Gahlord Dewald clued me in on this one. He knows how much I desire to listen and we have shared a common listening strategy for years. We try to listen to help. Gahlord likes to look for “the special hashtag people use when looking to be helped.” It’s called a question mark. And it’s a powerful hashtag indeed.

The folks at inboxQ understand this: “We started InboxQ because we realized that there were lots of questions being asked by people on Twitter but most weren’t receiving very useful answers. In fact, most questions go completely unanswered on Twitter.” And that’s a fact.

What inboxQ does is find that special hashtag for you. Pop in a few keywords and inboxQ begins scouring twitter, looking for people you can assist. Your first step is to create what they call “campaigns.”

A campaign is simply a category of keywords or hashtags used to delineate possible questions to be answered. You can create as many campaigns as you wish. The campaign opened for view above is called “wordpress.” And I’ve been using the inboxQ Chrome extension to answer questions using the Zeek Interactive account on Twitter for a few days now.

It  has been uncovering 20-30 questions each day.

You can answer the questions right in the extension’s window, without having to fire up Twitter or any of their third party apps, as you can see above. Of course, you can also see that I could be a bit more diligent about opening up the extension. Questions, after all, are best answered when someone is around to listen. Though, my results have been pretty good so far, even without constant attention.

Blog Post Fodder

Another thing the questions are good for is blog post ideas. I’m using the “TODO” tab to save questions I feel require more than 140 characters. Like these:

After a few days, the results have been very positive. I’ve been able to answer a few questions and create some good dialogue around WordPress, conversations we want to take part in. I’m not answering the question with any other desire than to help. But sometimes the questions open up an opportunity to talk about what we do as well. Witness this exchange:

I didn’t know James Hicks before I saw his question. And I know I would never have seen his question before inboxQ. I have no idea where it will lead, but I already consider the minute (total) I spent on it valuable. I hope James does as well.

What’s missing from inboxQ?

It does what it says it does really well, so there are only two things I’d really like to see added. First, the ability to add multiple accounts. I’d like to use the tool for other Twitter accounts I monitor, but it only allows for one account to be connected at a time right now. I can’t imagine this isn’t part of their future development strategy. Second, I’d like them to charge for it. I’m tired of seeing services like this drop off the map because they don’t have a way of making money. I’d pay for this one.

What kind of “listening to help” campaigns would you create?

I’ve tried every Twitter application on the iPhone, including the favorites Twinkle, Twitterific, and Twittelator. I’ve even tried Tweetsville, TwitterFon and GPSTwit and fired off photos with Twitfire. But in the end, I always ended up coming back to Hahlo, a web-based Twitter client built specifically for the iPhone.

Why? Simplicity and the ability to separate “replies” from “direct messages.” I wish it were more complicated than that. It’s not. I don’t want my direct messages mixed in with my replies and I certainly don’t want them mixed into my friend stream, indicated only by color. I want to choose easily whether to reply in public or private and I want to be certain that choice is honored. Hahlo did all of that for me. Tweetsville does it as well, but doesn’t allow me to access replies on the main screen. And… the one feature that was missing from Hahlo, was the ability to retweet, to easily repost something interesting.

Tweetie gives me all of that and more.

It is has now replaced Hahlo on my main iPhone toolbar. Tweetie allows me to set up multiple Twitter accounts, as you can see below. That’s helpful. My only “complaint” is that they’ve gone overboard on the text bubbles. I’d like to see more tweets on screen at one time and the graphics are taking up too much space.

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That said, the fact that “Tweets,” “Replies,” and “Messages” are easily accessef from the main menu was the first clue that I was going to like this app. And when I choose to reply, the option buttons are large and easy to hit accurately. I can’t tell you how frustrating the small icons on most of the iPhone apps are to hit accurately.

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The ability to copy and paste links was an unexpected bonus! When you access a link in a tweet, it opens inside the Tweetie browser.

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The icon on the lower left then gives you the ability to either open the link in Safari or “post the link,” which copies a shortened URL into a new tweet. Sweet.

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Ahh, but there’s more. Easy access to Twitter Search features and trends. And a quick way to search for tweets directed at me, but not directly at me, via the “Search @ResPres” button.

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In addition, Tweetie allows me to save drafts and easily follow and favorite right from the app. Simply put, this is finally a Twitter iPhone App I can recommend. Now, if only Twitter would take the limits off the API. The reason I keep resorting to Search.Twitter.com, even on the iPhone, is this:

But I know it’s not Tweetie’s fault. So, my first click is on Tweetie now. If that fails, then my saved Twitter Search icons are my fallback plan.

TextExpander has greatly simplified the task of getting common emails responses out to customers for me without having to rely on cut-and-paste or a template email that I have to find in a folder somewhere. And I’m not just talking about using a keyboard shortcut to generate my signature. Sure, TextExpander can do that too but it’s real power shows off when you can craft a full page email with formatted text or even generate AppleScript (which I haven’t tried yet). I have only touched the surface of what this program can do for me – I’ve only written about how I use it with email but TextExpander can work in all applications.

I can’t do it enough justice here in a short post so you really need to check out the videos. TextExpander is available from Smile On My Mac and there is a downloadable trial.

I’d be interested in hearing about how others are creatively using TextExpander as well.

Download all of the Mac Mail Stationery files discussed on this blog.

I’m in love with ScreenFlow from Vara. Every effect you see in the video is done inside ScreenFlow after recording. It’s a truly amazing application and I’m up at 2:45am as a result. I’ve never seen a better screen capture application.

Not ever.

Simply Amazing: Screenflow from Vara Software from reshows on Vimeo.

This is true of WireTap Studio, the recently released update to Wiretap from Ambrosia Software. This Macintosh only audio recording and editing app is truly amazing.

The video below will give you a look at what I think makes it so special – real time application of sound effects.

I’m not a sound engineer. I’m never going to be a sound engineer. So, I don’t know what every effect does or what each of the controls do. The only way to know is to try.

In the past, this meant the following: try, wait for the effect to render, try again, wait for the render, take a guess at what I just did wrong, try again, wait for the render. WireTap Studio changes that. Everything is real time. And any effect applied is non-destructive. That means my original sound file is not touched. So, I can experiment with abandon knowing that the original recording is always there to go back to.

Words on paper just won’t do this justice. The video below is not an attempt at a full review of WireTap Studio. This is a quick illustration of it’s real time effect rendering.

Click here to view the embedded video.