Use TARDIS Tweet To Back-Schedule Twitter Submissions And Usurp Your Rivals

I’m quite a prolific submitter of information to the Twittersphere and I feel like I have at least one finger on the pulse, certainly when it comes to social media, technology and movie news.

Being the first person to break a story on Twitter is a huge deal. I don’t have to tell you how important this is, I’m sure. Being first brings all the plaudits and glory. For days, weeks, sometimes months, your followers will remember that you, and only you, got the scoop. That’s all they’ll be talking about.

However, if you’re one of the little guys on Twitter, you often won’t have the resources, time and dedication to always be first.

We All Know That Pain

Is this a situation with which you’re pretty familiar? You’re scanning the internets and find a great blog article or website that you know everybody is going to love. You rush back to Twitter and submit it, sit back, and wait for the applause. A few minutes pass, and there’s not a single re-tweet. Nobody even responds. Something isn’t right.

So, you scroll back a bit through your feed and find one or more people have already shared that link, maybe ten minutes earlier. Maybe two hours. Maybe last week. You weren’t first at all. And when it comes to Twitter, if you’re not first, you’re last.

This happens all the time with me and @mashable.

The @mashable account, which is run by Pete Cashmore (who founded and edits the wildly popular Mashable.com), is in a class of its own when it comes to breaking stories from the world of technology and social media on Twitter. Few people are as consistently quick on the draw.

I find this frustrating. Why should @mashable get all the re-tweets, gold bracelets and trips to the Playboy mansion that come with being the first person to break a big story on Twitter, simply because they got there first?

Well, my our problem is finally solved. And with it, @mashable’s days as being the king of Twitter are over.

Introducing: TARDIS Tweet!

TARDIS Tweet is a new and revolutionary way to shape and control the exact timepoint that your submissions to Twitter hit the feed, even after you’ve already submitted them. By using TARDIS Tweet, you can easily and quickly re-schedule your tweets for any time period you like.

I know what you’re probably thinking: “What’s the big deal? I can already schedule my tweets with Twhirl, tweetlater.com, and various other popular Twitter clients.”

And I hear you my friend, I really do. But this is where TARDIS Tweet separates itself from the pack. Not only can you use the client to schedule tweets for delivery in the future: you can re-schedule already submitted tweets so that they go back in the timeline and appear in the past.

Example

The service is in beta mode and it’s a little glitchy at times, but the potential is, quite frankly, enormous. Tweets sometimes don’t re-schedule and on other occasions seem to disappear entirely. But when it works, it’s pretty spectacular.

For example, yesterday I broke a story about Wikia, a search engine that was hyped to be the supposed-killer of Google. I submitted it to the Twitter stream and fully expected to get loads of crazy re-tweets and marriage proposals.

My tweet went out at 17:38. This was pretty big news and I figured it would be a matter of seconds before I had at least ten direct messages asking me if I wanted to be the next Jon Stewart.

Ten minutes passed, and nothing. I quickly realised what had happened: @mashable must have usurped me again. I scrolled my feed back and sure enough, Pete had broken the story less than 5 minutes before me.

Here’s the screen-cap:

Man, I was pissed. In the past, this would have been it for me. I’d have been throwing my laptop around, making angry faces at the cat and telling everybody who would listen that Plurk was really where the cool kids hung out.

But thanks to the power of TARDIS Tweet, this was a problem no more. I logged on to the interface (you do need your real Twitter username and password, but it’s 100% secure) and was presented with my Twitter timeline/feed.

Moments later I’d found my message, clicked on the ‘re-schedule’ button, and changed the timestamp to a full minute before @mashable posted the same story. I clicked submit, and away my tweet went. Back in time, baby. Back to the future.

Will you look at that? How slow was @mashable to break that news? You’d think with all their resources and influence, they’d have been much faster than little old me.

Seconds after my tweet got re-scheduled, I got a bunch of re-tweets and congratulatory replies, and later I’m meeting @ijustine for drinks. Techcrunch.com even wrote an article about how Mashable.com was losing market share.

All because of TARDIS Tweet.

Negatives And Side Effects

As said, the website is still in beta mode and as such it does produce occasional errors and sometimes your tweets will disappear altogether. This is a bit frustrating but I’m sure it won’t be long before they’re rectified these mistakes. If this happens, you can always write the tweet again and then re-schedule it.

Also, I’ve found that if I try and repeatedly re-schedule a single tweet to go back further and further into the past, I tend to get a nose bleed. Nothing major, and to be honest I’m not even sure if it’s connected, but I feel it’s something I should point out. I’ll investigate further and report back if the situation worsens.

Conclusion

This is just one example of how you could use TARDIS Tweet. There are many others. Off the top of my head you could:

• Use it to go back in time and say something really funny to that hot girl who ignores your tweets
• Win every single quiz on Twitter, ever
• Make predictions about lottery numbers, sports results and other major events, and really wow your friends
• Create crazy paradoxes that might threaten the universe
• Go back before Twitter was even created, predict its existence with a solitary tweet that appears as soon as they turned the servers on, and establish yourself as some kind of Twitter god or ancient entity

Really, the possibilities are endless. Don’t delay: check out TARDIS Tweet today!

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