K A Social Media

TidyTweet. (http://tidytweet.com/)

What is TidyTweet, anyway?

Think of TidyTweet as your very own Twitter feed housekeeper. Based on your preferences, it keeps conversations clean, orderly, and free of unwanted comment clutter. TidyTweet works behind the scenes to prevent unwanted surprises from showing up on your website. After creating an account and setting up a feed, you can blacklist or whitelist specific handles, approve Tweets manually or automatically, and create a customized word filter to avoid annoying – or embarrassing – situations. TidyTweet lets you keep the conversation going – without worrying about what’s being said.

How K. A. Is It?

Coming from a person who works with a lot of “faith-based” clients, this product is amazing!

I’ve seen a lot of “spam” and such on Twitter lately. It’s almost everyday that I see another person who is following me that is following close to 900 people, with only 30 people who follow them. Then when you look at their tweet, you see a random link in there that send people to a “spam” site.

The great advantage of TidyTweet, is that with it, you can make sure that none of this activity is going onto your Twitter site, and that your clients aren’t getting upset by some of the people they are following or the things being posted to it.

TidyTweet has 5 great features:

1. Automatic or Manual Approval of Tweets.
2. Custom Bad Word Filtering.
3. Whitelist or Blacklist Twitter Users.
4. Auto-rejection of spam based on a number of settings.
5. Integration with Wordpress and VisibleTweets.com

I think most of these are self-explanatory, so I really don’t see the need to go into detail, but all of them will help out alot. (Especially the Wordpress Integration)

Anyways, if you are someone who is handling some Twitter accounts for other people, this is definitely a program that you will want to use.

Rating: 4 out of 5

ClickHeat. (http://www.labsmedia.com/clickheat/index.html)

ClickHeat is a visual heatmap of clicks on a HTML page, showing hot and cold click zones. ClickHeat is an OpenSource software, released under GPL licence, and free of charge.

Requirements:
- on the browser’s client: Javascript (tested on Firefox 2.0, Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Konqueror…)
- on the server: either Linux or Windows (since ClickHeat 1.3 release), Apache or Lighttpd (other may work fine), PHP, the graphic library GD2 (PNG support needed). Please post on the bug tracker or contact us (link on the right) if you have problem running ClickHeat.

Features:
- Low logging activity: a very few function calls to log a click, no server load rise should be noticed.
- A keyword is used to define the page upon Javascript code load, allowing you to group same pages.
- Screen sizes and browsers are logged, making possible the tracking of liquid CSS layouts (100% used width).

How K. A. Is It?

****First off, please do not go to http://www.clickheat.com thinking that you are going to get this product.**** I know it’s a great name for this product, but if you are like I am and just try to type it directly in, you’ll get a site with one of those “Click Enter if you’re over 18″ sites…

Besides that, I really think this site is really great. At first I was a little confused on everything the site could do, but then I noticed on the homepage on the right, it had a link to a demo. All you have to do is click on the link, and then use the word demo for both the username and password.

In the demo, it really shows off all the potential of the product. There are four that I would like to hit on.

1. Overall – This site shows you where people are clicking on your website. This allows you to see things that maybe should be links that aren’t and maybe links that you have on there that people aren’t even seeing or thinking about pressing on. At least for me, the demo had a bunch of random clicks, but one was on the screenshot, which doesn’t link and the most used one was actually the demo link.

2. Browsers – It has a cool feature that you can look at different browsers and see if people were clicking on different areas in different browsers. This also helps to see how your website looks in other browsers, which is always something good to know.

3. Screen Size – Today I walked into a friends office and on his desk, he had his 15 in. MacBook, 21 in. screen, and 27 in. screen. With this option, you are able to see what your website looks like on different screen sizes and at the same time lets you see where people with different size screens are clicking.

4. Calendar – Let’s say you have a special running on your site for a week. With the calendar option, you can see if people actually clicked on your special banner you had running for that week, or if people were missing it. You can also use this option to see what days people are visiting your site, and what days people aren’t visiting your site as much.

Overall, I really like this product. The only downside I see so far, is that installation looks like it could be a problem for people like me who aren’t really that “tech savvy.” But other than that, it looks really great!

Rating: 4 out of 5

Listorious. (http://listorious.com/)

Twitter’s new Lists feature allows anyone to curate the real time web. Listorious makes it easy to find the best lists of Twitter users on any given topic, and for list creator to publicize their lists.

This site was created using new Twitter List API. Thanks to the Twitter team for their support.

Listorious was created by Sawhorse Media in New York City. If you have comments or questions, please email hello at sawhorsemedia.com or contact us on Twitter at @sawhorse.

Follow @listorious for site news and updates about interesting lists.

How K. A. is it?

First off, I was really surprised this site was up and running as quick as it was. I feel like just a couple days ago, I heard about these new “Twitter” lists and then I heard about this site that was created to keep them all together and in one centralized area that people can search through the lists and also include their own lists, which they have created.

I’m also quite surprised that they have everything working as well as it does as well. Just from what I know about websites and website development, there’s about a 75% chance that a new website that I’m guessing was built rather quickly, would work as well as it does. I haven’t found anything yet that is messing it up and that is not working properly on there.

Overall, I think this is a great site, and I’m interested in seeing more sites like it pop up in the upcoming months. Although, Listorious is definitely a front-runner.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Dropjack. (http://www.dropjack.com)

DropJack.com is a social content website powered by users like you.

How K. A. is it?

To be honest I can’t really tell that much of a difference between this and StumbleUpon, but makes me think that there’s got to be more new creative things out there, then to just copy something else that someone has already been doing. (Point in case..have you heard about Christian Chirp? http://christianchirp.com/

The only difference I really see about this site, are that you can create groups of people with like interests. “Groups allow users to share articles with other members who share a common interest in a topic. Join a group to submit topical articles that other members would be interested in. Some groups may require membership approval before you become part of the group.” – dropjack.com

Overall, I probably won’t use this site much, as I’m just starting to get into StumbleUpon, but maybe once this things gets going a little, I may give it a try.

Rating: 1 out of 5

Kazle. (http://www.kazle.com)

Kazle is a Multi-Networking Aggregation Platform.

In simple terms, yes we’re a Social Network but we do, however integrate nicely with many other networks to create a nifty, super simple “Social Networking Hub”.
Social Hub?

A Social Networking Hub is a place on the interwebz that you can come to update and view everything from all your Social Networks in one.

For example, if you want to update both your Facebook and Twitter status at the same time then also view Feeds from both of these networks, Kazle is very useful for you.
Don’t have many Networks to update?

That’s okay, there’s still plenty of reasons to use Kazle. We’re a fully functional Social Network all on our own. The best part is, we’re going about things slightly differently to everyone else and entirely powered by user content, opinions and ideas.

That’s right. We’re the good guys, the ones that listen to our users. We’re going to take all ideas on board and we also aim to offer support at a personal level. hey, why not put Twitter and Kazle’s own Mailbox system to good use, eh?

Another thing you might like is the usability factor we offer here at Kazle. Lots of other Networks like Facebook and Myspace have quickly become overweight with content and features. We hope to keep Kazle as lightweight and easy to use as possible so that it’s never going to become tiresome to use.
Wondering why you haven’t heard of us before now?

Kazle is but a baby in the world of Social Networking. As a new site, we obviously do have a rather long way to go but, like any journey, we’re hoping it’s going to be as fun filled as possible.

Description of the term “Kazle” from UrbanDictionary.com: Kazle: social multi-tasking. to update, view, edit and aggregate all your social networks, blogs and gaming platforms from one place. Example: “I need to quickly notify all of my contacts and friends of what just happened, let me just kazle that.”

How K. A. is it?

Kazle is a brand new site, similar to ones that I’ve seen recently that allow you to update pretty much any of your Facebook/Twitter/Flickr updates all with one click of the button. Now in theory, this sounds amazing and sounds like it would be easy to use and save you tons of time, but in reality, as you can see below, when I first clicked on Twitter it just sat there for a good five minutes before it did anything.

Overall, I don’t think this is a bad product, and I probably could have used it a little more to see it’s full potential. But at the end of the day, my main thought was that I feel that as Americans we have lost the idea of patience and have this weird desire to need things done quickly and right now, when sometimes the “better” thing is to take your time and just do things one at a time.

Rating: 3 out of 5