knofun

So yeah I have been on twitter since march 2008 (yeah I know that’s why the post is entitled ‘Yeah I know I lag’) and the service, or rather the people using the service, has changed radically. It used to be just my seo/geeky friends that were on twitter, and my big time hollywood friends just made fun of it. Now (post Oprah twitter show) they are on it, which is a massive glut of technically inexperienced people opening a method to put a message in front of them with little to no spam filtering. This has resulted in massive twitter spam, most of it affiliate marketing and most of it dating / adult.

It’s easy to see, just click on the link that shows you who’s following you. If you are active on twitter at all, you have a bunch of cute girls who want to show you their sexy pics. (If you are not an internet marketer, let me explain these are fake computer generated accounts from an array of cute profile pictures, an array of names, and an array of sample tweets. They do not want to show you their sexy pics until you show them your sexy credit card)

So this creates the obvious opportunity of jumping in the spam stream and making some quick money before twitter gets better at stopping this behavior. Kinda greasy, but who am I to judge. It also makes your follower count totally irrelevant (sorry ashton).

I think what would be valuable and viral is a site that calculated twitter weight by creating an algorithm that takes into account not only the # of followers you have, but how long they have been on twitter, how many followers they have, etc. So someone with 100 followers including @iamdiddy could potentially be ranked higher than someone with 1,000 no name spam followers. I would do this but there is just not enough reward to tip the scales.. I think wefollow.com probably the best candidate but anyone with some spare time, php knowledge and server space could do this in a few days.

ventures, web marketing internet marketing, twitter

All is well with my twitter again. Sorry for shouting.

other twitter

$20 million in funding. A head start thats like a light year long. So what excuse do you have for anyone clicking on my name in these search results? As a web professional, I would really be interested to get an answer. I would imagine $20 million and a rosy bright future would be enough to recruit the 3-4 people I would need to make a service like that run smooth as silk.

But I guess its easier to pretend you are solving the problem, and just ignore all your support requests until you have fixes. You’re right, it is easier. Easier for me to sign up for an identi.ca account right now. Easier for me to root for whichever stable service takes your rightful place in our hearts. Peace out.

other deadpool, twitter

So last week I read Shoemoney’s post about his twitter account, and thought wow that’s weird. Then last night I was installing twitter tools so you all could read my awesome tweets right here on the blog. It kept giving me some error about logging in using my twitter username, chrishedgecock. I could put in my email, but then the link on the bottom to read more went something like http://twitter.com/blah@blah.com which was not good. So I tested my twitter url, http://twitter.com/chrishedgecock and got the “That page doesn’t exist!” error. I can search for “chrishedgecock” and get my page in the search results, but when I click on it I still get the error. I submitted a support request, but wow. I mean, how hard is it twitter? you have the best problem any startup could have – too much traffic – and you can’t keep it together. It’s like being forced to watch the Titanic sink. Well without all the actual death but its still horrifying.

other boom, broken, twitter

Ok, so I admit that sometimes I get like in a grumpy old man phase and I will refuse to try new things. Most of the time I am right, new things are weird and scary. But twitter is something I wish I had gotten the second it came out. It’s like old school IRC but the conversation is all around you, like walking into a loud room you can turn up or down. You can also really see the power of this, Jason Calacanis has amassed an army he calls the “JasonNation” and he makes them do funny stuff like add people on twitter and digg his SEO spam. I mean, he got 150 diggs on a spammy review in like 20 minutes.. if he could figure out a way to meter that flow so it looked like legit traffic he could DOMINATE the front page of digg.

Speaking of digg, the other cool thing I have now because of twitter is near daily live videos from kevin rose’s phone on qik. Pretty funny, almost makes me want to work in a dot com office again – wait no it doesn’t.

geek stuff digg, jasoncalacanis, twitter

But I am finally on twitter:

http://twitter.com/chrishedgecock

Hit me up or follow me. Now I have another method of spreading disinformation to me enemies yay!!! just kidding and dont make fun of me when I twitter that I am going to the gym.. sometimes I really do!

geek stuff, play twitter