Twitter lists are here and everyone’s talkin’ about ‘em, and figuring out how to use ‘em.  The folks over at twitter are putting the finishing touches on lists and giving access to a lot more people.

You can create two types of lists: Public and Private.  I’ll explain both and offer ways to use them.

1. Public Lists

To get started using twitter lists, make sure you have the ability to create lists.  You’ll know you can create lists if you see the following screen when you login to twitter’s home page.  You’ll also see a New list link on the right side of the page.

Click image for larger view

Click Create a new list and name it whatever you want (25 characters maximum).  Start adding people you follow or people who follow you, or anyone else you find on twitter.  You don’t have to follow someone on twitter to add them to a list.  Likewise, they don’t have to be following you to add them to a list.

People and Categories

One way to start using lists is to place people in categories that are meaningful to you.  So, as suggested by the screen shot above, put family members in a family list, co-workers in a co-workers list, etc.  Pretty straight forward.

Feel free to be creative with your lists.  You don’t have to try and label people how they want to be labeled.  If Johnny wants to be known as an SEO expert and Suzy wants to be know as a Social Media expert, you don’t have to create lists just for those categories of people.

So if you want to put a bunch of bloggers who blog about blogging, seo and social media experts into one list called “incredible-people”, go ahead.  You can put one person in multiple lists.  So if you want to put Johnny in your “incredible-people” list and your “seo” list, go ahead.

Excluding People

List can be exclusionary.  Someone might think they should be in that “TopTweeples” list on that “Big Popular Website”.  I say, twitter is already exclusinoary.  You follow someone you hope will follow you and they don’t.  Oh well.

Reputation Management

How would you like to show up on a list called stupid-people, or something worse?  Not too cool.  What to do?  You can block the person who put you on that list and you’ll be removed from the list.  Voila!!

Time will tell how reputation management issues play out.

2. Private Lists

Private lists are just like public lists except you’re the only one who can view the list.  Not only that, the people you put on private lists won’t even know they’re on them.

If you think someone might block you for whatever reason, don’t follow them, put them on a private list.  Because if they block you after the fact, you won’t be able to follow them or put them on a list.

However, if someone has blocked you and you still want to follow their tweets, there is a way.  Sign up for my newsletter and I’ll send you that tip.

Want another tip on using twitter lists?  Again, if you subscribe to my newsletter, I’ll send you one more tip that I’m using to keep up with my favorite lists.

Well, I received my Google Wave invitation and I can’t wait to dig in and check it out.  Oops, none of my friends are on Google Wave yet.  What to do?

Okay, I went over to Twitter and tweeted that if anyone wanted to test Google Wave, I was available at billbolmeier [at] googlewave [dot] com.

I also received 20 invites with Google Wave so I could send out invites to my friends email addresses.  Not only did I send a few out to friends that I knew were waiting for invites, I also posted a message on Facebook and Twitter.

Hoping to spark interest for Google Wave, I now have a few folks on it so we can test and experiment with waves.

What is Google Wave?

At its most basic definition, Google Wave is:

“An online communication and collaboration tool that makes real-time interactions more seamless — in one place, you can communicate and collaborate using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is a conversation with multiple participants — participants are people added to a wave to discuss and collaborate on its content. Participants can reply any time and anywhere within a wave, and they can edit content and add more participants as a wave develops. It’s also possible to rewind waves with the playback functionality, to see what happened, and when.”

Here are some images to help:

Click image for larger view (800 px)

As you can see from the image above, there are basically four panels:

1. Your Navigation Panel (upper left) – The Navigation Panel allows you to filter your list of waves including all your waves, waves created by you, waves created by others who requested you to be on a wave.  There’s more to the Navigation Panel but that’s a good start.
2. Below the Navigation Panel is the Contacts list. What more do I need to say, it’s your Google contact list that you can include people on your waves, assuming they have Google Wave.
3. In the middle is the list of waves that is filtered by your Navigation Panel.  The list looks like a typical email list with subject and a brief description of the wave based on so many characters of the wave.  It also includes a menu bar where you can create new waves, delete waves, archives waves and many other options.
4. The final panel to the far right is your wave conversation panel.  It lists the conversation of a wave.  Above the conversation are images of the folks that are included on the wave.  A menu bar offers common commands you’ll find in email such as reply, archive, delete, spam, trash, etc.  One cool feature of Google Wave is the Playback button.  It allows you to playback the conversation of a wave.  Very cool.  However, it doesn’t end there, as mentioned above, this is where you can share videos, formatted text, attachments, images, maps, and more.  Extensions really bring out the power in Google Wave.  We’ll explore those in another article.

So here’s the deal.  Once you receive your Google Wave invite and would like to connect with other Google Wavers, add your Google Wave contact information below in the comments.  If you’d like to reveal what you’re interested in, such as technology or parenting or poker, etc. that could act as a spring board to connecting with like-minded people.

Playing with The Public

If you want to watch and play with the public you can enter with:public above your list of Waves.  This will generate a rapid, “live” listing of waves.  So if you’d like to slow that down, you might want to enter something like with:public Parenting or something that you’re interested in watching the public “Wave” about.

Want to create your own public stream of waves?  Add public@a.gwave.com as a contact.  Then you can create Waves that the public can get involved with.  When you type in public@a.gwave.com as a contact, it will display a message about the contact not existing, just press the enter key and you’ll be good to go.

That’s it for now.  If you don’t have an invite keep looking for one by asking your friends online.  You might want to do a twitter search for people who are advertising they have Google Wave invites with this query on Twitter google wave invites.   Whatever you do, don’t pay for one.

See you on the Wave!!  Hang Ten!!  

Photo Credit: leszekwasilewski

Google’s got the goods. They introduced Google Social Search today.

What is Google Social Search? When you do a search using Google and you belong to various social networks like Twitter, FreindFeed, YouTube, etc., at the end of the first page of your Google search results, you’ll have Results from people in your social circle for…(fill in what you’re searching on).

The search results listed will include two listings from your “Social Circle” that include articles pertaining to what you’re searching for but from your social circle. If you click on the Results from people in your social circle link, you’ll be taken to a whole bunch of search results directly from the various social networks/social services you belong to.  What’s your social circle?  Keep reading.

How to Get Started with Google Social Search

1. Google Profile – Do you have a Google Profile? If not, you’ll want to create a Google Profile.  Provide as much information about yourself as you can.

While you’re creating your Google Profile, you’ll be able to list the social networks or social services that you participate in and would like to list on your profile.  Below is an image of the social networks I currently have listed on my profile.

The social networks or services you belong to are where Google Social Search will pull the information your searching on when you do a Google search and you are logged into Google.  And just a reminder: Log into Google to include the social search results.  These social networks or services make up part of your social circle.

2. Google Talk – Google Social Search also has the ability to include chats with your buddies from Google Talk.  Google Talk is an IM or Instant Messaging system from Google.  You can use it in a web browser to chat online with friends or even from a mobile phone by browsing to m.google.com/talk on your mobile phone.  These chats are included in your social circle.  You have complete control over whether or not you want to include these in your social searches.

3. Google Reader – Do you subscribe to blogs? If so, great.  If not, browse over to Google Reader and start subscribing to some of your favorite blogs.  As you add blogs to your Google Reader they will become available in your Google Social Search.  Google Reader also makes up your social circle.

These three tools: Your Google Profile, Google Talk and Google Reader, make up your social circle that get included on your Google searches resulting in Google Social Searches.  Whew!!  Happy searching.

Helpful Links:

• Google Search Basics
• Google Social Search Features

Photo Credit: fdecomite

In my first article Running WordPress on Your Computer, I explained how to go about downloading the tools you need to run WordPress locally on your PC so you can design themes, development plugins or just stay on top of the WordPress beta releases that come flying out the door everyday.

Well, there’s another way to install WordPress locally on your PC and it’s part of the Microsoft Web Platform.

So here’s what you do:

1. Browse over to the Microsoft Web Platform home page and click the Get Started button.  On the following page you’ll click on the “Get the Microsoft Web Platform Installer” button.  There will be a “Download” button on the right-side of the page that will download a file called wpilauncher.exe (Web Platform Installer).  View the System Requirements link under the download button to make sure you got the goods.

2. After you’ve downloaded the Web Platform Installer, install it.  After the launcher starts, you might need to install additional components depending on your current Windows setup.  For instance, if you don’t have IIS (Microsoft Web Server Internet Information Server) installed, this is when you’ll have a chance to do that.  Note: You might need to find your Windows install disk just in case the install asks for it.

3. Once you’ve installed the Web Platform Installer, you’ll be able to browse a bunch of web apps that are available for you to install on your computer.  In the WPI, select the Web Applications tab on the left and click the A to Z button at the top.  Scroll to the bottom where you’ll find WordPress.

4. You’ll be presented with a screen regarding various passwords.  Pick a standard password you’ll remember.  If everything goes well, you should see the following screen.

5. Okay, keep going.  After WordPress is installed click on the Launch WordPress link.  After a few moments WordPress will launch and ask you to title your blog.  Do not check the box that asks you whether you want to include your blog in the search engines.  Kind of pointless since you’ll be running a blog on your PC no one will be able to access – possibly.

6. After you install WordPress, you’ll see the admin login with a randomly generated password.  Copy the password and continue to login to your blog with the admin login and password you just copied.

First things first, go to the recommended Users screen and change your password to something memorable.  Seriously do this, because the next time you go to login to your blog it will be easier to remember a memorable password as oppossed to the randomly generated one.

After you change your password, logout of WordPress and log back in to make sure the password you entered works.

Guess What?  That’s it.  Click on View Site at the top of WordPress to view your blog.

You’ve installed the Microsoft Web Platform and the WordPress blogging software.  Now on to bigger and better things with WordPress, like finding some themes you like and installing them.  And that will be for future articles.  Have fun.  

If you’re a blogger and would like to include video on your WordPress.com or self hosted WordPress.org blog, you might want to give Automattic’s VideoPress a try.

You’ll need a WordPress.com account (Free) and VideoPress will cost you $59.97 per year or $0.16 cents a day.  Not too bad.  It’s available from the Upgrade page on your WordPress.com account.

It features HD quality videos as well as a clean and uncluttered interface.  If you have a self-hosted WordPress.org blog, VideoPress is available via a plugin.

Internet Marketer and Wordpress guru Joost de Valk created a video at his blog about VideoPress and how to use it VideoPress: Web Video, WordPress Style.  Below is the video that is displayed on the VideoPress website.

Tip: Click the On icon next to the HD icon and play the video in full screen by clicking the icon in the lower right-hand corner of the video. This will show you the quality of an HD video at full screen.

New to facebook?  Need some guidance on getting started with facebook? Well you don’t have to look very far as facebook’s Help Center offers plenty of information for you to get started.

Finding People

Not so obvious sometimes, but look at facebook itself and start with the Getting Started Guide.  With this guide you’ll be able to answer the following questions:

1. How to find friends on facebook
2. How to find classmates on facebook
3. How to find coworkers on facebook
4. How to do a name search on facebook
5. How to edit your profile and upload your profile photo on facebook
6. How to upload photos to facebook and tag yourself and your friends
7. How to find out what’s going on with your friends on facebook as well as their photos

TIP: You can also type in a Google (or your favorite search engine) search like this: bill bolmeier facebook

While checking out the Getting Started Guide, see the accompanying Help Center and Safety pages.  The Safety page describes how facebook does not allow anyone under 13 years old to have access and parents should consider supervising anyone under 13 years old who is accessing facebook.

There’s also an email address abuse @ facebook (dot) com for people to complain about about nudity, pornography, harassment or unwelcome contact.  Your complaint will be acknowledged within 24 hours and a response issued within 72 hours.

The Safety page also lists websites for you to read more on internet safety in general as well as Safety FAQs for users and parents.

Privacy Settings

After reviewing the above help information, I recommend visiting the Privacy page where you can set details related to the following categories:

1. Privacy -> Profile – By default under both Basic and Contact Information I set every drop-down to Only Friends
2. Privacy -> Search – By default I set Search Visibilty to Everyone.  This allows anyone on facebook to search on facebook for me.  You can certainly adjust this as you see fit. (see below)
3. Privacy -> Search – Under Search Result Content I checked: My profile picture, a link to add me as a friend and a link to send me a message (see below)
4. Privacy – Public Search Listing – I check Create a public search listing (see below)

Privacy -> News Feed and Wall

I might change these settings but see the image below to see how I have mine set.  By default I believe facebook has all of these checked but I uncheck all of them to start and then look at each one to determine if I want certain information to always be broadcast to people.

For the remainder of the security settings, I use the default settings at this time for Applications.  There’s also a Block List that you can use to block people by name or email address.

TIP: When you add new friends, start using Lists right from the get go.  You can use these lists later on to control who sees what as well as just a good mechanism to organize your vast amount of friends you’ll acquire as you use facebook.  Create lists as you add friends and create lists by navigating to your Friends -> All Friends menu selection, look in the left-hand column for creating and managing lists.

That’s it!!  If you’d like, Friend me on Facebook.

If you’re like a lot of folks who send scheduled tweets to twitter via whatever service you use, here’s a way to send your scheduled tweets to twitter and a status update to facebook at the same time.

The Twitter Side

HootSuite allows you to send twitter tweets immediately or later (scheduled tweets).  You can add multiple profiles for your one HootSuite account if that’s something you’re looking for.

The above image will send a tweet at 11:10pm on Wedensday, 09-09-2009.

The Facebook Side

Now, browse over to facebook and install Selective Twitter Status.  All you have to provide at this point is your twitter username and click the save button.

After installing the Selective Twitter Status facebook app, type your tweet into HootSuite as seen below with an ending #fb tag and your scheduled or immediate tweet will go to both twitter and facebook.

That’s it!!  The purpose of this article was to show how you can schedule a tweet to twitter as well as send that tweet to your facebook as a status update.

If you use TweetDeck, Seesmic or any other twitter client, you might  already have the capability to send a tweet to both twitter and facebook but not on a schedule.  So this is a free and easy way to get the job done.  I love TweetDeck by the way and would love to see a scheduler in there.  We’ll see.

Control Freaks

If you really want to have a lot of control over multiple social media sites and the scheduled information you’d like to disseminate whether it’s from your blog, twitter, facebook or other social media sites, you can try the service postlater.

If you found this article hlepful for yourself or anyone you know, consider retweeting it and/or saving it to delicious.  I appreciate the support and you’ll be a more awesomer person for it.      Awesomer – Yes, that is correct engish.

Here are 7 cool web tools to help you with your web work.  From creating online diagrams to an online business card for the web to good old bookmarking apps, a blogging platform and more.  Enjoy!!

1. Creately

Creately is an online diagramming tool I used recently to replace the diagramming stalwart Microsoft Visio.  Although Visio has been around forever and contains many tools to get the job done and much more, you might not want to plunk down the dollars it costs.  Besides, it might be over kill for hat you’re trying to accomplish.

You can create typical flowchart diagrams with Creately’s built-in flowchart objects as well as network diagrams, organizational charts, sitemaps, and more.  All these diagrams have objects that you can drag around on your diagram, tweak and design.

A very cool feature of Creately is the online collaboration, sharing and export features.  You can allow your colleagues to collaborate on a diagram, send it to twitter, export it to an image, embed it, email it, link to it, as well as export it as a pdf.

2. Card.ly

Wouldn’t it be cool to create a web-based business card?  (Yes it would Bill, tell us how.)  Well, browse on over to Card.ly and start creating one.

Card.ly walks you through a 5-step process to create an attractive online business card:

1. Select from a bunch of different social media sites where you hang out at and want people to find you.  Just pick the site and enter your name for that site and Card.ly will build the link automatically for you and verify it.
2. Enter your personal details that you want to share with people like your website or blog, your birth date, gender, an avatar, your location, a short bio as well as a long description and other data you might want to share with folks.
3. Pick from a gallery of excellent designs.  If you’re a premium member you’ll have more pro design choices.
4. Step 4 allows you to tweet your new Card.ly online business card.
5. You’ll also be able to grab embed code or link code to place Card.ly on your website or blog.

There is a premium membership that allows many other features incluing removing the “nofollow” attribute to external links.  This is cool because by removing the “nofollow” attribute you’ll get some link juice from the search engines via the Card.ly website.

Here’s my Card.ly card.

3. Evernote

Evernote is a bookmarking web app on sterioids.  I continue to use Google Notebook and have for a long time but since they stopped allowing new users to join, well, I’m pretty sure one day Google Reader will be history, so time to find a replacement.  Evernote really fills the bill and more.

Once you create an account you’ll be able to drag the Evernote Bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmark toolbar.  Then, when you find a website or part of a web page for instance, you’ll be able to click on the Evernote Bookmarket “Clip to Evernote” and the page will be saved for you or the selection of a web page.  You’ll be prompted for additional information you can provide as well as select how the clip displays in Evernote.

There are so many features including excellent mobile support that it’s best to read about them on their What is Evernote? web page.

4. Instapaper

Instapaper is minimalism.  And that is good.  A bookmarking app, Instapaper works by first creating an account and dragging their bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmark toolbar.

Whenever you want to quickly bookmark a web page, you click on the “Read Later” bookmarklet and Instapaper flashes a small, unobtrusive window that opens up and simply says, “Saved!” or “Updated!”.  That’s it.  Later you can go and read your bookmarks in a simple list at the Instapaper website.  As you read them they will automatically move to archive.  You can also categorize your links into folders you create.

5. Google Mobile

Google has so many cool apps that it’s almost hard to experience them all.  But what I’ve found recently and used is the Top Search Trends which has been around for awhile and now you can also get it on your mobile phone that allows you to browse the web at http://www.google.com/m/trends

What can you do with Google’s Top Search Trends?  Well if you’re an internet marketer looking for what’s popular then Google’s Top Search Trends could be something to watch and use in your marketing efforts.  Need a topic to blog about and want to write about something popular?  Use Google Top Search Trends.

Also, on the Google Mobile radar is their Google Mobile page in your browser as well as their mobile apps page on your phone.

6. Posterous

Want to start blogging but don’t want to go through the hassle of registering a domain name and all the stuff you have to go through that involves setting up a self-hosted blog?  Check out Posterous.

Posterous is a very popular site that allows you to blog by sending email to your account at Posterous as well as creating a blog posts at the site.

There’s also a built-in image gallery if you send images attached to an email, and that includes images sent from your mobile phone.  If you can send email with attachments from your phone, then you can create an image gallery that includes thumbnail images of your larger images.  See an example below.

These are some of the background images I have on my Palm Pre.  So I sent them to Posterous via my Pre to see how they looked in the gallery.  There’s also a command you can include that will just list the images and not put them in a gallery.

7. Dropbox

Last but not least is Dropbox.  With Dropbox you get 2 GB of space for free that allows you to sychronize files between computers.

Once you install the necessary software on your computer, you’ll get an icon in your taskbar that resemble an open box and you can start dropping files in there.  It also creates a “My Dropbox” folder by default under your “My Documents” folder in Windows.

You can use Dropbox as an online backup tool or share photos, documents, large files as well as track and undo changes to files.  Very handy.  You can pay for more space as well.