LIVEdigitally

Tag Archives: twitter

10000 followers won't get you a free latte

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Guess how much attention the following tweet garnered from MUNI (the San Francisco transportation organization)?  Answer below.

A lot of bloggers worked each other into a bit of a tizzy this weekend as they debated the merits of a Twitter feature that would allow one to sort search results in the order of users who have the most followers.  The debate wasn’t really about the feature itself, which is completely innocuous conceptually (Twitter search should allow tons of different sorts).  The debate was about Loic Lemeur (the original poster) using the term “authority” to define his request.

I’ll be as blunt as possible: the number of online “followers” (including Facebook friends, blog subscribers, and all the 19-year-olds on Friendster who genuinely want to meet old dorks like me) one has is not a measure of authority.  It is not a measure of power.  It is not a measure of intelligence. It is not a measure of capability.  It is not a measure of quality.  It is a measure of reach/audience, and if one wants to put a label on it, it’s called “popularity”.

In high school I ran for class president.  I lost.  The winner went to all the cool parties all year long, I went to few.  The winner was on lots of teams and associations, I was on several.  During our speeches, the winner talked about how great the school was and how much pride she had.  I spoke about getting the class to volunteer with a local in-need youth group.  In truth, little of this all mattered in the election, since I wasn’t a very popular kid in high school (yeah, that’s right, the guy who programmed C++ and ran an online BBS in the late 80’s wasn’t super popular, can you believe it? have no fear, I blossomed).

I really like something Robert Scoble wrote this morning:

Here’s why I’ve been saying for the past year that it is far more important who you follow than who follows you: if you follow people just to get followers you’ll end up being overworked, deep in information overload, and superficial to boot. You won’t have a philosophy. It +will+ show. You might be able to fool most of the idiots most of the time, but eventually they’ll see the difference between the “collect follower” types and the “surround yourself with smart people” types like Tim O’Reilly or Jay Rosen.

I can smell the “follow me” types a million miles away, can’t you?

I’m an idealist at heart.  Ideally one wouldn’t even be aware of quantity of followers.  Ideally one wouldn’t know their blog subscriber count.  Personally, my favorite “stat” is seeing responsive blog posts externally or comments on my blog posts and/or friendfeed entries.  Comments imply I’ve done something interesting enough that someone else chose to interact with it.  And that’s what excites me about being a content creator online.

ps – the question at the top of the blog post was rhetorical, sorry about my clever ruse.

Little Known Facts about Sarah Palin: a fun day of Tweeting

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I’ve spent a good part of the last 6 hours chuckling following the “Little Known Facts” meme about Sarah Palin. It appears to have started by a Twitter user named Michael Turk who Tweeted:

Little known fact: Sarah Palin used to wrestle kodiak bears in Alaskan bare knuckles fight clubs.

Since then, over 1000 (1092 at the time of writing) other entries have appeared. In fact, 60 more were written while I write this blog post.

Some are LOL funny. Some are not. But it’s just made my day, and if you want to read more, enjoy them here (including mine). There’s even palinfacts.com already in place with some highlights.

Thank you Internet (and especially Michael Turk), for making today an especially fun one.

Blippr tackles micro reviews – micro keeps getting bigger

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On a scale of 1 to 10, I think Blippr is pretty cool.

Blippr is a review service; you write short-form reviews of all kinds of things (books, movies, etc.)  In an oxymoronic set of circumstances that only the Internet can enable, “micro” services are becoming huge.  Twitter started a couple of years ago, and has become a popular (in the Valley, not in Kansas) “micro-blogging” service.  In 140 characters or less you give your followers a status update.  Some people use this for life-casting (i.e. I’m going to get a burrito) and others for starting conversations (i.e. what are the chances that Vista will stop sucking?).  In my opinion, the latter is a much more interesting use for the service.

Twitter is about “micro-blogging” because they have a strict limitation on your content – all posts must be 140 characters or less.  That’s as opposed to say WordPress, which is unlimited blogging (gurgitate to your heart’s content).   12seconds (which we’re involved in directly and which we posted about last month) also imposes a user constraint (twelve seconds, in case that wasn’t obvious.)  Blippr follows suit with a constraint of their own, 160 characters or less.

Erick Schonfeld at Techcrunch wrote an article about Blippr a couple of weeks ago, which offers a fine summary of the product.  I just signed up for an account myself – want to be friends?  So far I’ve reviewed a couple of movies, Dark Knight and 300.  Blippr encourages reviews for all kinds of products, including movies, music, games, books, and more.  The restraints force you to be choosy with your words and even your characters.  (Might want to start liking the ampersand.)

I see lots of opportunities in this product to link out to other products and services, whether amazon book and music purchases, netflix movie rentals, booksfree book rentals, social networks likes Shelfari, Facebook, and more… the list is more or less never-ending.  Some of those deals could include affiliate deals that might even generate revenue, which is always a nice little bonus in an internet company.

I like the UI in Blippr.  When you type out a review, a blue bar below the text window indicates how much space you have left.  Where Twitter uses a numeric counter (which turns red and features a minus sign when you pass 140), I think the visualization of the blue bar is effective and more interesting to watch.

Blippr’s also done a great job of integrating other services; it’s quite easy to link your blips to your Twitter stream, to your FriendFeed, and to a myriad of other services.

There are a number of things I think BLippr could improve upon – doubtless they’ve considered these already, but I’ll voice them anyway.  I think it would be cool if you could embed blips, make a widget out of all my blips, specific genres of blips, etc.  It’d be nice to have the option to embed them directly on my blog, on a profile page, etc.

Also, SMS integration makes a lot of sense.  According to tehir Get Satisfaction page, that’s coming soon.  I can see a great deal of utility to that feature, especially in regards to a spontaneous interaction with something or other (i.e. I just walked out of Indiana Jones 4, and I’m so offended by the refrigerator scene that I want to tell the world RIGHT NOW!)  I get it, they don’t have the money / resources / infrastructure / developers etc.  yet.  But they need to add SMS soon.

I also think this is an appropriate complement to Yelp, and other restaurant / business review services.  I’d like to see them expand their focus (or create a sister service) that is dedicated to that market.   And lastly, outside access seems really important to me.  How can I dip into the Blippr-o-sphere on my mobile handset when I’m in line at the movie theater and the movie I wanted to see is sold out?  Or I am at Green Apple Books (Clement and 6th in San Francisco, check ’em out) and I want someone’s opinion on a book.  A short, to-the-point opinion.

Overall, I think this service shows more promise than most “web 2.0” (god I hate that term) companies.  I’m interested to see where it goes.  To the right I’ve embedded a screenshot of my (considerably) shorter review of Blippr, using Blippr.  Neat.

This is also posted at 1to10reviews.