Boost your Twitter productivity with these tools

Twitter continues to be a great way to notify your adoring public, to provide customer service, to connect you with your potential customers, and to keep up to date on your competitors. And while you may not have completely gotten the Twitter ethos, you might be interested in one or more of these third-party tools that I have tried over the past several months. Feel free to share your own favorites. Please note: there is no guarantee that any of these companies will last longer than your average Tweet these days, so the links might be stale by the time you read this.

First are a variety of scheduling tools so you don’t have to be tweeting in the middle of the night or during dinner, as appealing as that might be for some of you. Studies have shown that most tweets aren’t read because they scroll off the feed in a jumble of posts. So it might be better to schedule them for the off-hours when the density is lower. Tweetdeck and Seesmic are two such tools.

Stat, search and research apps. TweetStats will graphically show you when you have Tweeted. Tweetmeme and Wefollow can be used to follow trends and keep track of what is popular at any given point in time. Twittervision can be used to find people in your local geographic area who are active with Twitter. Tools to follow people in a specific industry, or share lists of Twitter users, include Listorious, MuckRack (list of journalists) and Tweepml. Two real time search sites are SocialMention.com, which searches over several dozen sites, and 48ers.com, which will search across Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and Google’s Buzz.

Multiple account posting apps. If you have more than one Twitter account, or want to coordinate Tweets with your Facebook, LinkedIn, and WordPress blog accounts, then take a look at Pixelpipe.com, Ping.fm, or Posterous.com. Each offers ways to send forth your wisdom with a single click. Just make sure you check the post before you distribute widely. Dlvr.it can post your blog and other RSS feeds to nearly a dozen different sites too.

SearchSystemsChannel.com: Microsoft BPOS suite update

It’s been nearly two years since Microsoft unveiled its cloud computing offering, Business Productivity Online Standard (BPOS) suite. Microsoft BPOS suite offers online versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Office Live Meeting and Office Communications. It is sold by dozens of partners and has hundreds of thousands of individual users.

In this article for Techtarget, I discuss why BPOS is attractive to VARs, where it comes up short, and what Google is doing in the hosted services space.

Learn from the social media experts at this Stanford conference Nov 4-5

Yes, I know. Probably any day of the calendar you can find a social media conference somewhere within 50 miles of you. But pay attention, this conference is all meat and little fat. Sponsored by the Social for New Communications Research, it brings together top-flight researchers from around the globe in one place for two days. You will see original research results, thoughtful commentary by practitioners, and make some wonderful contacts with the experts. It is a small, very focused single-track event with some very bright people. You can find the agenda here.

I will be there, of course, and presenting some initial findings from a new study exploring the impact of social media on telecommunications service providers that is sponsored by HP. What, you work for a service provider and haven’t yet taken my survey? Click here now, please! You don’t want to be left out.

SNCR is a labor of love of Jen McClure, who I first met back in the good ole’ days when Ziff Davis ran Interop and when Interop had a lock on the Internet brain trust. Her non-profit has done some amazing work in the few short years it has been around.

Register for the conference here. It isn’t a free event, but well worth your time and money to attend.

eWeek: QualysGuard Offers Web Service for PCI Compliance Scans

A number of vendors have stepped up with a series of scanning tools to help verify PCI compliance, and there are dozens of PCI scanning vendors on their approved list. The hardest part will be picking one that works well for your situation. Many of these programs require you to download some software, but a growing number of vendors are delivering Web-based scanning services. I evaluated one such solution, version 5 of the Web scanning service from Qualys called QualysGuard PCI Compliance.

You can read the review for eWeek here.

Mediablather: Twitter tools and tips

This week Paul Gillin and I discuss some tools and tips to help augment your social media methods in our MediaBlather podcast. We touch on more than a dozen different things that you can do to be more productive in Twitter, You Tube and other social media outlets. You can find the podcast here, along with the links to the various services that we mention.

Here is my slide deck that covers similar ground.

Twitter tools for early stage companieshttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=twittervms-101104162101-phpapp01&stripped_title=twitter-tools-for-early-stage-companies&userName=davidstrom

View more presentations from David Strom.

Protecting your online banking and Paypal accounts

If you bank or shop online or otherwise use the Web to move money around, you need more protection for your accounts than just a simple username and password. Many of us reuse passwords on multiple accounts, and if a hacker or a malicious piece of software can obtain this information, you can suffer the consequences and be out a lot of dough in the process.

Of course, the quickest fix is to not reuse passwords across multiple accounts, but that isn’t likely to be implemented by many of us. A more secure and dependable solution is to make use of two-factor authentication. This is a fancy way to talk about a device that you keep on your person that only you have access to. If you work for a financial institution, or another paranoid employer, you probably already have something that looks like a credit card or a key fob with a small LCD display. This is the second factor (the first is your login name), and unlike your login only you have possession of this device. To make it work, you enter a series of numbers on its face after you enter your login ID. These are timed precisely to an authentication server. If you don’t enter the right sequence of digits, you can’t login to your account.

These fobs or security keys have been available for the general public for a few different Web sites. Paypal, for example, sells them for $5. Getting setup takes just a few moments, and requires an extra step when you login to your account.

But the fob can be lost, or you might not remember to carry it with you when you are shopping online. A better solution is to use a virtual key, one that runs on your smartphone for example, or makes use of a series of text messages if you just have that service. You don’t need to remember to bring anything with you, and these virtual keys are also free of charge.

VeriSign/Symantec calls its service VIP, for VeriSign Identity Protection. It is available in software for a wide variety of phones, including iPhones, Androids, Blackberries, and others. You download the software (via iTunes for the iPhone, and similar Web app stores for the others) to your phone, walk through the setup process, and register the software key with Paypal or other sites that you are interested in protecting. Here is one credit union in Palo Alto that makes use of the service where you can get an idea of the VIP process in more detail.

VIP can be used for other purposes than your online banking: they can protect VPN access to your corporate network, and other intranet kinds of applications. They are easy to manage, once you tie in the key servers to your corporate identity servers. And they remove the headache of managing the actual hardware security keys from the whole process, which is another plus.

VIP isn’t the only game in town. A startup called Enole.net is working on something similar that can turn your cellphone into a universal ID for all sorts of purposes, such as your car, your house key, and so forth. I haven’t gotten any specifics but the information on their Web site sounds intriguing.

It is time we started using better authentication methods for more of our online logins. And VIP is one very painless way to do so.

Markmonitor: Brandjacking Index 2010 on Luxury Goods

Everyone wants a bargain, but when it comes to buying luxury handbags and other high-priced name brand consumer goods online the deals are usually too good to be worth it. Given the discounts offered, it is no surprise that the amount of counterfeit goods being sold approaches nearly half the legitimate volume of the genuine articles.

But what is surprising is the level of sophistication that the fraudsters will go to place their sites high on search pages and purchase pay-per-click ads, making it harder to find the real articles from the name brand vendors when shopping online.

In this edition of the Brandjacking IndexTM, we look at the abuses in the luxury consumer goods sector. It isn’t a pretty picture, despite the smooth buttery leather exterior that many of the real handbags offer. You can register and download the full report here.

Baseline: Open Source Apps, Now

The time has come for the enterprise to consider open-source software. OSS, like Apache Web servers, Asterisk IP telephone switches, Linux desktops and others, can be less expensive to maintain and easier to support and scale. It can also provide a level of professional quality that, in some cases, can exceed purchased proprietary code. But before you switch to OSS, there are some issues to consider.

You can read the rest of my article on Open Source Applications in Baseline magazine here.

Strange Loop Conference St Louis

I attended a few sessions of this conference here in St. Louis, organized by Alex Miller. Miller has the uncanny ability to find the geekiest person at major organizations and convince them to come to town and talk about some of the really big issues that they are dealing with their code. The conference started off with Hilary Mason, who is a computer scientist and mathematician working for bit.ly. Did you know that you can get all sorts of analytics with any shortened bit.ly URL by just appending a plus sign at the end of it? Yup. She spoke about machine learning, and understanding and predicting behavior from large data set collections. For example, when the World Cup was playing, they observed all sorts of traffic coming from the countries that were in competition during the games. As soon as the game was over, the losing country’s traffic dropped to nothing. Obvious, but interesting. She also gave one of the best illustrations of Bayesian probability analysis that I have seen this side of grad school (and that has been a very long time for me).

I got to hear from Eben Hewitt, who wrote the O’Reilly book on Cassandra, an open source database project that is part of Apache and the current favorite of the large data set folks. He spoke about the really big data guys and how we have to talk in petabytes — WalMart’s customer data base is half a PB, and Google processes 24 PB each day. The data that was assembled to make the movie Avatar was around a PB.

Finally, there was Brian Sletten, an independent consultant based in LA, talking about new Web technologies. He mentioned the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney that is doing some interesting things with Web services — now how cool is that? I can feed my museum addition by going to a geeky conference.

You should put this on your radar for next year. This is very high signal, almost no noise. Some of the speakers could use some polishing, but the raw data is excellent.

SearchVirtualDesktop: Windows Intune shows promise at first glance

Windows Intune is Microsoft’s cloud-based antivirus software, and like other cloud antivirus products on the market that I reviewed earlier for Techtarget, it’s a bit rough around the edges. The product is a combination of Windows Defender anti-malware protection and the Windows System Center and Forefront management services. You can read my review published this week here.