The tool is super easy to use, enter keywords or possible words you’d like in the name. Let’s say you want to open a vegan bakery (not the most original startup idea, but just go with it). I enter the keywords vegan, bakery, baking, treats, cakes, simple, healthy, chocolate, tasty, delish. Then I enter the prefixes little, and the. Then pick some suffixes like, ous, ly, and shop. Mix it up and here’s what I got.

More options than I could show you! Mixnomer not only shows you the available domain, but if the twitter username is available as well. Right now the list is ordered by the number of characters in the URL. But I can rearrange to show my favorites on top.

Some of my favorites from this search were DELISHVEGAN.COM, LITTLETASTY.COM, THEDELISH.COM, lots of options I would have never thought would be available domains.

So play around with it, I’d love to see what cool domains you guys come up with! (full disclosure, mixnomer is a company I have been consulting for, but I honestly think it’s an awesome product!)

The video is embedded below. Please watch it and comment. I would love to continue the conversation that was started at #140conf.

For a good part of the beginning of the video, the camera guy didn’t realize I was on the panel, and I guess thought I was just the moderator. So he cut me out of the shot. But he figures it out half way through.

The first is Smarty Pig. Smarty Pig is a savings account with social aspects. This all started when I asked twitter if there was a way for me to save for specific goals and let other people also donate money towards those goals. Sure there were things like ChipIn, but that was only to show progress in collecting money, I wanted to also show my own savings progress. So someone suggested I check out Smarty Pig.

When you create a Smarty Pig account, you are actually opening a real FDIC insured savings account that has a 2.01% APY. Then within that account, you set up specific savings goals. That can be a family vacation, college savings for your children, or maybe just something you want to splurge on.

You set up these savings goals and choose how often you want to contribute to that goal, and how much. This was perfect for me because it allowed me to take out an amount from my check each week to save for rent, and then at the end of the month, I had my rent money without even thinking about it.

Next you can choose if you want to make the goal public or private. Certain goals like my rent, I kept private. But for other things, like my trip to SXSW, I can keep it public so that my friends and family can help me save too.

Once you reach your savings goal you have a few options. You can have the money deposited back into your checking account, Smarty Pig can send you a debt card with your savings, or you can choose to receive up to a 12% cash boost on your savings by placing it on a retail card like Amazon.com, Best Buy, Travelocity or Macy’s. You can even spilt your savings among the three, to find the best option for you.

You can add widgets for your facebook or blog so that all of your friends can help you save. I put one in my blog footer.

In case you are unaware, Twitter is rolling out an official retweet feature that is in beta right now. It allows users to RT with just one click (no more copying and pasting tweets), and it provides a way for people to easily see how much their tweets are being retweeted.

Now there are some obvious drawbacks to this. The new feature only lets you RT the tweet as it was originally written, you can’t modify it or add your comments. For some people this is a drawback, but for others it’s a plus.

It’s a drawback if you frequently like adding comments to the things you RT, and it could be positive because tweets no longer need to be short enough to add your username to be “re-tweet-able”. A tweet that is exactly 140 characters can easily be retweeted now, where in the past it would have needed to be shortened to allow space for RT @that persons username.

One reason that I like the new RT feature is that it helps to regulate fake RT’s and is a great way to discover new people to follow.

A few things I would change:

1. Avatar correction. I would want the avatar to be the person that I am following who is choosing to share this information with me. After all, the people I follow are people that I trust. So seeing what they retweeted to their followers should be reflected by showing their avatar in my timeline.

2. RT alerts. Similar to the way that Tumblr shows users alerts when someone else has liked or reblogged your post. If a simple one line alert showed up in my timeline letting me know that my tweet had been retweeted it would make the whole process easier and more encouraging for users.

3. 3rd party support! Currently desktop and iphone apps are not taking advantage of the RT feature because it is so new. There is no place in tweetdeck or tweetie for me to see my retweets the same way I would see @replies. In fact, if someone retweets a tweet that has my username in it using the official RT function, that tweet won’t show up in my @replies of a 3rd party client at all.

The fact is that it will be very hard for twitter to rope in a feature that was created by the users and standerdize it. That can’t force you to stop retweeting the old way, so they new way will be hard for people to adopt.

What are your thoughts on the new feature?

Let me know in the comments.

There are all the times people have put me on their list, right next to my followers. I couldn’t help but think, will being “listed” become the new benchmark people measure twitter success/popularity against?

Suddenly I wanted to see how many times other people had been “listed” and what lists they were on. It wasn’t about what lists they made anymore.

Then I saw this tweet from Alex Hillman,

Twitter lists illustrate the most important shift in the internet: your bio is now written by others, and what they say about you.

Take a look at some of the lists I’m on:

It’s true, I’m a blogger, I live in Philly, I’m noisy, I’m in “techmedia”

When you look at it that way, lists say a lot about you!

How do you think lists will change twitter?

What has it changed for you already?

Yesterday I started to think about what moving means for all of my profiles all over the web. Most of the sites and communities that I am active on have a location, or a city in the profile. I will have to go through and change my current city on all of these sites. I know this doesn’t seem like that hard of a thing to do, but it can become very time consuming.

Even harder then physically changing your current city, is keeping everyone up to date with your location. People perceive you to be living somewhere, but that might not be where you actually are.

Sites like foursquare help with this. Letting you know where your friends are in your city, or when your out of town friends are in town. But one of the big problems with foursquare is that you can’t see where your friends in other cities are. You are only shown who is in your current city.

I have found that checking in on foursquare had helped my friends to be more aware when I am traveling, or in a new city.

Yesterday I tweeted “Are there any social media sites for moving to a new city”

One person responded and said “Does craigslist count?” Craigslist is great when you are moving and need to sell large pieces or when you need to find and apartment.

But sites like Yelp! can also be very helpful when you are living in a new city. Yelp can help you find everything from good places to eat, to a great place to get a haircut. Yelp has been great for me in NYC, but I am hoping that the Yelp Community in Philadelphia is as active.

Do you know of any other sites that have been helpful for you during a move? Or sites that have helped you settle into a new city? I would love to check them out, so please let me know in the comments.

Of course I have my own personal tour guide to Philadelphia, Drew Olanoff (@drew) <3

But if you know me, you know I am always looking for new sites and communities to check out.

If you haven’t had a chance to take a look, here are the listed features. I have marked in bold the features that are unique to Tweetdeck:

• Tweet directly from your iPhone or iPod Touch.
• Manage multiple Twitter accounts.
• View notifications for new tweets received.
• Use columns to create your personal dashboard.
• Simply sync to set-up
• Continuously updates between your desktop and iPhone.
• Create Groups to easily follow all your friends.
• Follow topics in real-time with saved searches.
• Reply to tweets and send direct messages.
• Easily re-tweet messages.
• Share photos with Twitpic and YFrog.
• Shorten links with your favourite URL shortener.
• Follow and un-follow people.
• Shake your iPhone to refresh columns.

So of course I did what everyone else did and downloaded the app (it was free) but within the first few seconds of using it I noticed a huge missing feature. Go to User! I wanted the ability to type in someones username and see their tweets, followers, and be able to DM them. Within Tweetie this was a snap. You simply click the ‘more’ tab, and click ‘go to user’, then just type in the persons twitter handle and you are good to go.

This feature is especially helpful when you want to DM or @reply someone who you had not recently had a conversation with. In tweetdeck the only way to get to a userscreen is to click on that person’s tweet. So they would have had to have recently tweeted in order for you to find them. Well what if they haven’t tweeted in days, then what are you supposed to do?

Here is an example of what a user’s profile page will look like in Tweetdeck and then Tweetie.

I understand the usefulness of having columns, of having it sync with your desktop app, and putting people into groups. But without the basic feature so search through users, I cannot use Tweetdeck. So until that changes, it’s Tweetie all the way.

She told me that she felt like she didn’t think she was really using it correctly. I told her that there really isn’t a “correct” way to use twitter, but I was curious as to what made her think that.

She had some really interesting insights about how she uses twitter and ways she would like to see it be improved. These were things that I had not really heard from a lot of users or really from the general tech community so I thought I would share them with you all.

The first thing that she felt was missing was a facebook type of “wall-to-wall” view, for your conversations back and forth with one person. I know that there are some apps that do this but Rosie mainly uses the main twitter web page when she is at a computer and twitterific on her iPhone. She would like these features to be built into the main twitter site.
However you can use search.twitter.com/advanced to search for conversations between specific people.

She also was really wishing that she could see her list of followers/following in alphabetical order. This was something I never felt the need for but I was really wondering if other people might find this helpful as well.

Rosie also became frustrated that she could not just DM anyone. She wants to be able to have a private conversation with anyone, no matter who is following who. She said that it was kind of strange that you might be able to have a one-way DM conversation if you were DM-ing one of your followers who then could not DM you back because you were not following them.

Her last insight was that she felt that the interface and general feel of twitter was a little childish. She couldn’t really explain why she felt that way, but I thought it was interesting none the less.

If you want to follow her she is @rosesness on twitter.

I would love to hear your thoughts on her thoughts.

Topsy listens to the conversations taking place all the time on the living, social web. This is the rapidly growing, exciting world of Twitter, Blogs, Flickr, Digg, Yelp, Identica and many other communities. People use these communities to share reviews, opinions, messages, comments and discussions about things. Topsy indexes those things. Topsy indexes what people are talking about. The first index is based exclusively on Twitter statuses and the wonderful people who write them.

This is what a typical search page on Topsy looks like. You see the website and underneath in the speech bubble are the number of times that link has been tweeted. On the right hand side you can see the twitter users who tweet about this topic the most, and on the left side you can narrow down your search down to the last hour!

Another really useful way to use Topsy is to find out more information about people on twitter. Topsy has a page for every person it listens to. Tracking all the links that person tweets.

I was surprised when I looked up my twitter name. Topsy had determined that I was “highly influential” and had already added tags to my tweets.

And if that wasn’t enough to blow your socks off, take a look at this. Topsy has “trackback” pages for everything in its index, showing what everyone is saying about that thing.

I am not sure if Topsy can see who tweets what links if they are bit.ly or tinyurl links, because if it can, then this is a much better way to track the reach of a tweet or a link on twitter, regardless of what url shortening service people are using.

So that’s Topsy. Let me know what you think about it.

Last week was Internet Week here in NYC, and in the few days since I have had a lot of time to reflect on this past year of me being a part of this amazing community. I have been spending the majority of my time lately looking for a full time job, and that has put a lot of my passion projects on hold.

I got into this “new media” space because I was passionate about online video and I stumbled upon Social Media by accident. I was perfectly happy going on facebook and reading apple rumor sites. I had almost no desire to be on twitter, to be a blogger or a podcast creator. Then I started watching video podcasts and I realized that I wanted to create content as well.

As much as it seams like I’m busy, I know that it is not an excuse for letting my passion for online video fall off. What’s it All About has hit a few bumps in the road, and I feel as if I am back to square one with the project. However, instead of being discouraged I have decided to modify what I was doing.

Very often people will ask me questions, either on twitter, or via email. For example, the other day someone asked my about #followfriday best practices. I get asked questions about social media all the time. So, I am just going to start answering them on video, here in my room. For right now I am thinking that I will just put these videos up here on Random Sarah because I am not really sure that they are part of the What’s it All About brand, and I’m not really sure what that brand is anymore.

You can ask me questions on twitter or shoot me and email

I would love your feedback since you have all been an amazing part of this journey.

p.s. I am still working on the user generated “I am a geek” video, but so far I only have 5 submissions so keep them coming!