CHAPTER 20: Social Media and Skype
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As you consider choosing a favorite Twitter app, you need to keep a few things in mind.
Nearly all of the apps that support Twitter allow you to change how often they check for
new tweets. Unless you absolutely, positively must be notified of new tweets, you
should turn this down to a reasonable, battery-conserving setting of 30 minutes or
longer.
Many apps allow you to use either your own URL-shortening service or use one supplied
with the individual apps. You should pick a service that offers you tracking and metrics,
even if you don’t think you’ll use them just yet. It’s easier to have the data than it is to
wish you had the data. Bit.ly and Ow.ly both allow data tracking and are popular
choices.
Yammer
If you want the instant communication of Twitter, but you want to restrict access to only
your company, you may want to try Yammer (www.yammer.com). Yammer creates a
Twitter-like atmosphere that is only accessible to people with the same email domain.
Yammer also adds threaded conversations to the tweets and organizational charts, so it
has value beyond a simple Twitter imitation. Recently, it has added the ability to create
communities across multiple email domains, so it’s possible to have a partnership
community with vendors and customers or a group of close friends with different email
domains.
Yammer makes an official app. It’s not robust, but it does allow you to post and see
status updates. Fortunately, the intra-company nature of the Yammer service means
that you don’t need the same bells and whistles for communication that you would for
Twitter.
Other Microblogs
Twitter stole most of the microblog spotlight, but you may prefer a different platform for
your message. There’s no shortage of microblogging services, so there’s no chance of
naming them all. Some, like Jaiku, seem to be short on dedicated apps. Others have a
large selection of dedicated apps, but none of these other microblogs are included in
the Social Networking widget on DROID.
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