U2 Live on YouTube

Rock giants U2 will be broadcasting tonight’s concert at the Rose Bowl in a global webcast on YouTube. You can view the concert on the official U2 channel, which will be available in 16 countries.

Tonight’s concert will be an acid test for streaming live video on YouTube. In the past, Google (who owns YouTube) has said they were not interested in live streaming because of the cost. In recent months, they have begun experimenting with live streams of an Obama press conference and the Outside Lands festival in San Francisco.

The concert begins tonight at 8:30 PM PDT. That’s pretty late for those of you on the east coast, and if you’re in Europe, prepare to wake up in the wee hours of the morning. In reality, choosing to webcast a west coast concert was a shrewd choice, as the time alone will reduce the audience a bit. I like U2, and I’ll be tuning in to see how well the stream holds up under stress. It will be interesting to see how many people are able to watch simultaneously.

Twitter Down?

I’ve been getting the Twitter Fail Whale with an “over capacity” message on and off this afternoon. Apparently Twitter has been getting a lot of traffic. As they say, stuff happens. It seems to be working now, but I thought I’d share a handy tip for checking the status of the Twitter servers.

Just visit http://status.twitter.com. The folks at Twitter post updates here whenever they are experiencing networking problems, over capacity issues, etc. It’s a good place to go just to make sure the problem isn’t with your own Internet connection.

What do you do when Twitter goes down?

Dilbert Does Twitter

Scott Adams Dilbert comic provides a wickedly satirical view of life in cubespace. Dilbert, the geeky white-collar engineer, has discovered an ulterior use for Twitter — keeping up on the boss’ whereabouts. Go Dilbert!

Of course, you wouldn’t do that, would you? What creative uses of Twitter have you discovered?

Analytics for Twitter

I admit it. I’m a sucker for analytics. I love to look at the numbers, identify trends and analyze the peaks and valleys. I’ve used Google Analytics on BigBlueBall and other sites, and before that, used my own log file analysis programs. Tracking Twitter is a slightly different matter. It’s not a web site, so how do you track follower history, post trends and other stats?

Enter TwitterCounter – a free service that will let you analyze key metrics for your Twitter account (or that of any other Twitter user, for that matter). You can also chart comparisons for up to three Twitter accounts (similar to Alexa for websites); see your friends, update history (posts per day) and more.

In addition to the basic, free service, TwitterCounter is working on a “pro” version. According to their settings page:

“We are developing a Pro account for users who want to see more stats, browse back more than 3 months, track retweets, export data in Excel and CVS format and more. The Pro account will cost $32.50 a year. Are you interested in hearing more about this when it becomes available?”

They also have a clever blog widget called TwitterRemote that you can add to your blog or website. Much like similar tools from Google, Yahoo or Facebook, TwitterRemote shows recent Twitter users who visit your blog.

It will be interesting to see if TwitterRemote is able to monetize their users by enticing enough of them to convert to pro accounts. I suspect it would be attractive to businesses using Twitter, to help them manage their social presence, but it’s an increasingly competitive space.

Meanwhile, data junkies like me have another tool to play with.

Twitter Suckers

Why do we have Twitter worms? Because there are suckers out there who willingly give away their Twitter credentials for the promise of thousands of followers. Remember, the number of followers you have is irrelevant if they don’t really care to follow you. It’s quality, not quantity that matters.

In general, always exercise caution when deciding to click a link. Sometimes it’s better to just say no.

More from Noise to Signal.

Get a Free MP3 from Amazon

Amazon passed one million followers on their official Amazon MP3 Twitter account, and to celebrate, they are giving away one free MP3 to anyone who wants one. The offer is good from now until Sunday, September 6 at 11:59 PST.

Technically, the offer gives you a $1.29 credit. If the MP3 you buy costs less, you keep the remaining credit for another purchase. If it’s more, you’ll be charged for the difference.

To claim your credit and download your free MP3 from Amazon, visit their promo page. The promotional code is FIRSTMIL.

I downloaded Weezer’s new song, “(If You’re Wondering If I Want You To)I Want You To.”

Let me know what you download!

Tech Support Cheat Sheet

Webcomic xkcd nails it again with their Tech Support Cheat Sheet for “non computer people.” If you’ve ever been called on for your computer help, you’ll want to print this out and distribute to your family, co-workers, grandparents, and other “non techies.” It’s so true.

Facebook Pages Can Tweet

Truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction. Facebook has produced an app that will automatically send Facebook Page updates to Twitter, allowing businesses, organizations, bands — anyone with a Facebook Page — to have posts automatically generate a tweet to their Twitter followers. The details were posted on the Facebook blog by Michael Gummelt — the summer intern who developed this app.

If you administer a Facebook Page, you can set up Twitter updates by visiting http://www.facebook.com/twitter/. You’ll be asked to configure what kinds of new posts will trigger Twitter updates.

Note that this new feature doesn’t apply to Facebook user pages. So, for example, I can’t automatically send Twitter updates for new posts to my personal Facebook wall, but the BigBlueBall Facebook page can.

The fact that Facebook is announcing this feature is interesting, since many of the features they’ve been implementing are designed to compete head-on with Twitter.

Tax Irregularities and Twitter

Many bloggers turn their avocation into a part-time business, running a few ads to help defray their hosting costs and maybe even support their hobby. And, of course, for the tax deductions, as the Joy of Tech wickedly points out.

Now where did I put that receipt?

Twitter Your Flickr Photos

Twitter began as a simple way to post 140 character text messages for others to follow. But the Twitterverse was not content. So sprung a whole new lexicon of @ symbols and hash marks meaningful to only the Twitterati. It wasn’t long before people found ways to share their photos via Twitter, using third-party services like TwitPic and yfrog. These services are great, but for the millions of Flickr users, it was a pain to post some photos one place, and another if they wanted to share on Twitter. Or to have to grab the URL and shorten. It turned into a chore.

Today, Flickr announced that now you can tweet your Flickr photos!

There are two ways to share your Flickr photos on Twitter. For existing photos in Flickr, you first need to “Add a blog page,” authorizing Flickr to post to your Twitter account.  Once you’ve done that, you’ll see a “Blog this” button on your photo page, and you can send to Twitter from there.

If you want to upload to Flickr and post to Twitter at the same time, you can do that too! You still need to “Add a blog page” (you only need to do this once), then you’ll be given a special email address. When you email a photo to that “2twitter” email address, it will both post into your Flickr account, and send a link in a Tweet for your followers. The subject line of your email will double as the title of your photo in Flickr, and the message that accompanies the URL in your tweet.

Sweet tweets!

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