Twitter

"Yay, I am publishing my Buzzes over to Twitter!!! Here's how I did it... 1. Burn a feed of your public Buzz profile (Feedburner.com is great for this) 2. Push Buzz to Twitter (Twitterfeed.com is great for this) 3. Optimize settings in both apps, e.g. add your Bit.ly API key, etc. 4. Sit back and relax as your Buzz items go to Twitter! See mine here http://Twitter.com/SusanBeebe" - Susan Beebe

Chris - yes, there is!! ---> http://blog.louisgray.com/2010... - Susan Beebe

haha love this - Craig Davis

Yeah, I saw a load of FF user lists spring up and I slapped myself on the wrist for not spending enough time her over the past couple of weeks! - Martin Bryant

Martin - Yep, same here! :) - Susan Beebe

Can I plug my FF Twitter List here? Oh well here it is: http://ff.im/aOeIo :-) - Kol Tregaskes

Absolutely - thank you Kol :) - Susan Beebe

awesome. did u just look that up Susan? - Zee.

@Row, I seriously don't want to, but Old Media's wounds are entirely self-inflicted. There will always be investigative journalism, it's just that it needs to be paid for by newer/smarter monetization models. And the pay-wall ain't it.. Murdoch is entirely out of his gourd on this one, and that's not a political statement in this case. - Alex Schleber

"But Twitter is something different. Its whole raison d'être is to broadcast one's life, thoughts, whims and so on. And if you enable Tweet geotagging, the only time your location will be broadcast to the world is when you choose to send a public Tweet. In other words, if you're already publicly Tweeting an opinion, it's pretty likely that you wouldn't be too protective of the location the Tweet came from (I've already half-jokingly suggested the name Perch for this location). Tweet geotag info could basically become the way that geolocation becomes acceptable to a broader share of the public. And that's pretty exciting. Tied into Twitter's real-time news and opinion mojo, and exploited by some clever, entertaining or useful Twitter-based apps, geotagging really could become Twitter's killer feature." - Susan Beebe

"Rel=”nofollow” is an attribute that webmasters can add within the code for external links in order to signal that the link should not be followed by the search engine spiders. Bloggers often use the attribute to disuade comment spam. The nofollow trend on Twitter started last year when they first indicated to search spiders that links posted under Web, on the right hand side of the Twitter profile, were not to be trusted. They then extended that to links within the Bio as well. Now, Twitter adds the rel=”nofollow” attribute to all external links, be it links referencing an article or links to third-party Twitter apps that enabled posting the tweet. Internal links remain untouched, turning Twitter into a walled garden much like Wikipedia, with lots of link juice coming in from other sites but none going out." - Susan Beebe

"If it wasn’t bad enough that Facebook bought FriendFeed on Monday and turned on real-time search to better compete against Twitter in the Stream Wars, and is playing around with a lite version that resembles Twitter even more, now Twitter really has something to worry about. Facebook is growing faster than Twitter in the U.S., even though it is more than four times larger. In the month of July, according to the latest estimates from comScore, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the U.S., which was 14 percent higher than in June, 2009. Twitter, in contrast, only saw 21.2 million unique U.S. visitors to its Website, a 6 percent rise compared to the month before. In absolute terms, Facebook added about ten million new visitors in the month of July versus roughly one million new visitors for Twitter. At 87.7 million uniques, Facebook moves from the sixth largest Web media property in the U.S. to the fifth, passing the combined sites of Fox Interactive Media (80.9 million uniques) and coming within striking range of AOL (104.8 million). That is just in the U.S. Facebook is already the fourth largest site in the world (and Twitter is doing better worldwide as well, with a total of 44.5 million unique visitors in June). Note that these estimates are only for Twitter.com and do not include mobile or desktop clients such as Tweetdeck, Seesmic, or Tweetie, but it should be a good proxy for overall growth. Even if you double the numbers for Twitter, Facebook still trounced it in July (and the Facebook numbers don’t include activity on other sites other apps via Facebook Connect either)." - Susan Beebe

and I could still delete my Facebook account tomorrow - George Dearing

Time to hit the bomb shelters :-) - Todd Hoff

Twitterberry seems to be disabled, SocialScope is intermittent at best...guess I need to give UberTwitter another go. - Jared Smith

"Yesterday, Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Google's Blogger were targeted yesterday by a person or persons unknown in a denial-of-service attack (DDOS) which attempted to silence the voice of one individual. The target in question was a Georgian blogger who goes by the name of "Cyxymu" online, according to recent reports from CNET. While Google withstood the attack, the other services suffered. LiveJournal and Twitter went down completely and Facebook struggled throughout the day. As we now roll into day two of the "great social media outage of 2009," you may be surprised to learn that it's not over yet. Although Facebook and LJ have recovered, Twitter is still having issues. Not only was the site down once again early this morning, Twitter developers using the API are complaining the company is sending mixed messages by reporting that they're "back up" when in reality, the ecosystem of Twitter applications are, in many cases, still unusable. This morning, Twitter was once again taken down by the DDOS attack. According to Ken Godskind, Chief Strategy Officer for Alertsite, Twitter's website availability was less than 100% in the midnight, 3, 4, & 5 AM hours EST. As of 6 AM EST, the site has again recovered. Unfortunately, many third-party Twitter applications are still being affected." - Susan Beebe

Matthew, I tested extensively with all of the above apps this morning, and found that not all tweets were being sent or received by each of them. There were intermittent failures from each application. Interestingly, the most consistent failure was the twitter.com web site. I was virtually unable to tweet at all with that, and the few tweets that were accepted, were not delivered to API clients for at least 2 hours. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Web traffic stats / visual chart & data provided by http://AlertSite.com - Susan Beebe

"Twitter was shut down for hours Thursday morning by what it described as an “ongoing” denial-of- service attack, silencing millions of Tweeters the world over. It’s the first major outage the service has had in four months and possibly the first ever due to sabotage. The outage appeared to begin mid-morning, EST, and affected users around the world. In a post that appeared later this morning, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, gave no indication of how the defense was going, or how long the service might be down in the brief update." - Susan Beebe

The most interesting apect is how this attack on Twitter is affecting other services. - Liz

@biz ---> "Thursday, August 06, 2009 Denial of Service Attack On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack. Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate." - Susan Beebe

Twitter Status Blog - 3rd Update: "Update (9:46a): As we recover, users will experience some longer load times and slowness. This includes timeouts to API clients. We’re working to get back to 100% as quickly as we can." - Susan Beebe

update 11:20am EST: @biz ---> Thursday, August 06, 2009 Denial of Service Attack On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack. Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate. http://blog.twitter.com/2009... - Susan Beebe

Twitter Status Blog - 2nd Update: "Ongoing denial-of-service attack -- We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly. Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack." - Susan Beebe

The connection is that both situations are annoying. - Chrissie M

Twitter has been down for 2 hours already now, and Facebook has gone too shortly ago! - Flavio

for my friends who don't understand twitter..... - Stephanie Segel

The correct link is Http://tweetboard.com/alpha, your doesn't work - Roberto

I just requested an invite - any feedback from FF community ? - Susan Beebe

Chris - good to know it's stable. That's important for Corp use - Susan Beebe

This website is getting lots of traffic, so you may have to re-try it - Susan Beebe

"Flickr has finally joined the party for seamlessly connecting and sharing pictures directly to Twitter. Up until now, Twitpic and yfrog have dominated the Twitter stream for pictures, simply because they provided a tremendously easy system for snapping and uploading pictures to Twitter from mobile devices. While I’m an avid photographer, I am not however, an avid camera-phone shutterbug. Up until recently, if I were so inclined to proactively share an image from my Flickr Pro account, I would do so manually. However, an age-old feature within Flickr has finally received a long overdue update, the ability to not only “blog this” image, but also “tweet it.” Now, simply clicking on the “blog this” button above the image, you can now connect your Twitter account in addition to your blog. In doing so, it takes you to another window where you have roughly 120 characters remaining to frame the tweet. Flickr automatically provides a shortened “flic.kr” URL and embedds it into your Tweet to save time and effort." - Susan Beebe

Only the title argument in the Flickr API call gets posted to Twitter. The description, although required, gets discarded. Steve - CdL Creative

This is an excellent example of missing a key requirement when building applications. The API team failed to build a scalable application for accepting the incoming data (Problem: limitation on "unique identifier" variable assigned for each post "tweet" - fixed limit is too small for actual data capacity received via API). To their credit, twitter's growth has been unbelievably exponential, so it understandable to "miss" a key requirement like this as they may have never foreseen the need to scale up their API app this much; however, the sharp upward growth trending has been quite clear for some time (lots of warning) - oops. - Susan Beebe

considering that some of the earliest tweets have gone missing, maybe their fix is to roll over ? - martin english

Actually, Twitter is just fine, they have been handling that case since the start. It's only the 3rd party clients that may be impacted is their software is not designed to handle large numbers. - fbrunel

"Twitter: to tweet or not to tweet?""Twitter is a micro-blogging service that enables people to read each other's posts (known as 'tweets') in the form of 140 character updates. It was created in 2006, and in February 2009 Nielson.com ranked Twitter as the fastest growing site with 1382% growth - a lot of that growth happening towards the end of 2008. Not surprising, given the economic downturn and upsurge in the number of people embracing social media and social networking. Despite the sudden growth of Tweeple (people who tweet and are twitters), Nielson.com reports that 60% of Twitter users quit within the first month. Why? My guess is because they never should have been there in the first place. If you are thinking about using Twitter as part of your job search or career management strategy, here is what you need to know: The object of Twitter is to increase your visibility by acquiring followers (people who read your tweets). People will follow you if you have interesting information to share. This means posting helpful links, facts, quotes, and other data. The onus is on you to give first. Continually updating your status (i.e. is searching for XYZ opportunities, is working on her resume, is going to a networking event, etc) will not net you the results you're seeking. Save those updates for Facebook and LinkedIn. Twitter requires a larger investment of time and energy than other social networking sites. You have to research to find relevant and interesting things to share, and be committed to tweeting on a regular and consistent basis. Even on a busy day, you should aim to tweet at least three times (minimum) throughout the day if you want to solidify your reputation as a subject matter expert and increase your follower base. If you are more interested in following than being followed, an investment of time is still required to read tweets posted by others. Unless you're famous (or infamous), the chances of someone randomly searching for, finding, and following you are slim-to-nil. You need to create a buzz around yourself and your tweets by letting people know you're on Twitter and by tweeting about issues and ideas your target audience will find interesting. Pete Cashmore (Mashable) and Dan Schawbel (danschawbel) have done a great job of this. Twitter is a wonderful tool for keeping you on the cutting edge of the information highway, but it is worth thinking seriously about which lane you want to be in before you merge into traffic. You can follow me on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/KendraReddy " - Susan Beebe

"How Does Twitter Grader Calculate Twitter Rankings? by dshah on May 20, 2009 The most common question I get at grader.com is about how the Twitter Grader algorithm (and associated rankings) works. Before we dig a bit into the details, it will help to understand the what before the how. What Twitter Grader is trying to measure is the power, reach and authority of a twitter account. In other words, when you tweet, what kind of an impact does it have? Normally, we don’t like talking about the details of the Twitter Grader algorithm. This is for the same reason that Google doesn’t like to talk about its algorithm: revealing details increases the degree to which people try to game the system. So, lets approach the question from a different way. If one were to look at data for a given user available in twitter, what kinds of things would one look at to determine whether that user had power, reach and authority? Also, when looking at these various factors, it’s helpful to think about each of these in the “all other things being equal, what’s better” context. Otherwise, it’s easy to get caught up into non-productive arguments on why a certain factor is or isn’t important, because there are so many cases that “prove” that it doesn’t matter. Let me explain. One of the factors that goes into measuring your Twitter Grade is the number of followers you have. Many of you will argue that the number of followers is completely irrelevant because it’s so easy to game. There are automated tools to do nothing but acquire followers by following a bunch of people. That’s true. It is easy to spike up your follower count. However, I would counter with this: If we were looking at two different twitter users, all other things being equal (and I do mean all other things), the one with more followers is likely more powerful and deserves a higher twitter grade. Of course, all other things are usually not equal and that’s why the Twitter Grade is interesting. So, let’s go into the factors. Note: These are NOT in order of priority or weight (and they’re not all weighted equally — not by a long shot). Algorithm Factors 1. Number of Followers: More followers leads to a higher Twitter Grade (all other things being equal). Yes, I agree that it’s easy to game this number, but we are looking at measuring reach and I did say all other things being equal. 2. Power of Followers: If you have people with a high Twitter Grade following you, it counts more than those with a low Twitter Grade following you. It’s a bit recursive, and we don’t get carried away with it, but it helps. 2. Updates: More updates generally leads to a higher grade — within reason. This does not mean you should be tweeting like a manic squirrel cranked up on caffeine and sugar. It won’t help either your Twitter Grade or your overall happiness in life. 3. Update Recency: Users that are more current (i.e. time elapsed since last tweet is low) generally get higher grades. 4. Follower/Following Ratio: The higher the ratio, the better. However, the weight of this particular factor decreases as the user accrues points for other factors (so, once a user gets to a high level of followers or a high level of engagement, the Follower/Following ratio counts less). 5. Engagement: The more a given user’s tweets are being retweeted, the more times the user is being referenced or cited, the higher the twitter grade. Further, the value of the engagement is higher based on who is being engaged. If a user with a very high Twitter Grade retweets, it counts more than if a spammy account with a very low grade retweets. The Grade Calculation: So, those are the factors that go into the calculation of a score. This score is then used to compare a user against all other users that also have a score. The grade is calculated as the approximate percentage of other users that have an equal or lower score. So, a Twitter Grade of 80 means that about 80% of the other users got a lower score. At the time this article is being written, over 2.1 million users have been graded. The Ranking: The absolute ranking is exactly what it sounds like. Based on all other users scored, what’s your “position” in that list. A ranking of 5,000 means that only 4,999 other people had a higher score than you (at that point in time). Elite List: The elite list is simply an ordered list of the top users (based on ranking) at a given point in time. This list is updated several times a day. We also maintain lists of the top ranking users based on a narrower set of users (like those in a specific geography, those that match a specific keyword, etc.). That’s all I’ve got for now. Hopefully, this answers some of your questions. What are other factors you think we should be looking at to compute the Twitter Grade? Would love to hear your thoughts and ideas in the comments." - Susan Beebe

Interesting results from the grader... I liked the ability to see other tweeter's rank in my local area and to see who they are. - Robert Freeze

yep, it is a fabulous "discovery" tool for twitter - Susan Beebe

""On 12 February 2009 100+ cities around the world will be hosting Twestivals which bring together Twitter communities for an evening of fun and to raise money and awareness for charity: water. Join us by hosting a Twestival in your city, attending an event, or participating online. The Twestival is organized 100% by volunteers in cities around the world and 100% of the money raised from these events will go directly to support charity: water projects. "" - Susan Beebe

I'm game! I can get a few bands and Aaron Hunt volunteered his as well. Been meaning to contact Duffy anyhow for another item I wanted to bring up. I may be able to get the Ronnie Davis Clubs down town. Just gotta make a call. - Matthew Ray