Twitter Archive

Alternative title: Are Facebook and LinkedIn the largest Twitter aggregators?

Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter all provide streams of content – the content can either be created on the service or the content can be posted automatically from outside sources – typically either RSS feeds or from one of these services to another. Both Facebook and LinkedIn have content outside of the stream while Twitter is completely based on the content stream.

What I’ve noticed more and more over the past few months is that the stream on both Facebook and LinkedIn is dominated by Twitter updates. And since I follow basically the same set of people on all 3 services, I see the same update over and over again. I understand that everyone is different but I have to assume that for many people, their overlap is somewhat similar.

This overlap of content creates several issues – I’ve discussed a few of them in years past when FriendFeed was still an active service.

The biggest issue I see with the mass sending of content updates to every possible social network is: where to comment to get a reaction from the status creator. As a basic example, if you look below, Anil Dash has posted an update on Twitter which was sucked into Facebook. Three people have commented on Anil’s content. Will Anil respond to these comments? Does he even know that these comments have been posted? And do the people commenting understand that Anil may not even know that these comments exist? While it might not be important for a typical status update, if I ask a question seeking help, then it is important that I see the replies.

There is always talk that some updates belong on Twitter, some on Facebook and some on LI. But the truth is that it seems like people just want to pass along their content to whatever service will take it (most of you know my view is that 99% of updates are not needed). I am hoping that in 2012 both Facebook and LinkedIn will offer the option to turn off third-party aggregation. Such an option would instantly clean up my streams on all three services. The downside from the company perspective is that they would lose the updates that are so important for monetization.

Continue reading “Does Twitter Own Facebook and LinkedIn for Status Updates?” »

The big news in the social media expert camp from last week was the notification that all links that are posted on Twitter, both on the website and using a third-party app, will now automatically be converted to use Twitter’s official t.co URL shortener. You can read the Twitter help post and the developer guide to learn more about t.co and how it works. Part of the conversation around the t.co rollout reminds me of some of the discussion when Digg launched the Diggbar.

Short tl:dr version: Just because a t.co url appears in your referral log, it does not mean that all the traffic to that url has come from Twitter.

Sean at the analytics service Clicky posted about how the change to use t.co will make it appear that Twitter has zero influence because the referral logs will show t.co instead of twitter.com going forward. When I initially read the post, I thought there was something wrong but couldn’t put my finger on it at the time. Yesterday Zee at the Next Web (note: they are a Twitter default user) created a post titled, “Twitter Just Got the Respect it Deserves”. He continues along the same lines as Clicky and has several key points:

• Twitter is now influential in terms of traffic from an “eyes of the media” standpoint
• Facebook and Stumbleupon better watch out because now Twitter will appear really big as a social media traffic driver
• Brands and businesses will now take note of how influential Twitter is
• You can search to find out which tweet was the influential one because you can search on a specific t.co url

Unfortunately it looks like there are issues with both the Clicky post (and the very wrong change they made to their service) and Zee’s statements.

Continue reading “Behavior Patterns of Twitter’s T.Co URL Shortener and Why Zee/Clicky Are Wrong” »

Last week paid blog post network Izea went public with a stock on the OTC board. Jason Calacanis has his explanation of the transaction on the Launch blog calling the transaction a, “back door IPO”. Izea CEO Ted Murphy created a video to demonstrate why Izea is a good investment.

Today Izea has announced the acquisition of Berlin-based Magpie. The press release notes the transaction was a cash and stock transaction but no acquisition amount was noted. The release explains that the reason for the acquisition was to help Izea grow their base in Europe.

I haven’t heard from Magpie in what feels like years. I think Magpie was the first paid ad network to pay Twitter users to post content into their streams. Since their launch, a number of other paid tweet ad networks have launched. Customers of Magpie will be transitioned into the Izea SponsoredTweets product. It should be interesting to see what happens to paid tweets once Twitter launches their own paid in-stream advertising product later this year.

It appears that Twitter is currently down for most users – I was first unable to access the site around 3am Eastern time. As of the time of this post, 8:30am Eastern time, I am still unable to access Twitter.com. The Twitter status site notes, “Currently experiencing elevated error rates — You may experience some problems loading twitter.com and with Twitter clients.  We are aware of the problem and are taking action.”

Based on some searches on Google, it does appear that some people are able to post messages — it does look like if you use a third-party client (Seesmic, HooterSuite, TweetDeck) you might still be able to get in.

This is the first time for an extended Twitter outage in quite a long time. In the old days of Twitter outages, we would all hop on the bus to Friendfeed but that is no longer an option since many have left that service.

Update 9:45am Eastern – Several of my undercover sources tell me this might have to do with the snow in San Francisco.

Update 2 – 10:15am Eastern – Twitter is back – now go post all the things you would have posted if Twitter was up and running.

If you are a social media ninja, social media rockstar and are really upset or need someone to talk to because of this outage, please call 867-5309.

As always, please report in if Twitter is down for you – include your location, whether you use a client tool or the main Twitter.com site and what you are doing to occupy your time during this outage.

Of course, the outage gives me a chance to share Twitter Come Back one more time!

Have you ever wondered what you had for lunch 19 days ago? What about how many times you “released some gas” on November 12, 2008? What about how many times your followers said the phrase “Justin Bieber” the day after the Grammy Awards? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, I have found a service that can help!

In all seriousness, there is always a good reason to backup your contributed content on all social services. Last night at the Austin Co-Founders Wanted meetup, BackupMyTweets (BMT) co-founder Joshua Baer provided an overview of how his Twitter backup service works. The basic concept is simple…you enter your Twitter username and BackupMyTweets will create a backup of all of your posted messages on Twitter from the day you created your account. Apparently Twitter will only display the last 3,200 messages you have posted.

The service is free to use if (I believe) you allow BMT to send out a message into your Twitter stream letting your followers know you are using BMT. You can pay $5/year to grab the BMT premium edition which doesn’t send out the auto-message and it also will backup all of your followers tweets too so you can create a timeline back to the day you created your Twitter account.

Over 20,000 people have signed up for the service so far and there are paying customers as well. Joshua is looking for someone to run the business. He said that with someone working on the management full-time, he expects they could increase their userbase 10x without much work. If you are interested in this position, you can contact Joshua on Twitter.
Continue reading “Co-Founder Wanted: BackupMyTweets Offers Twitter Backup Service (video)” »

Television shopping channel QVC has been working to integrate the latest technology into their offerings for a few years. Last year they hired Courtney Cason, their first “multi-media host”. From what I can tell, Cason created a bunch of holiday videos where she interviewed the on-air salespeople and she also provides live chats during some of the fashion shows. The network has also created mobile apps for all of the major platforms so you can look for and order items anytime. Overall I think QVC has done a good job in the online space and certainly a better job than their competitor HSN.

I’ve been following a thread on the QVC community forums for the last week. The subject of the popular thread is, “Get rid of the Tweets, Blogs, FB’s and the F.F.”

The gist of the thread is that the on-air hosts are spending too much time pimping their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts instead of talking about and explaining the actual products. As I noted above, Courtney (along with a few of the other junior hosts) appears to be hosting many of the live chats and she appears on air to read some of the comments and to get other shoppers to participate.

Here are a couple of the interesting comments from the discussion thread:

• I also have no interest in FB or any other social networking site, and it’s especially aggravating on a shopping channel. Seemed even more disruptive last night on PMS. It reminds me of Romper Room when they start reading off the names of those supposedly participating with Tweets, etc.
• QVC is a TV HOME SHOPPING CHANNEL…..We can’t actually see, touch, etc the items we are buying so its QVC’s job to give us as much detail/information about the item for the customer to make a decision. I don’t care about what people I don’t know are doing, buying, etc etc. Just give informative presentations without the nonsense.

Continue reading “QVC Shoppers Say “No More Facebooking and Tweeting During On-Air Presentations”” »

This morning I noticed that if you mouseover a short URL in Twitter, it displays the full URL. I have never noticed this before today. I did some searching to see if this was already reported by the Twitter blogs but came up empty.

I love this new (or new to me) feature because it prevents me from ever clicking on a short link that will take me to somewhere evil. The URL mouseover works in IE, Firefox and Chrome and appears to work about 90% of the time. It worked for me using all of the popular URL shorteners including: Bit.ly, Facebook, Foursquare, Google, TinyURL, etc. I am sure there are ways to “trick” the expanded URL but it’s a good malicious link prevention technique.

Previously, I would use the “+” option on a bit.ly link to see the info page with the final link destination for any links I considered suspect. I have always preferred the TinyURL preview page and wish all of the URL shorteners would offer this service.

In speaking with a few colleagues, it appears Twitter is using the 301 redirect on the short URL to provide the mouseover with the full URL. I’ve also heard that the Brizzly Twitter client has always provided this functionality.

In my searches I found a variety of extensions and plugins that will expand the short URLs found in tweets but now Twitter is doing this for us by default. If this is old news, please leave a comment so I can update the post with any original sources.

Here’s an example of an expanded link by placing my mouse over the link in a Louis Gray and CloudContacts tweet: