I came across a cool website yesterday called SNODS, an internet game which uses Twitter. The game has a Mission Impossible theme to it and lets you go on missions, attack fellow Twitterers, kidnap your Twitter friends and much more.

To move up in the game you need to attack and kidnap other Twitterers and stop them from doing this to you. To achieve this you need to save up and upgrade certain things like your headquarters, vault and holding pen.

I don’t think you will waste a lot of time on the site but it’s worth checking out. Regardless, it has to be one of the best illustrations of how Twitter can be used for something Non-Twitter

Link : SNODS

I got emailed today about a new Twitter site called Tweet Knot, a new Twitter site which makes it easy to set up communities via Twitter.

At first glance I was a little bemused about what Tweet Knot actually does but it’s actually fairly simple. First of all, you can sign in using your Twitter login details, which is a good time saver. Then you can decide whether to follow other knots or creating your own.

You are probably thinking : What is a Knot? Well, a Knot is pretty much a group or community who share a common interest. Anyone can create a Knot and anyone can follow other Knots.

So for example, say you wanted to create a knot about japanese gadgets. You would create a knot called ‘JapaneseGadgets’. You would then add the members of the group, which is basically the Twitterers you want to post updates from. So you would probably add several Twitter users as your members who post about gadgets from Japan. And anyone who wanted to see the tweets from these members can do so by viewing www.tweetknot.com/japanesegadgets.

Through the Tweet Knot home page you can tweet to your regular account or to your Knot group. The home page itself isn’t the best designed in my opinion and it generated a horizontal scrollbar for me too (on a 1152×864 resolution).

Tweet Knot is a nice idea and I can see how many people would find it useful. Though, I don’t know if it will prove to be popular, particularly because you can currently only use the site through the TweetKnot home page itself. Perhaps if the service is integrated into some other Twitter scripts it will prove to be more popular.

Link : Tweet Knot

Managing multiple Twitter accounts is a real pain through Twitter.com. There are some good desktop twitter scripts available which let you manage multiple accounts but I hadn’t come across a webpage that let me do this. That was until I found Splitweet.

Splitweet makes it incredibly easy to check and update mutliple accounts. Additionally, it lets you check the latest reference to your ‘Brands’, which kind of works in a similar way to Google Alerts and helps you see the latest reference to your brand, product, website or whatever (or even the film star you’re stalking!).

At the top of the page is your dashboard. All of your accounts are listed here and are color coded. You can post a tweet to one of your accounts or all of them, a great time saver.

The main dashboard shows you the latest replies to your accounts. You can choose to show the latest tweets from any of your accounts here. You just need to unmark the accounts you don’t want to see tweets from. Next to each tweet is a handy Retweet button too, something which everyone is waiting for Twitter to add!!

I found viewing the latest tweets from all accounts to be overwhelming though the color coding for each account does help a little. It also seems to refresh too much with multiple accounts selected which made Firefox load slightly slower for me (I had 6 accounts selected).

One of my favourite things about Splitweet is that the latest @replies to your account are shown down the right hand side of the page. This is exactly what I am looking for as I essentially tweet from one account but check the latest @replies for the rest.

It would be better though if it allowed me to select which accounts I wanted to check for @replies for too (i.e. seperately from my main dashboard). This would allow me to see the latest tweets on the main page for my personal account but still see the latest @replies down the sidebar for all my accounts.

I did notice that the sidebar was sometimes very slow in refreshing though. As it stands, there is still a reply which is shown on my replies page but isn’t being shown in the sidebar.

The sidebar also shows the latest references to your brands. This is useful too but unfortunately they place the latest references at the top of the sidebar, above the @replies, and you cannot move them around. Which is a shame as I believe @replies are more relevant to most people.

Overview

Splitweet is perfect for anyone who has more than one Twitter account, and is worth checking out if you only have the one account too as it displays your @replies and brand mentions down the right side of the page so you don’t need to manually check it.

It’s not perfect but it’s incrdibly useful and easy to use. I have been tweeting through the Twitter home page for as long as I can remember but I have switched to Splitweet as it makes checking my other Twitter accounts a breeze.

I recommend checking out

Link : Splitweet

Last month I wrote a quick post about HootSuite, a great little multi Twitter service which let you track the click thrus to the links you post on Twitter via their site Ow.ly. The added benefit of using Owly was that it allowed you to integrate your Adsense advertisements into the link page, with your ads being shown half of the time and Owly ads being shown the other half.

There is clearly a demand for this kind of thing as a new url shortening service has been launched called Tweetbucks. Instead of showing Google Adsense ads, Tweetbucks shows ads from thousands of merchants from affiliate sites such as Commission Junction, Linkshare and the Google Affiliate Network. They pay 70% of the commission to you so if an affiliate pays out 5% you would effectively get 3.5% commission with 1.5% going to TweetBucks.

You do not have to include an advert in your shortened link. I shortened the TimeToTweet URL to http://bit.ly/dNi2M and did not include an advert. I then decided to include a frame and it was shortened to http://bit.ly/SHGof. This time the link added a large banner at the top of this blog, as seen below.

Tweetbucks pays out once a month to those who reach their $25 threshold. There is a $5 dollar sign up bonus plus you can earn 10% commission for a 6 month period from those you refer too.

Link : Tweetbucks

2 days ago I told you how awful the support for HummingBird is. As I said many times in that article, I think their script is great, however I am really in awe at how terrible their support is. Seriously, their support is that bad I’m actually kind of impressed!

After writing my post about it all the other day, which was 4 days since they last replied to an email, I sent one last desperation email to them asking for a refund :

I have did my best to be incredibly patient with you guys but you seem completely uninterested in resolving the issues I have with the script and with my forum account.

therefore, I would like to uninstall the software and get a full refund.

Please tell me how I should proceed?

Kevin

This morning (2 days later) I received this email from them :

Dear Kevin,

The forum accessibility has nothing to do with the use of the software application. Thank you.

Sincerely,
Support

Granted, forum accessibility has nothing to do with how the software application performs. However, it doesn’t change the fact that their product was crashing on me periodically and I had to restart it, it doesn’t change the fact that they haven’t upgraded my forum account so I cannot post any support queries and it doesn’t change the fact that I just paid $167 for this script and would, at the very least, like some sort of support!!!

I have wasted enough energy on them so I have just requested a refund directly through PayPal by raising a dispute. I have also removed the banner ad from Time To Tweet. Whilst I do like the script, their support is just plain awful, therefore I can’t recommend such a product to readers.

I’d like to think that they would provide a refund right away but no doubt they will draw this into a dispute. I’ll keep you guys posted with how I get on

If there is any other scripts you would like me to try just let me know and I’ll look into it.

Cheers,
Kevin

I wrote a review of Twitter HummingBird last week, a Twitter script which I recently bought for $167.45 (discounted from $197). Those of you who read my review of the script and my follow up post the next day will know that I’m a big fan of HummingBird. Whilst it is expensive, it makes mass following and unfollowing a breeze and it also great for mangaging multiple Twitter accounts.

However, their support doesn’t seem to match up to the quality of their product. I signed up to their Twitter Support Forum after purchasing the product however the authorisation was never sent (which means I can’t post).

So I emailed them about this the day after signing up and not getting an activation email :

Sent 14th May 2009
Hi there,

I have signed up to protwitter at http://twitterproforum.com/ but have not received an authorisation email in the last few days so I cannot post.

Also, I have noticed that hummingbird crashes every now and then. Is this a common problem?

Kevin

Someone replied later on that day (They didn’t even leave their name so I’m not sure who replied to me) :

Received 14th May 2009
Kevin,

If you have not received a conformation email, first check your spam filter, if you cannot find it there then please re-sign up. It is not a common problem for hummingbird to crash, please make sure you have all the necessary prerequisites. Thank you.

Sincerely,
Support

This annoyed me. I had just paid $167 for this product and they seemed completely uninterested in helping me. I have used vBulletin for close to 8 years now so I know how easy it is to manually activate an account that hasn’t been activated (it literally takes 5 seconds) so asking me to sign up is just plain lazy on their part.

I replied to them later the next morning (their email had been sent during the nightime in the UK) :

Sent 15th May 2009
Hi there,

The activation email is definately not there as I have did a search in my regular email and in my spam folder.

If I sign up again then I would not be able to use my usual username as I have already signed up with that. Could you please quickly manually approve the account System0. You are using vbulletin so it only takes 2 seconds to change the usergroup.

I do have all the prerequisites for the software. I have a top of the range gaming laptop running on vista so that is definately not the issue. I have just found that if the script is opened for a long time it just crashes for no reason and you need to switch it off and back on.

Kevin

Unfortunately, this was never replied to. Nor was my follow up email on the 17th.

Now I could sign up to the forum again with a different username but I’m perhaps a little stubborn. The way I see it, I just paid $167 for this product so why should I have to go to the hassle of signing up again because their software didn’t send me an activation email.

And is there much point signing up to the forum again anyways as they seemed to completely disregard my comment that the software crashes from time to time (which isn’t a major problem but it still happens). So no doubt all support queries are responded in this way.

I do still believe that HummingBird is a great product and if you are looking to increase your follower count it seems like there is no better alternative around at the moment. However, just bear in mind that direct support from the HummingBird team does not seem to be that good, particularly not for a script at this price.