On Freelance Switch, Will Kenny ponders whether online professionals are turning off prospective clients with personal tweeting. Freelancers have found blogs, social networks and microblogging services to be effective means to market one’s services virally. But the question here is whether one is effectively distinguishing between the social and professional aspect of having an online presence. [Read more…] about Do You Separate Your Personal and Professional Twitter Lives?
Twitter and Twitocracy: the Case of Moonfruit
If you haven’t eaten moonfruit, then you’re missing out on a lot. It’s a delicacy in some parts of the world. But it’s rare and expensive, and not everyone can afford it.
Of course, there’s no such thing as a moon fruit. But there is a web development company called Moonfruit. To celebrate their 10th anniversary, they’ve recently run a Twitter campaign involving the giveaway of 10 MacBook Pros. The mechanics are simple: Just include the hashtag #moonfruit in your tweets and every day they select a winner at random from among those who mention the keyword in the past 24 hours.
Sounds interesting? Of course to the folks who want a free MacBook Pro, it is. And a lot have participated, resulting in #moonfruit being a trending topic. People have won, and Moonfruit has even sent special prizes to folks had been creative in using their keyword–some have sung, some have created poems, some have recorded videos.
So is everyone happy? Apparently not. According to the Moonfruit blog, Twitter imposed some kind of censorship, in particular by taking the #moonfruit keyword off the trending topics list.
Late Friday night 3rd July, around midnight UK time Moonfruit finally tumbled off the top of the trends list on Twitter. Now this wasn’t wholly unexpected with July 4th on the way and the resignation of Sarah Palin. But what was odd is how it that it never returned despite the stats being above other trending topics.
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[I]f Twitter had come to us and said, “guys, enough is enough”, then we would have worked with them to limit the campaign, or complied with whatever they were demanding. However, if they have pulled the trending without explanation or communication, this sets rather a different tone.
Moonfruit provides some links to statistics, claiming that the #moonfruit hashtag continues to surpass most others, but is nowhere to be found in the trending topics list.
There are precedents here. Twitter is known to have taken off inappropriate terms from the trending list in the past. It’s understandable that Twitter needs to protect its network and technology. Adult and raunchy material definitely don’t fall under “acceptable” given Twitter’s diverse audience. I wouldn’t want my kid to read about those kinds of things. But what about keywords that are not necessarily offensive?
The argument here is whether Twitter’s trending topics list should be a pure numbers game, or whether it should involve some algorithm that determines which is eligible, and which is not.
Should there be an algorithm for trends rather than making trending topics a pure numbers game? Should the system be fixed so that #liesboystell doesn’t win out over truly important, significant, or newsworthy content? Should tweets, like images and other kinds of content, be screened for “adult” material and user preferences be set accordingly? Or do trends really belong to the lowest common denominator?
And if all else fails, should there be human intervention to flag something as spammy or obscene?
Other social media services involve some sort of algorithm to minimize or moderate the possibility of gaming. DIGG, for instance has its secret algorithm for bringing entries to frontpage. It’s not just a purely numbers game, but it also involves a host of other factors like aging, authority, timeliness of votes, and the like. Even Google doesn’t use a purely numeric algorithm in determining PageRank. It’s secret algorithm also uses a lot of factors. And even search results don’t rely solely on PageRank and the quantity of links.
The danger here is that using a simple numbers game would make Twitter prone to spam. I’ve already encountered my share of spammy marketers trying to push affiliate links at my face. Without some filtering or moderation mechanism, the Twitter trending topics list would be easy to fill up with useless keywords. Not that marketing on Twitter is bad. There is, after all, a better way of doing it, which does not involve in-your-face, pushy and spammy advertising. But if trivial, unimportant topics keep on edging out the more relevant keywords, this could dilute the value of Twitter as a live search platform.
Still, the question here is about “Twitocracy.” Is Twitter democratic at all? And is there sense in implementing a purely democratic system of presenting information? Or is pure social media democracy a pipe dream?
Would You Withhold Information If It Meant Saving a Life?
A lot of bloggers tend to be trigger happy with publishing information. There’s always the desire to be the first to post about breaking news, especially if it’s fresh and yet unpublished by the more mainstream news sources. Bloggers and editors of new media publications take pride in this. But how far will we go with the desire to be first? What if it meant possibly endangering the life of a person–a fellow writer or journalist at that?
Back in November of 2008, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist David Rohde was kidnapped in Afghanistan. His employer, the New York Times, has struggled to keep this information under wraps for about nine months until Rohde’s escape from his captors just a few days ago. The reason: word going out would potentially endanger the life of the kidnapped reporter.
However, some Wikipedia editors (which means virtually anyone who knows how to edit content on the site) felt the need to make the information public, and Wikipedia’s administrators likewise fought a “convoluted game of cat-and-mouse” in preventing this information from being included in Rohde’s Wikipedia page. They were met with much criticism and outrage from these editors. And the administrators felt they could not arbitrarily suppress this information without attracting too much attention. So they kept trying, keeping a low-profile, and trying to stick within the limits of Wikipedia’s terms of service.
In hindsight, the Wikipedia editors who wanted to include the information on Rohde’s kidnapping probably meant no ill will. But looking at the big picture, their actions could have, indeed, led to trouble on the kidnapped journalist’s part. Even if this piece of information on Wikipedia will probably not have any direct bearing on the captors’ activities, it could perhaps be a catalyst to bigger things. People do trust Wikipedia, after all (or at least that is my perception), and if adequate sources are cited, then bloggers, Twitterers and social media users of all kinds would post, link and discuss. And as the Times’ executives fear, the publicity could, indeed, “raise Mr. Rohde’s value to his captors as a bargaining chip and reduce his chance of survival.”
As a social media user, what do you think if this dichotomy between security and freedom of information? I know this has been a pressing issue in many oppressive regimes where information is curtailed in the name of national security or such ideals. But when the risk is concrete and identifiable, and when you know that someone could, indeed, die if you leak out sensitive information, doesn’t that make you think twice before hitting the “save” or “publish” button? Which do you value more: freedom of information or life?
At the very least, this makes me realize that I should be more mindful of what I post online, whether it’s on a blog, Twitter, Flickr, and other public places.
Would you withhold information if it meant possibly saving a life?
Would You Pay to Read Someone’s Tweets?
Would you pay to read someone’s tweets? For some time now, enterprising individuals have been trying to find the holy grail of Twitter monetization. Some have been blatantly spamming advertisements through @replies. Some have indirectly monetized their Twitter accounts by using it as a viral marketing tool. Still, others have created Twitter clients that are funded by advertisements.
Will you dare to venture into Twitter monetization by limiting your audience to paying subscribers? This is what TwitPub aims to do. It’s supposed to be a
marketplace made for Twitter so users can buy and sell premium tweets.
Is this a viable business model? It could be, if you are in the business of dispensing important, expensive advice.
While TwitPub’s activity may not be all that impressive, their service may have potential within the political and financial realms (as people would pay to access gossip and financial advice, especially in this economy).
I come from a school of thought that says the moment you set a price to your content, you would have already devalued it. For one, you are limiting your audience severely. Secondly, you won’t have as much interactivity and viral marketing potential if your content is closed. Of course, this may not necessarily be true in all cases, but unless you’re really famous and powerful, I’m not sure if anyone would be interested in paying to read your tweets. And if you’re already famous and powerful, you probably don’t need anyone paying a few bucks to read your tweets or to send you direct messages.
Would you pay to read someone’s tweets? And would you pay to get your direct message sent into someone’s inbox?
Do You Tweet to Read or Do You Tweet to Write?
I’ve observed several celebrity Twitter users to have a friend/follower ratio that is heavily skewed toward the follower side. This means they have a huge following, but follow only a very few people. While most do reply to tweets related to them or directly sent to them as @replies, a lot are probably just using Twitter to post updates about themselves (which is understandable, especially for folks with a very public life). Some others are most likely marketers. They don’t engage in conversation much, but they do post a lot of quotes, retweets and links.
On the other hand, some Twitter users I know are more of readers rather than writers. They seem to have a lot of followed folks, but only a few followers. And they mostly engage in conversation when the topic interests them.
I’m part of the second group. I must admit I’m not too fond of tweeting out of the blue, about what I ate for breakfast, musing about the weather, or complaining about the chores I’m currently doing. I mostly scan and read updates from my Twitter friends–mostly on my mobile phone using Gravity–and reply to or retweet interesting messages. I also try to get ideas for blog posts or articles from my friends’ feed or from searches relevant to my interests. For me, Twitter is not a platform for simply shouting out my ideas, but rather a community with a rich cloud of information ready to be harvested and processed.
What about you? Do you tweet to read? Or do tweet to write?
How Long Should a Twitter @reply Take?
If you were to reply to an email message, it’s generally acceptable practice to respond at your convenience, as you are able, or at the very least during the same business day. Email is not instant messaging after all. It’s like an exchange of letters. You send a message and you expect your correspondent to write you an answer in a similar fashion. Maybe the recipient needs to better digest the contents of your email. Maybe he’s researching and studying how to best respond.
Instant messaging, on the other hand, is different. It’s like a phone call–you expect the person you’re chatting with to answer as soon as you hit the “send” button. If we further compare to other modes of online communication, blogs handle it differently, because you write a message meant to be read, but you don’t exactly expect the reader to respond.
In a way, Twitter features these different characteristics from email, IM and blogging–of course, in 140 characters or less. You can write a tweet meant for consumption by the general public. You can write a direct message or a @reply directed at someone. And you can even have these exchanges of @replies on an instant basis, like being in a public chatroom where people can listen in.
Just this evening, after reviewing the day’s tweets by my contacts, I sent replies to a few. When I looked at the timestamps of the original messages, most were posted about 30 minutes to about an hour prior. But one of the tweets I replied to was already six hours old. In that case, was my @reply already too late? Was the original tweet stale already? What was the point of replying to an old tweet when twitter posts were supposed to be about “what [you are] doing right now?”
It’s like your neighbor asking you about the weather in the morning, and you get back to him later that evening that it’s a lovely moonlit evening, without a cloud in the sky. Where’d the rest of the day go?
In a way, Tweets are like blog posts, as they have time stamps and permalinks. And they’re sticky. Once you post a tweet, it’s public record and is searchable (unless you delete it), and so users looking for relevant material on the search engines or even Twitter’s own #search feature can chance upon your tweet, no matter how old it is. And whenever someone posts a reply, Twitter does have a record of which particular post that @reply was directed towards, and even links to the original tweet in the “this post was in reply to …”
Still, not all Twitter clients cite the tweet being referenced. And so sometimes the context is lost.
How long after a tweet should you reply? In the Twitterverse, what is considered fresh? How old is considered old?
I think for me, it’s reasonable to publicly reply to a tweet that’s at most one hour old. Otherwise, I insert a few keywords from the original tweet just to make sure the recipient and everyone else listening in would not be lost.
Yahoo! 360 Closing Shop. How Confident Are You With Your Blogging Service Provider?
Yahoo! has announced that its 360! service will be shutting down by July 12, 2009.
Though 360 gained a strong core of loyal users (you) who enjoyed the service, Yahoo! has been reprioritizing some products to help us deliver the best possible experiences to consumers. The decision to close Yahoo! 360 and transition users to profiles is part of this larger strategy, but we had been waiting until we had an alternative solution that we could offer to our community of Yahoo! 360 users until we officially shut down 360.
This might not exactly be big news to most of the world, but for regions where 360 is the preferred blogging and social networking application of choice, like in Vietnam, this could be cause for concern and headache. Yahoo! will provide a way to migrate blog content to a Yahoo! profile. But of course, it’s not the same thing. The functionality will likely be different. Also, if your blog has already been optimized on the search engines and saved on peoples’ bookmarks and RSS readers, you will definitely lose readership.
This makes me wonder: how sure are you with your service providers like blogging applications, lifestreaming services, and the like? Many of us rely on WordPress.com, Twitter.com and other free or paid hosted services to run our blogs, save our thoughts, and practically store our memories. Maybe the bigger, more popular companies don’t run the risk of folding up. But the smaller, niche service providers might be riskier. Does this mean everyone should just go with one service like everyone else? Or maybe it’s best to run a self-hosted blog.
Yahoo! 360 will not be missed, except perhaps in Vietnam. Maybe this is one big reason Yahoo! has decided (since 2007) to end support and ultimately pull the plug. It’s probably not cost-effective to maintain a big service when it’s only patronized in one niche or regional market. But then again, Yahoo! could have probably just focused its resources on that particular market, just like how other services like Friendster are doing. The only consolation of big users, at least, is that content can be migrated into a Yahoo! account, and this should likely be hassle-free.
Are your web apps future-proof? Or is there no such thing?
Via Blog Herald and @yahoo.
What do you do with valid comments that have commercial links?
You probably get these a lot of times. Some posts a valid comment, with well-thought out and substantial paragraphs. But when you check the author name and link, it’s a link to a commercial site, using keywords meant for search optimization. Some of these get caught by the spam filter, but some are approved. You tell yourself there’s no worry, because you use rel=nofollow anyway. But if your comment policy (if you have one) prohibits outright advertisements, your readers might start to wonder.
You probably get two to three paragraphs with good arguments, but signed as “buy used cars” or “bank loans” or whatnot. With a blog as big as Performancing, this can become a big headache.
What do you do with valid comments that have commercial links? You can either:
- Remove the URL, leaving out the name;
- Unpublish or delete the entire comment; or,
- Leave it be, making sure you have rel=nofollow turned on.
Deleting the entire comment is probably the easiest option, since it just involves one click. Editing out the URL is a bit more complicated, since it involves editing the comment and manually setting the URL field blank. Perhaps there should be an option or plugin on blogging platforms to nuke the URL field in one click, but leaving the contents intact.
And then there’s the question of your threshold for commercial links. What exactly does constitute a commercial link that you’d rather delete? What if the link were relevant to the post you made? For instance, if you post about viruses and malware, and someone from a known antivirus company posts a valid tip, with a link back to his site, what do you do?
Again, dealing with a couple of these would probably be easy, but if you are faced with dozens or hundreds per day, it can get tedious, and you want something automated. Most anti-spam plugins are either a go or no go, meaning you can get them to publish or kill a comment depending on certain characteristics. I’d like to see something like publish the comment but not the link.
Of course, you can just hide the contents of the URL field, but that would not be fair to valid comment posters and readers interested in checking out commenters’ sites.
What’s your general rule on these kind of comments?