The Inquisitr » Twitter

OMG Stop the Web! Twitter is gonna run ads – and Scoble says you’ll love it

Steven Hodson — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:01:39 +0000

Hang on a sec and let me check out the window and see if the world is still spinning….

Yup at least that is still normal but in the world of social media everybody’s darling let it out today at yet some other silly conference that they will be rolling out an advertising format that will just amaze everyone over its incredibleness.

Well if you listen to Robert Scoble this is the impression you’ll get; but c’mon this is a guy that cried at seeing the World Wide Telescope.

This is a huge shift in what Twitter is saying publicly.

But advertising isn’t something many people love. So, how will Twitter make advertising you love?

By building a SuperTweet!

Wow, a SuperTweet – someone pass me a tissue quick, I think I’m going to lose it.

Seriously though it is about time that Twitter did something that would come even close to justifying the billion dollar valuation that the company has gotten the last time they went back to the VC teat. All this means is that suddenly we are going to get tweets loaded down with a whole bunch of metadata crap and links attached to what we have written – so really who’s going to care?

Thought so.

A murderer on Twitter? Either one demented person, or a very viral campaign

Steven Hodson — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:44:08 +0000

I am almost reluctant to write about this given that it is indeed a real account and the facts are right I wouldn’t want to be seen as promoting the Twitter account of what appears to be a murderer. However if this turns out to be an attempt at some sort of attempt at a viral marketing campaign it’s brilliant.

The account I am referring to goes by the name dinner_guest and was first discovered by TechCrunch Europe then followed up by Zee at The Next Web tech blog. The account first shows up on November 10th with a typical innocuous first message:

With the exception of the last one the rest of the messages for that date are maybe a little strange but give no indication of the road these messages will start to go down. Remember these are reverse chronologically posted messages.

The last message of the day however is a totally different matter as we can begin to see the darkness start to come out.

The following day, November 11, saw the following posted to the account page

The following day we get a lesson on shrinking heads

Personally I am really hoping that this is really just some marketing campaign of some sort because to be honest the alternatives … well that is just sickening.

Historical permanence of today’s social media? Give me a break.

Steven Hodson — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:50:14 +0000

It never ceases to amaze me sometimes the seeming delusions of grandeur that permeates the social media niche of the tech world. That doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in the possibilities of how social media – social conversation – can change our society in fundamental ways. It does mean however that what we are dealing with today are only the rudimentary tools of a nascent ideology.

That said there is no way with our current technology that you can even come close to suggesting that anything being written today on services like Twitter or Facebook is of any historical significance. Not only that there is absolutely no reason to even think that any of it will be around in a 100 years time – let alone even 10 years.

Ayelet Noff over at The Next Web has for some reason fallen for the idea that the crap that currently flows through Twitter or Facebook is of some sort of historical importance that this generation and future ones will deem it worth of some historian having a wet dream over.

Sorry Ayelet but you along with Ben Parr who you quoted in your post are drinking way too much social media kool-aid and you need a reality intervention.

Both of you go on about how every one of our actions, our feelings, thoughts are being constantly recorded. Well beside the very idea of that happening is exceptionally creepy what makes you think that any of this will even exist beyond a point where it will survive in any usable form and hold any historical value. Seriously.

Over at Mashable Ben gets all effusive over how social media is going to change recorded history. Are you kidding me?

Like, who is really going to give a damn what the hell you or I were doing in the month of November in the year 2009 at some point in the future. That silliness aside there is the whole technological and business angle that you seem to be ignoring.

As it stands right now Twitter only keeps our data for a certain period of time and ask Thomas Hawk about the long time permanence of our online lives. Ask all the users of Sidekick when they potentially lost all their data or how about all those users who have been kicked from Facebook?

This idea that that just because social media is the hot ticket in a very small segment of the online world and that because of it we are creating some sort of new permanent record for future reference is nothing but an illusion. That so-called record exists only as long as companies want, or are able, to keep the data. That isn’t permanence. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

The one point I do agree with with Ben on though is that there will be an ethical war over how that information is used and that sir will be an event for the history books.

Free Rihanna Concert Today Sponsored By Nokia

Dennis Bjørn Petersen — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:52:53 +0000

To promote Nokia’s latest attempt at beating the iPhone music mobile, the X6, Nokia’s Ovi Store and Nokia Music Store , the Finnish company are hosting streaming a live and free Rihanna concert today/night. The concert takes place at a secret London location and is supposedly streamed using a X6.

The concert is a part of the “Nokia Play 2010″ campaign which will focus on the touchscreen Nokia X6, which the company is promoting as an entertainment device ideal for playing music and video, as well as its pay-per-track Nokia Music Stores and unlimited Comes With Music service. Now where have I heard that before?!

Nokia has thought the social aspect of the happening through. The Rihanna concert will be broadcast across Nokia mobile music, video and online at www.nokia.com/rihanna. Nokia will also stream videos that concert attendees take with their X6 phones. To further enhance the concert experience you can share your thoughts on Twitter and Facebook.

It must be a coincidence that Rihanna latest album “Rated R” is released in a couple of days too. What could she possibly get out of singing “Russian Roulette” in front of millions of potential buyers? Not to mention the tweets with #rihannalive.

All you have to do to enjoy the Rihanna concert is sign up at Nowplaying.nokia.com (it’s free) and wait some 7 hours.

(Yeah it took me two hours to get that screen dump. I missed it when it hit 9 hours by 2 seconds. Yes I’m a perfectionist.)

Damn you folks on Twitter are a chatty bunch

Steven Hodson — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:30:18 +0000

27.3 million Twitter messages per day – that’s how much you guys are yakking out there on Twitter. With the 5 billionth Twitter message reportedly posted last month some suggest we could see an annual yakking rate of 10 billion Twitter messages a year.

Much of this data is courtesy of a recent report from Pingdom who studied Twitter traffic for a period of three weeks (October 21 to November 11) to find out things like Twitter messages per hour, per day, and when we posted messages the most.

Per Hour

- highest number of Twitter messages during the report time period: 1,841,289

- lowest number of messages during the report period: 566,854

Per Day

Average Per Hour – based on US EST

The above graph is shifted to show US eastern time and clearly displays a dip during the night-time hours in the US. However as Brian Solis noted in his post on this, Comscore data shows that half of Twitter users live outside of the US. In this case the morning rise in Pingdom’s data could also reflect afternoon and evening activity in Europe and other parts of the world.

Regardless all this data just goes to show we love nothing better than to be blathering at 140 characters and our love affair shows no signs of slowing down.

Twitter In Trouble? I Smell Trolling At 100 Virtual Paces

Duncan Riley — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:19:23 +0000

There’s lies, damn lies and statistics, but when it comes to using online stats to attack Twitter, it’s not just a case of damn lies, but epic trolling.

Stats are out today from comScore and Compete for October, and depending on which one you believe traffic to Twitter declined 8% or 2.2% respectively. Depending on which interpretation you read, this is a sign that Twitter is in “trouble” or as Mashable more fairly puts it, that Twitter has “flatlined.”

A drop from the shiniest, buzziest startup of 2009 naturally makes for a great tale, which added with a dash of trolling no doubt makes it good for those writing it page view wise. But there is a flaw in using page views to Twitter.com as a gauge of usage for the site: a sizable portion of users never hit Twitter.com to use Twitter.

Depending on the stats month to month (and source to source,) roughly 15% through to as high as 40% of users connect to Twitter using third party services. To that you also need to consider that new users are more likely to use Twitter.com directly (not knowing about third party services), until after some time looking at or switching to third party tools (in this case, the Oprah spike.) Look no further than the popularity of iPhone Twitter clients as evidence that there’s a strong market for third party Twitter clients, even if pinning down exact numbers may be an abject lesson in guessing in itself.

Third party tools aside, it’s important to consider that the stats used to justify Twitter being in trouble are primarily based on US users (Compete exclusively, comScore mostly.) It’s easy for an American writer to presume that nothing important happens outside of the United States, but Twitter is not playing from the same handbook. The proof can be found in the under-reported announcements Twitter has made over the last few months as it has rolled out SMS support in places like India and Indonesia. Even if comScore was tracking either country, they wouldn’t be tracking SMS use of Twitter, where as Twitter clearly sees SMS as a growth tool in countries where data isn’t as affordable, or readily available particularly over mobile networks.

Twitter has always been secretive about its usage numbers, but we can get a rough idea about how popular it might be outside the United States through Alexa (yeah, I know it’s not accurate, but Alexa offers better non-US stats than most of the others.)

According to Alexa, Twitter.com is ranked in the Top 100 sites online (so not including SMS) in the following ntn-highly ranked countries for data access: South Africa (9), India (11), Philippines (12) Pakistan (14) and Brazil (18.)

If Twitter was in trouble, they’d need to clock something a lot bigger than a 2.2%-8% decline on Twitter.com to balance their growth outside of the United States and other Western nations.

It’s clear that looking at the bigger picture that Ev, Biz and the team are heading in the right direction when it comes to making Twitter a truly global service, and that the stats in this case don’t provide a full and true picture.

Xbox 360 getting Facebook, Twitter, and Last.FM on November 17

Chris Greenhough — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:43 +0000

The Xbox 360 dashboard update that will allow you access to Facebook, Twitter, and Last.FM through your console goes live on Tuesday, November 17. That’s according to Marc Whitten, Xbox Live general manager. Here he is, doing some talking:

“We look at things like Facebook and Twitter as amazing social experiences, but also entertainment. We didn’t want to copy and paste from the PC. It’s going to be great for current users, but it’s also great for new users who can see who is on Facebook and get their first 30 friends on Live.”

Using Facebook on Microsoft’s console will allow gamers to convert their Facebook friends to Xbox 360 friends, a rather nifty Xbox 360-exclusive addition.

Yet, as VG247’s Stephany Nunneley points out, gamers may just be distracted by a few other trinkets on November 17. Check out what must be the strongest day of releases in some time:

Assassin’s Creed II
Left 4 Dead 2
God of War Collection
Assassin’s Creed DS & PSP Bundle
LittleBigPlanet PSP
Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles
Tony Hawk: RIDE
Lego Indiana Jones 2

Just a bit good, eh?

[Via VG247]

Britney Spears suffers third Twitter hacking this morning

Kim LaCapria — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:57:41 +0000

Sheepish Britney handlers posted a quick FYI for fans who might have been offended by a series of puzzling tweets posted on the singer’s Twitter account over the past day while Britney’s been on tour in Australia.

The offending tweets may have been scary to her fan base, regarding Satanism and the New World Order:

i hope that the new world order will arrive as soon as possible- Britney

I give myself to Lucifer every day for it to arrive as quickly as possible. Glory to Satan!

Whoever is responsible for Brit’s tweets quickly posted a retraction:

Britney’s twitter account was just hacked. The situation has been resolved and we apologize for any offense the hacker’s messages caused.

This is the third time poor Brit has been the target of Twitter terrorists, with a death hoax previously promoted on her Twitter account. And though normalcy has been returned to Britney’s account, #DontHackBritney remains a trending topic on Twitter. No comment from Chris Crocker on the incident.

Twitter and LinkedIn get all warm and cozy … and the point is?

Steven Hodson — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:04:36 +0000

My first thought when I read Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post at ReadWriteWeb about Twitter and LinkedIn forming a partnership was – huh?

The purveyor of 140 character dribble is partnering up with a social network meant to let the whole world know how important you are and if you are up for a new job.

For what reason?

After all it’s not like prospective headhunters and human resources people who are trolling for new employees are really gonna give a shit about some retweet of a retweet of a message that is more hashtags than content. Not to mention the fact are you really gonna care if your blathering on about how drunk you got at some cool social media conference ends up in your LinkedIn profile – in fact you might want to really rethink that idea.

This is a deal in my opinion that only serves the purpose of keeping both company names in the news starved tech blogosphere; and really in this case it only reminds people that LinkedIn still exists. It’s not like Twitter needs to remind anyone since it is already the most popular non-business business on the web right now.

There is no real advantage to any kind of partnership between the two companies mainly because they have totally different synergies. LinkedIn serves as a great place to have yourself up for sale to the highest bidder and Twitter is the best place for expounding non-sequiturs and other pointless messages to show that your live really isn’t as boring as it seems.

In the case of either company there is nothing that is of benefit to the other by forming some sort of so-called partnership. Well other than giving us all another non-story to talk about for the next few hours.

Popular Twitter feed scores TV, book deal

Kim LaCapria — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:42:47 +0000

One of the more consisently funny Twitter accounts is @shitmydadsays, a young man’s collection of the random, hilarious things his cynical, elderly father says.

The @shitmydadsays Twitter account, populated by 29-year-old Justin Halpern, went viral in late August and currently has upwards of 700K followers. Halpern hit the social media lottery this week, with the feed being optioned by CBS to become a sitcom produced by David Kohan and Max Mutchnick of Will & Grace fame. TV isn’t the only opportunity opening up for Halpern- Harper Collins signed a book deal with Justin last month based on the feed as well.

While a sanitized network TV adaptation of the elder Halpern’s no holds barred style of speaking will almost certainly suck, it’s definitely an interesting development for internet humor and popular Twitter feeds. If you’re one of the few who hasn’t read Justin’s dad’s tweets, here’s a sample:

“Son, no one gives a shit about all the things your cell phone does. You didn’t invent it, you just bought it. Anybody can do that.”

“I hate paying bills… Son, don’t say “me too.” I didn’t say that looking to relate to you. I said it instead of “go away.”

“Oh please, you practically invented lazy. People should have to call you and ask for the rights to lazy before they use it.”

“You worry too much. Eat some bacon… What? No, I got no idea if it’ll make you feel better, I just made too much bacon.”

“I need to change clothes? Wow. That’s big talk coming from someone who looks like they robbed a Mervyn’s.”

“You sure do like to tailgate people… Right, because it’s real important you show up to the nothing you have to do on time.”

“Just pay the parking ticket. Don’t be so outraged. You’re not a freedom fighter in the civil rights movement. You double parked.”

“That woman was sexy…Out of your league? Son. Let women figure out why they won’t screw you, don’t do it for them.”

“Son, people will always try and fuck you. Don’t waste your life planning for a fucking, just be alert when your pants are down.”

“I wanted to see Detroit win. I’ve been there. It’s like God took a shit on a parking lot. They deserve some good news.”

“We didn’t have a prom. Dancing wasn’t allowed…What’s Footloose?…That’s the plot of the movie? That sounds like a pile of shit.”

Twitter and LinkedIn Now Status Share. In Related News, LinkedIn Has Status Updates

Duncan Riley — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 05:52:35 +0000

Twitter and business focused social network LinkedIn have signed a new deal that will allow users of both services to cross post status messages.

Users of LinkedIn will be able to link Twitter accounts to their profile, and select which messages are cross posted via a small Twitter option below the LinkedIn status entry field. Twitter users will be able to link their LinkedIn accounts, and (and this is perhaps the interesting part) use the hastags #li or #in to indicate that they want that Tweet to be posted to LinkedIn.

A spokesman for Twitter said that the wildly popular microblogging company wanted to take advantage of the strong identity in LinkedIn to make professional tweeters more successful…what ever that means.

The use of hashtags to indicate cross posting is a first for Twitter itself, although it has been used in third party tools before.

Sensible Ways To Use Twitter To Help Promote Your Blog

Duncan Riley — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 03:16:54 +0000

Twitter is very much this years number one get rich quick and buy my ebook topic, but there are some very sensible ways you can use Twitter to help promote your blog.

Let me say upfront though that if you believe you can get rich using Twitter (with or without a blog,) turn the computer off, walk out the door, and don’t return. If however you’re simply looking for better ways to use Twitter in promotion, here’s a few things we’ve tried and are using.

Dedicated Twitter account for your site

Lets start at the obvious one, although it’s still fairly common to see sites that don’t have a Twitter account attached to them. Some say that Twitter is killing RSS (a point of which I humbly disagree) but no matter where you stand on that argument, there’s no doubt that Twitter has become a distribution tool for your links.

There’s two schools of thought on using a dedicated Twitter account: simply links, or links and Twitter specific commentary. The latter will do more in engaging with your readers, but likewise if you already have a personal account, the simple links might be an easier way to go.

The easiest way to put links to your latest posts up on your Twitter account is with an RSS to Twitter service. Twitterfeed is the most popular service and offers a range of neat features, although the recommendation is with the proviso that in my experiences with them, they can suffer from downtime on occasion.

If you’ve got a self hosted WordPress blog, try any number of plugins available from WordPress.org.

Retweet Buttons

Retweet buttons are this years most popular alternative to the social voting buttons from the likes of Digg and Reddit, and for a reason: they most definately work. We love our retweet buttons so much we’ve mostly done away with other buttons.

Tweetmeme offers the most popular and commonly used retweet button. There are a number of other services that offer retweet buttons (or you can host them yourself) however in our testing we found that the Tweetmeme buttons get the most retweets; perhaps because they are common and people are use to seeing that design.

To maximize the chances of getting a retweet, put the button somewhere prominent towards the beginning of a post, vs following the text. We currently have our button to the left of each post header, other sites often have the button as a left indent at the beginning of the text.

Twitter comments

Using Twitter to make comments on a post is a new feature that you don’t see on many sites, although using Twitter to sign into services like Disqus or JS-Kit has been common for over a year.

The advantage of using Twitter comments is that the comment left (depending of the implementation) is tweeted back to the account of the person making it, exposing your post to others.

The competition here is with the implementation of Facebook, such as currently being used by The Huffington Post. We do neither so far (although users can opt to send messages out) but it is something you should look at.

Twitter Visitors Widget

One surprise packet for me was the popularity of a Twitter visitors widget. Think MyBlogLog or Google Friend Connect, but based on Twitter. People love leaving their details in the sidebar and promoting their accounts to other readers, and we love giving them that opportunity.

Our favorite is provided by Twitter Counter, and the widget also encourages visitors to sign up to your Twitter account as well.

I’d recommend using something like this vs a standard Twitter badge/ sidebar widget that just republishes your tweets because you get the benefit of promoting your site with an added a layer of engagement for your readers.

Use you personal account sparingly

If you’ve got a Twitter account set up for your site, use your personal account for site promotion sparingly. Maybe if you’ve got 100,000+ users that’s not the best idea, but for everyone else you run the risk of losing followers by basically spamming links, particularly if they followed you before you started using Twitter that way.

This is not to say you can’t promote your own links, but I’ve found that promoting my own links only when I really want to get the word out on a great post works a treat, because my personal Twitter followers know that I’m not wasting time with all and sundry.

Autofollow new followers

I’ve previously been cold on autofollowing new followers, but after a chat with Kate Carruthers recently I decided to give autofollow and auto unfollow a shot on my personal account and something strange happened: despite having roughly the same number of Twitter followers for nearly two years, my follower account started to increase.

It turns out that at least some out there really don’t like it that you don’t follow them back, so although I’ve been getting a steady stream of new Twitter followers for years, I was losing just as many. With automation, I’m not losing as many followers, and in the event that they unfollow my Twitter account, they are unfollowed back.

There are a variety of tools out there to automate these aspects of your Twitter account. I’m happy to recommend SocialToo, they do charge for catchups ($5 a pop for both autofollowing existing followers and unfollowing people who aren’t following you) but the rest of the service is free.

We’ve only just implemented SocialToo on The Inquisitr Twitter account, but I have every faith that we will soon be seeing strong numbers there as well.

Conclusion

The hints and techniques above aren’t difficult to implement, but they can and do work. Since reconsidering our Twitter strategy across the board around 6-8 weeks ago our number of retweets, and our traffic from Twitter (and by extension Facebook as many share Tweets into FB) have increased significantly. It hasn’t made us rich in traffic (or money) but it means a quiet day isn’t as quiet as it once was, and a good day pumps harder and longer than they did before because the viral spreading of posts is stronger.

Twitter’s power to change the news and the world – more hype than substance

Steven Hodson — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:28:17 +0000

Can you just imagine the phone call at Twitter WHQ when they were asked by the US State Department to hold off on a planned maintenance so that the voice in Iran could be heard around the world following the country’s national election.

Man the ego boost that must have sent through the office. You see Twitter isn’t just some hack-kneed 140 character messaging service for people with no life. No indeedy folks Twitter was at the forefront of being the worldwide voice for those trying to peaceably overthrow a corrupt government.

They held the pulse of the world’s news about what was happening within their hands. Twitter was a world shaker and mover. Yup it was full of all kinds of awesome sauce.

Or was it it?

In an interesting report that was made available to Ryan Tate at Valleywag by one of the author’s of the report shines a bit of a different light on just how much of an effect Twitter really had.

Charles Leadbeater, a British writer and analyst, along with research Annika Wong decided to go a little deeper than all the hype and back slapping that the Twitterati smothered themselves in. The report called Cloud Culture is to be published by the British Council next year but in the meantime some interesting facts have been put out there that take some of the shine off of Twitter’s halo.

It shows that such a tiny proportion of Iranians are on Twitter that any stories about a new movement based on the social network are meaningless. The figure they provide, by they way, includes the thousands of foreigners who changed their Twitter location to Tehran when the ‘Iranian internet revolution’ story struck after the elections in June and Facebook and Twitter were afire with Iran sentiment. So the likely figure is even lower.

The report adds that only one third of Iranians have internet access at all. And because opposition supporters are young, and on the internet, and Ahmadinejad supporters tend to be older and rural, the picture on the ground is likely skewed by any analysis that relies on tweets.

So the reality is that if there was any real hype surrounding the news coming out of Iran it had less to do with the people actually in the country than it did with the web digerati clamping on to a fleeting meme that is the end didn’t change a damn thing except for possibly getting a whole bunch of people in jail – or worse .. dead.

It’s a warm feeling when you believe that you are a part of something bigger than yourself. Something that might change even a little piece of the world and Twitter in all its simplicity does just that. That however doesn’t mean that any real long lasting change will come out of some sort of failed electronic version of the Ride of Paul Reeve.

The actual sphere of influence of things like Twitter regardless of how much the social media mavens is minuscule in comparison to the rest of the news gathering world and activist movements. If Twitter really did have the power to change the world why aren’t we hearing from Pakistan, why aren’t we seeing a flood of change coming from the Middle East. Why aren’t we hearing from within our own country about the injustices and Twitter being used to change those injustices.

Sure we might hear the late breaking story but just as in the old game we use to play as boy scouts around the campfire. What you whisper in the first person’s ear never turns out to be the same things that you hear whispered back t o you after the story makes the circle of the campfire.

That original news flash that occurs in the first second on Twitter will almost never be the same story we all hear as it gets retweeted to hell. Anything beyond even the first couple of messages fired over Twitter do nothing to add veracity or accurate new information. And as the recent events at Fort Hood have shown we may even need to serious question those first messages themselves.

Citizen journalism in the spirit of the reporter on the front lines might be a nice ideal but whether or not it stands up under the real scrutiny of examination after the fact still remains to be seen.

Let’s Stop The Nonsense, OK?

Kyle Brady — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:05:43 +0000

The “bleeding-edge” segment of the Internet has gone full-on crazy, so it’s time to give them their medicine… and fast.

First of all, let’s make some definitions:

“technology” does not include only the Internet
“the Internet” does not include only so-called “social networking” sites
“groundbreaking” does not include every minor change or release from X’s favorite site Y

With me so far? Good.

If you’re one of the people that goes insane and hyper-joyous over things like Twitter Lists, you need to seek medical help – these “features”, used in the loosest sense of the software term, are not something to get overly excited about. Facebook Chat opening to external clients is not “groundbreaking” or a “gamechanger”, because that IM process is used for an extremely different purpose than, say, regular instant messaging – in fact, the only real operational difference is that I can be connected to some people I don’t want to talk to via Pidgin. Twitter Lists, small changes to Google’s algorithms, and the like are included in this “excited about nonsense” category.

Furthermore, if you’re someone who claims to “love technology”, but what you really mean is that you’re a Facebook addict, a Twitter whore, and an iPhone fanboy, I have some news for you: you don’t love technology. If you really loved technology, you’d be more interested in real technological items like working space elevator prototypes, the multiple industry revolutions that are fast approaching, or even just software that has real and useful purposes. Reading a few blogs about the Internet and going to Twitter conferences do not make you a technogeek – try PhysOrg.com, almost-science-journals like New Scientist, or even some self-education on the things that make your favorite software or gadgets work.

So when you’re retweeting your favorite self-proclaimed geek pundit’s semi-legible statement about a “groundbreaking” release from “the Internet” using brand new “technology”, stop for a moment to think about what you’re saying – how often do you think Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs cry tears of joy over the latest incremental update from FarmVille?

That’s right – never.

Kyle Brady is a contributing columnist for the Inquisitr, an entrepreneur, and has a future in science fiction. He can be found at his blog, via email, or on Twitter.

Twitter once more playing with the future of developers

Steven Hodson — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:28:25 +0000

One of the constants that has been with Twitter since day one has been its hands off approach towards the service as it is presented to the users at the Twitter home page. They have let a rich and vibrant 3rd party developer ecosphere build up around the service as they have given the impression more than once that they aren’t interested in expanding beyond the simple interface as found at the Twitter homepage.

As a result we have seen a number of desktop and smartphone clients rise to the surface that have continually added features and improved the user interface experience. That hands off approach however looks like it could be changing and this should make developers who are trying to hook their wagon to Twitter a little nervous. I have written about his in the past but in light of recent moves by Twitter it bears repeating – Twitter is no friend to developers.

The one area that developers might have thought themselves fairly secure had to be developing clients for smartphones like the iPhone but if what Martin Bryant at The Next Web has found out not even that may be as safe as it seems.

In a post yesterday Martin reports on how Jesse Stay, developer behind Social Too, may have spotted what looks like a native Twitter app for the iPhone:

With the new geolocation feature being tested internally and the new version of Seesmic Desktop featuring the ability to read location from tweets that use it, how is Twitter generating location tags for its test tweets? From the looks of the screenshots Stay has uncovered, by using a secret iPhone app.

Now, we’re not suggesting that Twitter is about annoy its third party developer community by launching its own iPhone app. Given its bare-bones look this is probably noting more than a test app for adding geolocation data to tweets.

Now Martin may be being overly kind by suggesting that Twitter doesn’t want to step on any toes but I doubt it very much. We have already seen many times over just how Twitter feels about developers of clients for its service.

Things like turning off Twitter services without any notification to developers leaving them to scramble and deal with irate users. Or, cutting back on the number of API calls clients can make – again without any notification to the developers.

Twitter makes decisions about features they want to add that are for the most part re-interpretations of user developed features that developers have taken and added to their clients. Yet Twitter decides heavy handedly and without any apparent conversation with developers who actually deal with the people using the service change the ideas to what they think is best.

We have seen this with the @reply and most recently with retweeting. and as noted by Rob Diana on his blog Twitter is now trying to add features that will make their home page a better destination by showing you new message notifications.

I understand why Twitter is wanting to do things like this and it all boils down to pageviews. As it stands right now Twitter is probably only seeing half – or less – of the traffic on their home page because of all of the third party clients out there. They need to do something to increase their pageviews in order to even think about living up to their outrageous valuation.

This means that have to get people either using native Twitter client(s) and/or using the Twitter homepage. This is a situation that isn’t going to get any better either as pressure mounts, as it will, for Twitter to be able to find some business revenue that will justify their valuation.

In the end this doesn’t bode well for all those developers out there whether they be web based, desktop based or smartphone based – especially those without any business models of their own other than feeding off of Twitter.

Another brilliantly stupid idea of Twitter Lists – Country Lists

Steven Hodson — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:04:27 +0000

It has only be a few days since the roll out of the Twitter Lists and while most of the social media mavens are getting woodies over how great this is all going to be we are seeing new ideas being thought of each day, hour, minute that will only go to show just how badly this potentially great idea is going to get abused left right and center.

The current top idea that has come to light today is the idea being brought to you by a social media consultancy called Simplyzesty. It started yesterday with them creating a hand curated list of Twitterers who live in Ireland, and now today the word is that they are starting with lists for the US and UK.

The thing is with these lists is that they will be using some sort of automated system to create these two lists. Automated huh, well we all know that means that just as with any other scripts that can be run this stand the chance of being hijacked in some form or another.

According to Mike Butcher at TechCrunch (Europe) the process for getting on these lists will be as follows:

“Here’s how you get yourself into the list. The Irish one was built by hand, but the others are going to be built with a script but (sic) Twitter users tweeting “I want to get listed #TwitterCalifonia [or another state]” and Simplyzesty will collect all the tweets and add them to the lists for each State. In the UK Twitter users can tweet #TwitterEssex, replacing the county name with the county you live in.”

While Butcher notes that this won’t be a comprehensive list of sat Twitterers in Washington State or in London England I would be willing to bet that it will be full of spammer Twitter accounts. There is no mention in anything I have read about this automation of creating Country specific list as to whether there will be any oversight as to who actually gets on those lists.

Even the guys at The Next Web are having a hard time seeing any real value to the whole idea.

While it’s certainly interesting to see what everyone in a particular area is talking about, this isn’t the way to do it. All the company will have produced is a list of the people who are attention-seeking enough to want to be on it. What about all the other people out there in your state or county who aren’t on the list? Don’t they have something interesting to say?

On the surface, as with much of Web 2.0 and social media the warm and fuzzy of the goodness of man will win out, ideas like these are bound to become a way for spammers and less than ethical marketers to get their names on as many lists as possible thereby diluting the value of the original concept.

Call me pessimistic if you want but I tend to look at stuff like this with a healthy dose of realism and an understanding of how human nature isn’t always as pure in its motives as we might like to think.

Amazon to help you be a spammer while painting a bullseye for the FTC

Steven Hodson — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:22:46 +0000

One of the big topics today that I have picked up from my morning reading is the news that Amazon is going to help you become a Twitter spammer.

Yup now you will be able to populate your Twitter stream with links to items in the Amazon stores that you can sell as an affiliate and make money. Now to be sure there are probably a great number of people who will be totally ethical and above board when it comes to posting this type of stuff to their Twitter stream.

However I am willing to go out on a limb here and say that this kind of transparency will be extremely rare.

This idea is ripe for misuse and will do nothing more than provide a mechanism for affiliate marketers to start flooding Twitter with seemingly legitimate offers disguised as friendly recommendations. I wouldn’t be surprised if by the end of the week that this takes off to the point that previous hijacking of accounts will start happening again with links to Amazon products being the end game for supplied links.

The other big problem, which services like Magpie and SponsoredTweets have addressed is the matter of disclosure – especially with the upcoming changes as proposed by the FTC. In what I have read so far nothing is mentioned about the requirement of some sort of disclosure being a requirement of posting Amazon affiliate links to Twitter. In fact by all appearances you are totally left to your own ethics as to how you write up the Twitter message in your affiliate link message.

As Sarah Parez quite rightly pointed out in her post about this on ReadWriteWeb this is becoming nothing more that Twitter product placement or as she puts it – a hidden advertisement

The problem with this sort of “hidden” advertising, though, is exactly that: it’s hidden. This is the internet’s version of “product placement” – subtle advertising in plain sight yet never clearly identified as such. Was your favorite TV star using a Macbook? Was he drinking a Coke? Already commonplace in Hollywood, these almost subliminal advertising messages permeate our consciousness every time we turn on the TV. Now that same sort of hidden ad will soon show up in the Twitter streams of your favorite tweeters.

Sorry but with no guidance regarding disclosure, or even making it a requirement, this new idea for Amazon is exactly the reason why the FTC is getting involved. So much for self-regulation.

Twitterpeek: like other mobile devices, minus the functionality

Kim LaCapria — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:41:51 +0000

Is Tweet Deck for iPhone or TwitterBerry just not cutting it for you? Need something that exists merely to service your Twitter needs?

TwitterPeek is making gadget news today, physically resembling a smartphone without all the added functionality of an iPod Touch, iPhone, or similar device. Strangely reminiscent in aim (to me anyway) to those odd e-mail in your kitchen devices from the late 90s, this one just makes me wonder what the point may be. Is anyone tweeting so hard they need a device that just has to solely be devoted to Twitter, like your smartphone just can’t handle your Twitterosity? Is there enough Twitter functionality to warrant spending $200 or even $100 on one device?

I “get” Twitter. Although I’m not the most prolific Twitterer by a longshot, it has its unique communicative benefits and some people need reliable Twitter access for work. The TwitterPeek has a keyboard that looks like it ’s a bit handier than the iPhone’s compressed, self-reorienting pain in the ass- (incidentally, the keyboard on my iPhone also thinks I’m a bit of a trollop, as most misspellings get autochanged to a man’s proper name. In the wake of an unexpected death in my best friend’s family and a furious ensuing text volley, it tragicomically changed “anyone than him?” to “Antoine than Jim?”) But at 140 characters max, keyboard size can’t be that big a selling point.

TwitterPeek, true to it’s name, also shortens tweets to the first few characters- so unlike TweetDeck for iPhone, you have to click on each individual message you’re interested reading in its entirety. So while doing a few things exclusively, the TwitterPeek doesn’t seem to do the dedicated tasks it does very well at all. The other major cornerstone of the pitch seems to be access- for $200, you get “lifetime” access to the TwitterPeek network. $100 buys the device and six months of access, at which point access costs $7.95 a month. Or, you know, free with your iPhone’s data plan. I’m just saying. Let it be noted that “lifetime” access refers not to how long you own this item or draw breath on the planet, but rather the lifetime of the TwitterPeek device. Remember the airport Clear Card?

Of course, my skepticism could be misplaced- the TwitterPeek could take off. But with who? The heavy users of Twitter, the tech-y types and early adopter types- they must already have a Twitter habit in place that’s hard to break. They probably have a dozen devices that Twitter better than this one. And the social Twitter types- the pop-stars and clubby types- are happy with their smartphones, I’d imagine. The Amazon product listing pitches to newbies as well, someone who’s heard about this Twitter thing on Oprah and wants to get in on it. The Amazon copy, pasted below, seems to be geared toward that user, but it seems like a shaky demographic to stand on, notoriously vacillating and easily led away. Oooh! A Twitter device! Oooh! A Snuggie bundle! >click click click<

TwitterPeek keeps you connected with instant tweet delivery, so you’re always the first to receive timely, fun, useful and provocative information direct from the source. You might follow the New York Times for breaking news. Lance Armstrong might invite you along on a bike ride through Hamburg. Oprah might let you in on the latest book she’s reading. Or, better yet, you might discover the coffee shop around the corner is offering free scones until 11 am for all tweeters. You’ll discover an infinite world of conversation with the nifty, pocket-sized TwitterPeek.

Perfect for Twitter addicts, newbies or anyone interested in getting into Twitter, TwitterPeek makes a great holiday gift. It’s everything you love about Twitter packed into a slim, lightweight mobile gadget that works anywhere in the US – no wifi necessary! Tweet, retweet, reply and direct message your favorite celebrities, friends, co-workers and family. TwitterPeek’s intuitive menu, handy scroll wheel and universal tweet inbox make it as easy to master as email.

Because TwitterPeek is designed for Twitter, it provides a tweeting experience superior to any website or smartphone application. No more waiting for tweets to download or clicking the “more” button to see old tweets. TwitterPeek’s “always on” tweet delivery makes it a snap to follow 100’s of people throughout the course of your day. Best of all, you don’t have to spend $50/month on an expensive smartphone data plan to get Twitter.

Wait, if I buy this thing Lance Armstrong might go bike-riding with me? I don’t even have a bike! Sign me up!

TwitterPeek is available now at Amazon.

Twitter hell breaks loose in England

Steven Hodson — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:55:13 +0000

At the end of October I wrote a post here telling how Stephen Fry, England’s best know Twitterer was thinking about calling quits his love affair with the service. It all centered around a message on Twitter from one @brumplum who messaged “Much as I admire and adore the chap, they are a bit … boring,”.

Now in the scheme of things the message on a scale of one to ten for insult value barely registers above one. This didn’t stop Fry from letting it get to him. It should be noted that Fry has been very open about how he suffers from depression and is bipolar so quite possibly this message hit him at the wrong time.

However the reaction to the incident by the many fans of Stephen was fast and furious (Tworm?). In a Twitter instant @brumplum, or Richard as he is known to friends and family, suddenly found himself facing an onslaught of truly mean and abuse Twitter messages.

When Mr. Fry’s followers heard of his distress, they tended to do two things: offer their support and criticize his perceived antagonist. And suddenly Richard from Birmingham, who says on his Twitter profile that he writes “one-line movie reviews, and more,” found himself the target of a stream of unpleasant, even abusive, tweets. Among the most upsetting, to him at least, were those from the well-known British actor and comedian Alan Davies. Mr. Davies, who is a friend of Mr. Fry’s and has more than 104,000 Twitter followers, called Richard a “moron,” and worse.

Source: The New York Times

The end result of all this?

Well we still don’t know if Stephen Fry will be sticking around Twitter or not but the controversy sure hasn’t hurt @brumplum’s follower count. Before all this started he had 340 followers and now upon checking his Twitter page we see it has climbed very nicely to almost 1,500.

Twitter strokes egos with a new A-List popularity contest

Steven Hodson — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 01:21:01 +0000

Are you on any Twitter lists? Have you had your ego stroked by seeing the number of Twitter lists you are on climbing?

What the hell are Twitter lists you ask. Well my obviously social media deficient friend these lists are the new digerati’s A-List. It is how you are now going to be able to measure your worth in the world from this day forth. Yes sir you can now measure your value by how many lists you have been lucky enough to find yourself on.

Still not clear what all the fuss is about, well you see there is this social media juggernaut called Twitter and everyone who is everybody is climbing on board this bandwagon of warm and fuzzy collect as many followers as you can – or in the case of Stephen Fry getting off at the next stop. During the early heydays (last week) the principal way you could get any bragging rights about how well you were doing on Twitter was to con get as many people to follow you as possible.

This of course leads to the usual gold rush of spammers, marketers and PR firms doing everything they could to get themselves, or their clients they were ghosting for, to get as many followers as possible. After all this was the new world of touchy feely conversations with everyone in the world who cared about you.

However any value that you might have for your followers over the next person was short lived so Twitter came up with an idea. Lists. Yes we’ll let you all be able to create separate lists for all the different areas of interest and add people to those lists. Sound like a great idea huh?

Well according to much of the mucky mucks in the social media world this really is the best things since sliced bread and bacon. It’s got people like Robert Scoble smacking down on Google Reader and proclaiming to all who will listen that there is nothing better in the world than Twitter Lists (at least until next week).

It is, as Todd Zeigler at The Bivings Report says: the new endorsement. So the higher number of lists you are on the more value you have in the brave new world of social media.

People follow folks for lots of reasons. Out of courtesy. Because they like their avatar. To get them to follow them back. Adding someone to a list is more of an endorsement – you are saying this person is someone worth listening to. While I’m sure people will now work to game their “lists” number, in the short term I think it provides a really interesting insight into how respected Twitter users are.

Short term is right if the popularity of sites that have sprung up to take advantage of this new feature of ego stroking from Twitter are any example. From sites that are basically outsourcing their list creation to more curated types like Listorious it is apparent that Twitter Lists are the new ranking.

Interestingly enough some of the early push back to the lists is coming in from people who you might not think of right off the bat. One of the first to speak about how these lists might not be all they are cracked up be is Chris Brogan who wrote this today:

In talking with friends about it on Twitter, people immediately started DM-ing me, telling me that they felt left out or even LESS important because they weren’t on any lists. Lists are exclusionary by nature. They’re static. There’s a lot of reasons why they might not be all that pleasant for people.

Whether or not we get over being left out of other peoples lists doesn’t change the fact that Twitter Lists will become the new ranking system in Social Media. They will be the new measure of worth to a lot of people and you can be damn sure that even now there a lot of people, marketers, spammers and PR firms who are trying to figure out just how they can use this new TwitterRank to their benefit.