So let’s jump right in:

Retweet (shorthand: RT)

Retweets are unique out of all of the abbreviations you’ll see on Twitter because there is an official Retweet method, as well as a user defined method, but it wasn’t always this way.

Back in the day, when people saw a Tweet that someone sent that they thought was important enough, cool enough, interesting enough, or anything else enough, they would copy and paste the tweet into the New Tweet field on Twitter, slap a “RT @username: ” in front of it, and send it out to their followers.  Some people would even add their own commentary in front of the RT.  This became so common, that eventually Twitter decided to come out with the official Retweet method that is still commonly in use today.

The downside to Twitter’s “New Retweet” (as many still call it), is that you can’t add your comments, opinion, or hashtags to the Tweet.  That’s why you often still see RT in a Tweet, users did it the old school way.  If someone sent a new Retweet, Twitter doesn’t put a RT in it, and instead makes it look exactly like how it would have if you were looking at the original Tweet on that users Timeline (with a small icon indicating it is a Retweet).

Fortunately, Twitter seems to be opening up to the idea of “Quoting” a Tweet, which is what many people now call the “Old Style Retweets.” You can now Quote a Tweet in addition to Retweeting in the official Twitter for iPhone app, and many third party applications also allow you to Quote a tweet too.

Hat Tip, or Heard Through (shorthand: HT)

Hat Tip’s aren’t that common, but common enough to make this list.  People usually append a HT @username or H/T @username to a Tweet when that person had some influence on the subject of the Tweet.

Modified Tweet (shorthand: MT)

This is even less common than HT, but it’s picking up steam.  MT is used the same as a Retweet (RT), but used when the user modified the original Tweet in some way, most likely due to the length limit of only 140 characters.

Via (shorthand: /via or VIA)

/via’s are used almost like an RT too, but are usually sent with your own commentary.  For example, if you’re looking at your Twitter timeline, and you see a Tweet with a link to an interesting article online; you read it, and then decide to Tweet it.  You might want to add your own commentary about the link, but still attribute the fact that you found out about it via some Twitter user.  You’d do this with a “/via @username” at the end.

CC (shorthand: /cc or cc:)

/cc is similar to how it’s used in an email.  If you want to make sure someone sees something, you’d CC them.  Likewise, if you want to make sure that someone sees your Tweet, you’d add /cc @username at the end.  If you want multiple people to be CC’d, just keep adding more and more usernames, à la /cc @username1 @username2

There are also a few other terms that you should know if you’re using Twitter, and here they are:

Hashtag

A hashtag is any continuous combination of alphabetical and numerical characters prefixed by a hash symbol (#). An example: #socialping, #awesome, #analytics.  Hashtags are used to categorize your thoughts, or make it easy for people to find your tweet, in the case of it being a common search term.  Hashtags are also used on TV (look in the corner of any primetime show these days), at events for Tweetwalls (check the screens, or on printed materials), or more ad-hoc, around things that happen.  There is no registration process and anyone can create them, just put a #hash #in #front.  Hashtags are so commonly used, that nearly every Socialping account is monitoring at least one.

Direct Message (shorthand: DM)

Direct Messages are how you can contact someone privately on Twitter.  Many people have this misconception that everything is public, when in fact, there are two separate thriving and private worlds on Twitter.  The first is DM conversations which require both people to follow each other, but allows you to send message one-to-one in a way that no one can see it. The second is by setting your Twitter account private (and highly advised against).  Private accounts is probably topic we can talk about in a different post.

So, while there are tons and tons of abbreviations and new terminology on Twitter, the above list should give you a basic overview of what these things actually mean.

Did I miss something?  If so, let everyone know in the comment section below.

I just left a wonderful dinner with a group of people involved at Betaspring who are all some of the smartest people I’ve ever met in their various domains, and the purpose? To celebrate a failure that the majority of us have had recently.  I won’t go into too many details here, but I will say that tonights dinner was the culmination of something that I’ve been personally feeling for a few weeks now and thus, the intervention, if you will, was very welcomed.

Socialping has been on a growth pattern that is not linear, but exponential.  I am 100% sure that our growth pattern is like this is because of our involvement in Betaspring.  Betaspring has caused Socialping to grow in so many ways that I can’t even explain, but I’ll try: we’ve changed our businesses positioning, our focus, and our goals.  Personally, I’ve had to balance work and personal life, running day-to-day business, moving to a new city and getting settled in, developing new features and fixing bugs, and more, all while trying to manage this as best as I can, but as tonight showed, some things fell to the wayside.

I doubt that this is clear, but I (Joel Strellner) am one of those dreaded solo-founders.  Many people have told me along the way that I need to have a team, and to that extent, I have had some awesome help along the way.  I’ve had, and am fortunate enough to still have Tony Fonseca, one of the best UI/UX guys I’ve ever known to help out, and in previous versions of Socialping, I had Adam Lum, and Eric Martin helping out with development.  I’ve even had teams helping out with development from India and Russia in really early versions of Socialping.  Teams are awesome things to have, but still, with or without them, I’ve realized that startups don’t grow linearly and especially solo-startups don’t grow linearly.

One of the most unexpected things about being in an accelerator is how you grow as a founder is totally different than what you’d expect.  You almost grow like a disease, and bear with me, but, think of the growth as being like a bunch of pimples all over your body that just continue to grow, bigger and bigger, and each one of those pimples is a nugget of knowledge that you must, will and do learn as part of being in an accelerator.  You don’t just grow bigger and better, but some of those nuggets of information, or pimples if you will, grow in very painful and uncomfortable places.  It’s my job as a founder, and in an accelerator to make those pimples become comfortable and that is exactly why joining an accelerator is awesome.  Accelerators help you to grow in places you never though you would, or even should grow.

Sorry if this post was raw, rough or graphic.  Startups, accelerators and life is sometimes that way, and it seems fitting that my publication of what has been resonating in my head, and clarified for me tonight, is too.

And yes, we’ve Socialping moved to Providence, which is one of the coolest places I’ve personally ever lived.  They also have one of the most down-to-earth, genuine and welcoming startup communities, and I am personally honored to be a part of it now.

Needless to say, we are very excited about about being in Betaspring, the environment they’ve set up is second to none, and the mentors they consistently bring in, AMAZING!  Not to name drop, but just in the 4 weeks that we’ve been here, we’ve had the opportunity to mingle and learn from some industry titans, like Aaron Patzer (Mint), Brian Murphy (MOO), Rick Duggan (Zappos) and countless others.  The first week we were here, we met with over 45 mentors, industry experts, angel investors and venture capitalists in a one-on-one environment to get us thinking about things, get feedback, and generally to just help us refine our products.

What I am getting at is: Socialping is getting accelerated way, way faster than even we expected.  And because of this, all of our users will benefit from a much better Socialping.  This also means that we are growing, and with that, we need to hire!  If you know any php developers, especially those that know how to process a lot of real-time data, please tell them to contact me directly (joel at socialping dot com).

Since the silent time is now over, we’ll finally start blogging about some of the stuff we are working on, from the nitty gritty of things we’re learning on the way, to more general information about what’s new at Socialping.  I know in the past I’ve said this was a goal…. Now it’s going to be a weekly requirement.

So, what’s in the works right now? We’ve got a new website coming that better reflects where Socialping is going, a user experience overhaul of a few of our features that are just too complicated, and a ton of features I can’t talk about yet.  Over the next few weeks, more details of each of these things will be revealed here on our blog, and sneak peaks will probably be Tweeted on @socialping.  Any comments or suggestions for us on things you’d like changed? Let us know in the comments below!

We’ve got the usual types of goals, more Twitter interaction and engagement, more followers and what may seem odd, more friending on our part (we’re sometimes a bit too selective on friending).

If you’re setting Twitter goals, don’t forget that you can use Socialping to track many of these no matter which type of goal you set, percentage-based or actual number based.

If you’ve got any Twitter goals, please let us know in the comments below.  We’d love to hear them, and we might even add it to our resolutions as well.

• New chart option allowing you to flip between Absolute Values and Daily Change Values on the Twitter account reporting pages. Essentially, you can now easily switch between seeing total number vs just the changes when looking at or comparing the count of your daily mentions, tweets, friends, followers and lists that you are on (Hat tip to @netzaffin for the suggestion; have one yourself? Email us at support [at] socialping com).
• Initial deploy of the individual tweet page. This is where you’ll go to work with a single tweet when it’s all complete (you can review, then reply, rt, assign, etc from this page).
• Tweet approval queues is now live, but in limited beta. To get into the limited beta of this feature, shoot us an email at support [at] socialping com. Tweet approval queues allow you to require all outbound tweets on your Twitter account to be approved by an administrator before it goes out.
• Our LiveConference Tweet Wall automatic reconnect methodology has been enhanced to more reliably automatically reconnect and catch up if your internet drops out during your event.
• Our LiveConference Tweet Wall’s curse word filter support has been enhanced to reduce the processing power needed to check the quite extensive list we have of all things bad word-ish.
• Numerous bug fixes and minor text changes throughout.

And what’s coming up? We can’t say, but it’ll be awesome. If you’re not already doing so, follow @socialping for sneak peak screenshots on the things we’re working on. And of course, if you’re not already using Socialping, sign up now.

How many of you measure your return on investment (ROI) on Twitter?  Do you know how many followers you’re getting, mentions, or reach?  Can you easily determine how these things have changed over time?  If not, you are not really measuring the ROI of your Twitter activities.

First, there are a number of ways to look at ROI, there’s the typical financial ROI, in which you’re looking to see if your actually profiting from your endeavors, and then there’s the “buzz” factor, where you are just trying to see if people are becoming more aware of your business and what it does.  I’m going to show you how to use Socialping for both of these methods.

Twitter ROI Tracking: Financial

Using Socialping to track if you are actually making sales from Twitter can be tricky, and there will always be a little bit of a grey area here, but one way to track if you are making sales is to use Socialping to track the tweets that link to your website.

Socialping is quite a bit different than the other monitoring tools.  We give you the ability to monitor for domain names (yourcompany.com), as well as specific URLs (http://yourcompany.com/product/page.html).

To see if there is any potential for sales, the first thing you should do is monitor Twitter for Tweets that link to pages on your domain.  The Tweets may not reference anything else related to your website or your business, but if it links to your domain, you need to know about it.

If you have specific action pages on your site that you want to track, like landing pages, you probably want to track those as well, and fortunately Socialping can help.  And if you are A/B testing landing pages for people from Twitter, tracking specific URLs is essential to see how many potential people could have seen your tweets, and even how many actually clicked on the links.

Whether you are tracking any link mentioning your domain (really useful for content sites), or you are tracking specific landing page links, you’ll want each to be in it’s own Watchlist.  This will allow you to view the Watchlist Reports that show you the volume of mentions, reach and who the influencers are for the time periods you select.

Creating Watchlists in Socialping is easy, if you you just created an account, using the First Setup flow that you go through after creating your account is the easiest.  Just signup, and follow the steps.

If you already have an account, to create a watchlist, go to your Dashboard or Watchlists page and then click on the link to, “Add a New Watchlist” located in the top right corner of the page.

Twitter ROI Tracking: Buzz Factor

Tracking buzz on Twitter surrounding your business requires a two-prong approach.  Not only will you need to track mentions and comments about your business name, but you’ll also want to track your Twitter accounts, and how many followers, mentions, retweets, Klout and more it’s gaining or losing.

Tracking mentions of your businesses real name is going to be performed using Watchlists, and each of those Watchlists will have the different variations of your company name, and website domains.  To create a watchlist, go to your Dashboard or Watchlists page and then click on the link to, “Add a New Watchlist” located in the top right corner of the page.

To Track your Twitter accounts, you’ll need to add the account to Socialping.  This can be done from the dashboard, or your account settings page.  All you need to do here is authorize it with Twitter, and we’ll automatically start tracking mentions, followers, the links you share (and the clicks they receive), which tweets caused you to receive the most followers and more.

Wrap Up

The most important thing to determine, is exactly what your purpose on Twitter is, and then from there you can easily determine exactly what you need to track.  So what is your purpose on Twitter?  How are you using Socialping to accomplish this?

We are constantly changing things, most of which we feel is for the better, but sometimes we implement them knowing that it’s going to upset a few of our users.  Today is one of those days… Just a little bit ago we deployed the code that enforces the monthly Tweet limits on accounts.  Up until now, even though every plan had a specific limit to the number of Tweets you could bring in each month, you could happily bring in a million tweets a day into your account, and our systems wouldn’t even let you know that you went so far over your limit, let alone actually enforce the limit.  As of today, that is going to end.

The unfortunate reality for us is that we have to pay for each Tweet that comes into our systems, and not in the total expenses divided by total tweets that come into our systems sense, but in the actual hard number sense.  We literally pay Twitter for each and every Tweet.

We understand the need to test the reliability and accuracy of Socialping, but some accounts were bringing in hundreds of thousands of tweets per month as a test (which they likely just forgot about).  And since we pay for each of the Tweets, these tests become very expensive for us very quickly.

This new process will send you warning emails at 50% of your limit, 80% of your limit, 90% of your limit and finally at 95% of your limit.  Finally, if you hit 100% of your monthly limit, your account will be paused until you upgrade to a plan that offers more Tweets per month, or you hit your account cycle date (approximately the same date every month).

Regarding some of the better changes that we’ve recently made, recently we added RSS feeds for each of your watchlists, released a really awesome first time account setup process that walks you through the entire process of setting up your account, upgraded a few parts of our LiveConference (Twitter wall) manager, and most importantly, fixed a ton of bugs throughout Socialping.

Each week we deploy anywhere from 3 to 10 new features and bug fixes and it is our goal to start letting you guys know via blog posts exactly what we released for you, hopefully we can do this update weekly.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments below.

This mentality is wrong, for most people.

Today we are in the middle of a massive Amazon outage that has been going on for many hours already, and no concrete time frame is available for when it will come online again, which brings me to my first point: using a service like AWS means you don’t get the one-on-one customer support you need when running a business that has critical needs, like 100% uptime.

Sure there are ways to load balance between available zones, but as today proves, even that doesn’t always work. In order to be truly available, you need multiple datacenters and those datacenters must from from multiple providers and be far apart from each other, like one on the east coast and the other on the west coast.

My other point is related to billing. Cloud servers ARE NOT CHEAPER, when you run them 24/7. Many people have cited cost savings as the main reason to use AWS. I don’t know about you, but every time I have tested this theory, it always worked out that it was cheaper to use dedicated servers than it did using a virtualized server. Additionally, with virtualized servers, you typically also get reduced disk I/O, network latency and more which make your service run slower.

How many services need to scale up and down their infrastructure daily? Far less than you might think. Today, Foursquare, Quora, CoTweet, Hootsuite, and I’m sure dozen’s more of popular services are offline because of the AWS outage. The only one I see that is likely benefiting from scaling up and down servers is probably Foursquare, the rest probably have their servers running 24/7.

Until recently we’ve always hosted our servers at Steadfast Networks. In the recent months, we switched to using ServerBeach as our primary provider. With both of them, we’ve used multiple dedicated servers in a load balanced, high availability manner. We also use replication and a few other techniques to make sure that our customers data is safe and our service is online all the time. We learned this the hard way in the past.

I know that this post is different from most of our posts on our blog, but we have a lot of experience working with these cloud services, and in that time have determined, they just are not worth it.

We know many people feel strongly about using them.  Feel free to let us know why in the comments below.

As mentioned in our original post, we’re building our new web app on top of our new API, which is also on our new backend (MongoDB and MySQL).  This has been working really well for Socialping since it is making everything run faster, will scale much better and we can ensure that if we can do it on our site, you can do it yourself via the API.

Our Notification System is fully operational and supports more notification methods than our original implementation did.  This new system has a lot of benefits – most importantly, it’s fast, really fast – but it also includes the ability for us to add new notification methods quickly.  Tonight we added our 12th notification method – It was Notifo, and it took just an hour to get it fully up and running (also in part because of their excellent documentation and awesome PHP Library).

Adding watchlist items and tags is also fully complete.  Deleting them via the API is possible and our web app is nearly ready to release the UI to do this.

We have a really robust user management feature that allows you to add users to your account so they can tweet, view reports, set up their own notifications and more.  It’s a very fine-grained solution too.  Don’t want a specific user you just added to be able to send tweets? No problem, just disable that feature from their privileges.

LiveConference (Our Tweet wall feature) is fully functional, as is our Tweet wall manager (allows you to prevent users, keywords or tweets that originated in certain twitter apps from appearing on your tweet wall).  The UI for customizing the look and feel of your tweet wall should be completed in the near future. We’ve done over a dozen events recently where they utilized our tweet wall and we have a number of them in the near future.

The UI for interacting with tweets has been planned out and we are finally starting to work on that.

We have a new snazzy reporting console as well.  You can see Tweet and Retweet volume, unique and absolute reach, percentage of Tweets vs Retweets, time of day distribution, most popular Twitter users, most interaction with the terms you are watching, and can break those down by overall, just tweets or just Retweets. You can also export the charts as PDF’s and other various image formats right from withing the report interface so you can include them in emails or internal reports.  This doesn’t even include the account related stats that we are starting to track.

So, while it is taking a bit longer than expected, hopefully this is reassuring to the thousands of people on our waiting list.  We’re already letting a few of the larger companies in, and they are stress testing it out.  Expect some big announcements soon.

So, here’s an update: By now we’ve finished most of the API and we’ve got a new back-end in testing that is going to hopefully support us much better than the old setup did (for the nerds reading this, we’re using MongoDB for our tweets, Redis for a few things that need really fast access times, and MySQL for the account info).

At this point we’re still planning on rolling out a retrofitted version of the site using our new API instead of it having direct access, I think we are going to be doing more changes to the code than I anticipated, and thus there are likely going to be a few things that in fact, totally new.

I’m starting to get a bit of “can’t wait to release it” excitement because finally a number of the pieces are starting to talk to each other.  Just a few more talking pieces and we’ll have our MVP out and we’ll get to start iterating on it while you guys are trying to break it. Exciting stuff.

Want to help us break it when it comes out? Register for the beta here.