It’s still unclear what the intention was here. It may have been to groom children by posing as someone they knew. It may have been to falsely accuse the friend of grooming children. It may even have been totally innocent.

In the end, the friend was very lucky. Well before the situation could get out of hand, he was able to contact Facebook, prove satisfactorily that this was a fake account and have it taken down. But reputation being what it is, it could have ended his career.

Last week was the Plymouth e-Learning Conference 2010, and although I didn’t attend, I have been reading some of the coverage on the blogosphere. In particular my eye was caught by James Clay’s blog post, Privacy has gone… which in turn discusses Josie Fraser’s keynote on privacy.

As I was reading James’s blog post, that story came back to me, and it occurred to me that there’s an element of balance to be found in protecting one’s privacy and identity online.

Those of us engaged in education often teach our students about the dangers of revealing too much information about ourselves online. The publishing of addresses, birth dates, account numbers will almost inevitably lead to identity theft.

But it seems just as important to strongly establish your identity online. Perhaps by having a well-established Facebook page it would be much easier to say “that fake profile is not mine.” If there are even a dozen people who you’ve friended online who you know in real life, and who can vouch for the real you, you’re in a much stronger position.

In addition to this, having a Facebook account permits your friends to tag photos of you properly if they wish, rather than just entering your name, which in turn allows you to restrict who sees those tags.

The way to protect yourself online is not to become the Ungooglable Man — James rightly points out that this strategy doesn’t work. Much better to step up and proudly say “this is me“. Take control of your brand, and don’t let other people have the only voice in what the web says about you.

Do you have a Facebook profile? How tightly do you control your privacy settings? What comes up if you Google yourself? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Photo credit: My Identity by Kathryn B

Possibly related posts:

1. Ask the readers: How do you protect yourself online?
2. Beginner's guide to Twitter Part I: messages, followers and searching

Margin Notes by Peter Lindberg

For a long time, I’ve been the sort of person who tends to read and absorb information, without really wanting or needing to scribble notes down. This is probably because my background has been maths and computing, and the elegance of mathematics as a language is in its ability to express big ideas and small in a concise way: no annotation needed if everything you need is there.

More recently, though, I’ve been reading things with, well, more words in them.

Learning how to teach has been an education (pun fully intended) — I’ve started reading a much broader range of material, and a lot of it is quite social-sciencey. This stuff is necessarily quite verbose, and I find I need to take notes and rephrase things in my own way to get the most out of them.

Now, with library books, people seem to get a bit upset if you start scribbling in the margins. I have to keep a notebook in which to jot down thoughts.

Out on the web, the situation used to be much the same: unless a web page specifically included features for commenting, any annotation had to be kept in a notebook or a separate file, leaving you searching through to find what notes go with which page or dreaming up an ingenious indexing system.

No longer!

A while back, Mark Morley pointed me in the direction of Diigo. I’d variously been using Delicious and Magnolia (now defunct, but replaced by the intriguing gnolia) for storing bookmarks, so I thought I’d give this rival service a try.

For a while, I used it just as a bookmarking service, but it wasn’t long before I cottoned on to the real power of Diigo: highlighting and sticky notes.

Using the Diigo plugin for Firefox, or the diigolet (a rather clever little bookmarklet) you can:

• highlight any part of any web page, in a variety of colours;
• add comments to your highlightings;
• add sticky notes to the page.

Now, I can take all the notes I want, and keep them right next to the page they refer to. Great for getting the most learning out of what I read.

But the really exciting thing is that I can choose to make my comments public. And so can other people. And when we do that, it becomes a conversation. I can talk and debate with people all over the world on any website, whether or not that site allows it or not.

And that’s pretty cool. If you want to learn more, check out this video guide or take a look at an annotated blog post.

Now, a few weeks ago, Google got in on the act with their new Sidewiki project, and it’s caused a bit of a stir. It’s not as flexible as as Diigo — it’s a very simple sidebar-type affair — but it does a similar job in terms of turning the web into a conversation.

The big advantage it has is the Google brand behind it. It’s built into a special version of the Google Toolbar and I think we can expect it to make it into the standard version before long; it’ll also be working its way into Google’s new browser, Chrome. There’s an open API too, which means that if you don’t want to use Google Toolbar, there’s this standalone client for Firefox.

So now, I can scribble all over your web page. What are you going to do about it?

On a semi-related note, I’m still looking for ideas and opinions about using a portfolio to record professional development, so please drop by that post and join in the conversation.

Possibly related posts:

1. Quickie: University of Sheffield to use Google Mail

So, without further ado, here’s my first reader poll:

Possibly related posts:

1. Social networking poll

Posterous welcome email

I first signed up for Posterous after seeing Joseph Tame using it to post photos (though I don’t think he has recently). I played briefly then left it alone for a while because, already having a blog, I didn’t really see a place for it for me. Then a few months ago I finally got email working properly on my (now fairly dated) Sony-Ericsson phone. Last week, I remembered about Posterous again and thought I’d try it out.

I had two reasons for testing it out in more detail. First, I have a relative whose views I admire and want to get blogging; being able to blog by email might lower the barrier to entry for him. Second, I wanted to see whether mobile blogging worked for me and in what way. So, I set to work trying out what features I could from my mobile, using the festival to provide a motive for posting.

Features

The first thing you notice about Posterous is how easy it is to set up. And I mean really easy. You send an email with your first post to post@posterous.com, and you get an almost immediate response with a link to your new blog. That’s all you need to do to have a presence on the web. No forms to fill in, no special software, nothing.

Now, of course, you probably won’t leave it there. To start off with, you’re assigned a randomly-generated subdomain of posterous.com (mine was originally jeremy-jfjyk.posterous.com) which isn’t too easy to tell people about. Although an indecipherable blog address might have its uses, most people will want to customise this, which you can do by logging into your new Posterous through the link in the welcome email. This also provides you with the opportunity to set a password for your account, which I thoroughly recommend even if you do nothing else.

You can also customise a number of other aspects, such as the title and subtitle and privacy settings. You can use your own domain name for your blog instead of a posterous.com subdomain. You can even integrate Google Analytics and a Feedburner feed to track traffic to your new blog.

Now, being able to set up a blog so easily is all very well, but where Posterous really comes into its own is in its handling of the content of your emails. Rich text formatted emails keep their formatting, and any URLs are automatically turned into links. If you include the URL of a video in a supported service, the video itself is embedded. If you attach a file that Posterous knows how to handle, that too will be embedded in the post. Over the course of the weekend I’ve posted photos, video and audio content; multiple photos are turned into a clever gallery.

Last, but by no means least, is the AutoPost feature. This allows you to link in accounts from a whole load of social networking sites so that every time you post to Posterous, it gets sent out to them as well. It currently supports Facebook and Twitter, will post your photos to Flickr or Picasa, can send videos to YouTube or Vimeo and will save URLs to Delicious. You can also set it up to post to most major blog platforms, so even if your own blog doesn’t have a post-by-email option, you can use Posterous to replicate that feature.

Thoughts

My overwhelming impression of Posterous is how easy it is to use. Being based on email meant that I could post almost as easily from the middle of a field as I can from my desk at home (though my poor aching thumbs might beg to differ). Knowing that it could take pretty much any media I threw at it and do something useful with it made the experience even more pleasing. I would certainly recommend it to anyone who wants to start blogging but has so far been put off by a lack of familiarity with the technology: if you can send email you can start a blog.

I quite enjoyed being able to blog while out and about: it was a good way of recording my thoughts on the day and sharing them with others at the same time. The material was probably of minimal interest to most of my followers (although Google Analytics shows that a surprising number of my Twitter and Facebook followers clicked through to view my posts), but it would make a good tool for covering, say, a conference in which many of my followers had an interest. I will note that my fianceé did complain once or twice that she was becoming a social media widow, but she didn’t really seem to mind and I didn’t actually spend more than a few minutes each day blogging.

Will I carry on using it? You bet. It’s instantly replaced TwitPic as my photo-tweeting tool of choice, especially as I can use it to post video, audio and text as well. Just the ticket when I want to post a thought that’s more than 140 characters but doesn’t fit on my main blog here. I suspect that my Posterous will turn into a bit of a scrapbook, but I’m OK with that and it’ll be interesting to be able to look back in a few years time and see what I’ve been posting. I probably won’t be posting as regularly as I have done over the bank holiday weekend though!

I’m also tempted to set up a second Posterous (yes, you can set up a second, third or more through the website once you’ve set up your first) to use purely as a conduit for posting to this blog. If I give that a go I’ll let you know how well it works.

For more info, and lots of useful tips and tricks, check out the Official Posterous Posterous (i.e. their blog).

Do you have a blog? If so, what platform do you use to host it. Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

Possibly related posts:

1. Beginner's guide to Twitter Part I: messages, followers and searching
2. Beginner's guide to Twitter Part II: @s, #s and RTs
3. Beginners guide to Twitter Part III: cool tools

uSpace home page

If you’ve read a few of my previous posts, you might have noticed me talking about something called uSpace. This is the University’s new social networking platform and I’m pretty excited about it. I’ve had to keep relatively quiet about it until recently but now it’s been launched, here are my thoughts on where I think this is going.I was quite excited to discover, in the middle of last year, that the University was investigating social networking platforms with a view to setting up their own. A whole raft of options were considered, including open-source and proprietary solutions, but CICS eventually decided to go ahead and buy Jive Software‘s Clearspace (now known as Jive SBS).

Having begun life as a Java-based bulletin board system, Clearspace has since evolved into a fully-fledged communication platform, incorporating a hierarchical structure, wiki-like documents, discussions, blogs and project-management features. According to CICS’s own information page:

It has been chosen to meet the needs of the diverse communities within the University.

1. Academics – Develop an interactive learning area for your students in an environment integrated with MUSE and MOLE.
2. Researchers – Collaborate with external and internal colleagues in a secure and fluid way.
3. Administrative staff – Enjoy new types of communication with the University population. You can create intranet type areas for your department or Faculty, interest groups, discussions or polls. It enables much wider networking across department and role.
4. Students – It enables you to work collaboratively and creatively on course work as well as socialise with others.

I think the main strength of uSpace is that it provides a university-controlled, safe and secure environment within which to collaborate. In research in particular it’s often considered necessary (though whether this is actually the case is another discussion altogether) to hide ones ideas from the wider research community and the general public until they are published. Using services provided by a third party, however secure and trustworthy, to collaborate is often seen as risky (though in reality insecure passwords are probably a much greater risk). In addition, there’s the very real danger that a third party could go up in smoke, taking all of your discussions, documents and data with it. Having a university-maintained system will go some way to alleviate these fears and get people using social media to the benefit of all.

I also like the democratising nature of social media, and that seems to have carried over to uSpace. Too many of the university’s services are segregated into students vs. staff: for example while both students and staff have an online calendar, neither can see the other’s which limits its usefulness somewhat, especially when you consider that many postgraduates need to work with research staff every day, but are classed as students. By contrast, everyone has access to the same facilities (to a greater or lesser extent) within uSpace. This might put off some staff, but will encourage use amongst students who won’t feel they’re being shortchanged.

On the other hand, uSpace isn’t perfect. It suffers somewhat from being a jack-of-all-trades: while all of the components are good and are well integrated, none of them can hold a candle to the best in their individual classes. Google Docs are more powerful than uSpace documents, and most wiki services provide greater flexibility. uSpace blogs provide very limited functionality, especially when compared to systems such as WordPress. The social networking features such as friending and status updates feel clunky next to the power of Facebook or the simplicity of Twitter.

Another potential difficulty is Jive Software’s attitude towards the education market. They were obviously keen to play up their commitment to HE in order to make the sale, but I don’t think they’re really that bothered about it. It feels like they’ll be continuing to focus on the business sector, particularly with the recent renaming of Clearspace to Jive Social Business Software. At the start, they were very keen to provide support and help with education-related customisation. I’m not as involved as I was so I don’t know whether they’re maintaining this level of service, but I hope they do.

There’s definitely going to be an issue of training. Although some staff will have no problem hitting the ground running with uSpace, many others will need help getting used to such a novel way of working. And let’s not forget the students: I think we sometimes attribute them with more IT literacy than they possess. Tied into this is the fact that people will need a reason to use uSpace over whatever they already do, and it’s going to have to be a pretty good reason to overcome the natural human resistance to change. Staff and students alike will only use the service if they can understand how it will make their lives and/or work better, and at the moment a clearer message on this is needed.

I’m not convinced that uSpace in its current form is the way to go in the long-run, but it seems to be a good compromise for now, while the real work of embedding a culture of social media use within the university continues. In the longer term I’d like to see a more flexible solution using separate (ideally open-source) components such as WordPress for blogging and MediaWiki for collaborative editing, but I can see this would be a big leap for most potential users and would require a lot more effort integrating and maintaining them. For the time being though, it will be interesting to see how uSpace develops and how people use it.

This blog post seems to have gone on a bit, so I’ll cut it off now. I will, of course, be discussing uSpace and social media in general more soon.

Have you used uSpace or something similar? How did you find it? What uses can you see? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Possibly related posts:

1. Quickie: University of Sheffield to use Google Mail
2. Social networking poll
3. Project update

On my iPod touch, I’ve been using a client by the name of Tweetie from an indie developer by the name of atebits, which has loads of great features that I won’t bore you with here. Today it was announced (via Twitter, of course) that the Mac version is ready for human consumption.

I’ve switched over to it as my primary Twitter client already and I have to say I really like it. It’s still got some rough edges and it’s missing some useful functionality that I liked in Nambu, but it’s already showing the great attention to detail and some of the range of features that have made the iPhone/iPod touch version so good. There are already some detailed reviews up, from The Unofficial Apple Weblog and TechCrunch, so I’ll leave it at that, but if you’re a Mac twitterer and you haven’t already, I strongly recommend you give it a try.

I’m also testing out another bit of software right now: a Mac blogging client by the name of Blogo. This is my first post using it, and I’ll let you know how I get on with it.

In the meantime, how do you access Twitter? Or perhaps you dont? Leave a comment below to share your opinion.

Possibly related posts:

1. Beginners guide to Twitter Part III: cool tools
2. Weekly links: Twitter bits
3. Beginner's guide to Twitter Part I: messages, followers and searching

As a publicly-editable wiki, Wikipedia works by and large as a repository for human knowledge, which is great. The problem is that some of the people who edit it choose to wilfully present incorrect information. For example, the birthday of the artist Titian was recently falsified in Wikipedia following an exchange in the British House of Commons; the edit was quickly traced back to the headquarters of the Conservative Party. Other users vandalise the site, while others still are simply wrong.

What about the case in Wikipedia’s favour? Four years ago, an article (subscription required, report in Wired here) published in Nature compared 42 articles between Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica. The authors reported “eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, [...] four from each encyclopaedia.” In minor errors, Britannica still had the edge, but not by much.

Whichever way you fall on the issue, an understanding of Wikipedia is an important element of information literacy which cannot be ignored. As such, it needs to be considered by educators. So what are people doing already?

On the one hand, we have Prof. Tara Brabazon of the University of Brighton, who bans her first year students (found via Christine Sexton’s blog post) from using Wikipedia or Google. Her aim in doing so is to force them to use and understand conventional scholarly literature so that they know what to look for in a reliable source.

On the other hand, we have Jeremy Boggs of George Mason University in America. His tactic is to have students actually contribute a well-researched article to Wikipedia, and then observe how it grows and changes over the remainder of the term. This time, the aim is to give students a direct insight into the workings of Wikipedia to inform future use.

It is this second approach that I think we, as educators, should be taking. The constructionist view of learning, which I find useful, suggests that learners will tend to stick with their existing beliefs until these are rendered untenable through experience. Since many university students have now grown up with Wikipedia, I feel that some may need to be shown the flaws in this model of publishing before they will engage with more conventional scholarly resources. Forcing them to use these resources without a reason (and “telling them” is not sufficient reason) could result in them learning simply that books are difficult to use because of the lack of search capabilities (Google Book Search notwithstanding).

And it’s not just students in school and university who need to be taught these skills. There are many professionals who don’t understand this amazingly useful resource. Either they regard it with suspicion and miss out on its benefits, or fail to understand its shortcomings and treat it as more reliable than it is. Either way, all educators must engage with Wikipedia and its flaws to ensure that our learners make the best that they can of it.

Do you actively engage with your learners about Wikipedia? What tactics do you use to help them learn to use it effectively? Or do you feel that it has no place in the classroom at all? Leave me a comment below.

By the way, if you’re interested in this debate, I can strongly recommend listening to the Digital Campus podcast, which has covered the issue right from the first episode. The most recent episode of James Clay’s e-Learning stuff podcast also covers Wikipedia in some detail.

Possibly related posts:

1. Teaching with social media: engaging the audience
2. Equity in education: giving everyone a fair chance
3. Introduction to SLC 2.0: Part I

Photo by Pete Ashton

Do you like having an audience? I know I do: that’s at least part of the reason I’m writing this blog post.

The social web has greatly lowered the barrier to entry for those of us who want an online presence, and given us the greatest possible chance of reaching an appreciative audience through, for example, Google, social networking and RSS aggregation. Each one of us has a unique audience, defined by our own interests and views and how those come across in our writing, photography, music or whatever else we choose to share.

Those people who are interested in what we have to say will listen. Those who aren’t, won’t.

Now, if we want to reach more people, we can put effort into tailoring our output to their interests, marketing our stuff and generally going out to meet our audience half way. But for a personal blog or special-interest wiki, we don’t have to: we can just say what we want to say, and eventually a few people will start to read it. This is one of the things that makes social media great.

Education is not like this (and neither is business for that matter). We cannot just do what we want to do and expect it to be eventually found by those learners who can benefit from it. If students are taking your course and you’re using social media, then they’re pretty much obliged to participate: it’s common to enforce this with assessment. Because by now we’re getting used to the democratic nature of social media, it’s easy to confuse this captive audience with a genuinely interested one and assume that they will engage.

So, if we make them, they will participate. But unless they’re interested in what we have to say, they won’t be engaged, and if they’re not engaged, then their learning will be severely limited.

But fear not, for all is not lost! They’re generally taking a course (at least in HE) in which we have some expertise, so there will be at least some overlap in interests. Take advantage of social media to get rapid feedback and comments from learners; then respond to it! Thing of a blogger who you really respect: chances are that they respond quickly to comments left on their blog, learn from them and adapt to make their future posts more relevant to their readers. Why can’t this work with students too? Here are a couple of ideas that I can think of:

• If you’re asking students to blog, try to leave a relevant comment or two on each student’s blog to connect their views with your material;
• If your students are collaborating on a wiki, check up on it from time to time and use it to inform your lectures.

Yes, this takes effort, but so does everything that’s worth doing (although I won’t claim that that makes it worth doing). And yes, they should be hanging on your every word because you’re the expert and they’re not. But only a few of them will: the rest you have to meet halfway.

Do you use social media to engage with your students and tailor your teaching to them? Why/why not? What’s your top tip? Share your comments below.

Possibly related posts:

1. Social media resources for learning and teaching
2. Social networking at the University of Sheffield: uSpace
3. Ask the readers: Why use technology in teaching?

Suddenly, the landscape changed. This new medium wasn’t for helping you remember what Auntie Doris looked like. It could do that, but that wasn’t what it was for: it was for telling stories! And now, it’s used for teaching, disseminating information and even for two-way communication. The rest, as they say is history.

The point of the story is that when new technologies emerge, we tend to interpret them in terms of what we already know. It generally takes us a while to figure out how to use new tools that we’ve not seen before; sometimes the problem that the new tool solves doesn’t even exist yet.

So when you come across a new tool (and this applies to all walks of life, not just the web), don’t just think about it in terms of things you already know. Have a play, try a few things out, then ask yourself:

What is this for?

Then keep asking until you’ve figured it out. Then tell everyone your idea and ask again. With any luck, your eventual answer will surprise even the clever folks who made the tool in the first place.

No related posts.

1. Twitter basics: messages, followers and searching;
2. Confusing conventions: @s, #s and RTs;
3. Useful tools to make your Twittering life easier (this post).

Today, I’ll be making a whistle-stop tour of some of the tools and websites that can take your twittering to a whole new level. There are far too many of these to include here, so I’ll just try to give you an overview of some of the ones I’ve come across so far. As I come across more, I’ll certainly tweet about them (follow me on Twitter here) and I’ll blog in more depth about some of them too.

Useful tools

First, an aside. One of the things that makes Twitter so powerful is its Application Programmer Interface or API. An API is a well defined standard which allows direct communication between a service, such as Twitter, and another piece of computer code. Because Twitter has a well-documented public API, anyone with the requisite know-how can write a software tool to add new capabilities. Not all of the tools we’ll be looking at today make use of the API, and you don’t need to know anything about how it works to use them, but I just wanted to mention another great design feature of Twitter.

URL shrinking

If you’ve been using Twitter for any length of time, you’ve probably used it to pass on the URL (web address) of a web page to your network. In that case, you might have noticed that since URLs can be pretty long, you don’t get much space left to describe what it is you’re actually passing on. This is where URL shrinkers come in.

A shrunk URL

Quite simply, a URL shrinker takes your long, unwieldy URL and spits out a nice, short URL which points to the same web page. You can copy-and-paste a URL from your browser’s location bar into the URL shrinker, but most of these services will give you a bookmarklet; a link which you can drag to your browser’s bookmarks/favourites bar which becomes a button to automatically grab the URL, shrink it and copy it to the clipboard ready for use. Look this up in the online help for your URL shrinker, or look for links with titles like “Trim this”.

There are loads of URL shrinkers out there, but here’s a few that I’ve come across:

• snipr.com
• bit.ly
• is.gd
• TinyURL
• tr.im

Of these, my favourite is snipr.com because of the options it provides, but I encourage you to try a few until you find one you like.

This class of tools are, by and large, completely independent of Twitter: you can use them to shrink any URL for any reason whatsoever. For example, I’ve used them to make URLs more manageable to distribute in print, since readers will have to type these in by hand. There are a few, though, which will allow you to shrink a URL and automatically post it straight on Twitter (yes, using the Twitter API). My favourite of these is TwitThis.

Searching, trends and hashtags

As I mentioned in the previous posts, searching and hashtags provide a great way to follow specific conversations or trends on Twitter. However, Twitter’s built-in search isn’t ideal for this, particularly if there are keywords or hashtags that you search for on a regular basis. There are a whole range of search-based websites out there which allow you to track specific words or hashtags more easily.

The first group simply provide you with an automatically-updating stream of tweets matching a specific search. Some of these allow you to save searches that you perform regularly or display several searches onscreen at once. Here are a few to try:

• TweetGrid
• TwitterFall

The second group actually allow you to interact with the conversation you’re interested in by turning the hashtag of your choice into a modern version of the old-fashioned chat rooms: they display a live log of tweets with a particular hashtag and allow you to post your own tweets which will have the hashtag in question automagically appended. These include:

• twIRC
• TweetChat

Twitterfeed

The next tool, TwitterFeed helps to combine your online offerings: it takes any RSS feed (typically a list of blog posts or news items) and checks it on a regular basis, posting any new items automatically to Twitter. So, for example, my Twitter followers will have received a brief message with a link to this blog post, which happened completely automatically a short time after it was published.

A word of warning: it’s easy to overdo this. Some people use Twitter and Twitterfeed purely as another outlet for their blog or news site. Your view may differ, but I find this quite annoying, particularly if there’s a high volume of traffic. If I notice a user doing this, I generally subscribe to there RSS feed elsewhere if it interests me and then stop following them: I prefer to keep my news and blogs in a separate place. However, I think for low-volume, infrequent, personal blogs such as this one it’s a great way to let people know what you’ve written, as well as a legitimate answer to the question “What are you doing?”

Twitter clients

If you’re becoming a regular Twitter user, you might be finding it a bit of a pain to log in to the Twitter website every time you want to get up to date. This is where clients come in. These bring Twitter right to your desktop in a dedicated application. Many of them incorporate features of other tools, such as URL shrinking and searching. Most of them have an option to check automatically for new tweets and pop up an alert to tell you when there’s something you haven’t read yet: make up your own mind about whether that’s good or bad! All of them, though, let you read your latest incoming tweets and post new ones. There are far too many to list them here, so after pointing out that I currently use Nambu on my laptop and Tweetie on my iPod Touch, I’ll send you in the direction of this list on the Twitter website and this more comprehensive list. Download one and give it a go.

Analytics

If you’re really interested in that kind of thing, you might want to look at some statistics about your Twitter account and network. I won’t go into much detail on this, as I’ve not used them very much, but here are the ones I’ve come across so far:

• Twitter Grader
• Twitter Analyzer
• Twitter Counter

Twitter on Facebook

Other social networks

There are, of course, other social networks out there, and there are a number of ways to get them to play nicely with Twitter. There’s a Twitter app for Facebook, which allows you to tweet from within Facebook, and even offers to post each tweet as a status update in your Facebook profile. I don’t use Facebook much these days, but this is an easy way for me to keep it updated.

FriendFeed is a kind of meta-social-network. It aims to tie a number of other networks together in one place, so that you can read and post without having to visit a dozen different websites. I haven’t found it that useful yet, but give it a try.

Ping.fm is slightly different again. This one allows you to update your status, micro-blog, post full-length blog posts and save bookmarks in a huge variety of different social media websites simultaneously. It also gives you a wide variety of ways of doing this: through the website, by SMS (in the US only at the moment, I think), by email, by instant message (Jabber/GTalk, Yahoo!, MSN/Windows Live, AIM) and many more. An increasing number of Twitter clients are also supporting it, so you can transparently update your status on a number of different sites as you tweet.

More tools

There are plenty of tools that I haven’t had space or time to mention. I’ll try to blog about some of them in the future, but for now, you might want to have a look at this wiki — there are plenty listed under Apps, plus lots more useful information about Twitter.

Have you got a favourite tool that I’ve missed? Share it by posting a comment below: it’ll be great to hear from you.

That’s it for this series. If you’ve found these posts helpful, you can find out when I write new stuff by signing up for email updates or subscribing to my RSS feed: just click on the appropriate link at the top left of this page.

Possibly related posts:

1. Beginner's guide to Twitter Part II: @s, #s and RTs
2. Beginner's guide to Twitter Part I: messages, followers and searching
3. Weekly links: Twitter bits