Hootsuite 2.0 Twitter Web App

Yes, your humble author was one of the lucky few that managed to grab one of the 100 free private beta invites from Mashable last night. And here comes my little write up of what you can expect to see from Hootsuite after it comes out from its web 2.0 update. For any of you who don’t know (or haven’t guessed from the title) Hootsuite is yet another web app for twitter.

Interface:

I have to say that Hootsuite has to be, as far as web apps go, one of the most powerful I’ve seen. I actually prefer it over twitter itself for the amount of control over the different Twitter streams that can be aggregated. Firstly, when you sign on to the new Hootsuite you find yourself now presented with a tabbed interface (which is completely dragable). The default tab is a welcome page with updates from Hootsuite and featured users. By default there is also a second tab with your twitter profile home feed, replies, DM’s and pending tweets (because yes, with Hootsuite you can set tweets for later).

But this is only the beginning. The true power of the new Hootsuite is in the custom tabs which you can create to aggregate pretty much any data from twitter and save it into a tabs and columns within those tabs. The columns you can create are cover just about every range of data that you could want to monitor on twitter, anything from keyword tracking (up to a maximum of 3 in one search), twitter search, and the ability to organise people into different groups (eg. friends, co-workers, etc.) and the number of columns and tabs seems practically unlimited.

Multiple Accounts:

Another great feature of Hootsuite (which hasn’t changed much since the original version) is the ability to add multiple user accounts so those of you with more than 1 can keep track and post to multiple accounts all in one place. Other profiles can also be added as ‘admin’ level or ‘editor’ level so that if your a company or blog, you can have multiple people handling different twitter accounts from one place.

Integration:

And its not just posting to twitter that Hootsuite provides for. The site also gives good connections into Ping.fm so you should be able to post to just about anything. They also have connection for RSS/atom feeds if your one to use your twitter account as an RSS reader.

Stats:

Finally Hootsuite update is going to include twitter statistics for the links in your tweets. They get broken down into graphs displaying number of clicks per day, from what region of the world and the top refers for the links. A very useful little tool if you have a blog that shares posts on twitter to monitor how many people your pulling from twitter.

As i mentioned early Hootsuite is still currently in Private beta, but keep your eyes peeled for any information about when they plan on releasing it to the public. From the looks of it it shouldn’t be too long now!

Skydrive – 25GB of free online storge

Image via Wikipedia

I cant believe I’m about to praise a Microsoft product, but i have to say, that this is a very useful tool indeed.

Skydrive is basically and online storage space for documents, photos etc. offering you 25GB of space online for free, all you have to do is sign in with your Windows Live account (or just create one).

Once in you have the ability to create folders and photo albums, decide whether there shared or not, even change the background etc. very much like the windows file system. One of the features i like most about it is that you can change the permissions of the people who are allowed to view and edit the files and folders, ranging from everyone to specific individuals who i select. I’m currently using Skydrive to share photos around my family.

Great, whats the catch? i here you say. Well yes, being Microsoft there is always a catch which is that you cannot upload files bigger than 50MB in one go. So while being great for documents, photos etc. there isn’t much room for videos. And there are other services offering a larger amount of space (ADrive for example) but they don’t offer the same group editing for free. Still, despite this i don’t think that 25GB of free space is anything to be grumbled at.