Unfortunately, like Christmas, this can mean your eating habits suffer. Whilst attending a barbecue chez @cubicgarden last weekend, I discovered an interesting Twitter based app called Food Feed, which bills itself as an easy and simple way to track your food habits.

Using Food Feed is very simple. You just need to go to the Food Feed website and sign-in with your Twitter account. Then all you have to do is follow @having and start tweeting.

By tweeting “@having” at the start of your tweets, Food Feed can aggregate all your food tweets in one place, which means you can find them at foodfeed.us/username (like mine). Adding a picture in to your food tweets can make it more memorable or sum up a large meal!

You can share this public feed with anyone you want – your doctor, nutritionist or even your mother. It’s a great way to link up with other people eating the same kinds of foods for inspiration or, in my case, to improve my eating habits and put all my food tweets into once place. If your friend on Twitter following @having too, they can see your food tweets without it interfering with your wider stream.

Unfortunately, Food Feed doesn’t offer much more than a simple search and aggregation tool. It would be great to see it integrated with an app like Meal Snap that estimates the calories in your meal through a photograph. However, the downside of using Meal Snap is that you have to photo every item of food and the data gets sent to Daily Burn, rather than being quite as simple and easy to share as Food Feed.

Check out Food Feed for free and see if it could be useful for you.

If you don’t know, Twestival (or ‘Twitter Festival’) is a global fundraising initiative using social media for social good. Twestival is the largest global grassroots media fundraising initiative to date. Through harnessing the power of volunteers and social media, Twestival has raised over £760,000 for 137 good causes since the autumn of 2009. Each Twestival is run on the same date in host cities around the world.

Read more: Manchester Twestival is back for 2011 – Social Media Manchester.

Unfortunately, over-excited use of Foursquare can often simply annoy your Twitter followers. Who cares if you’ve just checked-in at “Don’s pizzeria” or if you’re Mayor of “[hipsterrific bar]“?

The real value in Foursquare is not just tweeting where you are, or when you’re Mayor or whether you’ve got the badge that says you’ve been out drinking every night for the last five days (maybe you need to check in at your local AA club).

Foursquare is primarily a popular platform for helping you keep track of your friends and get recommendations about good and interesting places to hang out from people you know and trust. When you go to Don’s Pizzeria, tell me why and what you’re doing there. Leave a tip to recommend something (or to remind me to avoid the kebab).

Here’s my top three tips for making Foursquare useful:

(and, influence people, in a sense):

1. Login to your Foursquare account on the web, click Settings and turn-off the default options to send tweets whenever you check-in, become Mayor or unlock a badge.

Don’t worry, you can turn these on per check-in. This will stop you losing Twitter followers, bored of incessant check-ins at home, work and the train station.

2. Check-in and add a note each time you do. What are you doing there? What’s good? Are you available to hang out? Many people will get your live Foursquare check-ins through Twitter too (if they don’t have Push-type notifications on iPhone etc). So tweet these, if they’re useful.

Again, avoid tweeting mundane places unless you’re looking to hang out with people or at an event. Adding a hashtag helps with the latter.

3. Leave tips. Not cash, but those little notes you can add to places from the Foursquare app. When others check-in, one of the tips pops-up which can help someone make a decision about what to do, where to go or what to have.  Ostensibly, tips are positive things, but I have no hesitation in pasting a place if it deserves it.

Saving tips that you find when you check-in and browsing nearby tips also means you build-up a collection of “to do’s” that are worth going through on a boring Sunday afternoon.

Winning over your friends

As you become more active on Foursquare, you’ll begin to add up a list of friends. The more users that join, the easier it becomes to find other people and use Foursquare as a way of organising social activities. In Manchester, for example, I find skimming my Foursquare friends list over lunchtime a good way of finding out where other people are and if they’re available to grab a bite to eat.

Of course, you can always check-in “off the grid” if you want a bit of privacy.

And yes, it is interesting to know who’s the Mayor of a venue. You become a Mayor being by the user to check-in most frequently over the last two months. If a friend is a Mayor, this is a signal to me that he or she goes there lots and, in a sense, endorses it as a venue for whatever goes on there. Checking-in at a venue without actually being there, or really making use of it, is probably somewhat misleading and won’t win me over as your friend.

Alternatively…

Foursquare is by no means the only location-based social recommendations app out there. I myself was (and still am) an advocate of others, like Gowalla, that frankly have a sexier design and ask users to crowdsource locations, rather than simply buy up a local directory a starting point.

Unfortunately, there is a degree of critical mass with Foursquare that goes with the relentless adoration lauded on it by Mashable. This means most of my friends and colleagues have naturally gravitated towards it as a network and that, in turn, makes it more useful for me, to find out what’s going on where. There are methods of checking-in on multiple networks, however I have yet to try these out myself.

In conclusion…

Remember, Foursquare is all about recommending local places and things to do. This sort of stuff can add value to what your followers see on your Twitter time line, but if you tweet about it too much, it can really turn people off.

So check it out and, if you know me, add me as a friend.

“collect similar opinions in one place making them more likely to be found by people and companies”.

It seems to do this primarily by browsing Twitter and picking up on feelings and emotions expressed about a whole range of topics. This is interesting, as it can flag up when positives or negatives are expressed about a brand, service or individual, making monitoring easier and identifying trends. Unfortunately, it’s well-known that people are more likely to express a negative opinion than a positive one, so whether Amplicate accounts for this is unclear.

The service also appears to pick up and tweet positive or negative trends automatically – which is why this afternoon, it had picked up on the trend that people “hate democracy“. Along with this sentiment, the service generates a landing page (screengrab) that offers the option of agreeing with this statement and even automatically generating badges for blogs and website with an “I hate democracy” motif.

Whilst it is true that even former Prime Minster Winston Churchill proclaimed democracy the least, worst option (more or less), I wonder how much the Amplicate owners want to associate themselves with this statement. It’s telling though that one of the opinions that (automatically) contributed to this feeling was “Chinese democracy sucks”. But, on closer inspection, this tweet is actually about the Guns N’ Roses album (or song) Chinese Democracy (if you’d also never heard of it, there’s a clip below from Wikipedia.).

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Listen on posterous

Will we ever get to a point when an algorithm can analyse a tweet in such detail, and deduce an overall opinion? I think so, but until then, picking out keywords from Twitter is an imprecise – and fraught-ridden – method for proclaiming popular opinion. Something PR firms would be well-advised to steer clear of.

What do you think? Would you use a service like Amplicate to track your brand, or is it simply too full of noise? Leave a comment below.

Posted via email from @technicalfault

While this is reasonable in the context of the overall cost of the conference – which is free to attend for student unions – it makes it difficult for poorly-funded unions and those with competing priorities for ‘student-involvement’ funds, to send dedicated reporters. This means the reporter often has to get involved in the student union election process and be part of the delegation that represents their union at the conference. Arguably, this can affect the quality of reporting by virtue of that person’s involvement.

Thankfully, blogging, mobile technology and now, of course, Twitter, means information is getting out from conference a lot quicker. Of course, there’s always been Educationet – probably the first, almost totally open online forum for student politics – but what useful information appeared here at conference was often drowned out by the muck that one had to wade through. Also, mobile Internet and WiFi hotspots were particularly lacking in Blackpool until the last couple of years.

Since I first attended in 2004, the number of blogs about NUS conference has increased dramatically. And last year (2008), for the first time, @ednet tried to provide live Twitter updates from the conference to those receiving texts on their mobiles (including those on Conference floor) – but from a single person’s perspective, it’s not possible to get a feel for the whole event. Still, the feed was good enough to be picked up by CGCU Live! and placed on their front page.

Now, with the explosion in Twitter use, there are a number of people – staff and delegates – who updating from the event and I’m going to make an effort to list them all here. There’s a surprising number and hopefully they’ll all use the tag #nusconf to record their tweets!

Delegates

@benjaminfgray Benjamin Gray – KCLSU – Block of 15 candidate
@wesstreeting Wes Streeting – NUS President – standing for re-election
@davelewistwit Dave Lewis – NUS National Treasurer – leaving this year
@fabulosity1 Ama Uzowuru – NUS Vice-President Welfare – leaving this year
@aaronporter Aaron Porter – NUS Vice-President Education – standing for re-election
@lincolnSU Lincoln Student Union, tweeting live for their students (++good – he’s also @danderricott)
@ray_sacks Ray Sacks – General Secretary St George’s Student  Union
@willonline Will Watson – Associate President Education at Leeds Metropolitan Students’ Union
@tomstubbs – NUS National Executive – leaving this year
@stephanielloyd1 – unknown!
@kazarhoosh – Kaveh Azarhoosh – chair of Hull University Labour Club
@deancarlin – Dean Carlin – from Edinburgh
@AndyButtons – Andy Button-Stephens – from Cardiff
@leemacaulay – Lee Macauley – journalism student from Cardiff
@SamKnight – Sam Knight – Cardiff student blogger
@BenBryant – Ben Bryant – ‘Head of Student Media’ at Cardiff
@danielgrabiner -  Daniel Grabiner – no idea though!
@rhysdart – Rhys Dart – Cardiff student
@worldofjr – Andy Hartley – VP Welfare at Manchester Metropolitan Students Union.
@pchiarella – Phillipe Giovanni Chiarella – London Metropolitan Students Union
@solomonsmfield – Clare Solomon – School of Oriental and African Studies
@rowleypolybird – Kate Rowley – University College London Union

Non-delegates but tweeting

@viclanger – NUS
@NUSHigherEdZone – NUS Higher Education debating zone
@edframe – NUS
@XChangeERS – unknown
@gemmatumelty – Gemma Tumelty – former NUS National President
@ednet – sort of unofficial Educationet.org feed – possibly the nearest thing to a crowd-sourced student media agency, but with minimal filtering.
@drewstearne – Drew J. Stearne ‘official NUS photographer’ (probably employed after I got annoyed with having my photos got ripped off one year)
@roryl – Rory Lawless – student political blogger
@parboo – Jaki Booth – Birmingham City SU staffer
@technicalfault – me – recovering student politician and digital communications producer.

Wow. That’s plenty for a Twitter caucus!

Any others?

Please leave a comment or tweet me @technicalfault.

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The red boxes insisting I use a verb/format that Bloombla accepts meant I turned off within moments.

Sort of a nice idea, but any ‘alternative’ to Facebook/Twitter* is going to require an exceptionally easy approach which a more compelling USP. It’s going to require something that provides an open foundation on which other stuff can be built. And it’s going to be as easy to pick up and run with as… well, walking I guess, with shortened user attention spans and constant demands for sign-ups, logins, approvals…

I know ‘we’ talk about Twitter being mainstream, but the good point was made by George Hopkin that Twitter has 6 million users – Facebook has 150 million users, and growing.

To be fair, the elevator pitch lured me in and I did the minimum to reserve my username (90 seconds including first ‘bloom’). But for now, find – and talk to me on Twitter.

Postscript:

* Laconica’s open-source approach is quite cool. Makes you wonder – if email protocols had been commercial, would we have so much email or would it have died a death through lack of revenue? See Laconica in action at Identi.ca.

Also, fans of Hallulujah, check out this clip from Season 3 of The West Wing that will serve as an embedding test: