Twitter Tools

So at the end of yesterday’s post about my twitter lovefest, I mentioned that I would post about PeopleBrowsr, my new twitter love tool.

Like most people, I started out using Twitter on the web.  As I started connecting with more people, I began experimenting with tools that would help me organize all of the tweets.  

The first one I tried was Twhirl.  It was light and easy to use.  At the time, it offered one column and was more like regular twitter except it was on your desktop.  It sent little notifications, so it was nice (when things were more manageable).  It also had some other features and has been upgraded since I last used it.

The next one I tried (and stayed with for a long time) was TweetDeck.  Some of my favorite features were:

• Groups
• Auto URL shortening
• Spell check
• Floating over tweets to interact (reply, dm, favorite, etc)
• Search column(s)

The biggest downside for me was the ability to be limited to 10 groups.  I know ten sounds like a lot, but take up one each in replies, direct messages, all follows & a search column, that left 6.  My Tweetdeck groups were Favs, Austin, Don’t Lose Track, Fun Tweeters, Marketers & News.

As my follower list became more diverse, the need for more groups began to open.  I really wanted to find something that I could manage from the web, because I work from more than one computer.  Tweetdeck customizations are only applicable to one installation, so you have to customize it on every computer you use it on (if you choose to use more than one installation).

You can direct tweetdeck to keep more tweets in the group streams (set the number of tweets per column), but if it’s too large, it can really cause deck to hang up.  It already uses a lot of resources as it is, so having it archive more than 250 tweets per column is a huge task for this application.  It just became habit for me to restart my computer twice a day because everything would start locking up after a while.

Don’t get me wrong, TweetDeck is FABULOUS and it was great during the time I needed it.  Once I passed 3k followers though, I was getting more than 250 tweets per update, so it wasn’t something I could manage anymore.  

I needed more groups to break down these tweets into something manageable.

I was almost sold on Tweetvisor, but it didn’t show the tweet time lines far back enough, so I’d often end up with empty groups.  

Then I came across PeopleBrowsr.  The first time I logged in and tried to figure it out, I ran away crying.  Ok, not really.  But I did walk away.

The complete opposite of a first-time Twitter login (which is like boring nothingness), logging into PeopleBrowsr was overwhelming.

The default windows (stacks) were following people I didn’t know and covered topics I had no interest in.  I know they were examples, but I wanted to figure out how to make my own stacks, and pronto.

The fact that it combined Facebook, LinkedIn & Plaxo meant nothing to me if I couldn’t even get it to work with one of my services (Twitter).

So, I decided that I’d check it out later, closed it, and went on my merry way.

Then, a few nights ago, I was on deck and felt like I had caught up with all the people who were in my groups.  My “following” tweets were flying past and I needed to restructure my groups.

I decided to give PeopleBrowsr another shot.  I logged in and though it looks like they’ve made some changes and have attempted to help people become acquainted with it more easily, it was more about the technical aspect of working with tweets rather than how to get your stuff up and running right away.

So, here’s my breakdown and what I did.

At the bottom toolbar, I clicked on “Settings”.  I chose to turn “on” my custom twitter background, which brought in the colors from my twitter web page into the background.  I also turned “off” the white on black background.  Even though I got sorta used to doing deck on a dark background, I wanted my web background to be white.  I left everything else as it was.

Then I also deleted the stacks that were in there and made my own.

I clicked on the links on the top toolbar for the stacks that I wanted to show, which were “Following” “Replies” & “DM”.  You can click on the others if you want those to stay in your open stacks.

 

 

I’ll stop here to say that you’ll see an “Outbox” one.  Though I haven’t used it yet, it appears that you can pre-schedule tweets.  (more on that in another post)

There are a lot of things you can do to interact with a tweet.  You can scroll over their name and their bio appears in a window:

When you  click on their username, two things happen.  A stack opens that contains a search stream of that persons username (yes, all of their replies and conversation – anything that has their username in it) as well as a pop-up window.  The pop-up window lets you do a number of things, including see all of their other feeds and social sites.  I usually use it to manage people’s tags (more on that in a minute).  You can also follow/unfollow from this window.

Now, I’m still old school (yes, I’ve actually been called an “old-school” tweeter, that’s how fast things move in the twittersphere), so I like to actually look at profile pages.  Ya, on the web and everything.  Anyway, if you click the blue Twitter “T” between a person’s avatar & their username, it’ll open their profile in a web page.

Now for my favorite part – all the groups you get to make.  Starting with my following stream (people I follow), I simply shift & clicked tweets to start tagging.

The tweet will highlight yellow and a window will pop up (you can tag multiple tweets by shift+clicking more tweets).

You can type in a new tag or if you already have some groups (tags), it’ll let you add there.  Now, you just decide if you want the tag to apply to the post or the tweeter.  For the sake of this article, we will be applying it to the user so we would not mark the box.  We want the tag to apply to the user.  Then, click “save”.

That’s how I started tagging my peeps and creating groups.

Now, to see the groups you’ve created (and their associated stacks), you go to the top left menu bar and click on “Groups”.

Now on mine, it takes a minute for it to open.  Sometimes I have to hit the “pause” button on my follows stream in order to open this window.

Anyway, a drop down menu should open.

If you click on “my private”, your groups window should open up.

Personally, I have 19 groups.  After I got them all set up, it was easy to start tagging people and adding them to groups.  If your following stream (or any stack stream) moves too fast, you can pause it by clicking the pause button at the top of the stack.

When you are ready to see the stream again, you just click the play button at the top of the stack.

You can close stacks at any time.  You don’t lose anything by X’ing out your stacks (groups) and can reopen them at any time.

To scroll through stacks quickly, you can use the dots at the bottom of the screen.  They act sort of like page sliders.

There are lots of other neat things you can do to make groups more effective (options are at the bottom toolbar of each stack).

My Google Chrome browser gets upset if I leave PeopleBrowsr on too long (which I assume would apply to most browsers under this kind of load), but a quick browser restart is all it takes.  And I don’t lose tweets cause I can go back as far as I want in a stack.

I know there are a ton of other things this Twitter tool can do, but this is enough to get you started in the right direction.

Please let me know if this has helped you and comment down below!