Social Media
Tweeple Twak Will Help You Track Your Twitter Followers
A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a Starbucks in Tampa with Josh and Sarah Perez. Josh showed us what he was working on. It is called Tweeple Twak. I’ve been wanting to talk about it since I saw it, but this morning I saw that Sarah blogged about it and I’m taking that as a green light.
This service will help you keep track of your Twitter followers. You’ll be able to monitor trends in followers and, even more interesting, you’ll be able to track who un-follows you. And you can even choose to send them a little message asking why they un-followed you and maybe persuade them to come back.
This site reminded me of MyTweeple when I saw it. MyTweeple allows you to manage your Twitter followers, see who they are, see if they are following you, ding them (flag them as spammers), etc. When I first came across MyTweeple, I was stoked. But, the site looks like hell. Josh has some web design skills and is clearly making Tweeple Twak into something that is not only usable, but also looks nice.
This service is in a private alpha stage at the moment, unfortunately, but sign up for the mailing list to be notified when you can get in on it.
I love seeing what new sites come out based on the Twitter API. That is one of the coolest things about Twitter.
Twitter Follow Limit: Let’s Get It Right, Guys
I think the blogosphere is erupting in a classic case of typo-gasm. Yesterday, I inadvertently broke news of a 2,000 follow limit by Twitter by linking to somebody else’s story. Louis Gray, I believe, took the post from here and ran with it. It ballooned into a huge piece of news today. Social media at work.
But, a very simple typo has led to a lot of people misstating the news. Even I, yesterday, was thinking follow and typed “follower”, which no doubt didn’t help the issue any. Thanks to Wordpress developer Mark Jaquith for pointing that out last night in a comment while I was in bed fail whaling.
So, the fact is this: Twitter is limiting how many people you can follow. It is NOT limiting how many people can follow you.
I just want to make sure that is super clear.
All the difference two letters can make. 
Twitter Limits to 2000 Follows. Could They Charge To Lift The Limit?
In my last post, I stated in passing that Twitter had limited accounts to following 2,000 people unless you already had more than 2,000 people you follow. Apparently, I broke this news to some – unwittingly.
Interestingly, Twitter only sort of acknowledged this. It seems people are commenting on it on their own sites, as in here and here.
So, Twitter is limiting to 2,000. Facebook has long been limiting you to 5,000 friends. Is it right?
I can see why they do it. However, are they placing an artificial limit that might get in the way of real networking? On the Internet, it is not out of the question to wish to follow more than 2,000 people. True, Scoble-esque information junkies are used to subscribing to tons of people and blogs.
Hmmm…just a side thought…perhaps this could be something they lift for premium Twitterers…and charge something for it? The idea of premium Twitter accounts has been floated as a way for the company to make some money.
Hey, its just a live thought stream from a nerd. This is what goes through my head in after hours.
Twitter Marketers and Gaming The System
Like a lot of people who use Twitter, I have been getting what seems like an increasing number of internet marketers following me on Twitter.
Now, I want to make a careful distinction here. Not all internet marketers are a problem. I know several internet marketers (a few personally) who use Twitter properly and are good members of the Twitter community. John Reese, for example, was attacked by Mashable a while back. It was a stupid, knee-jerk reaction on the part of Mashable because anybody who follows John Reese on Twitter (as do I) will clearly see that he is not using his account to pimp his products. Quite frankly, Reese is too smart for that.
The internet marketers who use Twitter to simply plug their products are the STUPID marketers. These are the guys who see their follower count as a statistic to increase however they possibly can. So, they’ll use some kind of mass follow script to mass add followers, hoping that a bunch will turn around and auto-follow. Twitter now has a 2,000 follower limit. So, the best way to detect a Twitter marketer is to see a follower count of 2,000, a low number of people following them back, and they just joined Twitter (meaning a low number of updates).
Is this a problem?
Well, it could represent a problem for Twitter, which has been famous for downtime. It would also be a problem for any of those people who use auto-follow scripts on Twitter (stupid, bonehead move, IMO).
There will always be some who will flock to a new social media site in order to game it for cash. They see it as a huge pool of eyeballs that need to be driven to their website. And, of course, Twitter is a good medium for that. But, it has to be used PROPERLY and with social tact. You need to be a good community member first, and marketer second.
Some ways to curb the problem would be:
- Do not use mass follow scripts. It just defeats the point of a social network. And, any real marketer would know that.
- Don’t auto-follow. These people who use bots to auto-follow anybody who follows them…you’re an idiot. Stop it. All you’re doing is making Twitter too noisy to deal with and you’re contributing to the problem.
Be selective in who you follow and your Twitter account will be a much more useful source of information.
TweetDeck: Cool, But Not Quite
I finally got around to giving the new Twitter client TweetDeck a try. In a word: interesting.
As pictured below, the most obvious change here is multiple columns. You have one column for your normal timeline (similar to Twhirl), another for replies, another for direct messages. Makes it much easier to see what’s happening on first glance. Twhirl just color codes your messages using differing shades of gray to tell you what kind of message it is.
The Groups function is really cool. You can add certain people you follow into customized groups and track those groups separately. For example, I could group all the other bloggers I know into a group and track what they are tweeting separately from everybody else. Nice touch.
Surprisingly, TweetDeck offers no preferences. At all. I personally find the font size to be too big. I would like to shrink the text so that I could shrink the size of the overall app and get more on screen. But, there is no option to do so. You can’t alter the theme and you can’t change the rate at which it checks for new tweets.
All in all, I admire the different approach they have tried with TweetDeck, but this is no Twhirl killer in my eyes. Twhirl has more options and it takes up less screen space.
Social Media & Internet Marketing: How NOT To Make Money Online
Anybody who is looking to make money online and wants to use social media as part of your marketing strategy…pay attention.
Facebook. Myspace. Twitter. LinkedIn. These social media services are built on one thing: relationships. Now, if you were having a social gathering and somebody just ran into your room and started pitching their product, how would you like it?
Answer: You wouldn’t like it and you might even want to stuff their product straight up their ass.
My Facebook inbox has been receiving an increasing number of messages from people who just don’t get this.
This is SPAM. These people have never tried to connect with me any other way. They befriend me and then immediately market to me. They have no reputation. They have never provided me anything of value. And what has Charles Dudley sent me – twice?
Dear David Risley,
This will be a powerful, life-changing tele-training series to help you solve your work at home problems. If you have ever struggled with cutting through all the information that is out there on the market place, then you have found your home.
Simply register below and you will be on your way to Work At Home Success. I look forward to sharing this exciting event with you.
http://workathomewealthteam.com/
To Your Success!!!
Charles Dudley!
The REI Dominator (http://reidominator.com)
So, right out of the gate, this guy is pitching me a teleseminar. Again, no relationship. And utterly pathetic sales copy to boot.
Social Media and Marketing
Yes, you can use sites like Facebook for marketing. But, you need to have a relationship with people before you market to them. Otherwise, it is spam.
You have some internet marketers that understand this and use social media properly. John Reese, for example, uses Twitter. He got into the middle of a digital feud with Mashable because of their overreaction to an internet marketer using Twitter. However, Reese uses Twitter properly. He actively engages his audience and he very rarely (if ever) uses his Twitter profile to pimp products. John Reese understands the use of these kinds of sites.
The idea is that you get to know the person before that person starts promoting to you. The smart marketers understand this. The stupid ones don’t and end up giving a bad name to everybody and cause overreactions like that demonstrated by Mashable.
Social media is a lot more work to use correctly as part of a marketing program. It takes rubbing elbows with people. It takes real networking. If you do it wrong, all you will do is build up animosity with the people you were trying to reach.
MicroBlogging Is About to Go All McDonalds On Us and I’m Tired Of It.
It seems like every week sees another launch or yet another new social media website. And right now, microblogging seems to be the fad. Twitter created the fad by being the standard bearer. Everybody jumped on board. The early adopters all wanted to have little baby whales with the Twitter.
Then, Twitter started to crack up. The fail whale became a common occurrence. Frustration grows to the point where people wonder if Twitter is going to die off.
Enterprising geeks everywhere saw the opportunity. Up sprouts Plurk. Then Identi.ca. Kwippy. Identica was the “oh lord” moment for me, especially when I saw at the bottom of their site that they are powered by Laconica.
Anybody can now download and install this thing and essentially create their own Identica. Oh lord, the days of all the early adopters flocking from one site to the next is about to end because we’re all going to get bored with it!
We’re going to see a boatload of these things sprout up. Like a McDonalds on every corner. Or a Starbucks.
Remember BBS?
Remember the BBS? This is pre-Internet as we know it. Independent people could start up a little mini network and run a little BBS from their home. You dial into a phone number and connect to the people on that BBS.
Well, I smell this concept potentially coming back in the form of open-source microblogging.
Maybe we’ll see niche Twitter-clones? Geographically centric microblog networks?
The difference would be, of course, that being based on an open standard means you could have a federated identity across all of these networks. At least potentially.
Clones Make Me Bored
All the “me too” people are getting involved in the Twitter/FriendFeed game now. There are just too many of the damn things out there to be interesting anymore. I, as a tech blogger, find I’m getting tired of it.
How many minutely different approaches can we put up with for the same concept?
So, I’ll hereby declare it: Twitter and FriendFeed are the standards. Nothing will kill them. Get over it. No more Twitter killers, please. You’re not going to kill Twitter anymore than a mom-and-pop shop is going to kill Wal-Mart. The only company that can kill Twitter is Twitter.
FriendFeed Etiquette
A post by Chris Pirillo got me thinking about this subject. On FriendFeed, he said:
Removing my Twitter stream from my FriendFeed stream. Why? Ping.fm supports posting directly to FriendFeed now.
The general reaction on FriendFeed was positive to this. Bwana, for example, says:
My name is Bwana, and I approve this message
Now, it may be that FriendFeed is currently blocking input directly from Ping.FM. Some have reported that it isn’t working. PingFM is working on it. However, the sites that Ping.FM posts to easily are all supported at FriendFeed.
Don’t Pipe Duplicate Content Into FriendFeed
I have Ping.FM set to post to Twitter, Plurk and Identica. This means the same message is sent to all three services. If I had all three services piped into my FriendFeed account, it means everybody following me would see the same thing 3 times. (unless they’re using a Friendfeed client which filters out duplicates).
That’s bad etiquette. Pirillo gets that. So does Duncan Riley, who I saw mentioned this same point in this article Tips on Handling FriendFeed.
In my case, I untied Plurk from my FriendFeed account. Just no need, and I noticed that I was seeing duplicate posts in my own feed. Interestingly, I also have Identica tied to my FriendFeed account along with Twitter, yet I do not see duplicates. Perhaps FriendFeed has some built in duplicate detection when they see incoming microblog entries from Ping.FM? If so, very cool of them and it shows they are listening to their users.
Proper etiquette on FriendFeed is making your feed valuable to subscribers. Part of this is not only sharing interesting links, but also making sure you’re not adding to the noise by subjecting them to the same post multiple times when you use aggregate posting services like Ping.FM.
Don’t Beg For Followers
Kevin Rose, anybody? It seems cheesy to use FriendFeed to beg for FriendFeed followers. There are more than enough ways to get followers onboard without doing that.
It’s fine to use your blog to ask people to follow you. I’ve done it. I also know Kevin Rose and Leo Laporte had a little contest going on Twitter to see who could get the most followers.
I don’t know, though. Maybe I’m the only one who sees begging for followers only for the sake of big numbers is a little twitter whore like. Plus, the people who already follow you see it as noise.
Social media is, by nature, noisy. Let’s not add to the problem unnecessarily.
TwitScoop Shows What’s Buzzing on Twitter. Awesome.
It is so cool to see some of the sites which are built atop Twitter. These are sites that could be integrated with Twitter at some point to create one of the best social platforms ever devised. It looks like Summize is being bought by Twitter, but this one emphasizes the "right now" nature of Twitter.
It is TwitScoop.
TwitScoop creates a "right now" tag cloud of what is going on on Twitter.
As I type this at a bit after 10 PM EST, the show Bachelorette just ended. I know this because my wife was watching it. Sure enough, I see that as a tag in the tag cloud, along with Deanna (the lady on the show). Also, a lot of people are saying "goodnight" to the followers. A lot of people are talking about the Red Sox, too. Also, is there another earthquake going on?
On the right side of the site, you can also see the hot trends on Twitter at any given moment. The possibilities to something like this are countless. News buzz? Market research? You name it.
Its a bit like a Techmeme for Twitter.
Mac Users: The Absolute Best Friendfeed App Is…
Like a lot of people, I dig FriendFeed. I find that it is much easier to have conversations on FriendFeed. And those conversations are based around the actual content we all produce on the Internet. Frickin’ awesome.
The FriendFeed API, of course, allows for the creation of applications that will allow you to monitor FriendFeed from your desktop. One of them is Twhirl. Twhirl is awesome for Twitter. But, for FriendFeed? No. And it is because of FriendFeed’s structure.
FriendFeed has structured conversation grouped around pieces of content. Whenever somebody likes or comments on one of the threads, the entire thread bumps to the top of the interface. This is good for community, but when you’re working with a slender little desktop app like Twhirl, it makes it really hard to participate without a LOT of scrolling. Twhirl makes FriendFeed seem noisier than it needs to be.
The best FriendFeed app is…the FriendFeed website itself. Their interface is clean and easy to use. It is also snappy and it reloads automatically using javascript so you don’t have to refresh it manually.
But, what if you won’t want to use your web browser? Well, take a look at FluidApp for the Mac. FluidApp will take any website and turn it into an application. So, make your own FriendFeed client!
It will even use the website’s Favicon and turn it into the application icon show you can dock it (see above). When you generate the application, you get a tidy little APP file. Just stick it in your Applications folder and run it.
Unfortunately for Windows people, FluidApp is only for the Mac. Hey, there’s a reason I bought one. Besides, you can see from my image above that I’m running VMWare Fusion, too, which has Windows XP running. So, I can use the best of both OSes.
Mac is cool like that.
I'm David Risley. I've been making my living as a blogger for over a decade. Blogging is my business and how I support my family. With this blog, I'm just gettin' REAL and telling you how this business works. 
