Feb 22 2010
These lovelies showed up in my tweetstream this evening. Be careful out there, there's a lot of porn, spam and scams to go around.
They all look innocent enough, but the e.bzpharma.net link is bad. Might even be an injection virus. Don't click that link.
@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/twee-spam
Feb 05 2010
I mean, it's kinda cool to think I could've done this, but 13,989 tweets in one day? Wow, that would be worse than a bot. I'd better go check my stream and see if I've been tweeting where I shouldn't have.
I'm not the only one with a funky blast o' tweets.
Ping me if you have examples of what's going on with this?
@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/tweetin-madly
Jan 25 2010
So… I make no bones about the things I don't like on Twitter.
Why? Well, we're all learning. We're all failing. And we're all getting back on the horse again. At least I hope we are.
Let me lend my perspective to the current state of the tweet.
The Twitter of Yesterday
In 2006 when I first joined Twitter during SXSWi, I was passionate and connected. I really DID want to know where my 10 followers were. I really DID care that they were going for coffee AFTER the Keynote but before the Frog Party. I really did. My company, Axiomfire, and my favorite team I'd ever been a part of, was over. Finite! Caput! Two of my followers and people I followed were members of that team, and to this day, still close friends.
By day 3 of SXSWi I had actually met one of my new Tweeple face-2-face and had lunch with them. We could not have been from further planets, but I still follow her to this day.
By day 4 of SXSWi the novelty of having my BB vibrate 3 – 6 times an hour was wearing thin. I mean I loved these people, but my goodness, so what if you are going to take a shower before heading out for more fun at XOXO bar. See the idea, back then, back in the day, was that Twitter would mainly be a phone app. (Ha ha!) Seems kinda funny now… Oh, wait. You said that 80% of all Tweets are from mobile devices. Oh… Nevermind.
The point I was aiming for was the same one I say to myself every single time Gowalla or 4square tells me "I am at…" about some one, I want to shout, "TURN OFF THE LOCATION UPDATES." If I want to find you using Gowalla or Dodgeball or MyPlanet or whatever else you're packin on that mobile computing device of yours, I'd a asked ya. Oh, I did ask you? Dang!
Let me put this another way. If I wanted to know you were going to the dry cleaners at 4th and Congress, don't you think I'd a checked the preference: [ ] please alert me for mundane updates 24/7?
The Reality of Twitter Today
So that brings up an idea for Twitter.com the Company to make some money. (We know they are still trying to figure that out.)
Give us powerusers, us sheep willing to pay for your service to kick ass, give us a power prefs setting. And here are my top opt-out prefs.
[ ] ignore all gowalla, 4sq, dodgeball, {insert new service name here} updates
[ ] ignore all autoDMs. Yep all of them! 100%.
[ ] ignore all quotes (if you didn't say it yourself, well… why tweet it?)
[ ] ignore all "using TwitCheck" type account validators (I unfollow these people anyway, but… please!)
[ ] ignore anything about "whitening" or "thousands of followers" or "sexy pics"
[ ] ignore any account without a bio or a bio link
[ ] ignore any account with < 2 tweets
[ ] ignore accounts without a geotag
[ ] ignore any account with 3x duplicate tweets (retweet offenders)
[ ] ignore any account with > 100 other people ignoring them
In a future post let's explore some "pounce" or "actionable" preferences that Twitter could implement.
@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/retweet-offender
More interesting Twitter philosphy under The Twitter Way tab.
<add you're "ignore" prefs in the comments and I will add them to the list. >
Makes me think of a line of jokes we should start, "Back when I joined Twitter…"
"I only had 10 friends and AT&T didn't have any cool phones."
*/sloppy drum fill/*
Jan 03 2010
So these days I think you've got to feel for the folks just getting into Twitter. When it was first released to the public in 2006 during SXSW Interactive, I didn't get it at all. The phrase "microblogging" still rings hollow to me. Twitter is NOT BLOGGING folks.
These days you can really tell when some one, or in this case a new conference/organization is trying to gain followers. I mean, what's a new tweeter supposed to do? In order to get followers you have to follow. In order to be successful you have to have lots of followers. So you have to follow a lot of people.
Well, the metrics don't work out quite that simply. And these days sooooo much of the tweets filling the Twitter.com web browser version of Twitter are in a word: CRAP. The scammers and RSS content drivers are out in mass. And as the golden egg is pursued via social media, what better way to get things going than creating a spankin new Twitter account.
So this unidentified tweeting org has begun following others in order to spread the love. But I have a hard time taking them seriously when I open their bio page and almost all of the people they follow have no bio pic yet. (A really good sign that the twitter account is bogus, spammy or scammy.)
But it gets a little funnier when you start looking at the accounts they are following that DO have pics. Notice the pentagram symbol. Now I'm not sure about your perspective on this, but I would guess if you were looking to join a professional organization and you saw Bruxinha0666 as one of the honorary or promoted members… Well, I'm just saying, it doesn't always present the appropriate impression.
So nothing against Bruxinha0666, but if the number doesn't clue you in what about the actual bio should you happen to click on his icon?
So I guess just plain bruxinha was taken?
and so on and so on…
Need a new bogus account just add another number on the end of bruxinha and you're in business. So… what about 666?
Final question, so if this professional organization is looking to grow it's membership and gain credibility through it's effective use of social media, don't you think they would pay a bit more attention to who they are "friending" in order to get the expected reciprocal "follow?"
I guess I'll ping the association and let them know that 666 stands for something less cool than "open source" or "hacker." But I can't help them with all those faceless bios. Cause a bird icon doesn't stand for a tweeter, it stands for pecker.
@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/not-blogging
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