Updates from the innovative and colorful social media hub Twimbow

What is a Twitter chat? A Twitter chat is a live event where many users tweet about a certain subject and can be easily followed by activating a live search of the tag that identifies that specific chat. You can find a great definition of “Twitter chat” on Quora:

Twitter chats are scheduled gatherings of people on Twitter to discuss pretty much anything that interests them, using a #hashtag to keep track of the conversation. There are chats for everything from blogging to art to agriculture.

For example, here is a screenshot of a series of tweets for the Twitter chat #swchat

On Twimbow for Google Chrome, this search for #swchat will be performed in real-time, so that you can keep track of what’s going on.

Every user involved in a Twitter chat knows very well that in order to participate to the chat actively, every tweet sent must contain the corresponding hashtag (in this example, #swchat) at the end of the tweet. There are actually two ways to do that automatically on Twimbow:

1) insert hashtags into replies: just turn on this option from settings

This option is fine when you just want to participate to the chat by engaging with other people who are actively chatting.

2) insert the chat tag, in this example #swchat, as your signature. You can do that from the account tab in the settings pane. This is very useful if you want to enter a “chat mode” and each of your tweets will be related to the chat. In this case, it’s better you turn the previous option (1) off, otherwise that tag will be duplicated when you reply.

Easy right? We highly recommend to use Google Chrome for Twitter chats in order to get realtime searches.

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In the past weeks, thanks to our faithful users, we realized that there are a few hidden settings that could actually make the overall Twimbow experience much better despite are quite hidden for the user.

Here are three hidden features that can make your day.

Enable full-size toolbar

Some users asked us how to keep the reply-all contextual tool always visible. Why one more click when it could be always visible (most users use that option a lot)? It’s pretty easy: open settings and switch the last option at the bottom (“Tools expanded by default”) to ON. Easy right? You will move from this:

to this, without any additional click

Add a signature to your tweets

This option is particularly useful when more than one user is managing the same twitter account, usually for customer service. You can easily add a custom signature at the end of your tweets through the option below. Select the account and add the custom signature (“include signature” at the bottom).

Switch to  two-columns view

Three columns are too much for you? Your screen resolution is not too high? You want to get rid of the search column on the right? Easy task: switch to “compact mode”, that is two columns only. This option is on the second tab of the settings pane, on the right under the “skin” section. You will get something like this:

Please, take a look at the settings section, you could find lots of useful features you were not aware of. (yet) ;-)

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Posting to multiple Facebook accounts or pages was one of the most requested features that finally arrived in version 1.8 released early in February.

First of all you need to add your Facebook accounts to Twimbow. At this stage, you can add up to 3 accounts/pages (total).

You can add your Facebook accounts from two areas: the settings pane, Facebook accounts tab, or straight from the “New Message Window”.

From the settings pane, just click on the Facebook tab and click on the “add account or page” button, then follow the on-screen instructions to login to Facebook and choose the accounts you want to add to Twimbow. Make sure to authorize the Twimbow Facebook app when asked to.

 

After you click “continue”, you should get back to the settings pane and see the new accounts you added (was empty previously).

 

From the “new message” window, instead, you can easily add your accounts by clicking on the “+” button at the bottom:

Everything should work fine, but you should have any problem, don’t hesitate to contact us :-)

 

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Another incredible version of Twimbow is now available, just two weeks after the previous release. We definitely wanted to make our users happy ;-) As usual, please make sure to delete your browser’s cache in order to make sure to see the new features (better you logout, close your browser and login back again).

Here is what’s new in this version:

Release notes v1.9

  • Twitter trends: Twitter trends are now available through an icon on the main toolbar. You can see trends from anywhere in the world and see how big each trend is in terms of “tweets volume” ;-)
  • Pinterest: support of native image preview from Pinterest
  • Hashtags into replies: now you can disable this option from settings (that is hashtags copied into replies of a message containing those hashtags)
  • Emoticon for “LOL”: some users reported that the famous expression “LOL” was replaced by an emoticon. We fixed this (doesn’t make much sense).
  • Link to Twitter profiles: link to Twitter profiles (like http://twitter.com/twimbow) are now opened inside Twimbow with the profile browser
  • FIX – space after username: in replies containing hashtags, a blank space after the username was missed (as many users reported, quite annoying). We added it.

Here is the new Twitter trends panel:

Enjoy this new version and let us know what you think!

Today we are very happy to announce that a new version of Twimbow (v1.8) is available to everyone. This is definitely a major release of our social media dashboard since we introduced a lot of improvements and new much-requested features. Here is what’s new.

Release notes (v1.8)

  • Facebook cross-posting: You can now add up to three facebook accounts/pages and send status updates to those accounts, too.
  • Twitter cross-posting: If you have multiple Twitter accounts on Twimbow, you can now send the same status update to multiple accounts at the same time
  • emoticons: you now see graphical emoticons. This option can be disabled from settings
  • redesigned “new message” window: the new message window has been completely redesigned and new accounts can be added directly from there
  • additional colors: more colors available!
  • URL auto-shortening: when you write / paste a URL in the new message window, the number of the characters left will take into account that the URL will be shortened (using the t.co format)
  • preview of message you are replying to: the message you are replying to is now shown in the new message window
  • tags on replies: if a message you are replying to contains tags, those are automatically added to the new message
  • signatures: you can now add a default signature to your status updates; very useful in case more people are managing the same account
  • new “send later” option: “slots” have now been moved to the “new message” window. More scheduling options will be added soon
  • slots shuffle: added the ability to re-order your scheduled messages randomly
  • go to source in reader (is back): the option to go to the original source in the Twimbow Reader is now back
  • native retweets bug: we fixed a bug, on Google Chrome, that was pushing native retweets by users whose native retweets were disabled on Twitter.com
  • improved RSS reader: some feeds were not working properly in the previous version, we fixed that
Here is what the new message window looks like:

Tons of bugs have been fixed, too, despite there are a few issues that have to be fixed yet. Please tell us what you think, your feedback is, as usual, much appreciated and very helpful to make Twimbow even more powerful.

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Many faithful users know very well what makes Twimbow unique. It’s actually a mix of innovative features and UI design that make Twimbow special, but today we would like to share with our new users five things that you can’t find elsewhere and definitely make Twimbow stand out of the competition.

1) Realtime

On Google Chrome, Twimbow lets you get any type of message in real-time. Your main timeline, mentions, retweets and so on, everything gets pushed to your browser as soon as it happens. Unlike other dashboards, on Twimbow you can disable the “auto-refresh” of tweets (unusable if you receive too many messages), so you have realtime but you can decide when to actually see them.

2) Colors

On Twimbow, colors are everywhere. You can add colors to your tweets (other Twimbow users can see them colored), assign color labels to users, change colors of messages related to you (mentions, DM, RTs), change your Twimbow skin with a new colored one… it’s just up to you.

3) Music Player

On Twimbow you can easily listen to and share your favorite music while tweeting. You can also choose any song and enable the “radio mode” so that Twimbow will play related songs automatically and continuously. The usic player has been updated recently and now it’s even more powerful than ever.

4) Reader

Any article and blog post your Twitter friends share is automatically opened inside the Twimbow Reader, a powerful news reader where you can read and share content, see what other users are reading and choose your favorite news sources so that those can always be at your fingertip.

5) Monitor

Want to keep track of what’s going on about things and users that matter for you? Just add them to the monitor. You will get real-time notifications about new occurrences of keywords, tags, new tweets from lists or from specific users.

Stay tuned, new exciting features are coming to Twimbow, very soon ;-)

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We are happy to announce that we just released a new version 1.7 of Twimbow. Not many changes and we are aware a few little bugs you reported might be still there, but we wanted to make sure to release a major update to the Twimbow reader just before Christmas!

What’s the Twimbow Reader? Since the first releases of Twimbow, the Reader let you preview articles and blog posts from within Twimbow, without the need of opening a new browser tab. It was very useful to “consume” news from within Twimbow, but the concept was very simple. Today, we greatly improved the Reader and it now became a real dashboard inside the dashboard, from which you can discover news, keep track of what you read, see what other Twimbow readers are reading, bookmark your favorite content, share your favorite news and so on. The news is also that you can now open the Reader from the main toolbar, whenever you want.

Twimbow Reader

There are actually a few features missing, yet, but those will be added in the next release. Sync with Instapaper and Read Later, share on Facebook and a few other features, for example, will be available in the next release. At this point, we wanted to release the new Reader as soon as possibile in order to get users feedback and make it better in the next release

The new Twimbow Reader is, together with the new music widget released in the past release, another important step in order to make Twimbow a powerful tool to consume news and media socially, transforming it into something way more powerful than a social media dashboard.

What do you think? Please tell us!

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As promised, after the release of a Mac App that works as a shortcut to run Twimbow as a standalone app on Mac OSX (more or less), here is a Windows installer to do the same under Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.

On Windows, we couldn’t really use a separate Chrome instance, so it should share cookies with your main Chrome installation.

You can download the ZIP with the EXE inside from the button down here. If you have any problem, please drop us a line (Google Chrome must be installed in your machine).

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According to the feedbacks we got from our users, it seems that a small percentage of you prefer standalone apps over web apps. I am not among them, personally, but I can understand their standpoint. Despite it is a small percentage, we tried to figure out how to make everyone happy.

Since we invested a lot in Twimbow as a powerful HTML5 app and at this time native apps are not our priority (neither running an HTML5 app inside) we found a very good compromise: a full-featured HTML5 Chrome App running on Mac OSX as a standalone app. You get a dock icon, desktop notifications and a stand-alone behavior, but leveraging our powerful and fast Google Chrome App.

That said, here is Twimbow for Mac! It’s our first release so we definitely need your feedback to improve it. A Windows version will be available in the following days, so please stay tuned.

You can download the DMG from the button down here. If you have problems, please drop us a line (Google Chrome must be installed in your machine).

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We are happy to announce that a new version of Twimbow is now available.

We fixed lots of bugs introduced with the real-time version in Google Chrome and we also added a new music widget that lets you listen to music while staying in touch with your friends way more easier than before. You can also discover more new friends who love the music you love ;-) More widgets will be available soon, all focused on making news and media consumption on top of Twitter and other social networks an outstanding experience for all Twimbow users.


Release notes for version 1.6
NEW: brand new music player widget (more widgets to come, stay tuned)
NEW: real-time for Chrome users: now available for everyone!
NEW: four new skins (Christmas!)
NEW: now the main toolbar is shown with one format only (no big one anymore)
NEW: improved anti-spam filterFIX: some fixes in the real-time management in Google Chrome

FIX: gaps (missing tweets) in home buzz when auto-refresh tweets was ON
FIX: sometimes the ability to go back in time was not possible in home buzz
FIX: DM or tweets sent from other clients were not showing up in real-time on Chrome
FIX: image previews not working for certain formats and links
FIX: error when you try to add the same Twitter account more than once
FIX: filters: now links contained in shortened links are properly filtered
FIX: reply-all available for native retweets (to the original sender and the user who retweeted)
FIX: Google Buzz (service no more available) is now “grey”. Will be removed completely soon.
FIX: other minor bug fixes

Please feel free to contact us for any information you might need about the new version. Enjoy!
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