Twitter Launches An “Alpha” Testing Program On Android, Invites Users To Give Feedback And Collaborate Directly

Twitter launched a beta testing program on Android which allows users to opt-in to try out early versions of the Twitter application and other unreleased features which are being considered for inclusion in the official Twitter mobile applications. Now it seems the company is taking this testing one step further – or rather, one step back – with the launch of an alpha testing program for Android users.

Alpha versions of the Twitter app “will include earlier iterations of experiments,” says Twitter in a post to the Twitter for Android Alpha Program Google Group, where it shares announcements about its testing programs.The program will also give users the opportunity to provide direct feedback and collaborate directly with the company via a forum, the message explains.

That’s much more involvement that the beta program allows for, as beta users generally just receive a new build of the Android app for testing purposes, but don’t really interact with the company beyond sharing bug reports. Alpha testers, meanwhile, may have the ability to actually influence the direction Twitter heads.

The program will have limited space, and it will be accepting requests on a first-come, first-serve basis. Those who are invited in will receive an email confirmation in a few days if they’re able to get in. Note that joining a test group like this is not for those who rely heavily on the Twitter app working perfectly all the time. An alpha build of an app will have stability issues and far more bugs than the beta or public releases.

Twitter is not the only company to turn to Google Groups and the Android platform to gather up app testers. Other companies have also begun running tests there in recent months, including both Snapchat and Facebook. But Twitter is keen to experiment with its mobile interface, having added a number of new features and changes just ahead of yesterday’s IPO event, including rich media-filled Twitter Cards, a blue line to connect conversations, interaction buttons on the mobile timeline, pre-expanded images, and more.

Not all the changes have been warmly welcomed by Twitter’s user base however – the blue line, in particular, irks some to no end. But with Twitter’s alpha program, there may be room for Twitter’s most vocal and engaged users to have a say in these changes earlier on.

LinkedIn and Twitter Breakup

So much for efficiency with LinkedIn and Twitter!

Since 2009, LinkedIn and Twitter have shared the conversation on both platforms. Last week, Twitter announced that tweets will no longer be able to be viewed within LinkedIn. This is good news and bad news. the good news is that some people post the same types of data on LinkedIn and Twitter so you will see a decrease in volume in LinkedIn activity. The bad news is that you now must look in two places for your LinkedIn and Twitter posts

Now, you can post on LinkedIn and if you check the box at the bottom of the ‘Share and update’ box, you can still push that same post into Twitter. However, if you Tweet on Twitter, the post will NOT show up on LinkedIn.

What is the reason for this change? According to Michael Sippey a Group Product Manager at Twitter,  Twitter is focusing on “providing the core Twitter consumption experience through a consistent set of products and tools.”

Great for Twitter but that makes more work for the rest of us. So, what are your options for more efficient solutions?

Efficient Solutions

For Reading – Use A Thrid Party Platfom

I personally use HootSuite and really like it. You have tabs in HootSuite and each tab can have its own feed which means. HootSuite has several social networks to choose from in addition to Twitter, FaceBook, and LinkedIn. A feed could be from LinkedIn, a LinkedIn Group, Twitter or more. I have one tab for LinkedIn, one tab for Twitter and one for both.

For Posting – Use A Third Party Platform or LinkedIn

Again,I like HootSuite to post with because it can shorten my links, give me reports, post to multiple platforms all at once and lets me schedule posts.

If you don’t use a third party platform to post, do your posts on LinkedIn and checkmark the box to also send the post as a tweet.

Share and Enjoy ...

Twitter Knows When You Sleep, and More

Twitter knows when you nap. At least its engineers think they have a pretty good idea when you nap, because those are the few times when you’re not pouring your heart out in 140-character bursts.

Peering into its fire hose of tweets from four big cities around the world, a pair of Twitter engineers, Miguel Rios and Jimmy Lin, have discovered that the Twitter users in Istanbul don’t sleep much in August — and why would they, considering how many people are strolling along Istiklal Avenue on summer evenings. The denizens of Sao Paulo, Brazil, seem to take an afternoon siesta – tweets sharply drop off in the period after lunch.

New Yorkers tend to be as voluble on Twitter during the workday as they are during evenings. But that is not the case for the other three cities. The Japanese in Tokyo appear to be most disciplined about actually working during work hours – they tweet very little, relatively speaking, between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. Their sleeping hours also appear relatively unchanged over winter and summer.

All this intelligence is potentially lucrative for a global communications business like Twitter. It can inform when to serve up advertisements on the site and potentially for what kinds of products. It also produces very cool graphs and charts.

The data at the disposal of social media companies are, in principle, valuable to other organizations, from soda pop companies to politicians to police agencies that seek to understand human behavior. Location is one of the most useful pieces of information, especially for marketers that want to target their advertising dollars most efficiently.

Facebook this week released a map that political advertisers would find useful in an election year. It matched its users political affiliations with where their physical locations. The map went far beyond the red state versus blue state divide, with far more fine grained information about where Facebook users checked in in various parts of the country.

California, predictably, had large swathes of Democratic blue, but with plenty of Republican red polka dots in in the Orange County and San Diego suburbs.