The recent web faceoff series by Mashable pits Twitter vs. Facebook in a poll, “Where do you get more of your news: Twitter or newspapers?”

While posing this question is a great way to gauge social media and its growing importance in our daily lives, I don’t think the comparison of platforms is a fair fight.

Twitter is a medium to share information. And while you could argue that newspapers attempt to do the same, the architecture of each platform is different. Twitter, a micro-blogging platform, is a means to get to the information. It’s the route to your final destination.  You can’t use Twitter to compile a story or write an editorial. Twitter, and social media and general, is used to share information which is mostly contained elsewhere (i.e. newspapers, TV news websites, and blogs).

There is no doubt that newspapers should be harnessing the power of Twitter to drive traffic and market their product. Maybe the better poll to judge where you get your news is to put newspapers in the ring with blogs in a battle of the big guy vs. the little guy.

"The Twitter username I want is already taken" is the likely cry of a lot of people who have just recently decided to join the Twittersphere. If this describes your Twitter signup experience your fortunes may change in the coming weeks.

In recent post on by Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land, Danny caught up with Ev Williams (Twitter cofounder) at the Chirp conference and asked him if/when will Twitter release inactive usernames in bulk.

Williams replied that Twitter hopes to release "deleted names" for reuse within the next few weeks.

While this news doesn't return all "inactive" usernames back into the wild, it should help some Twitter newbies to obtain that username relevant to their personal brand.

More details on the Twitter username status can be found in Danny's write up at searchengineland.com.

This article is a follow up to an earlier post we made "The Twitter Name I Want is Taken but Not Being Used"

Generating automatic content for your Facebook friends and Twitter followers can make life a little easier for you. Let’s face it; there just is never enough time in the day to keep up with everything we would like to. It seems like the “to do” list keeps growing, but the hours in the day remains the same. While it is important to keep the content on your Facebook and Twitter pages fresh and up to date sometimes you blink and it’s 11:00 at night, you still have last months Facebook status and can’t even remember the last twitter update you made. My solution was to create a script that will update Facebook and Twitter automatically for me every day. This way the content is both fresh and more available to searches. I decided to share the process with others and maybe it could save you a few minutes a day.

Ingredients Needed

• Facebook Page / Twitter Account
• Selective Tweets on Application on Facebook
• A Mysql Database
• Perl (this is the language I used, but it can be done with another language)
• Cron or other scheduling software.

The first thing you will need to do is install the Selective Tweet application in Facebook. Selective Tweet will watch a Twitter feed for the phrase “#fb” and if a Tweet contains that phrase it will also update your Fan Page status with that Tweet. On the “Your Fan Pages” tab of Selective Tweet you can enter the Twitter account you would like your page to monitor.

Next we will need to set up the database. I am using a MySQL database because they are lightweight and easy to use. Inside my database I created a simple table with only 3 columns. An unique ID field, a Year Day Field and a Message field. Then I populated the table with one message for everyday of the year, 366 in total to take into account leap year. And in the ID and YearDay columns I entered 1-366. So for the record with YearDay of 94 I would have entered “Happy Easter” as the message because the 94th day of this year was 04/04/2010 (Easter).

Once you have the database setup you can then work on creating the script to update the Twitter account. You can use Perl to post a status update to a URL. What I do is select from the table where the YearDay is (localtime)[7]+1 (which will return the system YearDay). I then use the below command to send the message for the current YearDay to Twitter and append #fb so that my Facebook page will also be updated.

system "curl --basic --user $username:$password --data-ascii status='" . $tweet->{Message} . "#fb' http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json";

Since I have my application on a Linux machine I am using cron to schedule the script to run once a day at 7:00am. If you are on a windows server you can also use Scheduled Tasks to fire off the script.

And that is all there is to it. Now I will have fresh content on my Twitter and Facebook accounts that will hopefully drive more traffic to them. It also allows me the chance to get some of the other things on my to do list done, like mow the grass.

The growth of social media has thrust the demand of URL shorteners into the spotlight. With Google and other search engines showing more and more social media results, URL shorteners provide more than a method to put long links in your status updates. Key factors in choosing a URL shortener are performance, tracking and benefit.

Dy definition URL shortening is a technique on the World Wide Web where a provider makes a web page available under a very short URL in addition to the original address. For example, the page http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=TinyURL&diff=283621022&oldid=283308287 can be shortened to http://tinyurl.com/mmw6lb.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_shortener

A recent article by pingdom revealed a speed test on URL shorteners. In a nutshell; ow.ly, bit.ly, and is.gd performed the best on overhead and uptime metrics. Put these findings into perspective tell us these 3 URL redirect services are reliable resources to use.

The ability to track the statistics on your links is where most URL shorteners are separated. For the purpose of this post, that narrows our set of 3 services down to 2, ow.ly and bit.ly. Both of these services provide solid statistics on clicks and traffic through your shortened URLs.

Lastly, ow.ly and bit.ly operate their redirects in profoundly different ways.  Ow.ly shortens URLs in an iFrame.  Clearly this method offers a solid performance, but iFrames presents hurdles to the user and mainly the service doesn’t truly redirect the user to your site / link. This can be frustrating to both navigation tools and branding purposes. Bit.ly on the other does perform a server side redirect to the source URL.  In fact the 301 redirect is being used and that is the ideal redirect to benefit both end user experience and search engine crawlers.

Bit.ly redirects:
“A 301 redirect is the most efficient and search engine friendly method for webpage redirection, and is what bit.ly uses. Because bit.ly doesn’t re-use our links, we consider our redirects to be permanent.”

In closing the benefit both you, as the webmaster, and the end user should be taken into effect. The advantages that bit.ly provides to webmasters and social media users alike set it a step above the rest when selecting a URL shortening service.