Types of desktop clients…
There are quite a few you could choose from. Here’s a well-compiled list of 26 microblogging tools by mintblogger applicable for Mac & Windows OS with explained features. However today, I’m going to feature 3 powerful desktop clients that you heard so much about:

2. Notifications of Tweets, DMs, Replies etc:

As much we have mixed feelings with URL shortener, one could not deny its importance in microblogging where ’140′ is the limit! Twhirl and Seesmic Desktop are good picks if you wish to track your bit.ly click stats. By providing your bit.ly acc API key, all URLs shortened by bit.ly will be saved for track backs.

4. Sharing Pictures from Desktop Clients:

Twitpic is the default picture sharing service for all desktop clients. Seesmic Desktop has 4 more options: Twitgoo, yfrog, Pikchur & Posterous. Tweetdeck, on the other hand, just added YFrog as the extra image sharing service.

5. Support Multiple Accounts:

9. Scan & Filter Keyword Search:

And there’s so much more in each desktop client!

Now you understand why we make a fuss about these twitter desktop clients. Aren’t they fascinating? If you have yet to use any, please try. You will be amazed how it saves your time, and makes your tweeting life much easier and organized. Power users should definitely give Seesmic Desktop or Tweetdeck a run through.

To track source and number of clicks, including users (‘Best Guess’) & locations. In order to utilize Twitclicks, you need to log in with your Twitter username/password. Although some may be having second thoughts about using it due to security issues, but that is just a matter of preference. Twitclicks still manage to impress users with the detailed statistics as shown below:

3. Bit.ly

Apart showing the number and source (location & timelines) of clicks, bit.ly allows you to claim and bookmark your tweeted links upon registering a bit.ly account. Extra features including bookmarklet, ‘Conversation’ tracking in Twitter, FriendFeed & page comment for the link itself. Bit.ly is undoubtedly one of the most used URL shorteners, could be found in various desktop clients (Tweedeck, Twhirl, Seesmic Destkop etc); and also used by the popular Trend-tracker, Tweetmeme!

Features:

Cli.gs also requires account setup to enable stats tracking. Private analytic data available only for cli.gs account holders. Referrer stats will show whose link sent you the most traffic. Another specialty of cli.gs is that it provides social media tracking for both cli.gs and destination links, meaning you could monitor the response in terms of backlinks, tweets, link-sharing in friendsfeed, comments etc.

records of shortened URLs in cli.gs account

Number of hits shown in graph

6. Ow.ly (Hootsuite)

Features:

Stats tracking for Ow.ly could
be done via Hootsuite. It is a powerful web interface that allows user to handle tweeting with multiple profiles, along with pre-scheduling tweeting ability – Tweet Later! Take a peek at the toolbars, you’ll get what I mean:

‘Send Later’ feature in Hootsuite

Hootsuite to manage tweets as in Twitter official page

A Lil’ Piece of Advise…
URL Shortener is our handyman, but don’t get too carry away with it though. In my opinion, it is always better to use the original link in online articles or references for they are recognizable. You may think you’re doing the readers some favours by replacing long address like:

ttp://www.wchingya.com/2009/03/10-blogging-attitudes-you-should-learn.html

with ‘http://twitclicks.com/fecu‘–unknown and suspicious. What if someone never heard of twitclicks and goes ‘What on earth is that??’. They just may skip it for fear it it’s an affiliate link or some sort of malicious site that disguises itself in shortened URL! Also, in terms of SEO opportunies, we wouldn’t want to lose any details the link could provide for the search engines.

Further reading~ Do you use URL shorteners? Maybe you should reconsider

Share with us…
Which is your favourite URL shortener service? What aspects you would consider before making your pick? Do you anticipating any further improvements? Share with us your valuable thoughts.

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a. Meet like-minded people
Either retweet out of kindness or simply loving the content, this guy/lady might be somebody worth following, befriends with. We could show our appreciation by giving thanks, repaying kindness, following each others’ tweets… usually that’s how the networking begins. (In reference to 10 Simple Ways To Show Kindness Online)

b. How popular/unique is our tweet
how far it could go via retweet — the clicks, stats and the performance. Is the title catchy enough? Shall we do a sequel for the post? How is our twithority? Time to evaluate your twitter experience.

How To Track Retweets ?

You could try ReTweet Rank that shows both of your current ranking along with retweet history, but only limited to the keywords ‘RT‘ & ‘your username‘. What if people retweet using the word ‘via’? Untraceable.

Some people may or may not address our username when they retweet. Great tools are on the queue to track them all:

1. Backtweets – Link search engine that leads you to people who retweet

Enables URL-tracking for a particular link. Neither registration nor Login required. However, to get the most out of Backtweets, you need to:

“Make sure to paste in the complete URL for your link. This is to enable tracking for various shortened-URL, such as tinyurl, is.gd, bit.ly etc that originated from the link”, as shown below:

Ok, now you may want to know…


“WHAT IF I Search By…”

Q1: My own blog URL? say, ‘http://www.wchingya.com’,

Results:
Random results will be flooding in, not only for the recent one, but including previous tweets or whenever your blog URL is mentioned.

Q2: My very own shortened URL. For Instance, ‘How To Personalize your Twitter Background‘ was using ~ http://tr.im/iYvr

Results: ‘There are no tweet results’. I know, I’m just as surprised.

Q3: How about ‘post title’?

Results: Nothing.

Q4: Apparently, it only works for complete URL-tracking then?

Results:
Not quite, here’s why:

Let’s say I wish to trace 1 previous post of mine : The Reveal: Killer Apps for A Successful Twitter Network (pt2). I’m only using part of the keyword search “Killer Apps To Enhance Twitter Network”, what do I get?

Surprisingly, somebody tweeted this post from Digg, and the keywords used are coincidently the same for article submission in Digg. What if I use the exact post title? Killer Apps for A Successful Twitter Network ? It returns with zero results.

Seems like there’s not fixed rule of ‘no keywords’ allowed. However, Backtype Founder, Christopher Golda explains that the keyword search would only direct you to the unshortened link URLs containing the keywords. Backtweets still stands as a link search engine.

Downside of Backtweets:

Not all shortened URLs are traceable. For example, Backtweets is unable to detect twitclicks, another URL-shortener service with stats available. We’ll be discussing more about this service shortly.

In the coming post, we will be covering part 2 of the Retweet-trackers. If you happen to enjoy this post, do subscribe via RSS Feed or email so you won’t miss it. No pressure, you can unsubscribe anytime if you find it disturbing. ^^

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Copyright © 2009 by Wong Ching Ya, All Rights Reserved, “‘How To Track Your Retweet In Twitter (Pt.1)“

Seesmic Desktop is one of the desktop clients for Twitter. What does desktop client do? Instead of us logging in everytime through the Twitter official site, which could be cumbersome sometimes, desktop clients make us life easier by allowing us to tweet over our PC desktop. Think of it as a twitter messenger. Efficient and easy to operate.

Let’s make Twitter + Facebook all in ONE place!
The process is similar to how you setup your Twitter account in Seesmic Desktop:

1. In the configuration bar, go to ‘Accounts‘, click the ‘+‘ to bring up the ‘Add your Facebook account‘ command box.

2. You will be asked to verify your Facebook account by key in your email add & password.

3. Then, the following confirmation boxe(s) will appear for Seesmic to remember your facebook account while allowing status updates etc be done through it.

4. There! You’re good to go. Account switching between Twitter and Facebook is now applicable in Seesmic Desktop. You could even have a split screen for the both.

So here is my most recent status-update for Facebook, via Seesmic.

For those who have yet to try Seesmic Desktop, you can download the application here. Good news is: No compulsory sign-ups for new users to download the latest version.

Other updated features from version 0.1.2 are as follow:

a) Following/Unfollowing Twitter users
b) Larger fonts
c) Ability to favourite tweets & Facebook posts
d) Configuration-shortcut button replacing the search tool (moved to upper right corner)

So, how have you enjoyed your Twitter/Facebook integration so far? Do you have further expectations? Love to hear your thoughts.

The steps are rather easy,

Here’s How:
1. Log in to your Blogger Account.

2. In the Dashboard section, click at the ‘Followers‘ option (in this case, 1 Follower).

3. Locate the follower you wish to Block. Click at his picture thumbnail to bring up the below commands: ‘Block This User‘. Click it, and confirm by ‘Block’.

You will notice the drop of your followers’ count immediately.

4. In case you’ve changed your mind, bring him back anytime you wish by using the ‘Unblock this user’ command.