Twitter get togethers, tweetups, have begun.  Crooked Tree Coffeehouse welcomed our crew on Saturday, January 2nd, for the first St. Charles Tweetup of the year.

I’m just going to share a few pictures from the place and point you to two blog posts from others who attended.

1st Tweetup of 2010

Coffee House Review ~ Crooked Tree Coffee House

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Tweetup at Pujols 5 West Port Plaza

Karen Goodman, aka @KarenStL, and I will be presenting a class on Twitter for Real Estate Agents. Introducing them first to what Twitter is followed by hands on.  Hands on will cover not only how to send a tweet, that’s a Twitter message, but also installing a client on their personal computer.

Key topics:

• What is Twitter?
• Signing Up
• Sending a tweet
• Replies and Direct Messages

Hands on will cover how to find and install a few of the popular Twitter clients. Tweetdeck will be the primary client used in the demonstrations, and will be the first client recommended and offered to install.

Training is open to all St. Louis area real estate agents.  If possible, please RSVP to Karen Goodman, 314-677-6538 office, or karen – at – archcityhomes.com. It is this Wed, October 28 from 1:30-3:00 pm at the Keller Williams office in Kirkwood. Agents from any brokerage are welcome to attend, but registration is required for non-KW agents.

3 Key Reasons Facebook Bought FriendFeed

Facebook buys Friendfeed, and Mashable takes a stab at three reasons it’s a great deal.

Facebook, one of the leaders in online social networking, today purchased Friendfeed.  The sum was undisclosed as well as the future of the Friendfeed staff. Why buy now?  It turns out that the desire has been there for some time.

Is it good for you? That remains to be seen.  Facebook is likely to become even more of an integration and central sharing tool.  Browser integrated sharing, already part of Facebook’s schema would seem an easy upgrade point and one the everyday user will use.

Another good possibility will be borrowing some of Frienfeed’s built in display of items instead of taking the user out of the Facebook interface.

In any case…

The full release from Facebook is below:

Facebook Agrees to Acquire Sharing Service FriendFeed

Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”

“As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founder. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”

Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.

“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use.”

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.

Mirexo is YAATA, Yet Another Twitter Air Application. Kidding aside, it brings us a different look to Twitter. Big selling point is detachable channels or columns.

Mirexo starts off with a simple main application with two panels on either side of a central control column.

As you can see, it doesn’t require a ton of desktop to use. The left side of the application is used for various channels to be displayed. A channel is a selected stream such as all friend, replies, DMs, or a custom channel based on search or a subset of folks you follow.

On the right is your follow list, and a tab away is your list of channels. Adding a new channel is a button click away, and the same holds true for following someone. The central column at the top shows a count of replies, and DMs, as well as providing a single click way to bring up a posting window.

Customizable features aren’t many here. The best feature over other clients is really the detachable channels. In the top picture above, I’ve split out my all friends, replies, DMs, and two channels, a search on origami and a search on #STL. The detached columns are individually adjustable as to height, width and position. Each column can be filtered as well.

One nice feature is the ability to view a conversation thread. Each tweet in the display will show an icon under that users avatar if there is a conversation history. Basically a chain of reply messages.

If you see the icon, click on it to display the thread. Interestingly enough, it will not just show your replies to that user’s tweet, but other’s as well. Gives real context to the conversation.

Things I’d love to see?

• Themes.
• DM button, or shift click on the @ to do a DM.
• Tweet from any window. I’d love to keep the control panel out of the way.

I guess that’s a big enough wish list for now.

Give Mixero a chance if you’ve gotten an invite. If not, follow @Mixero on Twitter and ask for one. They’ll send you out a code pronto.

Paisano indulges himself with thoughts about the unchanging faces of social networks. Here’s an excerpt:

The way we communicate on social sites like Twitter and Facebook has to evolve at some point when it comes to expressing ourselves beyond just plain text. I don’t mean merely by using video which has already begun with services such as Seesmic, 12secs and Utterli. I’m talking about allowing us to use visual aids similar to the way we can use emoticons when text messaging. You know, those little smiley faces we add at the end of IMs on GTalk?

He challenges the notion that a static icon to represent us should be the standard, and discusses some presently used alternatives on some networks.

What do you think? Smileys? Rotating picture? Mood based pictures?

Drop by Paisano’s blog and leave your thoughts.

 Welcome to a new series on Social Networking Tips. The plan is to bring in folks to share their best ideas about social networking. The next person to write up a tip could be you!

Tip:

Search.

Last week hdbbstephen shared another great way to connect with folks on your social networks, search.

I like to create do searches for topics that I am interested in on Twitter, to see what people are saying. Then I go look at their Tweets and reply when I have something to add to the conversation. I have found some cool folks this way, and been invited to write guest posts, etc.

What a great method to not only learn what’s being said about your favorite topics but who’s saying it.  The problem is that most folks have never thought to use search.

Let’s see a about one of your choices.  How about searching Twitter.

Twitter can be searched best by using search.twitter.com.

It’s that simple really.  The search will bring up tweets from most recent back. Searching here is forgiving of periods and the like, and does better with words that aren’t imbedded. However it does find links with the supplied search text.  Where I’ve had the most success is finding locals in the St. Louis area.  It’s also been useful to find folks interested in my favorite shows and such.

Google doesn’t slack either for searching on social networks, all tweets are indexed.  However there are other ways to find great discussions and people on Twitter.

Layered on top of Twitter search is one of my favorite tools, Tweetstats.com. Tweetstats Trend page is a winning way to find out what’s hot and from there who’s talking about it. Want to find out who the biggest talkers are on Twitter, then try twitter_stats. It shows the folks with the most replies.

Back to the basics there though.  So you’ve searched, and @sallywhoseit is talking about jumbotron physics, your favorite topic. Now what?  Do you just jump in and say something about the topic? Do you introduce yourself first? Do you tweet about them and hope for the best?

My recommendation is that you take two minutes and do a few things first.  One, check their Twitter profile out.  See if they are perhaps a Jumbotron Physics professor, student, or just like to ride jumbotrons.  This will go a long way to steering future conversation.  Second, check out their recent tweets. Was this a one of joke comment? Do they talk about this often?

A great way to check their history is to go back to Twitter search and add that person’s ID to the search. Bang. You’ll know if they are an expert, wanna-be, fan, or just making a joke.

From there it’s just a matter of making the proper introduction.  Jump in and chat.

Notice I didn’t say follow them, stalk them, or find their email and drop them a note. Just chat. And go away if they get creeped out.

This week, take a few minutes to search for some new contacts by searching Twitter for your favorite topics.  Come back and share or write your own blog post. Either way, please do leave a comment and let me know how it goes, or drop me a line on Twitter/@tojosan.