A word about working with YouTube playlists

I had some lengthy youtube playlists and found it impossible to sort them.

I've since figured out a few things by trial and error:

1. If the lists have 100 videos or less, they can be sorted by:

-order
-newest
-oldest
-most viewed
-longest
-shortest
-A to Z
-Z to A

So to keep your lists sortable keep them to 100 or less in size.

2. If you need to cull out duplicates from such a list you can just sort alphabetically and find the culprits.

3. If they're longer than 100, they're not sortable.

4. If you need to cull out duplicates from an unsortable list, or from multiple lists which have duplicates among them, there is a way to do it, based upon my discovery that while youtube playlists tolerate duplicates, the 'favorites' folder does not. So if you clean out the favorites folder, and move the offending playlists into the favorites folder, you'll have the duplicates automatically removed. At that point you can put the videos back in their respective playlists and remove them from 'favorites'.

For example:

-Ray has 580 blues videos in 6 playlists; he knows there are duplicates but doesn't even know how many, or which ones.
-He empties his favorites folder.
-For each list he (a) "adds" the videos to favorites, then (b) "removes" them from the list.
-When he's done with the 6 lists, he finds there are 530 videos in favorites, telling him there were, but are no longer, 50 duplicates.
-Now he "adds" the videos back to their lists, removing them from 'favorites' after he adds each column to its proper list.

[the way to do bulk operations is to click the arrow in upper left, wait for column to be selected, then perform bulk operation... for me it operated slowly, but it's better than nothing]

How to get retweeted

If you would like some of your tweets to be retweeted, there are -- in my book -- 3 simple rules:

1. make them good;
2. make them short; and
3. be a retweeter yourself.

If you have to ask people to retweet you, it's because you're not doing a good enough job at (1), (2), and (3).

As to what I mean by "good", there's no simple rule, but studies have shown that tweets with links to substantive content are more likely to be retweeted than those without.

And as to keeping them short, studies have shown that using shorter URL shorteners like is.gd rather than longer ones like tinyurl will increase the likelihood of getting retweeted too.

And to those of you who feel it's wasteful if you fail to use up all 140 characters every time you tweet... it's not.

(PS, if you want to know "How to get unfollowed", one good way is to send a DM to someone whom you rarely, or never, retweet, asking them to retweet something of yours.)

(Short URL for this post: http://is.gd/cUAym)

My 200,000th tweet. Even I think that's a bit much.

Well, today I posted my 200,000th tweet:

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter ~ Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. #rays200k

I definitely tweet too much.

But I have met a lot of extraordinary people on Twitter, and learned an awful lot.

The experience has been priceless.

Of the 200,000 tweets, the only ones I would take back are the few I squandered responding to right wing nutjobs and other trolls, before I learned not to do that.

I chose that Martin Luther King, Jr. quote, because it best exemplifies why I take Twitter seriously. As citizens we have important work to do.

Here's a screenshot of what my home page looked like, including my 200,000th tweet, and the two which preceded it.

Twitter lesson I learned from Carolina (@MissBrazil) : the power of @

One of the greatest Twitter lessons I learned was from Carolina (@MissBrazil), cofounder of The Bloggers School (@BloggersSchool).

Carolina taught me the power of " @ ".

I was just getting started, and really didn't "get" Twitter, having bought into its founders' misguided use of language, calling my stream a "timeline" and my tweets "updates" about "what I'm doing".... and wondering why on earth would anyone want to read my "updates" on "what I was doing".

As if Twitter was a game of solitaire, where I record my random musings, and others mysteriously would find that of interest.

But Carolina disabused me of that. She said "I want you to be a good citizen of Twitter, I want you to be courteous and polite. Many people don't know how to be polite, they don't know how to respond to tweets. But I want you to understand. When people send you a tweet, you must respond to it. That's just good manners."

And then she taught me how to unravel Twitter's mystery and find the mysterious hidden location of the tweets addressed to me, since Twitter had no inbox and was silent on the subject (it has since updated its format to include such a 'place', but at the time offered none).

She taught me that every tweet addressed to me had a " @ " before "raybeckerman", so all I had to do was search for "@raybeckerman" and I would find them.

And then I was able to respond to them.

I have since learned that the " @ " is at the core of all interactivity on Twitter.

Every tweet intended for my eyes has my name preceded by the @; every tweet I send to someone has their name preceded by the " @ "; and every time anyone gives another the honor of a "retweet", the retweeted person's name is preceded by an " @ ".

The other day, I noticed that when I am looking at someone's profile page, to decide whether I wish to follow them or not, the most important thing to me is the incidence of " @ "'s in their timeline. The absence of "@"'s tells me this is someone who is just talking "at" people; their presence tells me this is someone who is engaged in conversation and sharing.

Since sharing and conversation are what Twitter is really all about, for me, the " @ " is what it's all about.

I see many, many twitter accounts -- many of them accounts of people who supposedly are knowledgeable about "social media" -- which have very few tweets that include " @ ". I'm glad I avoided that mistake. In my opinion those people are wasting their time here, in self-promotion, self-adoration, or just plain isolation, and are missing out on the treasure that is here, which is community.

So thank you, Carolina ( @MissBrazil ), for the valuable lesson I learned from you: the power of @.

(Here's a shortened url for this post: http://twurl.nl/l4aqfu)

How to set up your twitter apps (or "clients") to do traditional retweets rather than rubber stamp retweets

As most of you know, Twitter's fake "rubber stamp" pseudo-retweets should never be used (see "The "traditional retweet" (#TR) : the key to conversation & visibility" ).

Some twitter applications (or "clients") can be configured to ensure that whenever you're going to retweet something, you will be doing genuine retweets instead of the fake ones.

This post will collect links to instructions on how to do that for each app.

If you know of any that aren't listed here, or if anything here is no longer the fact, please use the comment section to let me know the details and your twitter name, and I will incorporate them into this post, and credit you with a "hat tip".

If your app does not provide a method for defaulting to traditional retweets.... scrap it.

The following apps can be configured to do traditional retweets when you retweet; each link will take you to the instructions on how to do it:

-Tweetdeck
-UberTwitter
-Twittelator
-HootSuite
-Tweetdeck (Android): needs no configuration; once you start doing a retweet, if you tap in compose section it converts to traditional retweet.
-Twicca (Android): no need to set up; choose "quote" rather than "retweet" and it automatically uses "RT @" format.
-Twidgit (Android) uses traditional retweets only. h/t @jameld
-Twitterific is an app for Macs, iPhones, & iPads. I'm advised that it supports traditional retweets, where they are called "retweets with comments", but have no information on how to configure it.
-Seesmic desktop does not provide a method of doing it, except by making an extra click and using its "quote" function.

(Here's a shortened url for this post: http://is.gd/d5jsp)