Twitter | Vegas Geek

Has #FollowFriday on Twitter jumped the shark?

September 4, 2009

For the uninitiated, #FollowFriday is an Internet meme that goes on every Friday on Twitter. The concept is simple, each Friday you pick a person (or group of people) who you think is interesting, informative, funny, or in any other way remarkable. Then you construct tweet telling people why they should follow this person. At it’s core, the concept is very cool if you think about it; somebody who you respect enough to follow on Twitter is now suggesting somebody that THEY follow and respect. That is a pretty powerful endorsement, right?

I’m not so sure anymore.

Since first learning about the #FollowFriday concept, I have personally tried to remain true to it’s original intention. When I send out a #FollowFriday message, I select only 1 or 2 people to include in the message and I explain a reason WHY you should follow this person. My biggest gripe about #FollowFriday these days are the people who send tweets that start with the #FollowFriday hashtag and then they fill the rest of the space with as many Twitter user names as will possibly fit. They give no reason why to follow them, just the demand to follow them. This makes no sense. You are telling me to do something but giving me no reason as to why I should. Without a reason, I promise you, I’m not going to start following.

So, the question is, has #FollowFriday jumped the shark? For me personally, the answer is an emphatic YES!

To me, the #FollowFriday tweets have become white noise. They are filler between the rest of the filler on Twitter. Have a look at the current search stream on Twitter for #FollowFriday. You’ll see exactly what I’m talking about.

If you think I should follow somebody because they have solid information to share, please, don’t wait until Friday to tell me about it. Send a tweet telling my why I may be interested to follow this person and chances are I’ll check them out and I’ll follow them if I’m interested.

Let me ask you this, when was the last time you followed somebody new on Twitter simply because of a #FollowFriday recommendation? Leave a comment a comment below and let me know what YOU think.

Filed Under: Social Media, Technology Tagged With: #followfriday, twitter

The 5 Phases of Twitter

July 18, 2009

The other night at our weekly Beer and Blog meetup, we had a pretty interesting discussion about Twitter. It all started because one of our friend who is a promoter recently had his Twitter account suspended. As far as I could tell, he wasn’t doing anything wrong. His tweet-stream had a mix of conversation, random tweets and information about things going on in and around Las Vegas. For some reason he managed to trip the suspension switch and down his account went. We decided to rally on Friday and see if we could help convince the powers that be to give him back his account. I’m quite pleased to see that they took notice, reviewed his account and then reversed the suspension.

The conversation went on to cover how we each use Twitter and for what purpose. Communicating with friends, physical in-person friends, being the main reason. This brought to light something that I have been noticing for a while; the way I have been using twitter has changed several times over the past 2 years. That lead to this post.

Here is how I’ve used Twitter since I opened my account in July of 2007.

What the hell is this?
I’m not sure how I heard about Twitter that first time, but I signed up and I probably tried to talk a group of friends in to signing up, too. I got the basic idea right away, but without a group of friends also on the service, it wasn’t all that useful to me. I would spent the next several months ignoring Twitter for the most part. Picking it up and putting it down without much regularity.

Oh, cool. follow follow follow.
In early 2008 I started planning a trip to Alaska. At that time I bought a digital SLR camera and started trying to learn as much as I could. Then, it all clicked. I found several photographers online who already had twitter accounts. I immediately started following them and anybody that they followed, I followed, too. It was like being spoon-fed free information. These guys would throw out tips or links to tutorials and a ton of other helpful information. If you were the least bit interesting, I started following you… and likely anybody that you followed.

Hey, I’m semi-popular.
As I was getting all sorts of free information from Twitter, I started to return the favor. I started using desktop software like TweetDeck to search for “wordpress.” I would then read the messages that came in and would respond immediately to anybody who was having trouble. I’d either answer their question directly if it fit in 140 characters, or, I’d have them contact me for assistance. The more I helped out, the more followers I would gain. Of all the phases of my Twitter history, this was by far my favorite.

Stop spamming me.
at some point along the way, I was introduced to a service that absolutely must have been conceived by the Devil himself. This service would update your Twitter account to automatically follow anybody on twitter who would follow me. At first I thought this was a brilliant idea. Wow, what a time saver. At the time I was basically following anybody who didn’t look like an out-and-out spammer if they followed me first. Not to mention, I was still going out and finding tons of new people to follow on my own. So, the amount of people I was following was getting to be crazy. The amount of TwitterSpam I was getting started to be too much. I shut down the auto-follow service and spent an entire afternoon going through and removing anybody I was following who was even the slightest bit spammy.

What did you say? I missed it.
Recently I’ve had something annoying happen several times. I’ll either be at lunch with a group of friends, or at our weekly meetup and somebody will mention an upcoming gathering or maybe a cool new iPhone app or website and when I ask about it somebody will respond, “I sent the link out on Twitter yesterday, didn’t you see it?” No, as a matter of fact I didn’t see it. And here’s why…

I do a lot of my Twitter activity from my iPhone. The software I use will load up the last 100 tweets from the people I follow when I first start it up. Way back when, that would cover a few days of activity. The other night while we were having our Twitter conversation I loaded up the software and saw that 100 tweets covered 14 minutes. (I double checked, that is NOT a typo.) So this means that if you did not send the tweet directly to me (like an @reply), or if I didn’t happen to check Twitter in the 15 minute window following your tweet, I missed it. This seems to defeat the purpose of Twitter, doesn’t it? I want to know what my FRIENDS are up to. I want to hear their recommendations. It’s not that the rest of the Twitterverse isn’t interesting, because it is. But, if it means missing what my friends are up to, then I’m just not that interested.

I’m going through a major Twitter purge right now. My goal is to be able to see at least the last 4 hours worth of tweets when I load up my iPhone app. That may be ambitious, but a boy can dream, right? Do I expect to lose a lot of followers because of it? Yeah. But, if I plan to continue to use Twitter, I have to use it in a way that makes it useful to me. The benefits far outweigh the consequences.

So, what about you? Does your Twitter history sound anything like mine?

Filed Under: Social Media, Technology Tagged With: twitter

I’m done with auto-follow on Twitter

February 24, 2009

About 2 months ago I was introduced to a site called SocialToo.com. I created an account and added my Twitter credentials. I turned on the feature that would automatically follow anybody on twitter who started following me.

Yesterday, I canceled my account with SocialToo.com.

One feature they offered that I never used was the automatic direct message for new followers. They gave you a form field where you could craft a message that would be sent via direct message to every new person who follows you on Twitter. At first glance this seems like a cool feature. Send everybody a quick thank you for following. However, as Twitter grows, so do the amount of people who start to abuse features like this. Here was one of the DM’s I got the other day.

This was the final straw for me. It set off the following series of actions:

1. Canceled account at SocialToo.com
2. Used friendorfollow.com to find out who I’m following who’s not following me.
3. Removed over 200 people I follow who started following me to get a follow-back and then stopped following me.

Up until last week my daily Twitter routine was this:
- Auto follow everybody who follows me.
- Each evening check out the profile, latest tweets and website for each new follower.
- Block spam-only twitter accounts from following me (which also unfollows them).

No more! Instead I’ll skip step 1 and move right on to step 2. I’ll follow back anybody who doesn’t appear spammy, has tweets on topics I’m interested in, doesn’t send out self-promotional links on more than 10% of their tweets. I will, of course, still block all spammy twitter accounts.

After 2 days of turning of my auto-follow and cleaning up my twitter follow list, I can honestly say that it’s removed quite a bit of stress. For some reason the spammy automatic DMs were really pissing me off. I’ll be happy if I never see another one!

(quick note: This post is in no way meant to suggest that socialtoo.com has anything to do with the spammy auto-dms. They simply provide a service that other people choose to take advantage of.)

Filed Under: Social Media, Technology Tagged With: spam, twitter

Twitter Automation

February 16, 2009

It’s no secret that Twitter is wildly popular these days. People all over the world are using Twitter to stay in touch with dozens/hundreds/thousands of people at a time. But the social aspect of Twitter is only one aspect of it’s power. Using Twitter for automation has the potential to be just as powerful and a huge time saver.

Earlier today Mike sent me a link to an article talking about using Twitter for some really cool projects like a gadget that reminds you to water your plant or the ability to tell your house what to do via Twitter using some home automation gadgets from x10. My first thought was “hey, cool.” That was quickly followed by “Darn you, Mike!”

This evening I wanted to see if there would be a way for me to use what I had learned in the article to enhance a project that I already have up and running. The first thing that came to mind was the Photo-a-Week project I put together on Flickr. The way it works currently is, if you want to join you need to give me your email address, I add it to a database and then once a week you receive an email letting you know the topic for the upcoming week. After a little bit of research and roughly 8 lines of code, there is now an automated Twitter element that makes the entire process way easier. Here’s what I did:

1. Created a new Twitter account called @PhotoAWeek
2. Updated the PHP script that sends the weekly emails to also send an update to Twitter with all the pertinent information.

OK, that’s it. Simple, yes. Time saver, yes. Just the tip of the iceberg, most definitely.

This is a really basic example of a way to automate a process using Twitter. I’m really interested to see what other ways people are using Twitter to automate projects and processes. If you know of any links to articles on the topic, please leave them for me in a comment.

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: automation, gadget, twitter

The social part of Social Networking

December 4, 2008

As I get more and more active with online social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Meetup, something very interesting has been happening. My calendar has been filling up with things to do. Tomorrow night is a monthly meetup that combines a Meetup.com group with a pre-existing monthly gathering here in Las Vegas called First Friday. In two weeks I’m giving a speech on WordPress Vs Blogger. In January I’ll be speaking to a group about using social media/networking to grow your offline business. Right after that I’m doing this little thing called WordCamp:Las Vegas. I may have mentioned that one before.

I have met some amazing people through my blog, twitter and facebook over the past few years. I’ve exchanged emails, tweets, comments and IMs with literally thousands of people. Most of whom I will never meet in person. You know what, that’s a real shame. There’s no substitute for meeting somebody in person that you share common interests with, shaking their hand and introducing yourself and starting up a conversation. Obviously it’s impossible to meet everybody you are associated with online. Not everybody is down the block or even a few towns away. Online social networking is global in it’s reach. But that doesn’t mean all your social networking has to be.

Over the past few months I’ve been taking a great interest in meetup.com. I’ve joined groups related to WordPress, Twitter, Social Media, Photography, Graphic Design and even Massage Therapy. Over the past month I’ve attended meetup events for more than half of these groups and have put faces to names (and screen names) that I’ve known for months or even years. Through these meetups I’ve also met people who may never have heard of me otherwise and have become followers on Twitter, subscribers to my RSS feed and commenters on my blog.

Here’s my suggestion for you; go to meetup.com and create an account. Search for meetup groups in your area related to things you are interested in that are offline activities (i.e. photography, hiking, line-dancing, whatever). Join a few groups and RSVP for a few meetups and for Pete’s sake GO TO THE MEETUPS! When it’s over, if you had a bad time, feel free to come back and roast me in the comment box. But, if you had a good time and if you made some new contacts, well, I’ll be expecting the comments proclaiming that I’m the man.

Get Out, Get Connected, Get Social.

Filed Under: Blogging, Social Media Tagged With: facebook, meetup, twitter

Dealing with Twitter Spam

October 16, 2008

I’m not even close to being surprised, but the amount of Twitter Spam I’ve been getting lately is on the rise. Sure, it’s nice to have your follower count go up, but when the only messages coming from them are for you to come check out their poker site and receive $50 in bonus cash, the trade off is just not worth it. Besides, letting these spammers stick around only makes the place a little worse for everybody.

So how should you deal with spammers? Easy; block them.

Ya see, Twitter has a nice set of rules that is designed to keep the spammers out. Of course that’s just not going to happen entirely since any time you have access to a large number of people, the spammers want to come piss in that pool. But, by taking the 10 seconds to go an block the spammer on twitter, you are actively being part of the solution.

Twitter’s software is getting pretty good at catching the spammers. Twice this week I have received notices that I have a new follower. An hour later when I went to check out their account, they had already been blocked. I call that efficient!

I’m one of those guys who leaves the email notifications turned on so that every time I get a new follower, I receive an email. I do this because I usually will go and follow the people who follow me. I read the incoming email, click the link to go check out the person’s twitter profile and I decide if they are a spammer.

What is considered spam?
When I view the person’s twitter account, I look at the following:
1) How many followers do they have?
2) How many people are they following?
3) How many tweets do they send out?
4) How many tweets include a link or some sort of offer?

If they have 8 or 10 (or more) times less followers than they are following, this is a good indication that they are using external software to follow mass quantities of people hoping that they will reciprocate by following them. They are getting blocked.

If they are following more than 100 people and they have less than 10 tweets, I’ll check the content of their tweets to see if they look “spammy.” I usually just give it the sniff test. If something smells funny, for example, 5 tweets and 3 of them have a link back to the same site, I’ll block them.

If somebody has sent 5000 or more tweets, I won’t block these ones, but I’m less likely to follow them, too. Typically I find that these guys are responding to EVERY tweet they see come in. That’s totally fine. I have no problem with that. I’m just not going to follow them back as I don’t need to read all their response messages.

Twitter’s software looks for all of these things as well, so it won’t be too long before your spammy follwers end up getting the proverbial boot by Twitter. But, it’s such a nice feeling to think that you’ve helped get them kicked off the site. Well, I know it works for me.

Not sure how to block somebody on twitter? Check out this post here.

Filed Under: Ranting, Social Media, Technology Tagged With: spam, twitter

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