Twitter Archive

So by now you probably know that Skype took some time off earlier this week. Now it appears popular marketing service Twitter is also acting all down, over capacity and/or acting funky – as if the service drank some big cups of spiked egg nog. I also noticed that Twitter widgets are not loading any content.

It’s really a horrible time for Twitter to be down – I mean people are just waiting to run to Twitter to tell the world what gifts Santa brought!

The Twitter status blog notes, “Site Availability Issues – We’re currently experiencing some site availability issues; we’re looking into it now and will update when we have more information.”

Update 2:10pm Eastern – it does appear Twitter is back…you may resume telling the world what gifts you have received and if you celebrate Festivus, you may now air your grievances.

When I try to load Twitter, I see one of the following:

• error message – Something is technically wrong. Thanks for noticing—we’re going to fix it up and have things back to normal soon.
• fail whale – “over capacity message”
• sometimes Twitter loads but the timeline doesn’t load any gift messages

Please report in if you are having issues telling the world what you are doing on Twitter – make sure to include your location in your comment. Since I know it’s important, you can also leave your received gifts in the comments as well.

Amazon is offering a free $5 in video credit if you click their special follow button. I say special because not only does the button do a typical follow function, it also sends the following tweet automatically, “I just got a $5 credit for instant movies and TV shows @amazonvideo. Click (url) to get yours. #get5″. Go here to get the credit.

If you search for the term get5 on Twitter,  you can see that a large number of Amazon customers are clicking the button to get their $5 video credit. Funny points go to Twitter user Mobile Jones who clicked the Amazon button and when I questioned him, he replied, “Yeah, but then I immediately revoked the connection to my acct. ;-)”

I think this type of deal works is a much stronger way to build a Twitter user base than buying a “promoted” ad on Twitter. The deal has already spread to all of the deal boards. What’s smart with Amazon’s offer is that it gets people who probably aren’t using Twitter on a regular basis to follow their Amazon Video account. This is different than buying an ad on Twitter for an account on Twitter when you are already on Twitter.

If you aren’t sure what movies to use the $5 Amazon video credit on, here’s a big list of movies and television shows for $2.99 or less.

A month ago, CNN fired reporter Rick Sanchez after some comments he made – you can read the story here and here. The big story to tech bloggers including Marshall Kirkpatrick was how the Twitter account run by Sanchez would be handled. I spoke with a friend at length in general around ownership of social media accounts. I believe that much like a corporate cell phone, the Twitter account belongs to CNN. But both my friend and I agreed that, “there is really very little value in the RSCNN account for CNN.”

It appears that about a week ago, the @ricksanchezcnn account was moved to a new Twitter account, @ricksancheznews. Based on his counts, it looks like everything was transferred over to the new account. The old Twitter account points to the new account although I am unsure who “owns” the @ricksanchezcnn account at this time. Sanchez does appear to be actively using the new Twitter account. It’s a good deal for Sanchez as he gets to start with a Twitter account with a base of followers rather than starting from scratch.

Perhaps eventually social media accounts will be considered part of severance packages.

We broke the news last week regarding the launch of Twitter’s in-stream advertising offering. Just as we expected, Twitter did officially announce and launch their in-stream ads service yesterday with Hootsuite as their first partner.

Below is a screenshot of my Twitter feed inside Hootsuite — as you can see, Sprout Social has “promoted a tweet” (aka advertisement) into my twitter feed. Viewing my Twitter feed inside of twitter.com does not display the advertisement. The ad behaves in the same manner as the promoted tweets ads currently visible in search results. The link “promoted by Sprout Social” takes you to the Twitter promotions overview page. You can perform the normal functions on the ad – reply, retweet and/or favorite the ad.

I am not following SproutSocial and am unsure at this point what targeting was used to send that ad to my stream. My @AllenStern account follows very few accounts (less than 60). If I can gather any info on the targeting, I will update this post.

A note regarding the screenshot below: the highlighted color of the ad was based on my rollover on the ad – the ad is not highlighted in yellow by default although my guess is that if the ads don’t receive the expected response rates, highlighting as seen below may be the next step is gaining a higher response rate.

Thanks to RWW for linking to us yesterday when Twitter posted their official announcement.

Last month, Jeff Cormier from Next Web reported that promoted tweets (aka ads) would be coming soon to third-party Twitter clients including Hootsuite and Tweetdeck. AdAge reporter Michael Learmonth noted, “Twitter’s ads will travel wherever tweets go — particularly third-party apps and search. This will bring a source of ad revenue into the ecosystem of Twitter-based apps, and increase the audience for the ads themselves.”

A source has shared with me that the promoted Twitter in-stream ads will begin a beta launch on Monday. These new ads will appear in-stream and are NOT the same as what I noted above regarding promoted tweets in search results.

We’ve heard that at least one third-party Twitter client will be part of the initial launch — when we can confirm who the initial launch partners are, we will update the post. Cormier spoke with Hootsuite last month who confirmed that the promoted in-stream ads will be coming to their third-party Twitter client. I’ve been digging but as of yet have been unable to find out the revenue-share between Twitter and Hootsuite (and the other client tools). Hootsuite discussed their promoted integration earlier this month – but the source tells us that Monday’s launch is for in-stream ads not for the search results promotion.

I have to assume that the promoted in-stream ads will also be pushed to twitter.com. These in-stream ads should help with visability and clickthru rates as they don’t require a stop at the search results for a promoted trend- you would go direct to the advertisers website.

It’s also interesting to note that in-stream ads will be very difficult (if not impossible) to block  similar to ad blocking tools. Over time, I believe we will see more and more content providers offering in-stream ads to make sure they can’t be blocked.

I have to admit – I was not a regular viewer of the Rick Sanchez show on CNN. One of my experiences watching the show resulted in a post titled, “shame on you Rick Sanchez” which looked at how Mr. Sanchez dealt with Twitter being down and a story about a plane crash killing 15 people. In general I am not a fan of shows that just read content from Twitter and Facebook.

Apparently Rick Sanchez was fired from CNN today based on some comments he made. You can read the story here and here.

Blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick immediately wondered what will happen to the “RickSanchezCNN” (RSCNN) account. My comment on Marshall’s post was short, the account belongs to CNN. The reason is simple…the RSCNN account is the same property as a corporate cell phone or laptop. Sure it’s in the “virtual” computer space but the account belongs to CNN. If Sanchez gave out the number to his corporate cell phone to his family and friends, should he be able to keep that as well?

The RSCNN account isn’t alone – any of these accounts that are pushed by the corporation belong to the corporation. For example, QVC pushes their hosts to use hostnameQVC as their Facebook accounts – these belong to QVC.

Continue reading “Re: Rick Sanchez — What’s The Difference Between a Corporate Cell Phone and a Corporate Twitter Account?” »

Over the past couple of days I watched all of the demos at the TCDisrupt conference in blazing hot San Francisco. One of the more popular startups was GameCrush. Sebastian Anthony from Download Squad explains what GameCrush is, “…just like prostitution, but with boys buying game time rather than sexy time from a dizzying array of cute, gamer girls…Just like prostitution, some of the girls are cuter than others — and some are better at what they do, too — but they’re all available as potential PlayDates (seriously). All you have to do is whip out your credit card (it’s $0.60 per minute), grab your joystick and game.”

So basically you can play hangman, pac man, tron, spy hunter, galaga, doom, wolfenstein 3d, or the coming soon duke nukem with a cute girl for $36/hour. Apparently GameCrush shares the revenue with the girl although the split wasn’t shared on the Techcrunch stage. (They do accept men as well as playdates, ladies signup for a session of Ms. Pac Man with me!)

I started to think that gaming is just the beginning here! Just like there are clones of all the popular apps, I am excited to announce the launch of SNCrush – the first service to allow you to pay to chat with the person of your dreams and needs on the social networks. But haters, this ain’t a clone!

Continue reading “SNCrush – Pay To Tweet With Hot Women, Men, Cats & Fish” »