The last time I had an ongoing online presence was 2000–2002, when I was webmaster for the Vermont School Information website. A lot has changed since then, so I knew I had some catching up to do.
Seeking both ways to easily follow and post to Twitter and how to link my blog to Twitter, I began by looking at what others were doing:
• I saw that Suzanne Podhaizer, Food Editor for Seven Days @feedmenow (my daughter), is posting from Tweetdeck.
• I saw that Daniel Spreadbury, Sibelius Senior Product Manager @dspreadbury, is using Twitterfeed to link his blog to his Twitter account.
• I saw that David Harvey, Team and Technology consultant @david_harvey, is posting to Twitter using twhirl.
So those were my jumping off points.
I read reviews and visited the websites of
• Twhirl
• Twitterfeed
• Tweetdeck
• Netvibes
• Twitterfox
• Splitweet
• Nambu
• Tweet3
• Peoplebrowsr
• All Your Tweet
• Seesmic Desktop
• Twiterator
I learned that some handle multiple accounts while others don’t (I found CNET’s “Battle of the multicolumn Twitter clients” useful, but noted—through Rafe Needleman’s update—that it was outdated within hours “TweetDeck gets new features, fixes”.
For now, I have both Tweet3 (for the analytics and multi-account functionality) and TweetDeck (on the premise that folks who are working that hard on development are going to come out with a multi-account version sooner or later)—one Adobe Air app and one online service. Reasons for dismissing others included user satisfaction, functionality, their terms of service, and operating system limitations. And Twitterfeed, for which I could find no alternative.
I got everything set up in Twitter, creating custom designs for the background, wrote my first post for each of my blogs, created an OpenID through VeriSign, and entered the feed information into Twitterfeed, all by about 3:30 p.m., about nine hours to research and set up.
One problem. No tweets from my blog. I tried updating the dates. No tweets. I tried copying the entries, reposting them, and deleting the originals. No tweets. I rechecked my feeds in Twitterfeed and couldn’t find anything wrong. It was now about 4 hours after the feeds should have gone live, and they were still listed as “not checked yet (new feed?).”
So I went to the Twitterfeed help page and clicked the support forum link in the answer to the last FAQ. I saw immediately that I was not the only person having an issue with the feed. So I clicked on one likely thread, wrote out a post, and tried to post it.
And all of a sudden I was faced with a log-in into “Get Satisfaction”—an entity of which I had never heard, and (as far as I knew at the time) I had no interest in. I thought it was one of those groups that offers you a survey when you leave a site (though I admit —given the point at which I was caught, I possibly did not read as carefully as I would have had I not been in the midst of a post on a complete service failure). Not understanding a third-party intrusion in the midst of a support query, I must have clicked “block” when asked if they could set a cookie because there was no obvious reason to allow it. Uh-oh . . .
Well, here’s the thing I didn’t know and all my research didn’t tell me:
not only do you need OpenID support to log-in to Twitterfeed, you need OpenID support through Get Satisfaction to enter a support request in Twitterfeed,
and
if you have not previously registered with Get Satisfaction, it will have you set up an account in the midst of your post and send you to its dashboard, from which you cannot get back to Twitterfeed directly until you choose it as a product.
The most unproductive part of my day was trying to sort this out, which I eventually did with the help of Scott Fleckenstein of Get Satisfaction tech support.
I posted to point out that it would be helpful and clearer for Twitterfeed to let users know about the Get Satisfaction connection before they’re in the midst of a support issue and/or to have the log-in happen along with initial log-in to Twitterfeed. And Mario Menti, Head Twitterfeeder, has responded, “I’ll try and make the fact that getsatisfaction is a separate service a little clearer, sorry for the confusion.”
And by 11:30 p.m., Twitterfeed fed my posts.
What most impressed me in the course of the day was a speedy (18 minutes) response from Gary Krall, Technical Director for the PIP/SeatBelt project at VeriSign to an email mentioning that looking at the Terms of Service while in the midst of signing up for an OpenID does not open up a separate window and—by replacing the sign-up window—blanks out any entries that might have been made as the user was starting his or her account set-up. He responded that he had asked his staff to make a change.