry and @wossy respectively) on the latter’s Friday night talk show.

I wanted to share a handy way of using RSS feeds to keep on top of specific Twitter topics of interest.

For example, during the build up to this week’s Learning Technologies conference, there’s been a lot of related activity on Twitter, and to make it easier to find those Tweets, they’ve been tagged as #LT09UK. There are various ways that you can find all Tweets with that tag, such as using the #Hashtags search,  but one of the simplest is to head over to http://search.twitter.com and use the familiar search interface.

That’s okay if you just want to do the search once, but what if you want regular updates? Well, you could simply come back and run the search again, or bookmark the url to make it a one click process. Or you could save time, and use RSS.

Once you’ve run your Twitter search, click on the RSS icon on the left of the page, and add the feed to your reader.

twitter search and rss feed

Now each time you check your feed reader, any new items matching the search criteria will be displayed. You can set up as many searches as you like and subscribe to them all.

Filed Under: Tutorials Tagged With: , ,