My Favorite Tweets of 2008

In case you haven’t noticed, I LOVE Twitter. The microblogging platform has become like a second home for me and I keep TwitterFox open pretty much the entire time I am online.

Whenever I read a tweet that makes me laugh out loud, I favorite it immediately. Then, whenever I am feeling a bit flat, or sense a bad mood coming on, I turn to my favorites list knowing I will be giggling in no time.

Here are some of my favorite Tweets from 2008 (oh and may I add a *Mature Adults Only* rating for some of the following):

1) @pagecrusher When you check in at a Motel 6, refer to it as a “Motel Sex” and add a theatrical wink. The desk clerks LOVE that.

2) @fireland Turns out a two-week vacation to the Ronald McDonald House is not as fun as it sounds. And those kids are TERRIBLE at Jenga.

3) @coplandmj 10p coin exactly the same size as a US quarter. Coffee girl not too smart. Second cup on her majesty.

4) @hotdogsladies Sometimes I won’t follow someone who isn’t following me. Then Karl Lagerfeld and I make fun of poor people and hit each other with our fans.

5) @fireland It’s great that my superpower is the ability to make women sigh with disappointment, but sometimes I wish I could fucking fly instead.

6) @Moltz It’s great to sit back at the end of a long day and relax with a beer and catch up on OH, MY GOD, WE LEFT HANK IN THE IKEA BALL PIT

7) @fireland How much do you have to pay a cop to forget he saw a bloodstained Tickle Me Elmo stuffed with opium? Wikipedia is like zero help over here.

8 ) @ikostar Catsby’s just lost his lunch under the table. He’s blown chunks. Parked a tiger. Ralfed etc. Chundered.

9) @motherwell @bonytoad my ebook was huge in Thailand, especially the golden triangle.

10) @fireland This macaroni necklace my daughter made me tastes like garbage. Fuck this Montessori bullshit.

11) @lonelysandwich Remember the rash of creature horror-comedies that came out in the 80s (Gremlins, Ghoulies, Critters)? That just came out of my dog.

12) @hotdogsladies When the Dr. asks why I think I have undiagnosed ADD, I’ll turn and point toward the internet. And then you guys can all laugh and wave.

13) @sugarrae @streko I’m NOT fucking drinking – are you nuts?

14) @patrickaltoft Using xoom.com for the first time. It’s crap.

15) @MarkDykeman I’m watching CSI. Somebody died. Yawn.

16) @AinsleyofAttack I want a bunch of forensic investigators to use luminol in my bedroom. I’d be like, “Yeah, bitches. That’s right.”

17) @fireland Played golf with my old man this morning and on the fourth tee I accidentally hated his guts since the day I was born.

18) @smartasshat People are insane.

19) @johnweb I always get the hot and the mild sauce at the drive in. They give me 10 packs. Then I don’t use either. I am why people hate Americans.

20) @coplandmj All I want for Christmas is for someone to turn the fuck up and do their job.

21) @cleversimon Kissing her neck, I made her drop a stitch. That’s not a euphemism.

22) @AinsleyofAttack Most likely due to the way we looked after 22 hours on the road, the front desk clerk gave us a room with a handicap shower. We disabled it.

23) @nick Going crazy over this band “TBA.” Every time I think I’m gonna see them perform, they get replaced at the last minute.

24) @fireland Well actually the difference between Helvetica and Arial is pretty glaring if you oh my god this is why I haven’t had sex in twenty months.

25) @nonlinearmind You know what I love about pie? As you eat it, it creates a graph of how much is left.

26) @AmyJane New idea: We skip the private school and use that money to fly in a guest Twitterer each week to homeschool the kid.

27) @Remiel A misguided prankster laced the office water cooler with a small amount of LSD. Trying to get to HR to complain, but being thwarted by bats.

28) @HalfPintIngalls Today was a pretty good day until we got diptheria.

29) @AinsleyofAttack I really just want a women’s magazine to have the headline “Hot Summer Tip: Men Are Assholes.”

30) @meowrey Oh man, I’m sorry I freaked out like that. This coffee is making me super agitated. I asked for a cappuccino, but I think I got an alpacino.

31) @cleversimon Jesus Christ, I drank enough last night to kill Paul Newman. What? Why is everybody looking at me like that?

32) @confession I made it all up. – God

33) @bitchoftheday OH: “Are you eavesdropping bitch?”

34) @DieLaughing I can only remember my sponsors phone number when I’m totally wasted. Let me borrow your cellphone and $100 bucks. Wait right here.

35) @pagecrusher There’s a school bus parked in front of Sassy’s, the strip club. I want to see the permission form for that field trip.

Thanks for the giggles tweeps. Happy tweeting in 2009!

Marketers: Are you up for the SEM Challenge?

Lots of charities and non-profit organizations have been doing it tough since the global economic slowdown. One of those is FORGE, an organization that works with displaced communities in Africa.

A few people in the search community put their heads together and decided to help FORGE meet their budget gap of $100,000 through a pro-bono SEM campaign designed to increase awareness and donations.

You can read about their efforts on the SEM Challenge web site. Congratulations and hats off to the following marketers that have generously volunteered their time and expertise to help FORGE: Greg Laptevsky of ClickInclusion.com, as the Pay-Per-Click expert; Todd Mintz of S.R. Clarke Inc. handling Search Engine Optimization; John Robbins of Anvil Media as the Social Media Marketing expert; and Derek Edmond of KoMarketing Associates providing Website Usability recommendations. The organizer of SEMChallenge is Boris Mordkovich of MordComm.

Care to lend a hand? You can help in two ways:

1) Visit FORGEnow.org and consider sponsoring one of their pending projects. Even a $25 donation can go a long way into helping others live better, more rewarding lives. Best of all, you’ll be able to monitor and view the progress and impact of your sponsored project as it develops.

2) Spread the word about SEM Challenge and FORGE on your blog, website, or professional and personal networks.

Thanks in advance!

7 Cool Xmas Applications

It’s Christmas Eve and I’m sick to death of SEO. Time for some Xmas related fun. Here are six cool Xmas applications designed to distract you from your REAL job today:

Elf Yourself is an application that allows you to turn yourself into an Elf.

Norad Tracks Santa is a way for kids of all ages to track Santa’s progress around the world on Xmas Eve in real time.

Tattoo Santa allows you to tattoo Sanat’s butt, tummy, arm or leg with your own personal Xmas greeting and then send it to someone special. Hours of fun for the whole family!

What Crappy Christmas Gift are You? is another in a long line of online surveys that have pre-determined results based on your individual Scrooge factor. Me? I’m apparently a pair of socks. Cosy and warm, but easily lost.

Build a Snowman – er yeah, it’s not rocket science.


Snowball Fight
– Fight your friends to see who can pack the meanest, hardest snowball.

TweetWrappr – Wrap your Tweets to show your followers how much you really love them.

Merry Christmas everyone!

16 Must Have Tools for Twitter Users

Hands up if you’re a Twitterholic. Yes, my hand’s up too. If you love the micro-blogging platform Twitter as much as I do, then keep reading.

I’ve put together a list of the coolest plug-ins and apps designed for us Twitterholics and scored each out of five on the *must have* scale.

Twitter Specific Tools:

1) TwitterFox is a Firefox extension that notifies you of your friends’ status on Twitter and lets you make posts from your browser status bar. It also allows you to switch between multiple Twitter accounts in one click. This is my #1 must-have, deal-breaker, cannot live without Twitter plug-in.

Must Have Scale: ♥♥♥♥♥

2) Retweet This is an application designed for use with the Greasemonkey Firefox plug-in. It allows you to append a retweet button to the end of each Twitter entry to encourage your followers to retweet your posts.

Must Have Scale: ♥♥♥

3) Classify Twitter Users is a script that allows you to classify Twitter users and decide whether they are worth following based on their friends, followers and post ratios. Another Greasemonkey app, it’s a great tool to help you weed out the Twitter spammers and fan boys from the socially healthy.

You can set the script to use your own Twitter user scales (e.g. spammer, social climber, social rock star) or just gather more information about people you are following.

Must Have Scale: ♥♥♥♥

4) TwittAd allows Twitter users to monetize their account by accepting advertising on the background image of their Twitter user profile. You decide the duration and price advertisers pay for exposure and get paid for every hour you serve the ad.

Must Have Scale: ♥♥

5) TwitterCounter lets you add a daily updating TwitterCounter to your blog so everybody can see how popular you are by the number of persons following you.

Must Have Scale: ♥♥

6) TweetBeep is just like having Google Alerts for Twitter. It enables you to keep track of conversations that mention you, your products or your company via email. You can even keep track of who’s tweeting your website or blog. It’s a great tool for online reputation management and you don’t even have to be a Twitter user to benefit from it. TweetBeep is another one of my personal *must haves*.

Must Have Scale: ♥♥♥♥

7) Twitter Grader measures the reach and authority of a Twitter user, calculated by the pace of their updates, the completeness of their profile, their number of followers and the network power of those followers.

Twitter Grader displays as a score out of 100 and is consistently updating and adapting as your Twitter account grows. Based on those grades, Twitter Grader lists the Twitter Elite globally and in each country, just like Technorati does for bloggers.

Must Have Scale: ♥♥♥

8 ) TwitPic, as the name suggests, is a photo sharing tool for Twitter. When logged in, it allows you to upload photos and post them with comments as a Tweet. It works with a range of Twitter clients such as Twitterific, Twhirl and MobileTwitter and stores all your photos in a single location with updated viewing stats. As far as Twitter image sharing goes, this is king for reliability.

Must Have Scale: ♥♥♥♥♥

9) Twuffer is a Twitter buffer. It allows Twitter users to compose a list of future tweets, and schedule their release. Twuffer is ideal for making hourly, daily or monthly announcements or send post-dated birthday greetings or reminders to people about upcoming events. It’s also perfect if you’re the type of person who wants to give the impression that you never sleep.

Must Have Scale: ♥♥♥

10) Twistori I have a real soft spot for. One of the developers is Amy Hoy, one of my favorite speakers from Webstock 2008 and a goth geek to boot. Twistori is a social experiment that taps into the Twitter conversations revolving around life’s central activities: Love, Hate, Think, Believe, Feel, Wish. You can click on any of these emotions and witness a live feed of Tweets that use them. It’s voyeuristic and utterly compelling.

Must Have Scale: ♥♥♥♥

11) iTweet is another interface for Twitter. It has built-in auto-refresh, search and hash tags and features full follow, block and notifications features. Users can view and post user bio, location and URLs inline with their tweets. Another cool feature of iTweet is the ability to Retweet a user post with a single click.

Must Have Scale: ♥♥♥

12) Twitturly is a service for tracking what URLs people are talking about as they talk about them on Twitter. Similar to Digg, on Twitturly, people “vote” for a URL. The more votes it gets the better it ranks. If it does well enough, it gets promoted to the home page and as the votes increase it gets displayed higher up the home page. Twitturly differs from Digg in that instead of voting on their site, you vote by participating on Twitter. Each time that you send a link to your followers on Twitter, Twitturly takes a note of it and applies your vote to that URL. It’s a great way to follow the loudest global conversations.

Must Have Scale: ♥♥♥♥

13) Mr Tweet is another big favorite of mine. Similar to LinkedIn, it looks through your extended network and makes suggestions to help you build effective relationships on Twitter. For example, which of your followers should you be following in return? Who are the most influential people you should be following? Who are your followers following?

Must Have Scale: ♥♥♥♥♥

14) Twitter Search is Twitter’s own built-in and oft-overlooked search tool. You can use it to search for other Twitter users, keywords, hash tag topics and a range of cool shortcut items.

Must Have Scale: ♥♥♥♥

Non Twitter Specific Tools:

15) FlipTitle is, not surprisingly, a tool that enables you to flip text upside down. It’s great for Twitter because sometimes your tweets can get lost in the conversation. Using FlipTitle makes sure they get noticed.

Must Have Scale: ♥♥

16) Bit.ly is a very cool URL shortener that also includes click-thru statistics. Why is it perfect for Twitter? Because the length of the converted URLs is generally much shorter than other URL converters like TinyURL. When you are tweeting, space is premium as your whole post can only consist of 140 characters including spacing.

The other neat thing aspect of Bit.ly is that it keeps a record of clicks that your URLs received and where they originated from. It even provides a share button so you can re-tweet your URLs on Twitter or send them to friends on Facebook, Gmail or another email client.

Must Have Scale: ♥♥♥♥♥

So there you have it, 16 cool tools to help you indulge your Twitter addiction.

Happy Tweeting!

Last days for SMX Sydney Pre Early Bird Pricing

If you’re planning on attending SMX Sydney next year and you don’t want to pay full price, you’d better get your skates on.  You can save $700 if you register on or before next Tuesday 23 December.

The Promo Code to use is: Pre-Earlybird and you can register via this link.

To follow the fun leading up to the Conference on Twitter, do a search for #SMXSydney or follow Conference Organizer and jolly good fellow Barry Smyth.