I’ve been waiting what seems like forever for a Google invite and finally got one a couple of weeks ago. But you know what?…its only this week that I finally got around to logging in and checking it out properly. Pretty bad I know since there are thousands still dying to get in and try out Google Wave.

I’ve only had a quick play but have already integrated the ability to tweet from my Google Wave account and now I am trying to see how it integrates with Wordpress. I have downloaded a Wordpress plugin called Wavr which allows you to imbed Waves into a blog post.

So to see if this works and also how it works, I have created a Wave in Google Wave and imbedded it below. If nothing shows up then I obviously didn’t do it right but if it does I will be adding to the Wave to as it is supposed to automatically add each addition of content to this blog post. So let’s see…I am going to Publish this post right now…I’m excited!

Update: Well I can’t seem to get it working just yet. As you can see below there is a Page Not Found window. Too late for me to play around with it now so I will see if I can get it working tomorrow.

Another Update: Seems to work in Firefox but I can’t see it in Internet Explorer…and what’s with the green background.?

Latest Update: I’ve decided to remove the plugin because it really isn’t working consistently. Instead I have put in a screen print below of how it looks in Firefox.

Want to know where we learn to make money online? Head on over to Wealthy Affiliate University for all the latest info.

Twitter has definitely become the place to be for anyone wanting to create a presence on the web. So with this in mind, we have put together 30 links to great Twitter tutorials, useful tips, hints and tools from around the web.

There are so many sites now that provide excellent information and advice for using Twitter effectively so it was actually difficult to choose what to include. But we think we have found some of the best to help both those new to Twitter and those that have been around for some time.

If you have any others you think could be added then leave a comment below and we’ll take a look.

The Basics

1. The Twitter Tutorial – if you have no idea what Twitter is or if you do you’re still not sure what it all really means then this is the tutorial for you. It should only take you about 5 minutes to go through this slideshow. I would have to say that this is one of the best little tutorials I have seen on the subject. Highly recommended.

2. How to Set Up a Twitter Account – another useful piece of information for those that are new to Twitter. This one includes both a video and written instructions.

3. How to Set Up Multiple Twitter Accounts with One Email Address – We have a number of Twitter accounts all using different email addresses we set up in Gmail and Yahoo. I wish I had found this post before setting them up – it would have saved a heap of time.

4. Twitter in Plain English – A quick video to give you the basics of Twitter.

How to Get More Followers

5. 5 Tips to Grow Your Twitter Presence - Another Problogger post

6. How to Grow Your Follower Numbers to Over 10,000 In a Week – See how Sitepoint gathered 10,000 followers in a week.

7. 7 Ways to Be Worth Following on Twitter - A few basics to get yourself in a good position to start attracting followers.

8. 6 Tips for Using Your Twitter Profile to Get New Followers – Tips for customizing your profile in order to attract more followers.

How to Be a Success on Twitter

9. 10 Traits of Effective Twitter Users - An analysis of successful Twitter users. 

10. 8 Sure Fire Ways to Tick off The Twitterverse - How not to be a success on Twitter.

Twitter Feeds

11. How to Automatically Add Your Blog Posts to Twitter Using Twitter Feed – This is one I wrote.

Tips and Hints

12. 50 Great Twitter Tips and Secrets – A good comprehensive list of Twitter tips and hints.

13. 35 Twitter Tips from 35 Twitter Users – An old post by Problogger but still highly relevant.

14. Top 10 Twitter Tips for Beginners – Some of these are not just for beginners.

15. 8 Tips for Building a Strong Presence on Twitter – Some interesing tips here.

16. 55 Twitter Tips – Another comprehensive list of tips and hints.

17. 9 Advanced Twitter Tips - Some excellent tips here – worth reading. 

18. 100 Serious Twitter Tips for Academics - Tips for instructors and students…and worth reading even if you aren’t an academic.

19. 137 Small Business Twitter Tips – You’ll need to click on the link to a pdf to view them…it’s worth it.

Twitter Applications

20. Is the Tweetie 2 Application Worth Buying? – Tweetie 2 is an application for the iPhone/iPod Touch. This is my review of the application.

21. What Twitter Application is Right for You – A great post about the variety of different applications available for Twitter including desktop applications and iPhone/iPod Touch, Blackberry and other mobile applications

Twitter Themes and Backgrounds

22. Twitter Background Gallery – Has over 1500 Twitter backgrounds as I write this post.

23. 10 Beautiful Customizable Photoshop Twitter Background Templates – I put together a list of customizable Photoshop templates. You obviously need Photoshop for these but it is worth the effort as you will have your own (almost unique) Twitter background.

24. TwitRounds – New backgrounds added daily.

25. 40 Free Artistic Twitter Backgrounds – A beautiful list of Twitter backgrounds.

26. Twitter How-To Design and Best Practice – If you are thinking of creating your own Twitter background this is a great place to start.

27. Create a Custom Twitter Background the Right Way – Another post that provides some tips on creating a Twitter background the right way.

Twitter Plugins, Tools and Widgets

28. 35 Awesome Twitter Plugins for Wordpress – An excellent list to start with by W3Mag.

29. 10 Best Twitter Tools, Plugins, Widgets for Wordpress - A nice list if you are using Wordpress.

30. Must Have Twitter Plugins for Twitter Fans – Another list of plugins for Wordpress.

31. Tweet Adder – I know we have reached 30 but there is always going to be one more to add. Tweet Adder allows you to run Twitter on autopilot or at least reduce some of the regular tasks you might want to perform. It’s not free but well worth the money.

If you have any others, please let us know in the comments below.

Today as I logged into Twitter I noticed an announcement at the very top of the screen introducing Twitters new LIST function. So I promptly clicked on the ‘Create New List’ option and proceeded to create my very first List. It wasn’t difficult and within about a minute or so I had a list of some of my favorite tweeters.

As I was doing this it suddenly occured to me that this could possibly change the face of Twitter forever…at least in terms of making money from it.

Let’s face it, the good majority of those on Twitter follow someone only to get them to follow them back. This is what Twitter has become. It is really just a big marketing network with each person trying to sell something. Even the big celebrities are there to sell themselves, their image, their next movie or whatever. There really are only a small handful on Twitter who use it to chat simply for the sake of chatting…and the reason there are only a few is that as a means of communicating it really is a clumsy system.

So if we want to make money on Twitter and we need followers to do that, then I can see the potential for the new LIST system to make it just that much more difficult.

This is how I see it…users are going to log in and head straight to their favorites list and hang out there. What this means is that they don’t get to see the full list of tweets coming from the regular list they are following…they only see the tweets from their favorites list.

Now I see this as a good thing because when you think about it, it can only increase the quality of the tweets on Twitter. I mean who is going to add a spammer or someone who is constantly promoting products to a favorites list? You are really going to have to start getting good with your tweets in order to be added to someones list AND ‘getting good’ means providing quality and not promoting products every second tweet.

If it happens to go this way, then a lot of people are going to leave Twitter as it will get harder and harder to make money with it. If enough people start to leave then Twitter’s popularity may just start to wane. After all, the only reason Twitter became as popular as it has is because of its money making potential. Or to put it another way, if Twitter suddenly made it mandatory that you could no longer promote products on the site, how many people do you think would actually be left on it? 

I believe that people really need to be able to continue to easily make money from Twitter if it is to maintain it’s popularity. If the money is no longer there then people will only leave looking for the next big thing to make them rich.

This could just be the beginning of the end for Twitter if this is how it all pans out. Hopefully my thinking is totally wrong and instead the new List system opens up a whole new world of opportunities. I guess we can only wait and see…

For most of the day today one of the trending topics on Twitter has been Tweetie 2 so since I had no idea what it was and I was just a little curious, I clicked on the link to see what the fuss was about.

Well I’m glad I did because I found out that it is an iPhone or iPod Touch application that you can use to access Twitter and do all the things you normally do on Twitter on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

This application isnt free and for me being in Australia it cost $3.99AUD…not a huge amount of money but when you can get other Twitter applications for free you usually think twice before spending. However, the ratings for it looked really good so I decided to take the plunge.

I have only been using it for about 30 minutes and have had a lot of fun so far. This application has so many features that some of the other Twitter applications lack like:

• The ability to handle multiple accounts – I love this…I have quite a few accounts and it makes it so easy to get into each one without having to open a new window and enter passwords. In fact, the accounts are all listed on one page (once you enter them in the first time) and it is just a matter of touching the account with your finger to get into it…so easy!
• An easy to use retweet option – this is so much easier than using twitter itself which doesn’t actually have a retweet option. It’s just a matter of finding the tweet you like and selecting a retweet button.
• There is also a place to draft your tweets and save until later to post.
• You can also update your profile via Tweetie 2.
• There is an offline mode but I haven’t gotten into that yet so not sure what is involved.
• And I just found out that it has the ability to reveal the short urls – in other words you can see the full original url and not just the shortened url.

As I said, I’ve only been using it for about half a hour now but I can definitely recommend this great little app if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch.

UPDATE: Since yesterday I have been using this application quite extensivley and I have to say that I am starting to prefer using my iPod Touch to access Twitter over my desktop computer. In the past, I had used other Twitter applications on my iPod Touch but only used them for when I wasn’t at my computer as although they did the job, they just weren’t as easy to work with as Tweetie 2.

But my absolute favorite part of Tweetie 2 is the ability to swap seemlessly between multiple accounts. I know I have already mentioned it above but anyone who has multiple Twitter accounts will understand how messy it can getting logging  in and out of different accounts.

Other features include:

• the ability to link twitter accounts to your Address Book contacts
• the ability to save searches
• a translation facility to translate tweets
• the ability to add photos and video you have on your iPhone/iPod Touch
• a url shortener
• hashtags

I have to say that I am loving it.

If you have Tweetie 2 tell us your experiences or if you have a question leave a comment below. We answer most comments left on our blog.

Yes, you heard right…I think I am over Twitter. Why?…well for a number of reasons actually but read on…

When Twitter first started to become popular I went in and created an account for one of my niche blogs but at the time I really couldn’t understand what it was all about let alone what the point of it was. But Twitter got even more popular so I persevered and created Twitter accounts for most of our websites including this one (@affiliateblogon).

But even after using it for some time, for the life of me, I really can’t see the appeal of Twitter in terms of a form of communication.  It really is both clumsy and inefficient…BUT it seems to work for a hell of a lot of people to promote whatever it is they are promoting. So the inefficiency of this networking tool is forgotten in the rush to get as many followers as possible in order to make as much money as possible.

Okay I can accept that…I am in the business of making money online too so I understand the thinking here. Unfortunately however, in my view, Twitter is starting to become one big spammy piece of junk.

Just take my own followers for instance which, as I write this post, are up around the 1150 mark…not too bad I suppose except when you consider that a large number of people are getting tens of thousands of followers with some having followers numbering in the millions  – my 1150 followers now starts to look a bit shabby in comparison.

Of that 1150, I follow about 800 or so and out of that, probably a handful actually Tweet live – the rest have preprogrammed Tweets  in place that go up on a regular basis throughout the day. Some even repeat the same posts over and over so they might have the same 10 tweets go up every day. The majority of those tweets are 140 characters of promotional garbage…the rest are quotes or retweets of someone elses garbage , so that only a small number of those left are actually worth looking at.

I also find that once you are following more than a couple hundred people it is almost impossible to keep up with the number of incoming tweets so it becomes almost redundant if you truly want to keep up with what someone has to say.

Now some of you are probably thinking why I just don’t unfollow them…and I’d have to agree with you. This has been in my thoughts for the past week or so but I also have this almost warped thinking that says if you unfollow them, they will unfollow you and then you will be back to only a couple hundred followers…and as it appears that everyone is using Twitter I might get left behind by not keeping up with it all.

I mean, a celebrity can afford to not follow anyone and still get thousands of followers but anyone else needs to work for it. This means following people, tweeting appropriately, retweeting and  generally just chatting to people you are interested in chatting to. It’s not difficult by any means but it can take up a lot of time and I am wondering is it really worth it…maybe I need to get to 10,000 followers in order to answer that question.

Others reading this might also say that I should be following those in the same niche – in other words, grab people who are interested in what you have to say…stick with quality not quantity. Actually, that is what I have been doing but unfortunately my niche is all about making money online and that does tend to attract spammers. So what looks like quality ends up  being someone who just sends out promotional tweets to get you to sign up for something or go to their recommended site if I want to get more followers!

When it comes down to it, and to be totally honest, I am really only following someone to get them to follow me…that is my total motivation for using Twitter. It doesn’t sound right does it? I am not sure whether my thinking needs to change or whether I just need to go with the flow and do what the majority of people are doing and just keep working at getting more followers.

Now you can see my dilemma – although I am over Twitter  I can see the potential in this rather clumsy system.

So despite this blog post I am not giving up on Twitter and I am trying to stay positive about it. I am going to see where it goes – my thinking is that it can only get better with more followers and I hope to come back in a few months time and say how wrong I was and that Twitter made a real difference in my affiliate business.

Even so at this point I am more disullusioned with the amount of spam on there than anything else and I know that at some point I am going to do a mass unfollow and stick with a handful of people whose tweets I really want to read…in other words, use Twitter as it was intended to be used.

Stay tuned…

In the past couple of weeks we have been working on our Twitter accounts a little more seriously so decided to change the backgrounds on a few of them. Well it wasn’t as easy as we thought.

There are plenty of Twitter background sites out there but we wanted something a little more unique and professional…and something we could customize.

So in my search I came up with 10 beautiful and professional looking Twitter backgrounds and decided to share them with you. Just be aware that if you have Photoshop 6 some of these templates may not work for you.

1. Boinbong – has two different Twitter backgrounds both with a very simple but professional look.

2.  Design Freebies – This background comes in three different colors – blue, green and orange and offers the ability to customize the Polaroid shots in the corner to whatever you like.

3. MXM-Studios – This is a dark template but very cool looking. The template fits a large screen of 1700 x 1050px but the designer says it works equally well on screens that are 1024 x 768px.

4. Paperworks – Another beautiful template from Design Freebies.

5. Shades of Blue – three beautiful blue backgrounds from Design Freebies.

6. ChethStudios – This is just one of four beautiful templates at Cheth Studios.

7. Christmas Theme – Save this one for Christmas. This is cute but professional looking.

8. The Internet Genius Background – Simple but classy looking.

9. Digital Design Advice – This is a fun background and very easy to customize.

10. Manifestbozeman – This is a basic Photoshop template which defines the ’safest’ areas for adding content. A great one to start with.